January 14, 2021 Combine Funds Work Session Zoom Meeting

001at any time. All right. Well, good evening, everyone, and welcome to the January 14th work session. We've got two items on the agenda. First, the combined funds budget presentation, and then we'll get an update on our virtual plus and phase reopening plan. So with that said, I am turning it over to Dr. Hutchings to lead his team through the combined funds budget presentation. Thank you, Madam Chair. And today we are going to be specifically talking about compensation and benefits. That is this component of this work session. So I want to make sure that we try to stay focused on that particular aspect of the budget. Our next session, we'll be able to talk about everything else in addition to the compensation and benefits. So we're going to try to stay focused on that today. So

002I'm going to turn things over to our CFO, Dominic Turner, to introduce our team and to begin our presentation. Is Susan sharing or are you sharing, Dominic? I think Susan is sharing. Perfect. So Mr. Turner. Thank you all and good afternoon school board members and viewing public. As Dr. Hutchins said, tonight we'll be focusing on the employee compensation side of the budget, which everybody by now probably knows is almost 90% of our total combined funds budget. I'll give a couple of seconds for the presentation to come up, but as we wait, I'm joined tonight by our budget director, Mr. Robert Easley. our chief, Steven Wilkins, our director, Sandra Hardiman, our director, Cheryl, I believe is on as well, and as well as Segal Consultants for the compensation study. Okay. I'm having a hard time getting

003it to go full screen. So hold on one second. There we go. Thank you. Thank you, Susan. Next slide, please. So for the fiscal year 2022 proposed combined funds budget, the total budget is $320.6 million. It's comprised of our operating school nutrition and grants and special project funds. The lion's share of that, 91%, is our operating budget with the other funds representing roughly about 5% of the total. Next slide, please. As I stated at the beginning of the presentation, the lion's share of our budget are personnel costs, and that's the focus of the presentation today, to go over the compensation side of the budget. When it comes to the combined funds budget, it's roughly 86% of the total budget, leaving 14% of the combined funds budget for non-personnel items. If you slice out just the

004operating fund, it's roughly 88% of the total budget, with 12% going to non-personnel items. So what that tells you is that our grants and special projects and school nutrition funds are a little more balanced when it comes to people and non-people expenditures. for them to represent less than 10% of the total budget, but still be able to change the percentages by about 2%. Next slide, please. So the largest piece of our budget this year is our salary enhancements. Again, roughly 90% of our budget being personnel. And we weren't able to do a step increase last year just because of the economy. So we really wanted to be able to take care of our employees going into fiscal year 2022 and provide that step increase. So in the budget, we have a step increase for our

005eligible staff, which is roughly 88%. of all staff. And then for those that are either on a full step or on the top of their scale, making them not eligible for an increase, they would receive a 1% one-time bonus. So this would help offset the health care premium increase that we projected and to ensure that all staff have some type of salary enhancement going into next year. We've also sustained the market rate adjustment that we had. compensation study on the last year to stay committed to that three and five year plan for those as well. And as you'll hear from our consultant, we have commenced a second compensation study this year on some other groups that we hope to be able to look at their salary scales as well. Next slide, please. So again, excuse

006me the one-time bonus is one percent of your total salary and there's roughly about 12 and a half percent of our staff that would be eligible for this uh one percent one-time bonus again as i said on the last slide it helps offset the healthcare premium increase that we're projecting and then it just ensures that all of our staff will receive some type of salary enhancement going into fiscal year 2022. next slide please So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Segal Waters Consulting for the market analysis of several different job classes that we looked at this year for them to give you where we are with that study and how some of these positions rank amongst our surrounding jurisdictions. On the screen now are the areas that we looked at in

007this year's compensation study. Susan, if you could put up the attachment for the Segal Consulting presentation, please. And while we're waiting for that, I just wanted to say hello and good evening. It's nice to see you all again. Can you see that on your screen? Okay. Thank you. Okay, so I have a few slides of information, but you should also have a full report, which gives you a lot more detail about the methodology and the findings for each of the jobs. But for this presentation, we have roughly about 15 slides, about 10 slides of content. So I can give you an overview and answer any questions. So moving to the next. I just realized this is a... PDF, so I can't advance the same way, so I'm sorry. That's all right. So I'll start with

008just a little bit about the methodology and the approach we took. I did share this same information with you, I guess it was about two months ago now. It was an update, but I thought as a refresher, share that, then get into the findings and some recommendations. So scrolling to the next one. So just starting with the introduction and the methodology. The purpose of this is a result of the HR audit. You decided to engage a consultant to conduct a compensation market assessments in two phases. And this assessment is a total compensation evaluation. So what that means is we're looking at both pay and benefits as part of the total compensation for selected employee groups. And a year ago, I shared the results from phase one. So that was January of 2020. Feels longer, but

009it was only a year ago. And now we're sharing phase two. And so next one. In this study, 26 jobs were evaluated, and you see the employee groups here. They're primarily positions on the support staff scale. So that's facilities, food and nutrition, general administration, HR, IT. And then the positions that are not on the support staff pay scale that we looked at are assistant principals at all school levels. So, of course, we need to define the market if we're doing a market assessment to say if we want to quantify our market position, what is the market? And for phase two, we looked at the same seven school divisions that we did in phase one. So those are the same divisions in Northern Virginia, Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, Loudoun, Manassas, Manassas Park, and Prince William County

010Schools. But because many of these positions are also found in local area employers, both public sector and private sector, for phase two, we included data from two local governments, City of Alexandria, of course, and also Arlington County. And we use three published data sources to represent the private sector data for this analysis. So moving on to findings, how does ACPS compare to the market? What you're seeing here is a comparison of total compensation for the support staff jobs only. So that's 22 positions out of the 26 that we evaluated. And it shows an average across all 22 positions. And what you see in these stacked bars here is Alexandria Schools is on the left, and you see base pay at the range midpoint. The orange bar in the middle shows health benefit costs, and then

011the green portion of the bar is retirement plan contributions. And we compared that to the market average for those same three. three segments for those 22 positions. And what we found is that across all jobs, base pay is about 5% below the market average, but yet total compensation is about 5% above the market average. And the primary reason for that is higher benefits costs, primarily on the health benefits side. And I'll get into the details as to why that is in a minute. But if we can scroll to the next page, That was for the support staff jobs. This is looking at those. three assistant principal positions that we've looked at here. And what we found is a little bit of a different story for assistant principals. We found that base pay is about 8.5%

012below the market average. It's about $10,000 a year lower than the market average as for assistant principals. And total compensation is about 5% below the market average, 4.7%. So while the benefit costs are somewhat higher in Alexandria than for the market average, it's not enough to make up for the 8.5% below in the base pay. So I mentioned the health benefit costs. So the differences between ACPS's market position for base pay and total compensation is primarily due to the differences in cost sharing for medical benefits. As you know, you pay 90% or 80% of medical plan premiums, 90% for support staff, and 80% for licensed or administrative positions, which is generally higher than most other school divisions. And so what we see here in these bars is for family coverage, the cost-sharing percentages and cost-sharing

013arrangements among all the different school divisions and local governments that we looked at. And so the differences in that cost-sharing percentage results in higher benefit costs compared with the area employers. And so what we're looking at here is our estimated employer cost per person per year. for medical, dental, and vision benefits combined. So what we're seeing for staff, primarily because you have that 90% cost sharing that you pay for staff, and I'm trying to see what this number is. It's about $16,500. I think that's what it is. It's awfully small. That's for staff, which is a bit higher than the estimated employer costs for all of the other public sector entities we looked at. For administrators, can we stop for just a second? Is it a way for us to make it larger? Because I

014mean, it's difficult to see those numbers. And I just know if we have people watching, I want them to be able to understand what we're talking to. I also, I mean, I want people to know you can download it on the website, but I just think it's important as we're talking through this for people to be able to see. So that's better. Perfect. Thank you so much. So the slightly darker bars you see for Alexandria Public Schools. So the one for staff is furthest to the left. And for administrators, that's fourth from the left. And because the cost sharing is 80%, 20% for administrators versus the 90% and 10% for staff, that's why we have a different estimate here in terms of the dollar amounts. But you see in the market, it ranges from roughly

015maybe around $9,000 a year up to close to $16,000 a year at Falls Church. So that's what we see. It is quite a range in the market. So I wouldn't say that there's necessarily a prevailing cost or prevailing approach here. But because of the decision you made to... to take on a greater share of those health care costs. This is why we see the difference between the base pay market position and the total compensation. Moving on to the next. So I wanted to take a little bit of a step back and talk about the pay scale design, because everything that we've talked about before is either looking at the midpoint of the pay range, and you'll see in the report that we've talked about the entry rate, the minimum of the range, and also the

016maximum of the range. And as you requested in the last time we spoke, the report shows the ranking for every job at every point in that salary range. But in the course of putting that together and thinking that through. We noticed some differences in the pay scale design that result in some market misalignment, particularly in salary progression for employees. So those hold steps that Dominic mentioned earlier, you know, employees progress along for, I think it is roughly 14 or 15 years. And then they're on a hold step where the step number increases, but their pay rate does not. And so you see here in this chart in that orange line. That's showing a pay progression for, in this example, we're showing building engineers at the school division, their salary progression stops. And then it goes

017back up again after a couple of years and stops and plateaus and then goes up and then reaches the maximum at about 20 years. Whereas what we see in the market is a smoother. progression without those hold steps. Hold steps are unusual in my experience and unusual in the metro area. And so not only do you see that sort of jagged progression compared to the smoother one in the market, but also in about 20 years it stops. That's when employees reach the maximum. Whereas what we're seeing in other school divisions is that there is a wider salary range and more opportunities for more increases after about 20 years in the job. So I just thought that that would illustrate that notion. Keep going. Keep going. That's fine. Thank you. That was one example. The building

018engineer asked, so I thought you might want to see a school administrator example. And this is for high school assistant principals. And whereas the other one followed the market pretty closely for the first 14 years or so, here we see the starting rates are. below the market average. So you can see that market gap there. And if you could scroll a little bit more so I could see the numbers at the bottom of the chart. So we see where. So it's below market until roughly about nine years or so. Then it comes close to the market. And then because of those hold steps, now it goes below that market line again. And then because the maximum was reached fairly quickly. The pay is truncated and stops roughly about 16, 17 years. If I could, Heather,

019if I could, Heather, real quick, I just jump in. So what the last two slides are illustrating us is one, our scale isn't really off. It's just that we top out earlier than others, whereas this slide is letting us know. more that our scale is off, right? So we need the entire scale to move up to meet the market. Whereas the previous slide is letting us know there's nothing wrong with our scale. We just need to add steps to the top of that scale and possibly truncate the cutoff, some of the steps on the bottom. So there's... Just different things that we see when we're looking at different positions. So obviously in this example, the entire scale looks like it needs to be adjusted versus adding steps at the top. And we'll see when we

020get to recommendations. That's exactly what we're suggesting is to think a bit about how the scales are designed. So not just the pay rates themselves, but how they're designed and how employees progress through them. So moving on. And that's a good segue then to recommendations. So how can you stay competitive? So we're suggesting some both short-term and longer-term things for you to think about. In the short term, we noticed that all of the assistant principal salary ranges are below market. So we think that short-term... Since last year we looked at the school principals, this year we're looking at assistant principals, and so we think on a short-term basis, consider modifying the salary ranges and the dollar amounts there so they come closer to being market competitive. And also, you know, while we saw that that

021stack bar chart that showed all 22 jobs, we did see some variations among those jobs. Some are further behind market than others. So, you know, consider working with your HR team to evaluate some of those great assignments and see if it makes sense to adjust some of those in the short term. But from a longer term perspective, you know, the space to, you know, let us to suggest to you that you might want to think about developing a compensation philosophy that defines your desired market position for pay benefits and total compensation. And, you know, what we saw in the data here is that for many of your jobs, your total compensation is close to market. But it's more heavily weighted towards benefits than it is pay. Nothing wrong with that. It's just we're suggesting maybe

022you make a conscious decision and document a compensation philosophy as to which direction you wish to lean within that mix of pay and benefits and why. And also thinking about, you know, is it benefits that attracts and keeps employees? Is it starting pay? Is it, you know, mid-career pay? Or is it the pay at the higher end of the scale, meaning experienced and committed employees? So just thinking through those, and we have some information here and also in the report about different elements of a compensation philosophy that you might want to consider in the future. And as part of that is the third recommendation here is while you're thinking about a compensation philosophy, you might want to consider conducting employee surveys or focus groups to understand how your current educators, staff, and administrators value each

023element of the total compensation package. We haven't talked much about the retirement benefits, but you have a robust retirement series of retirement plans. Three of them. And, you know, as part of this, you might want to understand how employees value their retirement, their health benefits, their work environment, their paid time off, their opportunities for advancement and professional development. There are a lot of other elements that can go into total compensation. So I think that would be helpful to inform the board and the senior team to think about developing a compensation strategy or philosophy. And then once you get through that, we have our fourth recommendation here is to consider restructuring the pay scales. I think the current structure and design has been in place for many years. And you might want to consider modernizing it

024a bit and, you know, think through those step increases, whether it makes sense for those values to be what they are, for the salary ranges themselves. And just, you know, the intervals between the grades, there's, you know, other sort of structural elements that you might want to better align with market practices and also to think about that internal equity and internal consistency, you know, among and between the different employee groups. So that's, well, we can scroll on to the next one, but this one, I won't read all this to you, but this gets into those elements of a total compensation philosophy that should you decide to go down that path? Is there a few things to think about in that regard? So that was the end. And Dr. Wilkins, or anyone else have any comments

025to add? So I don't know, school board members, if you want to ask questions at this point of the compensation study or to finish the rest of the presentation, which focused on the benefits portion, and then ask questions. Yeah, I think we should do. I think we should chop it up and do the compensation just because we have Heather on this call so that we can cover the compensation component. And then let's take Q&A now and then go into the benefits component, if that's OK, Madam Chair, to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Let's start with Ms. Reeve. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation and for the report. I think it was really just like last year was very enlightening to read it. I think the information about the pay scale in particular was, you know,

026was very helpful. And I know that was something when we were looking at the paraprofessional position last year that I thought I saw that they were kind of tapering off there in the midpoint and in the maximum. I also wanted to just plug your comment about the retirement contribution for my colleagues. If you haven't had a chance to look at the full report yet, towards the end in the appendix or it's before the appendix, I wanted to just draw everyone's attention to the fact that the retirement contribution for support staff is very low. quite a contrast from the contribution for teachers and administrators. It's 19.12% for teachers and administrators, and it's 3.7% for our support staff. That's the employer contribution for retirement. And personally, I think that's kind of an equity issue. So I just

027kind of wanted to plug that. But my question, I have two questions, but the first was about the methodology. in looking at the total compensation for employees. And if you can help me, Ms. Kazemi, understand how you determine the health benefit cost. Because one of the things I noticed after our conversation last year, I was looking at the report a little more closely, and I noticed that On the page with the study of the paraprofessionals, as one example, it said that for the total compensation, it said that the hourly cost for benefits assumes a 2,080-hour annual work schedule. And that's assuming like 40 hours a week, a few weeks a year. Whereas our paraprofessionals, they have a 6.8 hour day for 192 days, which is 1,305 hour annual schedule. So I just, I wanted to

028make sure that we're not like inflating the health. benefits for this, since that is what makes up kind of the difference in the salary. So if you could talk a little bit about how you get to that number, that would be. Sure. And that certainly does not assume anyone's working 2,080 hours. What it is, is we have an annual cost. for health benefits. So if somebody works full-time, however full-time is defined, the school district pays 90% of their health costs for that year. And the same is true for every other school district. But because we were looking at hourly pay rates, we needed to take that annual health cost and just convert it to an hourly rate so that we're looking at numbers that are you know, on the same basis. So for every school

029district, we took that annual salary, we divided it by 2080. So it's, you know, we could divide it by some other number that is more typical for just paraprofessionals or some other number that's typical for just building engineers or whoever we're looking at. But it seemed to have consistency across all the job titles. We wanted to have the same hourly basis for everyone. So it is, it's, well, it's, you know. If you looked at how many hours somebody works per year to earn that annual benefit, you could divide it by their actual hours. But that would show that a different dollar amount for every single individual employee. We just wanted to have something on a consistent basis. Okay. Thank you for that. And then just my second question was about another thing that I noticed

030last year in the executive summary is that It mentioned that ACPS costs for the PPO coverage are somewhat higher than the market average, about $200 per person per month higher for administrators and $270 per month higher for support staff. But it also mentioned that the higher costs do not necessarily reflect the richer benefit. So I guess I was wanting to understand, you know, I know that we, you know, the employer's paying a greater percentage of the cost for our employees, but is our PPO premium higher or like, are we, is there a benefit to the employees or if you could just kind of address that. We're going to cover this component. I know in the next section that we'll have. an actual slide that covers the benefits in comparison to other school divisions, as well

031as with different employee groups. So I think that your answer might get, your question may be answered during that time. But Dominic, I don't know if you wanted to, I saw you took your mute off. That is correct. The rest of the presentation does go over the benefits, much like the presentation that Heather had. It showed, you know, how much the employer, us, ACPS, pays on behalf of our employees versus other employers throughout the region. We do the same thing. We had Aon Health Benefits Consultant do a study for us in 2018 that provides the same information that was in Heather's presentation only. It looks at the premium so whereas heather shows the cost that the employer is paying on the rest of the slides and my presentation will show you the premium that the

032employee is paying so that 10 or 20 percent um that the employee is paying and i will say and and cheryl you might be able to um speak more to this but a ppo plan does offer extra benefits that an hmo plan doesn't offer And that's why it's typically costs more to have that PPO plan versus the HMO plan. Yes. Thank you, Dominic. My name is Cheryl Waldron. I would concur completely. The PPO that ACPS provides is on the more generous side in terms of the benefits to the employees. And that is reflected in the cost. All right. Thank you. We have a question from Ms. Nolan. Thank you, Chair Alderton. Thank you so much for this presentation. I'm really happy that the board and the staff are collectively looking at compensation as this is

033something that we've been talking about for quite some time as obviously I don't think it goes without any. confusion as to why this is such a priority given the talent that we want to secure and retain here at ACPS. In fact, honestly, the slide that concerned me the most was slide number 11 that showed there's really no return and value in staying with ACPS. And so here we are training folks and preparing them for other jurisdictions. And what's challenging about that, especially for me, is that given the uniqueness of ACPS, we really do want to retain our talent as best we can. And again, I think this goes without saying to everyone on the Zoom that participates in ACPS is that that's just going to be really critical. So I'm glad even during tough times,

034we're making this a priority. My question consisted of the AP position and showing how From the beginning and I appreciate Mr. Turner you pointing out that it's not just a matter of increasing steps like it is for other positions, but that actually from the get-go we're really just never aligned and at where we should be. Are there other positions similar to that or I know we're doing compensation studies of positions along the way over a few year period, but I'm just curious like from a priority perspective, you know, where are we in terms of the most egregious? positions that need to be aligned. And I would say the AP position obviously is a critical one because Because ACPS is such a unique school division to work for, obviously our goal should be to hire top

035talent at the assistant principal level, ensure that they are not only, you know, adapt to ACPS as a cultural fit, but also that they're really skilled educational leaders, and then hopefully invest in them so that they become our next cadre of principals. And so the AP position in particular to me isn't just an assistant principal position, but it's also an investment in the future of ACPS leadership, because the more... that we can groom from within, the stronger our culture is going to be and just the more we can hit the ground running in serving our student population. So again, my question is, really appreciate the focus on assistant principals. Are there other positions similar to that, that from the get go, they're just not aligned and we really need to have our laser focus on

036those as well? Sure, yes. There were some areas that were, that showed. A notable market gap in addition to assistant principals. Many of the human resources positions are below market and also the school nutrition managers are below market. A couple of facilities as well, but I would say the ones that really stood out to me are the school nutrition managers and the HR positions. Yeah, so just to piggyback on what Heather is saying there, there were a handful of positions where it looked like the entire scale needed to be looked at. But most of the positions, either we needed to add steps at the top to become more competitive at the top of the scale, or some of them we needed to simply cut some of the steps off at the bottom to become more

037competitive at the bottom of the scale. So we're looking at all of the positions that were in the study holistically to determine what's the best approach to be able to get them to a place where we want to be. In addition to what Ms. Nolan had mentioned earlier about making sure we had that cadre of assistant principals prepared to go into the principalship, a part of this was last week when we were talking about the retained component of our FY22 budget. And that is making sure that we are developing our leaders. So when it is time to fill positions, and I'm going to give one. prime example, Penny Hairston, who's now, you know, our principal at Douglas MacArthur, who was an assistant principal at James K. Pope for several years and done a phenomenal job

038and now is serving as a principal, that we are building our leadership. in-house so that we're not having to do national searches to find the best of the best in regards to the principalship. And one specific focus area for us is having the doctoral program that we are working to develop. that focuses specifically on our strategic planning areas of focus and building that professional capacity for our leaders. Also, the partnership that we currently have this year with AIR, and this is executive coaching that is for principals as well as professional learning and development from the administrative perspective. This is another way that we are working. directly with our leaders so that we're building their leadership capacity. So when it is time to fill, whether it's principal positions or central office administration positions, that we're able

039to pull from within and not have to go outside of the organization to find those new leaders. Madam Chair, may I follow up? Yeah, go ahead. Thank you. Real briefly. First off, thank you so much, Dr. Hutchings, for that update, because I distinctly remember even five years ago when I first served the board, I recall thinking the number one missed opportunity in ACPS was not having a concentrated effort to groom from within, because we have so many talented professionals within ACPS that we want to maintain, and just not being strategic and proactive enough and thinking about, like, how are we really positioning folks so that we're having folks in the top leadership positions that have been in ACPS, they're invested in ACPS, they understand ACPS, and that we're gaining from their past experience into new

040leadership roles. So I'm thrilled to hear that that's now a concerted effort. My follow-up question is, you know, I think it's really important to understand the data and to understand, like, in particular, which positions are not, we need to focus on, and I appreciate the commitment that's going to continue with that. Are we, is it possible to expect as a board? that we could have, and Ms. Cassimi, you kind of highlighted this with your recommendations in terms of like, what is the philosophy of like compensation, but like, is it possible to get like a long-term, like big picture package of like, you know, this is what needs to take place from compensation from a division perspective. Here are the priorities of positions. Here's the five-year long-term plan. Like, I just am curious if that can

041be something that we can expect, because I just fear that While I appreciate these compensation studies and I find them to be critical, I worry about us getting into a situation where we're piecemealing the work and that we end up after a few years of playing whack-a-mole where we're just not able to see that. I just don't want anyone to get left behind, I guess is what I'm saying. So if there's like, is that the expectation or did I miss something or is that? And I think we're working towards that. I think we were starting from a huge deficit coming in just like- Right, I know, I know. Hard to just- all of a sudden fast forward as if we were doing things in an orderly, responsible, and efficient way. So I'm just going to

042put it out there because everybody needs to know that it's not that easy. And it is really because of some of, I believe, the turnover that we've seen in our HR department over the past, just look at 10 years, and turnover in superintendents over the past 10 years, and turnover in board members over the past 10 years. And this board has really stayed true to that commitment, as well as our staff. to ensure that we are not putting ourselves in a situation where employee groups. are being forgotten year after year. And now you're trying to make up for seven to 10 years, right? Which we're in right now. We tried to chunk it though with the employee compensation over the past couple of years, but we are ready to pivot into a more aggressive, looking

043at a long-term plan, as you were mentioning, Ms. Nolan, where you're looking at a three to five year, what are going to be the upcoming employee groups that we're looking at? So it's not on an annual basis that we're just using our preliminary data from the- from the wavy information that we typically use on a yearly basis. So that is a work in progress. So I can't share, we don't have anything to share today in regards to three to five years, but that is the next step for us is to now expand. And we've been able to show our due diligence, especially the EAA, that we've been committed to this over the past two years. Now we need to like step it up. you know, to the next level and looking more long term, just

044as you mentioned, Ms. Nolan. So we're not in this situation five to 10 years from now. Right. Thank you so much. That's exactly what I was hoping for. Perhaps at some point during a board meeting, it'd be great to get an update. I don't expect the actual plan, but even if it was just an idea of when that you think you'll be in a position and ready to provide that, that will just be great to know. But thank you so much, everyone, for the presentation and most of all, for the priority on this exceptionally important topic. So thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Nolan. That was great. Just follow up on what the superintendent was saying there. Sure. So we also taken the four recommendations that came from Heather out of that

045presentation. We really want to be able to follow up on that and determine, you know, what is the most important for our employee group? Because this is a budget work session. We have to understand that if we want to be number one in both pay and benefits, we're talking about meeting. lots of money to be able to do that. So, you know, there has to be a give and take. Do we want to have the best benefits and therefore we're not going to have the best pay? Or do we want to have the best pay and therefore we're going to give some on the benefit side? So, you know, that's going to be a part of the discussion that we have to have as a school division to determine, okay, what's more important? Because it's

046very hard to be at the top and afford. both you know top pay and top benefits um as you all see you know when we have these budget conversations every year we're talking about the increases in the uh health benefit costs and that's something that we can't really escape um if we want to be able to continue to offer those benefits the only way we can escape that is if we change those benefit options thank you thank you thank you dominic thank you um miss nolan um both very important points and things to think about for sure. On to Ms. Green and then Ms. Anderson is after Ms. Green. Thank you, Chair Alderton. And thank you, Ms. Kazemi, for the work you did on the compensation study. It's always extremely interesting to see when the

047numbers come in. So thank you so much. We appreciate it. And I believe... I'm clear. My question was very similar to Nolan's. I wanted to know the reasoning behind the groups that were selected. I know. And I believe Mr. Turner did answer that with the leveling off around the 20 year mark. But was there any other reasoning for any other category that was picked or was that the main reason for the majority of them? So the reason for why these particular job titles were chosen for the study? Correct. Yes, I mean, we worked together on that, Mr. Turner and Dr. Wilkins and my team here. And the goal was to have a distribution of positions throughout the different job families and occupational groups with a strong focus on that support staff schedule and that's in

048the support staff area. And also the assistant principals were chosen because coming out of last year's study, when we were looking at principals, you all asked to include assistant principals this year. So that was the reasoning there. Anything you would like to add, Dominic? Right. So, yeah, so as Heather said, there was a high concentration on the support side. And that's because when we first looked at our comparison, the support side. Look to be behind other jurisdictions, so that's why we wanted to be able to take the opportunity now to address our support side. And then, as I said, with the, as we looked at principles last year. We saw a piece needed to be addressed as well. Thank you. Right? Miss Anderson. Thank you. Now I'm unmuted. Thank you. First of all, I just

049want to thank everyone for doing this because yes, early when I was on the board and we were actually asking for this, I was told it was just too hard. And so that was literally the reason at some point I was given as to why we're not doing this. hard or not, it's a very important. And I just want to draw attention to the whole hold step thing. I just never understood it. So I'm really hopefully hoping that we can make that a thing of the past at some point, because I just don't get it. And then I am really interested in that whole idea of engaging the staff about the benefits, because I know we've talked for years, a whole time, you know, that about how we have better benefits. But if, if Number

050one, if people don't really recognize that, it doesn't really help us. And secondly, they may not need them. Because if you have, you know, a dual working household and the insurance isn't critical, I don't want to lose people because we have too much of a differential in the pay. So I really do hope that we can, and I actually think there's some of that could actually. snowball in terms of decreasing our costs for insurance as well because you know they may at any rate I'm glad that that's one of the things that's suggested and I really think that we need to look at that because we don't want to give something to someone that they're not valuing and we don't want to lose people because we're not giving them what they do value. I think

051I just want to one point and Ms. Anderson, thank you for mentioning that to get some context of his school nature of what we were working with previously. One thing I do think that is important, a lot of school divisions during the recession across the country were doing hold steps. And that was really a cost savings to try to not have that commitment of a market rate adjustment. and additional funding. And this happened, it was around the time I was here the last time, I believe, that we started bringing in the whole steps when Dr. Sherman was the superintendent. So it was about 2010. It happened prior to my arrival, but we were still going through some of that at that particular time. So that just gives you some context as to why that was

052in place. What we have to do is, which I'm glad this is why we're doing these employee compensation studies, is adjusting to kind of like what is typical. in regards to compensation and what are the best strategies that are available now, not things that we're no longer, well, we're about to maybe go into another recession potentially. You never know. I don't know what the future is going to hold, but we are supposed to adjust based on the times, the sign of the times. And I think that is something that we are going to have to work towards. Thank you, Dr. Hutchings. And Ms. Green, I see a hand up. Is that just didn't go down? Oh, sorry. I'll take it down. No, it's okay. I'm just checking. My apologies. Okay. All right. Well. With that,

053I think I'll just chime in. I think I would say the highlight of this presentation for me was this notion of a compensation philosophy. It seems to me that, you know, if we can get to that point, we have something to anchor ourselves on that would really... we would really be able to implement a lot of the changes and that we're saying that we all want to see. So that was, you know, I've never even heard of that, but, you know, looking at that, it seems very powerful. So if we can get in that direction, I think that could get us to where we want to be for sure. So thank you, Ms. Kazemi for joining us. I think. That's your part here. So unless you want to hang out with us forever tonight. I

054did want to mention, though, in the in regard to a compensation philosophy that you have a new and very talented and experienced compensation director who I feel is well equipped to help you in that in that direction. Awesome. Cheryl Waldron, who is on there, if you can wave so everybody can see. I'll work hard to live up to that bar. Thank you, Heather. And you've already said yes, so thank you for that. All right, great. So we can move on to the next part of the presentation. Sorry, I was going to turn things back over to Mr. Turner so we can continue into the benefits of the presentation. Okay. Yes, and I'll try not to take that much time since we've really spoken about benefits here a lot already. But next slide, please, Susan. So

055as we were saying, the employee benefits are the other part of compensation. We have three plans here in ACPS. We have UnitedHealthcare, Kaiser, and then we also have a high deductible plan, which UnitedHealthcare offers for us as well. And we projected that our health care benefits will increase again this year. And we've based it again. for every year based on the historical analysis of the increases. So we've shown an 8.5% increase for our health benefits. We will revise this in the spring once we have our consultant take a deeper dive into the numbers for us. Fingers crossed, we'd like to see the number go down some, just like we saw last year. But again, it's just based on the number of claims that we have. Considering we're in a pandemic, I wouldn't get my hopes

056up that we've over projected. Next slide, please. So this comes from our study that we did back in 2018, where we had a Aon health benefits consultant do a study for us on how our benefit plans compare to other surrounding jurisdictions. And what's important to know about health benefits are we have both fixed costs and variable costs. So the fixed costs are paid by all plan members, and the variable costs are paid based on utilization of those services. So meaning when you go see your doctor, your dentist, or... the optometrist or anything like that or the er or your care and so forth those are your variable costs the more you use it the greater your health benefit cost is going to be whereas your fixed costs are your premiums that everybody pays each month

057or more twice a month in your paychecks. As Heather said earlier, we have two different bands for our employees. We had the 90-10 band for our support staff and then the 80-20 for everybody else. And just some history behind why that was done. That was to be able to put more money in the pockets of our support staff, recognizing where they are on the pay scale there to be able to help them out there. As you see, our premium has increased a little bit over the last two years, but we're still way better off than our surrounding jurisdictions. Next slide, please. So this slide just gives us a little bit of the plan options for the PPO plan that we have here compared to some of the other jurisdictions. Again, our options are... far exceeds

058many of our surrounding jurisdictions when it comes to what we have to pay when we actually go see a doctor. Next slide, please. So the last three slides here are just an example. Again, as this presentation is about compensation, this is just an example of some of the different employee groups of what their pay will be like next year if we're able to give everybody a step. So for support staff, this is looking at a bus driver. And as you all know, bus drivers, you know, we're trying to correct their salary scale. So they're going to see the biggest increase if they get the step plus, you know, correcting of their salary scale. So they would see roughly about 7.7% increase of their salary next year. Next slide, please. And then with our teachers, you'll

059see from 20 to 21, there was no increase in their gross pay because we didn't offer steps in the current fiscal year. And what this did was because benefits were projected to increase, they would actually saw a negative take home in their pay. So that's why tomorrow, if you didn't get an MRA, you should be getting $158 payment tomorrow. And then next year, can we go back a couple of slides, please? I can pretty much just talk to it. But for the teachers, you know, given them the step this year, they'll see a little over a 3% increase in their net pay for next year. And then when we go to an administrator, the example here is an elementary school teacher. They're also a part of the group that we're trying to rectify their salary

060scale. So they would see about a 7% increase in their pay going into next year. and I do want to just let everybody know that's watching this that these are just examples. None of these examples take into account anybody's individual tax situation. If you've chosen a different benefit then your net pay will look different. So these are just examples to try to give people an idea of what it would look like next year if we're able to give everybody a step. So please don't look at this and wonder why you don't have the exact same net pay as on these examples. And that's it for my presentation. And I'll open up to questions. All right. So we're opening up to questions from the board. Dr. Reif. Thank you, Mr. Turner, for the presentation. It was

061a little unclear to me about, you made the recommendation for the MRAs last year for the select groups, and it sounds like we're continuing with those, but what exactly are the changes we're making for 22 for, like, are we modifying the salary range for the APs, or what other changes are we going to be making, and is there any other changes in addition to the step increase? So, yes, we still have to work with HR to look at what are going to be the changes for those employee groups. Again, because we looked at several different job classes this year versus the five or six that we looked at last year. And there's varying degrees of... of what I believe should be done based on their results that Heather has provided us. Again, some of the

062positions don't need anything because they're competitive. Some of the positions aren't competitive at the start of the scale. Some of them aren't competitive at the top of the scale. And then some of them, you know, aren't competitive at all. So the whole scale needs to be adjusted. So we're working with HR to determine what's the best path forward. Do we want to add steps to the top of the scale? Do we want to eliminate steps at the bottom, provide MRAs, or what? So we're still working with HR to determine what's the best path forward right now. So that would be for the 26, just the 26 jobs you looked at this year. And I trust that at some point you'll update us on whatever you all decide to do. Yes. Yes, we will be updating.

063Specifically, what we want to try to look at are the employee groups from this compensation study where you see across the board there is a discrepancy or it's not an alignment or competitiveness. So that's really where we want to start. But then, as Mr. Turner mentioned, we do want to look at, you know, some of our employee groups where we could collapse that, you know, at the front end of the steps and add to the tail end. It's really just going to have to be some additional analysis, like looking at how many of our staff are planning in that subgroup or maybe close to retirement age and, you know, just things of that nature so that we can determine if it's going to be feasible. Because if we put ourselves in a situation where it's...

064just hypothetical because we haven't done this analysis or complete this analysis yet but if we um had a situation where we were looking at an employee group that was soon going to be retiring over the next two to three years we wouldn't add all these steps when we're going to have to go and um and not do something to the the you know on the front end when we know we're going to need to hire a bunch of people for that employee group two to three years from now so we're going to have to really look at scenarios such as that um to determine the best strategy. So we're not trying to fix something today and it becomes an issue, a problem in regards to recruitment at a later time and vice versa. That can

065go either way. We don't want to invest at the beginning, you know, on the front end and majority of that employee group are in the middle and they're going to be with us for the next 20 years, you know. Hopefully we're going to retain them over the next 20 years. So we would want to try to invest in that particular employee group. So those scenarios can change really depending on what our deeper analysis is going to look like. Great. So if there aren't any other questions. We can move along in the meeting and I'll turn it back over to Dr. Hutchings. We do that. I do want, I meant to mention this, Ms. Anderson had talked about this earlier about the benefits component. I think it was Ms. Anderson. I can't remember. But one thing

066that I think is going to be important for us to look at, it may not have been Ms. Anderson, it might've been Dr. Reif about the PPO. And we may want to, we have to be careful. Because our current staff, many are kind of like faithful to, you know, this is my insurance. This is my doctor. I don't want to leave this network, you know. So we have to be careful when making kind of adjustments to some of those benefits because there are. whether people have certain existing conditions or certain medical doctors that they've been working with over the past couple of years or several years, that does have an impact on those things. So that is something that we definitely, you know, when you start talking about shifting or having just one, you know,

067medical. provider, medical insurance provider, or health insurance provider, it can be very, very controversial just because the current staff members are part of those groups. So it's different for somebody coming in because that's all they will know. But some people have been faithful to those, you know, to that provider. And that's one of the reasons why when we begin to talk about benefits, it's always a very heated discussion. um uh you know around around that topic but uh mr turner i saw that you unmuted so you may want to add something to that yes so i was just going to say it is definitely a hot button issue and that's why the last time that when we made any plan changes and even added a new plan uh we had a health benefits committee that

068um comprises several different stakeholders across acps to come to a decision on what what the benefit changes were going to be and again it's to provide savings on one side to be able to provide employees with something else right so if we're looking at trying to increase pay and then money is scarce um you know we can make changes to the plan options to lower our costs on the benefits side to be able to provide the money to offer salary increases um as heather said in her presentation it's all about the compensation philosophy um and understanding what's more important to our employees I will say a lot of times it's very difficult because you end up with an even split on those that want to pay versus those that want the benefits. So a lot

069of the time it comes down to just making a decision, you know, for what we believe is the best for the organization. You know, we have a fairly young staff when you look at the overall average age of our employees versus other organizations. For instance, if you look at the City of Alexandria staff, their staff is much older than our staff, so their staff may lean heavier on the benefits than our staff might be. But again, you know, just got to, you know, kind of pull your staff to understand what's important to them. I'm sure what's important to me when it comes to compensation is probably vastly different than what might be important to the superintendent or Dr. Wilkins or anybody. Okay. So I know, do you want us to shift into our next item,

070Madam Chair? Absolutely. Let's move on to our virtual plus and phase reopening update. Great. So is Susan or who's, or Sahar, thank you. Sahar is going to put up the presentation. So as we bring up the presentation, I just want to start by, as any chance I get, thanking our staff because they are working tirelessly. And trust me, everybody, I know that you all are working really hard. In spite of what you might hear from people on the outside. I know that you're working really hard every single day on behalf of our students and this virtual plus you know that when we embarked on this back in September I mean it was a huge transition for everybody including our students our students and our staff and over the past several months they have really rose

071to the occasion and I just want to thank them for all of the hard work and dedication that they have done. I also want to be able today I hope to clear some of you know, the confusion that I've heard from just a couple of emails that we've gotten in regards to our decision matrix so that we can provide some clarity around that, as well as to help the board understand how we're continuing to move forward in spite of not being able to open our doors on January 19th and what that work looks like. So we're going to start off with going right into our essential questions. And I'm going to hand things over to Dr. Mozingo so we can get started there. And then we're going to go right through our presentation and hopefully

072be able to answer some questions from our board. Thank you so much. And good evening, Madam Chair and Vice Chair. And Dr. Hutchins, I think you are absolutely correct. I think many of these essential questions were set up to help clarify some of the confusion that might be, you know, around what you just described. So here we go. We have seven guiding questions for the presentation this afternoon. The first is, what is the guidance, inputs, and health data that will continue to inform the decision-making process? for phasing our students back to the hybrid learning model. Number two, as he just indicated, we will provide more information regarding the decision matrix indicators that are being used for phasing students back into the system, as well as what is the staff and students' ability to return? Our

073school principals are really working in this area and you'll hear more information about what is occurring in that area tonight. What is the hybrid instructional model? We'll provide an overview of that. Profession learning, what will be implemented in terms of professional learning to engage and build the skill set of our staff to be successful as they transition to this model. In addition, technology, what technology tools will support teaching and learning within our hybrid model. And finally, we'll end with how will the facility processes and safety measures be implemented over the next few months. You've seen this slide before, but we want to continue to present it because it means a lot to us and the work that is being accomplished here within our school division. And we want to restate again that the work is

074being guided by the public health experts from the CDC. We're getting a lot of information from the Center for Disease and Control and Prevention. And later tonight, again, you will hear from our director of the Alexandria Health Department. Dr. Stephen Herring, who will provide some information to us. We're continuing to enhance the virtual instructional model. We have gotten a lot of feedback from our families in the community and the many efforts underway to continue to engage our students in the virtual model. In addition to that, we just want to highlight that the plan that was approved. by the school board is still based upon these factors that are listed here, staffing, building capacity, the community metrics. And again, you'll hear more about the decision matrix indicators. And lastly, the guiding principles, we leave these up

075just about in every meeting because they're critical for building trust, for ensuring collaboration, for ensuring coordination. they really do guide a lot of what is occurring, what is being developed, as well as many of our discussions with many groups. So again, we just want to continue to have those in the forefront of our work. And I see Dr. Herring is on here, Dr. Mazzinco, so I think he will be able to do the slide now. Yes, we'll turn it over to Dr. Herring. Yes, good evening. Dr. Stephen Herring, Director of Alexandria Health Department. Thanks for having me here this evening. The upper left of this... slide here talks about the five different categories that the Centers for Disease Control provides in their CDC school metrics decision-making toolkit. And you can see that ranges in the

076green from lowest risk to highest risk. So it doesn't use the word safe, it just says gradations of risk. Then when you look at the lower left, those are the core indicators. Those two core indicators, one is the total number of new cases for 100,000 persons in the past 14 days. And that number there is 678. And to give you an idea, to go from the higher risk to the highest risk, the threshold is 200. So we're more than triple the threshold just to get the highest risk. The other core indicator is the percent of positive PCR tests that have been done in the past 14 days. And you can see that's 11.3%. And the trigger or the threshold for that is about 8% to go from, excuse me, it's 10% to go from the

077higher to the highest risk. So we're considerably above that threshold. The column on the right are the secondary indicators, and we watch those as well as many other things. And those secondary indicators, as you can see, Alexandria is currently falling in the highest risk, a moderate risk, and then a higher risk for those three categories. And I know, Dr. Herring, that you're very modest, but I have to say this publicly. I know I said it when the governor visited Alexandria this past Tuesday. We are so grateful and thankful for your hard work and dedication, as well as your team. We were able to get this vaccination before many of our other school divisions in the Northern Virginia region because of the hard work that you have put forth and the advocacy that you put forth

078to ensure that we are, you know, working to get. our buildings as healthy and safe as possible. And this gives us a lot of hope. As we have gotten these vaccinations and I got my first dose, everybody, I'm feeling great today, right? My arm hurt a little bit yesterday. I did take some. I said it was a leave. My wife was like, no, that was Advil. So I took some Advil. But I worked out today. I ran yesterday. So I have really been okay thus far. I haven't had any symptoms in regards to like flu-like symptoms or things of that nature. Knock on wood. But I think I'm past the two-day mark. So I should be good to go. So I'm just encouraging our staff, and many of them are already out there doing this.

079And I just appreciate the Alexandria Health Department for your you know, tirelessness, as well as all the hours you're putting in to make this work and to make it like a well-oiled machine. Because many school divisions across, or not school divisions, but cities across the country, they're not having the processes smooth as it is here. I was on a panel earlier today with the superintendent from California and They said that the setup is the line. Sometimes you're waiting for six hours to get your vaccination. So that lets me know that they must not have the appropriate kind of like setup if people are waiting in line for six hours to get the vaccine. I know that our staff have been talking about their time slots and they're getting through. um many are saying you know

080in 10 minutes uh from the time that they arrive to the time that they leave so uh that it takes a lot of um planning to make that possible so i wanted to just put that out there dr herring so that you knew how grateful we are and that people understand that you and your team have been really going above and beyond the call of duty to make this possible Dr. Hutchings, thank you. And actually, there's one more thing on this slide I need to talk about that I'm glad you talked about all this because what comes up in my mind is collaboration. It's been two ways what ACPS has been doing with the health department has been above and beyond as well. And so what I want to highlight is the bottom left, and

081it says the ability of the school to implement the five key mitigation strategies. And that's not colored because Those things are actually not something one can report across the state. All this information is posted on the Virginia Department of Health website. But those five key mitigation strategies, we're seeing from the health department perspective that if this was color-coded, this would be in the lowest risk. This is the green. This is the area that a school system has control over. So I do want to report that all the things that I'm hearing from ACPS in terms of their plans and their implementation are in the right area, right direction. in terms of controlling the things that ACPS can control. Okay, I want to go right into our phase reentry timeline because I think this is another

082point of clarification so that everyone is aware of how we're moving forward, especially with the fact that due to our community transmission rates that we're not able or we were not able to transition our first group of students on January 19th and now have combined that first group with our second group to both start on January the 26th. So let's pay attention to each one of these columns. I'm going to kind of give an overview. of each. When you look at the first column that says two weeks, confirm and update staff availability. What we're doing on these particular dates is we are sharing with our staff two weeks prior to the scheduled return for that particular group. So for our staff who work with students with disabilities in grades K through five, as well as

083our English learner teachers who work with students in K through five. for English learners, we're reaching out to them to make sure that they have a student roster that includes their students that they currently have, because a part of this transition was to keep our students and our staff together. So giving them a roster of their students and helping them understand which students based on the family choice document are going to be virtual and which students have opted to receive the hybrid delivery of instruction. We will also, at that time, revisit the intent to return for that particular staff member. And specifically, what we're asking is, has something changed between the November date when they initiated or when we initiated our intent to return form and that particular date that they've received their roster? And

084things that can only change have to be within the five categories. So, for example, you may not have had a medical condition two months ago, and you have one now. You may have someone in your household that didn't have it. a medical condition before, but it has one now. You could have someone who were in your household who had a medical condition and two months, now they're gone. They're not in your house anymore. Maybe something happened. Not something bad. I didn't mean that. That didn't come across right. But the third area is childcare needs, because we asked our families, excuse me, we asked our staff if they had any childcare issues that they needed to address. The fourth is dealing with They may have had a birthday because we allowed folks who were 65 and

085older, they may not have been able to come back into our school buildings. And now they're 65 and that may have changed. And then the fifth area may be fear or anxiety. And the greatest thing about this all is we do have this vaccine, which I know is not the end all be all, right? So the vaccine is not gonna all of a sudden tomorrow. all of our kids and all of our staff come back to school, right? Because we still have certain groups that we have to go through for everyone to have the vaccination in the first place. But what it does bring to us is hope, and it may mitigate some of the fear and anxiety that we know came out of the intent to return forms back in November. A lot of

086the fear and anxiety was that we don't have a vaccine. And at that time, they were talking about a vaccine, but it wasn't official. Now we have one, right? So that can mitigate some of the fear and anxiety that- people had prior to returning back into our school buildings. So the goal is that these vaccines that we're administering to our staff, that we should see an increase in the number of staff members able to return as we move forward and transition through this whole vaccination process. The next column is providing a class assignment and course kind of schedule to our hybrid families. So these are families who opted to have the hybrid learning approach. And what we will be doing is providing on these specific dates, we will be providing them with their actual schedule

087to say, your child will be reporting to school X on Tuesday, Wednesday, or your child will be reporting to school Y on Thursday. and Friday so that they can have that information. We are trying to keep our siblings on the same days so there's not a conflict where you have one sibling on Tuesday, Wednesday, and another sibling on Thursday, Friday. We're really trying to work through some of those conflicts so they don't have household issues that they might be faced with us trying to have different days or different times for them to report. These schedules are going to go specifically out to our hybrid families because they have opted to be in person on two days per week. And we want to make sure that they're informed about that. At that particular time, they are

088also going to receive, in addition to their child's schedule, and we'll talk about this later on in our presentation from Ms. Runkle. But they're going to receive the status of the teacher, whether the teacher is going to be in attendance or not. And this is why it's important prior to us sending that class assignment out that we poll our teachers again, because something might have changed. And we don't want families to get worked up over a teacher. Initially, they weren't going to be there, but now they are. So we want to make sure that we're giving the most recent information out to our families so that. anyone who would like to make a change based on the information that they have, that they will be able to go into power school and make a change.

089They may have decided, you know, I thought I wanted to do hybrid right before the winter break, but now I don't. So we're going to ask those hybrid families if they, if they wanted to make a change to their option. The third column deals with our communication to our staff, as well as our families around our decision. And this is why it was important for us to have the decision matrix. Our community wanted to have something that was a visual, something that was simple to really follow how we're making our decisions with reopening our school buildings. So these are the specific dates that families in these particular groups will know when they are going to, whether or not, excuse me, we're going to be able to transition on that specific date. And then the final

090column is just the phase re-entry date. These dates haven't changed except for January 19th. We combined January 19th and January 26th groups together to return on January 26th, but we have not at this time pushed any of the other groups out because I know there were some questions out in the community with us not having the January 19th date. Does now every group get pushed out by a week. And that is not the case. We collapsed that first group and the second group together at this particular time. But every week when we make our decision, if there is an adjustment, this timeline is going to be a part of that announcement. So you'll see if the dates don't change or if it's updated, you'll see updated like you see right now on specific dates. So

091this is going to be important for us to keep the community kind of involved and engaged so they understand our process. Next slide. So I want to go right into our decision matrix indicators. I'm going to turn things back over to Dr. Herring in just a moment. I just wanted to make a point in regards to our decision matrix. First and foremost, it is important for the board and the community to know that the VDH provided guidance for mitigation measures back in July. It was updated again back in October. And then we just got an email today that it's updated again. So we are going to make some updates based on that new information that was released today to the community. But for the most part, it is pretty aligned with our decision matrix that

092we have shared with the community as well as with the board. in the past. So I just wanted to make it clear that this decision matrix, yes, that is a new feature that we're sharing out with our community, but it was developed using all of the previous documents and guidelines and guidance that we received from the Virginia Department of Health, the CDC, and the Alexandria Health Department. previously. So that's not new. That partnership with our Alexandria Health Department is not a new partnership. Us working with the VDH is not a new partnership. So all of these things have just been put into this matrix so that it could be more of a visual and simplified. So I'm going to turn things over back to Dr. Heron so you can talk about the next slide, which

093deals with our considerations for transitioning between our school instructional models that specifically talk about the community transmission component of that. Thanks, Dr. Hutchings. I'm going to take the upper portions of this. So the highest upper portion is divided into criteria on the left side. I talked before about the number of new infections per 100,000 and the percent positivity. And then coming across, you see three different columns. Before we talked about the Centers for Disease Control providing... five different categories. And what we've done, and we've modeled this after other health departments across the country, and then Virginia Department of Health has adopted something similar. And as Dr. Hutchings said, they're presenting something even newer soon. But for now, what we're talking about is we've collapsed those five categories into three categories of moderate risk or less,

094higher risk or highest risk. The highest risk category, the farthest to the right, is the same as the Centers for Disease Control. The higher risk combine a couple of the different categories from the CDC matrix, and then the moderate or lower risk combine the lower columns. Then we look at the, and so that's the level of community transmission, that upper box. The next box is the level of school impact. And I'm going to take the first row of this. And that first... criteria is the transmission within the school facility. This is where I'm understanding from Virginia Department of Health, they haven't finalized it, but a lot of these things will change in terms of the framing. But the general idea is the same, and that is that from a public health perspective, it's low impact

095if there's zero sporadic cases, a case here or there, and there's no evidence that there's transmission widely through the school. That wouldn't concern me as the health director. There could be medium school impact if there was an outbreak, and depending on the size of the outbreak, if the outbreak was, because an outbreak by definition for COVID-19 is two or more. Well, if it was two or three, we might not be concerned, maybe even five or six, depending on the number of people we're talking about, what the denominator would be. Or there might be, you know, sporadic outbreaks over a period of time. And then the final category for the level of school impact again from a public health perspective would be high if there were several impact several outbreaks within a short period of time

096or if one of the outbreaks was significant in terms of the percentage of student and or staff that were impacted and so then i'll i'll have dr hutchings take over that last row Can we go to the next slide? Because I'm going to talk about that here. So specifically, when we're talking about the levels of school impact, in addition to what Dr. Herring just shared, is we have to look at the staffing and building capacity. During a normal, typical year, right, our staffing and building capacity is at 75 to 100 percent. That's meaning any and everybody can fit into the school all at the same time. No CDC requirements. You know, everybody's at work. all those different types of factors come into that normal range, which we're not quite there yet. I'm hoping we will

097get there at some point really soon, especially with this vaccination that is happening right now. The strained level is when we are at our staffing capacity between 50 and 75%. Now, we have to keep in mind, we can't have 100% of our staff in our school buildings because of the CDC guidelines on a given day. So that alone causes us to have a strained staff within our school buildings. And that's why we're at between 50 and 75%. This can vary once we begin to open our doors and we see outbreaks that happen. you know, or if outbreaks happen within our schools, we could see a variance at different schools. And that can vary from classroom to the entire school as a whole. So that's something we're going to have to monitor on a weekly basis,

098not just from the school division level, but also from each individual school level. That's why you see schools and or division. And then we get very critical when we are in a situation where we have less than 50% of our staff. or less than 50% of our building capacity available for use. We're at a very critical level because that's going to have a significant impact on our facilities, on health services, on our instructional delivery, on school nutritional services, transportation, the list goes on and on. But we could get potentially into a critical range if we were in a situation where our buildings were open and we had a wide community spread within a school. and we had to close classrooms down or close half of the school down. That is when you begin to get

099into some of those critical ranges. If you can go to the next slide, I want to share how the two come together in our decision matrix, where we're taking our levels of school impact, as well as our level of community transmission, and using all of this information to make the decision on whether we're going to have a hybrid model implemented, a modified hybrid model, or a 100% virtual model. So let's take today, for example, and we know that Dr. Herring, he just went over the level of community. at the beginning of this presentation, he mentioned that we're at the highest risk as of right now. So this is up-to-date information as of today. So we're at the highest risk. I just share with you that we're at a strange level in regards to our school

100impact because one, we have to follow CDC guidelines. So 100% of our staff and capacity is not available. all at one time because we do have to adhere to those guidelines. So we're at a strained capacity level in regards to our school impact. So if we're at a strained school impact level and we're at the highest risk for our community transmission, then our decision at this point is still 100% virtual. Now, what we're hoping to see over time is that this vaccination that is occurring with all of these different groups, as we're moving through all these different groups, that we should see our community transmission decline over time. And we should see more of our staff members back into our school buildings. And we should see some of the CDC guidelines changing, you know, in

101the future. I don't know when that date is going to come. I can't predict it. I wish I could. I would be a billionaire if I could. But all of those factors have an impact, not only in our school, but also our community transmission, which helps us to make our decision in regards to the method of instruction. So I want to go quickly through each of the different phases because there were some questions around what's hybrid, what's modified hybrid, and what's 100% virtual. So first, let's look at the hybrid. And this is a slide that you have seen before. Specifically, it lays out what a typical week looks like for students and staff. When a student is a hybrid student, so that means two days per week they're in person, they're either going to be

102in person on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or they're going to be in person on a Thursday, Friday. Right. Then we have a group of students who are who have selected to remain 100 percent virtual. So you'll see they'll be virtual Tuesday through Friday, really Monday through Friday, because, as you know, Mondays are our asynchronous days for our students. It's a planning day for teachers, professional learning for our teachers. And it's also office hours for our teachers that we want to continue to have in that, you know, this schedule is still going to remain once we transition into the hybrid. So this is what our schedule will look like as a school division when we transition into a hybrid approach. When we transition into a modified hybrid, and that is the next slide, this gives you an

103idea of where our prioritization student groups are. We started this process back in July when we were having discussions on how do we transition our kids back into our school buildings. And we began to set up this prioritization matrix that allowed us to focus on the specific student groups that we know are most vulnerable. The specific student groups that we know have childcare issues or families have childcare issues, as well as the specific groups that we know have some academic vulnerability and challenges as well. So if we're in a situation where we're not able to transition into a full hybrid model, we're going to have to start. looking at specific groups that we may transition into our buildings. And we're going to start with special education. Then we're going to look at our EL students,

104as well as our earliest learners. meaning pre-K through third grade students. We also want to start looking at our academically vulnerable students, and that's pre-K through 12, because we do know that there is a population of students who are having significant academic challenges and significant social and emotional challenges that we want to make sure we're able to address. So it really is going to depend on why we're at a modified level. What is the cause of the modified hybrid level? give a clearer kind of layout of how those timelines are going to change. But I wanted to make sure that our community were asked, well, who are those student groups that you will focus on in a modified hybrid? We wanted to make sure that we were sharing who those groups are. Special education, EL,

105English learners, pre-K through third grade, and those academically vulnerable students. So the next slide. And this is just, you know, our current schedule that everybody's already familiar with, which is our virtual plus 100% of our students are virtual right now. So I'm not going to rehash all of this information, but it's just to give a clear understanding around each one of these phases. So, Mr. Page. Thank you, Dr. Hutchings. So just want to provide a quick high-level overview of the family choice form that was collected across the division in December. Before we get into the actual results, just want to go over that we had over 12,800 family choice forms completed for students throughout the division, which represents approximately 83% of all students. And that is not something that was achieved through a passive stance.

106There was a lot of active and proactive outreach, both centrally and from schools, communicating with families directly and doing all that we can as a division to support families and making the best decision for them in this instance. So to get into the results, you'll see on the left-hand side there. We had approximately 60% of students falling within the virtual realm and approximately 40, 41% opting into hybrid. And it is noted that the virtual 60% does include the 17% who were unable or chose not to complete the form. When we began to disaggregate those results across different groups, we did see some differences among our race ethnicity of students in terms of their selection with a high of 53 percent. of white students being opted into the hybrid model and a low there of 27%

107amongst our black and African American students. When we looked at those results by special program in terms of talented, gifted, English learner, and students with disabilities, we didn't see much variance there from the overall division average, but you can certainly see there talented and gifted was at the high of 45%. and students with disabilities was at the low of 39%, but all largely revolved around that division average of 40%. Next slide. Further, we did see clear patterns emerge when we looked at the results by grade level. So you can see here clear preference or increased preference for our families for our youngest learners with a high of 50% of our kindergarten students being selected for the hybrid model. And then you can see that kind of incrementally decrease as you matriculate up the grade levels

108all the way to a low of 29%. for our seniors. We also did see a wide variance across individual schools in terms of the hybrid selection with George Mason being a high at 68% of students opting into the hybrid model and the low you can see there being both Patrick Henry at 26% or Chance for Change at 11%. So certainly a high level overview. I know our administrators as well as central office staff have been working through these data at a very granular level over winter break and certainly since the close of the Family Choice Forum right before winter break to best inform the transition to hybrid. Dr. Wilkins. Thank you, Clint. Good evening, board members. I'm Stephen Wilkins, chief of staff and oversee HR and operations. I will cover our plan to hire classroom

109monitors. These persons are the adults in the classroom with our students while the teacher is virtual or teaching remotely. I will cover our staffing plan and then Sandra Hardiman, our Director of Recruitment and Retention, will review the costs and funding for these positions. We have worked with our great rock star principals to draft a job description that fits what they need for this role. And I emphasize that this classroom monitor role is not a substitute teacher, but a classroom monitor. The virtual teacher remains the classroom teacher. The instruction is provided online or virtually, while the classroom monitor observes the students so that they remain attentive in the classroom. The classroom monitor ensures the students stay engaged in their learning, and also assist with laptops and classroom instruction so that it is followed per the instruction

110of the online teacher. And of course, the technology that we're using in this event is the Zoom video technology. Some of the responsibilities for the monitor includes helping students manage their day, whether they are in the hallways or during lunch, indoor-outdoor recess, or even during restroom breaks. Most importantly, the monitor will also help students to follow our safety protocols and other activities as requested by the school principal, for example, fire drills. And the monitor will also help students follow the public health protocol, which includes maintenance of the six-foot social distancing, the wearing of face coverings while inside the buildings and even outside in some cases, and of course, the reporting of any safety concerns whatsoever to school administration for immediate resolution. So how many monitors do we need to cover the classroom? We have a

111multi-tier approach to determining that number. First, the school principal determines what other available staff may cover the classroom while the teacher is working remotely. Second, human resources will then recruit from our existing applicant pool for substitute teachers and casual workers. And then third, we will consider outsourcing to a temp agency to bring additional staff on board. so we're using all three means to hire these classroom monitors. However, I remind us that all school divisions are looking for similar help and filling hundreds of positions will be a challenge. Finally, we are also developing an orientation class to ensure that the classroom monitor successfully onboards. We will provide a paid training day before they report to the school so that they can orient and meet their virtual teacher online before the actual class start date. This covers

112the duties and responsibilities of the classroom monitors and the timeline to staff our classrooms. I'll be followed by Ms. Hardiman, Director of Recruitment and Retention. Sandra? Thank you, Dr. Wilkins. So this slide includes a cost analysis for both staffing options that Dr. Wilkins mentioned. For internal staffing, this includes our vetted substitutes and casual personnel who do not have ongoing contracts. This work group includes a total of 1,127 FTE, and the recruitment team has presented this opportunity to them, and 46 have applied as of noon today. The outsourced procurement process is being reviewed and will require a contracting of these services. This costing will include salary and overhead costs from the employment provider. And the costing is based on two scenarios. The four-day workweek if Monday remains an asynchronous day and therefore it wouldn't require a

113monitor on Mondays. And then the traditional five-day workweek. There are some additional operational costs in both of these scenarios, and they're noted in the comments. We plan to cover these costs through CARES Act funding. And now I'll turn it over to Mariah Runkle. Good evening, everyone. Next slide, please. We wanted to provide an overview to the board and for those listening in of what information and repeat and expand upon what Dr. Hutchings mentioned earlier. We will be sending the communication we will be sending out based on the time chart that he shared in earlier slides. We'll include the days which their student is scheduled, the return date. which the first group that will receive their emails tomorrow, that return date will be for the 26th of January, as Dr. Hutchings mentioned previously. In addition, we

114also will be adding the teacher return information, so whether that teacher is able to return or not able to return. And we will include a school specific contact that the principals have let us know of the person at their school that is going to be responsible for fielding those emails and calls from parents should they have questions and or should they like to update their choice whether their child is returning in the hybrid or the virtual model. It will also include information about meals, a little precursor. For those who are attending school in person, on the days they are in person, they will be receiving breakfast, snack, and lunch. In addition, it explains some of the transportation and that transportation. Information will be coming soon as we begin to finalize that. Transportation is doing an

115amazing, I want to give a shout out to Mr. Merriman and his team. It's quite the task and they're working very hard on that. In addition, we also will be alerting people that they will need to make sure that all of their registration documents, if they are new to ACPS, and then that their immunizations are up to date if they are opting to return into the hybrid model. We are well aware, and one of the things during COVID is the Faith Center and Ms. Burgos' and Mr. Huffman's areas of the division have done just above and beyond duty in making sure that we're reaching out to our families. If families do not have an email on file or they may need some additional assistance, we already have groups getting ready to help reach out to

116families and field families calls in those areas as soon as they receive that email tomorrow. And finally, the helpline is always available and they have received literally over tens of thousands of calls this school year and have done an amazing job in keeping everybody informed. So those will start going out tomorrow and then they will go out based on the chart that is publicized on the website. I will now turn it over to Corey who will let you know about professional learning. Good evening, everyone. Corey Kapelsky from the Office of Talent Development, and I want to provide an update on the professional learning opportunities that are being offered to staff. So we've broken down our professional learning into a framework, a three-tiered framework of technical, instructional, and personal learning. And that really walks through health

117and safety and technology integration, mixed in then with instructional planning and delivery. And then finally, some of the personal, which is the assessment and differentiation for our diverse learners. In terms of what's been filled in there and some of the resources that are available, we have a presentation that's been developed for school staff to view and as well as a Canvas module that looks at health and safety protocols so that all of our teachers can understand the expectations and the resources that are available to make sure that we are maintaining social distancing, hand washing, using our masks correctly, and that we're recognizing those needs in students. There's also been a Canvas page that's been developed that outlines the hybrid model specifically for ACPS, connects with our curriculum and our teaching and learning framework, and also

118provides instructional planning and delivery resources. These are specific resources for planning and delivering instruction in a hybrid model. We've also looked at some online self-paced courses that really walk through all of the phases of teaching from setting up the social emotional needs of students to assessing and feedback and communication with parents, all focusing with that online piece. And we are working on procuring that and making sure that we can get that out to teachers. And the personal is in development. It'll be coming soon as we continue to partner with EL, SPED, TAG, and other offices to make sure that our messaging and the resources available for teachers are high quality and exactly what they would need. Taking a look at the next slide, looking at where teachers can access this, we're going to utilize a

119resource that teachers have been accessing throughout the Virtual Plus model. So there is a Canvas course that looks like this on the page. And we'll be putting everything there. And there's some advantages to having that is that it's a consistent and well-trafficked location. Teachers know exactly where to go. They've been there before. Ideally, they've been going there throughout the time in virtual to gather resources and get professional learning. So there's no new registration and teachers already have access. We're also prioritizing some key ideas for teachers as they engage with this professional learning. So the focus is mainly asynchronous learning. We want for the topics to be very focused on what teachers will be doing. with students in this model. And we also really want to prioritize flexible participation so that teachers can participate in this

120professional learning throughout their school day, at night, in the evening, in the morning, during a lunch break, whenever they want to access it, they can do that. And also making sure that we highlight the school-based support is not going anywhere. Coaches, TISs, administrators, PLCs, they will all still be there to support the high quality instruction that's been happening throughout the year. And now I want to pass it over to Dr. Hoover. Thank you. So a quick update on the additional technology resources that we have purchased to support concurrent teaching. I was feeling very pleased with how well everything had been going as far as our process and planning and receiving. We have received a lot of equipment this week. We received our web cameras and our computer monitors. Unfortunately, today we learned that our tripods

121are still in China. and we do not know when we will receive them. So we are looking at our other options. However, the web cameras can be affixed to other surfaces like a computer or anything else. So it's not a crisis, but I guess I should have planned on having some sort of challenge like this. So right now, this week, my staff has been inventorying and assigning them. We are delivering them to schools next week with the help of facilities and operations, which we're grateful for their collaboration. And then by the end of this month, we will increase our bandwidth from five gigabits to 10 to support the increased network traffic in our school buildings. In order to support our teachers with the new equipment, we'll be doing several things. We will have several webinars.

122So if teachers want to come on and talk to somebody and get support, we'll do that. We're recording some videos that can be accessed anytime from the Canvas page that Corey was just talking about. They'll receive PDF documents on how to set this up. It's really a plug and play. Everything plugs in directly into their laptop. And then we will be also working to have some of our staff in the buildings when teachers set up their rooms. So if they do need the additional support, we can be there. So I'm going to turn this over to Dr. Hart so she can talk about our school. And I'm going to speak for Dr. Hart because she's getting her vaccine right now. So she had to step off. So she's at TC getting her vaccination. So one,

123I just want to say that this past week, we were able to do our walkthroughs on Monday and Tuesday at all of our school buildings just to. to gauge the progress that we've made over the past several months. And I have to give a huge shout out to our facilities and operations team. They have been working tirelessly since March to not only do our capital improvement projects, but also to ensure that we have all of our processes and health and safety measures in place. So our classrooms are set up in all of our school buildings using our six foot distancing guidelines. I do want to make it very clear when I spoke with our VDOE. superintendent, Dr. James Lane, he mentioned that the VDOE does support six foot distancing and it's something that they are

124strongly encouraging for schools to abide by. And I'm glad that we stayed true to that. And we are continuing to follow that within our schools. our buildings, they range depending on the size of the classrooms and the size of our school buildings. I have to give a hats off to our custodians as well as our principals and our administrators at our school buildings because they have been working through ensuring that classrooms that may have had a higher number of students who need to be or who have opted to be in that particular classroom, that they're moving those particular classes to rooms that can accommodate those numbers of students. So there's some shifting. that has occurred. Teachers have been notified about some of those changes. It didn't happen at a lot of schools, but many of

125our schools who had high percentages of students wanting to return, we had to make some of those adjustments. And, you know, hats off to, especially I was so concerned about George Mason because it was the school that had the most students wanting to return at 68%. But I have to tell you, Dr. Oliver, we toured her school on Tuesday. And she has it all set and ready to roll, even with the 68% of students that are returning. So we have made the necessary adjustments to accommodate that. So we're really at a good place in regards to that. Some of the non-instructional areas, as I mentioned earlier, had to be used. In some cases, like George Mason, we did set up one of our classrooms in the library area. We had to set up one of

126our classrooms in the band room area because there are larger spaces to accommodate some of those classes that had larger numbers of students wanting to return just so that we would be able to provide. that request from our families. Our signage and our floor distancing decals and markers, they are throughout. all of our school buildings. So you will see if you enter our schools now, little markers that say social distancing to remind our students and our staff members about the importance of social distancing. You'll also see markers for six feet apart. So especially at the elementary schools, when students are walking in line, that they are at their spot so that we can maintain the social distancing throughout the day. And then, as I mentioned before, we did make some of those minor adjustments. Hats

127off to Anita Cordova as well, who is our director of custodial services, who has been working with all of our custodians throughout. They have done just an amazing job. I wish I could send all the pictures to you all. I'll try to send some more to you just so you can get a feel of just the hard work they've done. You can see our John Adams crew right there. We were all excited because they have a new cafeteria too. So that's the new, it looks amazing, by the way. way, the cafeteria staff was so excited about their kitchen because they have a real kitchen now that looks nice and clean. And then Miss Doritha, I mean, she is just an amazing woman too, who she's one of our contracting custodians. However, she... chose to paint

128our bathrooms at the Minnie Howard campus of T.C. Williams, or formerly T.C. Williams, and also some of the stairwells and hallways as well, on her own, you know, over the past few months. And she did a phenomenal job. So hats off to all of our custodial team. They have just been working so hard. Next slide. This is one of our teachers at Douglas MacArthur. Those are empty boxes. We walked in because, you know, our teachers at Douglas MacArthur, as you all know, they're at our swing space location, the old Patrick Henry. However, it is a step up from the old Douglas MacArthur. So even though they're at a, you know, a swing space right now, they are so excited to have larger rooms, to have windows, to be able to, you know, have places for

129all of their things. But as you can see, and Dr. Hoover, tell me the teacher's last name again. Emily Leinbach. Thank you. I knew Emily, I just know Leinbach. Ms. Leinbach. So I just wanted to make sure we give a shout out to Ms. Leinbach because she was able to get through all those boxes, which many of our teachers are. We're having them utilize Mondays. This was Monday when we were here visiting because Mondays are already teacher planning days and teacher professional learning days. We opened our buildings for teachers to be able to come in and start unpacking some of their things in their classrooms on January 11th so that they're prepared when their time shifts for their students so that we're ready to roll. But we are delivering our PPE to all of our

130classrooms. Thank you to our facilities and operations team who have been ordering PPE since March. So we do have enough for all of our buildings. And as for student and staff, we've been doing all of our training sessions for and preparing for our training sessions. Many of our custodians have already been going through a lot of training. We happened to sit in one of the trainings when we were doing our tours this past week. And then also making sure that we're getting our on-site screening technology options in place to, you know, because we are going to have a lot of situations where we're doing temperature checks and everything, every building is going to be similar to where our stations are right now. Every school is going to have to operate that way. So we are

131making sure that we are prepared when our staff and students return back into our school buildings. All right. Dr. Mozingo, I think you're going to end it. Yes, I'm going to end it. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much. Many of you will remember this in working with Education Elements. They introduced the concept of sprints. And so we are continuing to utilize that concept. This is the hybrid reopening sprint. And these are what we have listed here for you are the goals, our planning sessions that occur to reach the goals, as well as our school board meeting updates. you will see that we have scheduled four sprints, January the 11th, all the way through March the 26th. I wanted to highlight just a couple of milestones or priorities. If you go to, because there have been

132questions about this, if you go to sprint three and look at the last bullet, then you will see that there is... will be efforts on the way to establish, to conclude and develop an academic plan to conclude the year. I know that that has been a question that has been asked and we're really good glad to see March 15th to the 26th, that last bullet. Efforts will be on the way to complete a summer 2021 learning plan. A lot of, some of what you've heard tonight is identified as some of the milestones listed under these various goals. The second, the planning sessions relate to the different groups that we meet with, you know, comprised of teachers and parents and students and community members. And we'll continue those meetings because we learn, listen and learn a

133lot from those stakeholders. And lastly, as I said earlier, we've also listed the school board meetings where we are committed to still providing updates. And the last slide. is just a summary. Sorry, Dr. Hutchins. Can you go back to the other slide? Can you just push, I mean, I just wanted you to highlight those bullets under Sprint 2, Sprint 3, and Sprint 4 because they seal analysis and then the summer, the ending the year and also our summer learning so that people can know when to expect that information. Okay, so if you go to Sprint 2, which is February 1st through the 19th, one thing that's significant there, the second bullet does relate to the groups that are being phased in and the planning that's occurring. You'll also see the last bullet there where there

134will be a presentation regarding the analysis to be able to support children that have had some learning loss. So there are efforts already on the way. Schools are already working and have plans in place, but that is some information that will be shared. If you go to sprint three, what I want you to see is that again, that last bullet, there will be a plan because we have to have a plan organized in a way that we conclude the academic school year. So it's very important that that actually occurs. In addition to sprint four, just want to say again that We're completing a summer learning plan. Remember last summer, we introduced summer learning for all. Well, we know given some of the challenges and the losses, we want to introduce that again and really have

135a plan, a summer plan for all of our students to be successful and to succeed. Is that okay? So that's what I really wanted to highlight. And each week we'll be bringing updates to you in these areas. And on the last slide, the last slide is really just a summary, but it is very important that it kind of takes us back to the beginning of the presentation. We're committed to always continuing, you know, to monitor the public health indicators and the safety metrics. So just want to kind of highlight that we're committed to that. Again, as Dr. Hutchins has already indicated on Mondays, he will be communicating to the community, the decision matrix information. Mariah did a nice job and our principals that are on with us tonight, really many efforts across all of our

136schools to provide information to our families around the class assignment and the course information. And we'll continue with, as he mentioned earlier, we'll continue with our principals, contacting staff in terms of their availability. Most importantly, as you transition to a hybrid, is continue lots of professional learning. And so that, and that was described tonight. Last, we are working with Education Elements. We'll be reporting out some of that next week. But the goal is to now to put all of our milestones and priorities into a work plan so that we can stay on track and not miss any steps as we move forward. So thank you so much. And I'll turn the presentation, the end of the presentation back over to Dr. Hutchins. And that concludes that presentation. But there's so much information and we could

137go on for another two hours, folks. Trust me, we can. But this is a complicated situation that we are rising to the occasion. And guess what? We have no problem doing our jobs every single day because we all took this vow to work for children and for our staff. So we love it. But it's hard work. And we wanted to make sure that we were providing you all with the necessary information so that you can see we are prepared. to pivot whenever that moment comes for our young people to come back into our school buildings as well as our staff and we're going to welcome them with open arms and we're just as excited to get out of our homes as excited as our parents want their kids out of their homes uh so we're

138looking forward to some of your questions and i'm going to turn things back over to you madam chair all right thank you everyone for that um presentation it is a lot a lot of information um i appreciate everything that everyone's doing um to get us back into our buildings as quickly as possible. So with that said, we're going to have questions from the board now. And I've got a question for Ms. Greig. Thank you, Chair Alderton. And thank you, Dr. Hutchings and team. Yes, it was quite a bit. I will have to review that again tonight. I might be reviewing it in my sleep. But thank you nonetheless. We know how hard you're working and we greatly appreciate it. Dr. Hutchings, oh, Madam Chair, before I start, I have two questions. Would you like for

139me to ask now or get back in the queue? You can ask two questions. Thank you. Dr. Hutchings, as you know, Governor Northam had an update, a press conference today with State Superintendent Lane, and he spoke quite a bit about prioritizing schools now and new guidance is coming down from the state. I was just wondering, could you give us an overview of that new guidance and how that will affect our planning and moving ahead with our reopening? Yes. So one, we're really excited that a lot of the revisions that the state is making is aligned with our current discipline, I'm sorry, decision matrix that we have in place. So specifically where they are focused on is how do we go away from when you close schools to focusing on. how do we open schools? You

140know, so they're changing that language for one. They're looking specifically at the community transmission, similar to what we are looking at in our decision matrix. And they're also looking at the level of school impacts, which we are also looking at within our matrix as well. And we really won't see too... too much of a variance between what the VDOE has released and what ACPS currently has. And the reason for that is because we're using all of their documents. So we didn't create our own decision matrix by ourselves. We've been using VDH's information and the CDC information, as well as working directly with our Alexandria Health Department. So it just shows that or validates that we have really been aligned with the state all along. I can't speak for every school division across the Commonwealth of

141Virginia, but what I can say is that we've stayed true to everything I got out of my state superintendent meetings. I brought it back to our team. I did not try to reinvent the wheel or ad lib or add my own perspective to how we should open or close our schools. So I think that is going to show when we show a correlation. You will see our team is going to be reviewing the newly released information and making some updates to our decision matrix. It won't be anything major that you're going to see in regards to those updates. Some colors, some language might change, but the concept and the prioritization as well as the decision matrix kind of like visual is going to be very similar as to what we currently have. So you'll see

142a copy of that next Tuesday. Okay, great. Thank you. And then in Dr. Hoover's presentation, we saw that there'll be professional learning and it specifically said for teachers to support them through webinars, videos, documents. I was wondering what type of professional learning slash training are the subs and the monitors going to receive? So the classroom monitors will not be receiving technology. The technology, because the teachers will be Zooming with the students in the classroom. So the classroom technology has to be attached to the teacher's computer. And if the teacher is at home, that cannot be done. Okay, so in general, the subs or the monitors, and this might not be for you, Dr. Hoover, but in general, will they be receiving any training at all? That's a good question, Ms. Green. And Ms. Hardiman, she

143can talk to, or Dr. Wilkins can talk to. the training that is going to occur. So we're going to have a one-day training for all of our classroom monitors that will entail some basic technology. So just a matter of, hey, I need to turn on my computer, that type of thing, because some kids might have forgotten by the time they get into our building. if Ms. Hardiman or Dr. Wilkins can talk to that one day training that we are discussing that they will be required to have, as well as the safety guidelines that will happen at each one of the schools. Ms. Hardiman. Thanks, Dr. Hutchings, and Sandra can comment as well. I do want to emphasize again that this is a classroom monitor position. It is not a substitute teacher. So the responsibility of

144the classroom monitor is to observe the students and help them stay attentive to the teacher who's teaching remotely, but ensure that the student pays attention using their classroom laptop. So in developing the skill sets for this particular requirement, there are some mandatory things that we have to do along the school safety protocols, as we mentioned, of course, with the COVID-19 public health requirements, as well as some general classroom management skill sets. And then again, some basic technology skills so that they're familiar with the camera system that Dr. Hoover just described. But we're working to develop that particular. class day and I expect it to be somewhere between maybe three to four hours, perhaps longer. We hope to get that finalized here within a week. Sandra, would you like to make any other comment? No, I

145think the important emphasis is just also distinguishing that there is a difference between monitors and substitutes. I've heard that being used kind of interchangeably. Substitutes are charged with really instructional, you know, they're mimicking the classroom teacher, and that is not the purpose of the classroom monitor. And we will have situations where we will have substitutes who will have training, which all of our substitutes will have training, which is going to be different training than what our classroom monitors have. I also think it's important to point out the fact that our classroom monitors of our special education classrooms who might have students with severe needs, that there is some specialty training that they will have to receive. And Ms. Werner may be able to speak to some of that training because it is a little, it's

146in addition to what the typical classroom teachers have. Yes, Dr. Hutchings, it is. And thank you so much for this opportunity. We are working with select agencies that provide highly trained staff, both in the behavior support areas. We are looking at hiring behavior support technicians. We are also working with some of the contracting agencies where we reach out for special ed staff when we need. to have staffing vacancies filled. And in addition, we are working with one of our agencies to provide specialized training for the monitors. So right now, in order to bring back our K-5 students, we have identified the need for 44 monitors. So we are, we're working through that process right now in order to bring them in for additional training. And that training would be above and beyond that which Dr.

147Wilkins was referring. Thank you. Oh, Ms. Thornton? Thank you, Chair Alderton. And thank you so much to everyone for all the hard work on this. I'm grateful for the fact that if we had to have students start transitioning back in person tomorrow, it looks like we're pretty much ready for that. So thank you so much for all the preparation. But I do just want to kind of get a bigger picture overview because, you know, and looking at our decision matrix and at the level of community transmission right now. If the threshold is for us to be below 200 and we're currently at 678. I think it's really important for us to be realistic about the likelihood of when we actually will be able to begin this in-person transition. And I don't know if Dr. Herring

148is still on the line, but Dr. Herring, thank you very much for, you know, the work of the Alexandria Health Department in getting this vaccine program rolling so quickly. And I know a lot of our staff and teachers are grateful to be able to get that vaccine. But just looking at the CDC website today, I saw that. Even after receiving the second dose, and we all know that you have to wait about a month or so before getting your first dose to get the second dose, it could still take up to two weeks, even after getting the second dose for the vaccine to become effective. And so I know we're all excited about everyone getting vaccinated, but in the likelihood of seeing how that might impact our community transmission rate, like how long realistically will

149we start seeing any noticeable impact in that rate? Because I think it's, you know, we're looking at this update every week, but realistically, we're likely not probably going to see any lowering of that transmission rate, especially below 200, you know. I'm not a scientist or a medical professional, but it looks like we're not going to get to that point anytime soon. So I don't know, Dr. Herring, if you could just offer your educated hypothesis on projecting like when, and I know there's no crystal ball, but realistically, how soon could we start expecting some lowering in those transmission rates based on the vaccination process, if he's still online? Dr. Herring, are you still there? I don't see him. I see him. I see his phone. Oh, I see him at the bottom. At the bottom. He's

150on. He may have just stepped away. Yeah. Come back to that. I'm going to come back. Yeah. Okay. We'll come back to that. That's okay. That's fine. And if I may, just while we're waiting for that too. I don't know, Dr. Hutchings, if it's possible to include like when we're giving this weekly update. You know, I think it's helpful for people to understand. I know we have the charts, but when we actually write out those updates in the ACPS Express, if we can put like what the goal is. So for example, we're at 678, but we need to get below 200 to get to that higher rate to begin transitioning. I think it'd be really helpful for people to have that understanding when reading our updates. Thanks. Okay, and we'll come back to you. We'll

151see if we can get Dr. Herring back. Until then, let's go to Ms. Nolan. Thank you, Chair Alderson. So if I may, do you want me to do the same thing, Chair Alderson, in terms of Ms. Green and ask the two questions? Yes, please. Okay, great. So my first question is about... I'm trying to figure out how to capture how to say this is that the week to week plan, my one, it's a sort of a two part of the first question, but number one, given that the vaccine wasn't information we originally had when we scheduled that. Is the vaccine rollout impacting the timeline that was provided today? That's a question I'm being asked by a lot of ACPS parents about what is the impact, again, of vaccinating ACPS staff in terms of the timeline

152that you just introduced today and the rollout plan. And then along the lines of the timeline as well, I appreciate the fact that we've been really transparent and timely with the community. My only concern is... What kind of strain is this putting on the staff, in particular the principals, to have like sort of that, you don't know, it's almost like, hey, double dutch, you're looking at the, you know, the ropes to see when are you going to jump in. And so every Monday announcing, you know, okay, we think this is going to happen, it's going on, you know what I'm saying? I'm just concerned about what type, I appreciate and understand the reasoning for it, that we want to be as transparent and get kids in as quickly as possible. But what kind of strain

153is that producing on our staff? So, Ms. Nolan, to answer your second question first, I think this whole pandemic is putting a strain on everybody, to be honest with you, because it seems that we get new information almost every single day, and we're being forced to pivot. And that's one thing that I think the community doesn't appreciate, because they don't get to see what happens behind the scenes every time we're prepared to open and then we don't, or all the work that comes into just... just the preparation. This wasn't made up that we had to present to you all today. We had to literally work through getting every classroom set up in the school division, monitoring every classroom in the whole school division, making sure we have the PPE and things of that nature. to

154answer your question, I think it is a significant toll on our principals. However, I know our principals rise to the occasion and I know that we, the main focus for us is to ensure that we were prepared for January 19th. January 19th was the official date that we were supposed to start bringing our students into our building and we needed to be prepared for that and when we make pivots or have to change our dates. It's just a matter of maybe changing language, but it's not having to go and redo a classroom or redo a schedule or, you know, those things are just waiting for the green light. So I think there's a lot of hard work and dedication that's being put in on the front end. But as we start finalizing things like our

155classroom monitors, because that's really the big stressor right now, is trying to, you know, have those available, that we will be at a place where we're just ready for the green light to happen. And it's just a matter of us waiting for that moment to, you know, to transition back into our school buildings. Your first question. Yeah, so that, and again, if you don't mind me commenting, no, I appreciate that. And, you know, I obviously rely on your school leaders to share with you their feedback and all that. I just think that at some point, if you feel that it'd be better to tell people, hey, we're definitely, definitely going into Ms. Thornton's point about the uncertainty given like the moment in time. If you feel at some point that it's better for the division

156to stay with utmost certainty that, you know, we're going back this date in March or, you know, And there's some assurance around that. I think that if that helps your staff, I think that's something that we would want to back as a board, because I think it's better to stay with certainty. And I'm just concerned about the strain this has on everyone. But I appreciate the response. The first, the original question as well, again, this is aligned with the timeline, is the vaccines and the rollout that recently occurred, humongous kudos to everyone involved. And really, thanks to the staff. I don't think I've ever received as many. you know, excitement from staff in terms of the morale of people, how fortunate they feel. And I also just think it's a phenomenal example of the city

157working really well in conjunction with the school system. And Dr. Herring, we really appreciate all you did and your colleagues at the city to allow us to be in this position. So my question in terms of the vaccine was Given that that's new information, does that impact? And this is just a question I'm getting asked by a lot of parents. Like, how does the introduction of the vaccination to staff, does that influence or does that impact the timeline? It really doesn't impact the timeline as of right now, because you have to keep in mind, I just got my first dose on Tuesday. I don't get my second dose until February the 9th. Our timeline goes through February the 16th. we were prepared to begin to bring our students back following the CDC guidelines and social

158distancing and face coverings and the cleanings and the air quality. So we're already prepared, even if we didn't have a vaccine, to be able to transition. And so having the vaccinations available to us now does not impact. impact the timeline. What we hope it will do though is that it will impact the number of staff able to come back into our buildings because many of our staff members, some of the fears and anxiety as well as medical conditions that many have, this vaccination will make their ability to return you know, more feasible. And I'm hoping that, or we're hoping that that will change the number of staffing who are able to return. But if it's not going to change the timeline, what changes the timeline at this point really is going to be our community

159health metrics, just like we just had just recently with January 19th. That is something that could really have the most impact on our transition timeline. Thank you. I know Dr. Herring is back. So Ms. Thornton, I can give a nutshell, I think, of what you asked. And just let me know if I got this right. But Dr. Herring, what Ms. Thornton was asking was specifically around, you know, we now have this vaccine in place. However, when we look at our community metrics, they are at the highest risk level and how likely are. our community kind of transmission rates, how likely are they going to kind of like subside or decrease over the next couple of weeks? And if you had to be able to make an educated guess using your health expertise, like when do

160you think we would be at a level that will afford us from the community health metrics level to be able to transition students back? So that means when do you think it will be most likely to get to that higher or moderate risk level as a city? Yeah, and sorry, I had some technical difficulties. Thanks for welcoming me back. It's really difficult to say. I will say that we're not anticipating changing our recommendations on the mitigation strategies through the foreseeable future. So we're still going to be recommending the social distancing, the face masking, staying home unless you have a good reason to be out. And that, I think, is going to be one of the real key points of how quickly this curve starts to come down because, you know, we've seen it go up.

161And as you're reporting, somebody was saying that this is the highest number of new cases that we're seeing. We're seeing the number of deaths go up. And that's what happens when we have more in community transmission. We end up getting more transmission within facilities. And that's what we're starting to see again in our long-term care facilities, unfortunately. So to say how quickly the vaccines will reduce this, it's speculation. But I think it's going to be months before we see some really consistent low levels. So a lot of that's going to, I mean, I know this is things that people aren't wanting to hear, but. The reality is our numbers are going up because we're not being as cautious as we were over the summer. And there is that balance. The more cautious we were during

162the phase zero, phase one, it meant businesses were closed. And that's not good for the economy, clearly. And so there's this whole balancing of how much. transmission are we willing to tolerate versus how much are we willing to not go out. and then the vaccine plays in. And there's other variables that we really can't predict. And that is, I think everybody knows from the common media about the variants that have a higher transmission rate. And we don't think we have that here now, but of course we're watching for that. So I know I'm not giving a very firm answer, but I'm just saying that we're still in a great level of uncertainty at this point. Thank you, Dr. Herring. I have Dr. Reif. Great. Well, thank you for that presentation. When I was looking at

163the sprint slide, I was thinking, it's like you guys just keep going and going and going like the Energizer bunny. But I'm thinking this is a marathon. It's really not a sprint, but we're just continuing at the sprints. And it's obvious that you all have been working very hard and we do really appreciate it. And I know, you know, we even have this presentation tonight during our work session so we can. continue to keep abreast of what's been going on. And I had questions. If you could go to slide number nine, please. And I do have a question for Dr. Herring. But before I get to that, the highest risk category, just to what Ms. Thornton was saying, like according to the decision matrix, even in the highest risk category, we would still be bringing

164students back in a modified hybrid if we get to the certain level of school impact. And so that's what I wanted to just understand, especially since you said the school impact can be variable based on the different schools. So how, especially since we're talking about bringing back particular smaller groups of students. Are we still looking at, you know, the total school division staffing level or are we drilling down in some way just to see what do we need to be at for those first groups that we were wanting to bring back? So if you could just speak to that a little bit. That's what I was trying to understand a little better. Well, I can speak from the school impact side. And Dr. Herring, if you want to talk to about the highest risk side

165of the community transmission. To get to the normal kind of level in regards to school impacts, we're going to need to have all of our staff in that particular scenario vaccinated. Everybody's able to return and be in our buildings. So we really are looking at a normal kind of school impact level months out. That's nothing that's going to be over. I mean, that's it's just unrealistic for it to be in the next month because that's that's actually having the same amount of access we have to staff in our school buildings that we do that we did prior to the global pandemic. Right. So that. it makes it just it makes it a challenge unless everybody's vaccinated um and not just first dose but now you're vaccinated you've gone through the full two doses um so

166so i i don't foresee us getting to that normal level uh but what i really see us at um with the strained level And you'll see this when we release or when it's actually official that the VDOE's decision matrix is released. At the strain level, you still can be at a higher risk and have a modified hybrid approach. So still bringing in some of our most vulnerable. students and that's that prioritization groups that I talked about earlier. And that's the strain levels where we're probably going to stand for the next few months is what I'm assuming. And that's just me making an assumption right now based on where we currently are. It is going to take for us to get to a more moderate risk level to begin to bring in the full span of

167students who want to be in the hybrid approach. that is going to take us, you know, some time to get to that moderate risk level. And that's based on the community transmission that Dr. Herring, if you can just speak to, because I know that's your kind of like wheelhouse and where your area of expertise lies. So if you can talk to the community transmission section, Dr. Herring. Absolutely. And so how quickly is it going to come down? It is so hard to say. When I look at the numbers that we were looking at back in the end of May, for us to get that slope down to a lower level took two weeks. But you'll have to remember that was during a period of time when we had pretty much things were shut down. We

168were having... businesses shut and no more than 10 people gathering. Lots of things were closed. And our highest numbers at that time, our seven-day moving average, was in the upper 30s and 40s. Our seven-day moving average now is in the 90s. So it's hard for me to predict human behavior at a population level and how much are people willing to truly social distance, truly monitor themselves and stay home when ill, wearing their face coverings. You know, if everybody were to really do that, you still have the problem with others coming and visiting. So it's going to be some time before the vaccine takes effect. where we can let down our guard on these things. So I would say we're many weeks, months away from seeing those numbers come down. So just to clarify, so what

169I heard is that even to bring in like some of the first priority groups, we're looking at still probably weeks. before that's going to be possible, but we are going to keep giving a week-to-week update to folks. So I guess I would say then that I share Ms. Nolan's concern about, you know, just the impact that that's going to have. I mean, I understand kind of the thinking behind that, but I think maybe people are going to start tuning out what happens with those weekly updates. Well, I know that the community, the last time when we tried to give extended times, people were in uproar. If we're giving weekly, people are in uproar. So we're not going to make everybody happy. But I do think that us being consistent with having a weekly update, regardless

170of where it is, it's trying to be as transparent as we possibly can be with real data versus making today, making an assumption that it's going to be March and then. It does go down in February and it's now February. And they're like, well, you told us March, doctor. You know, so it's hard to balance either way. You know, we tried to do, hey, we're going to wait until December to bring everybody. I mean, to January, our initial plan that went out in November and look what happened with that. It's not fast enough. It's not enough. How are you going to predict what happens in January? And they're right because. That is now mute. It's void. It's not even possible what we shared, you know, two months out. So I really do think that I

171think we should be consistent with our messaging on a weekly basis, but we should continue to also be, which we have been, and people don't like to hear. that it might not happen. We got some emails about that last week when Ms. Nolan asked, how likely is this going to be on January 19th? And I said, well, it doesn't seem like those numbers are going to go down. We got criticism about that, but I think we just have to be upfront and honest every week and giving some rationale as to why, because no one can predict a month from now. No one can predict three weeks from now. But one thing that Dr. Herring said that I think is a very good point is within the city of Alexandria, if we begin to limit our

172traffic and being out of our homes and doing unnecessary things outside of our houses, that we could see. that risk level declining over time. That's on our, it's human behavior and what we're willing to do or not do, right? That's going to determine what our community transmission looks like. And unfortunately, we can't control everybody in ACPS. We only serve 16,000 families, but, you know, there's, you know, over 100,000 families or people in this community. So I think that Dr. Herring. was well taken around. It is gonna require some different human behavior in our city. And just the final point. So I heard you say that when you do the updates on Mondays, you'll also then share out a modified calendar for as well at that time. You will... I'm sorry, you're muted. You said like

173this calendar, you know how we push the first group back with the second group or however you want to put that. So every Monday, you will also be updating this calendar then as well. People can look for that. Yes, we could. So you'll see. So this past Monday, when we shared out our information, we shared that real time data for that Monday. Next Monday, the data is going to look different. I'm assuming. I don't know how different, but it's going to look different. So we're trying to use and actually is going to be on Tuesday next week because it's a holiday on Monday. But we are trying to make sure that we're using that real time data when that decision is made with those exact numbers that are from. that particular date. So you will

174see an update there. You will also see an update to the timeline if things changes as well so that a parent doesn't have to figure out, okay, well, when is my date now? But we do have to, and I think this is something that we can consistently say, I said it on Monday, I'm going to say it this Monday as well in the announcement, is we do have to understand that you know, our community transmission metrics is a key factor with this decision making. And if there isn't much change in that area, that that's going to keep us at that highest risk level, which really limits the options, you know, for us. And that's also going to come from the VDOE's guidance as well. This is not just Dr. Hutchings and what I think, right?

175We will see it from the Virginia Department. of education, some of the same information that I've already been sharing with our community. Thank you, Dr. Hutchings. Mr. Suarez. Thank you, Chair Alderton. Thanks again for the presentation and for all the hard work. The staff really appreciate it. So I'm just trying to think through like my colleagues sort of what's realistic and trying to just understand, you know, how to be as transparent with the community as possible, while at the same time, hopeful that we can. obviously, you know, get as many kids in the classroom as possible under these very difficult circumstances. So I guess, you know, it sounds like the most realistic path is that Right. We're at a strained level of school capacity. It sounds like with the vaccine, we're not worried about being

176at that extreme low staffing capability, given that the vaccine is coming and, you know, everyone's getting excited, getting excited about that. And and there's there's going to be hopefully less risk on staff as a result of the vaccine. But it sounds like the most realistic path is going to be. that we could potentially go from the all virtual to the modified hybrid, maybe in a matter of weeks. And then possibly if, you know, the most optimistic view go into the full hybrid model after the community spread goes down. So I'd like to kind of just talk briefly about slide seven to sort of understand just so I'm on the same page about. the criteria we're using. Okay, Mr. Suarez is frozen. For the positivity rate, we're at 11.3% right now. So I guess my question

177is, The latter number is a lot closer to the cutoff than the higher number. So like if we were to drop to like 8% level of community transmission and the upper number goes to like 250, is the decision going to be that's still highest risk because one of the two numbers is higher? Or are we going to take kind of the average of the two numbers? I just want to kind of understand. Dr. Hutchings, how you're thinking about making that determination, because I could see a scenario too, where, you know, the risk level of transmission is like 5%, but maybe it's at 203 or something like that for the community transmission. So I just kind of want to understand, is it going to be, is your decision point the sort of, you know, both have

178to be in the middle range to be higher risk, or are you going to kind of take sort of borderline cases into account? I just kind of want to understand. understand your thinking around that. And maybe Dr. Herring can provide perspective on that as well. So I'm actually going to ask Dr. Herring to provide a perspective on that because it's community transmission and I want to make sure he's using his expertise. So Dr. Herring, if you can respond to that or assist with that. Absolutely. I see my camera's not working. But yes, so what we're going to be recommending from public health is that if there is one that says highest and one that says higher, in other words, if the number of new cases was greater than 200, like in your example, 250, and

179the percent positivity was 8%, which would be higher, I would recommend that we consider the level of community transmission to be in the highest risk category. And the reason is the number of new infections actually weighs more than the percent positivity because the percent positivity can rely on the number of tests that are taken. And some of the tests might be actually not necessary. People are just getting tested because they want to get tested, for instance. which would, of course, increase the denominator. And then also one of the things that is not really shown on here is... where are those occurring? Which zip codes are those occurring in? And so if there were an overall rate of 8%, but we knew that there were some zip codes that were particularly high, then that would kind

180of lean us toward saying we need to consider the community transmission at a highest risk. You know, again, this is, there's some... This is the first time we've been through a pandemic, and so we don't really have the type of experiences that we have had in the past, but I mean, comparing to other disease states, if you will. So what we're doing is we're taking these as guidelines and applying them with our best knowledge and experiences that we do have. Understood. And I appreciate the clarification. I just think it goes back to the transparency with the community. And I would echo Ms. Thornton's suggestion to the extent we can provide that information sort of on the decision matrix so that it's clear, you know, what the cutoff is, what the criteria is. I think that

181would be good. Madam Chair, if you'll indulge, could I just ask one brief follow-up? And then could I give one clarification as well? I anticipate that when VDOE and VDH release their matrix, that they will also provide that sort of clarity as well. Okay, great. Yeah, go ahead, Mr. Schwarz. Yeah, so I just had a question about slide 11. So kind of going back to what's realistic, you know, it sounds like the modified hybrid is going to be the most realistic. But I just had a clarification about the prioritization matrix, which I appreciated. It's really helpful. So. On there, the first category is the vulnerable students at risk remotely, and it lists students with academic loss as the last category. And then in the third category, it's academically vulnerable students. I guess I just want

182to understand, what is the line we're drawing between students with academic loss who are at the highest priority and those who are academically vulnerable but are below the children of parents who require child care. Because obviously, you know, the more we can get all of the students who are experiencing losses and who are struggling this year back in the classroom as soon as possible, that's really important to me. And I just want to make sure I understand the difference. So first, let me just tell you, this is not in order. So for example, when I was talking about, they're all high, so all of them are on the same level. But we are already tackling our, and that's why you didn't really hear me speak too much about the child care issue, because we're tackling

183that with our community partners right now. Many of our families who are having challenges with child care, they are being provided this service through either ACPS's childcare options or some of our community partner childcare options. So we've kind of tackled that now because those issues were already out there. We really are gonna have to focus on the vulnerable students piece. And we wanted to really showcase kind of like that academically vulnerable student because When we first started going down this path of virtual plus and we were talking about vulnerable students, we were specifically talking about special ed and EO. So we want to make sure that vulnerable students and academically vulnerable students are at the top priority. And that can range beyond some of the early grades, depending on the situation. But what we're doing

184now is. with our analysis even from quarter one and now we're working through our quarter two analysis we'll be sharing with this with the board in February. is what we're working through is just trying to make sure that we're identifying those students that are not just having academic loss, but also social and emotional loss as well, because there are some students that are having just some challenges of being at home. And we want to try to work through that. But until we get some definitive data, we're going to just have to start prioritizing what's feasible. Once we get all of our groups together, what is going to be feasible? What is going to be manageable based on the staffing that we have, based on the transportation at that particular time? Because now we're doing it

185at a modified level and not having the full every school is operating type thing. It may be different locations. I mean, I'm just throwing this out there, so don't say it's definitive right now. But I wanted to provide the community just with an idea of what student groups we were targeting because they said specifically who are the modified hybrid students, what group of students is that and I wanted us to be sure to share that with the community and the board. So will you be able to provide at some point a more granular sort of gradation of like the high category, like for example? We will. And we'll be able to, as now as we're going through our academic data, we'll be able to have, you know, a better sense of numbers and not because

186you can't, we don't want to. In the past, what we did is we just looked at our students who have IEPs, right? You can't just say, well, every student with an IEP, because some students with IEPs might be doing well right now. Not every student with an IEP is having struggles. And with some of the additional supports that we're going to be providing, and this is even now we're having discussions for some of our students with special needs, it might change some of the you know, academic vulnerability that they have experienced over the past several months when we give some in-home supports that we're having discussions about now. Thank you. All right, so I'm aware of the time here. I think we definitely can wrap the discussion up at this point. And I think my

187only parting thought, it's interesting as we, as this discussion unfolds. is that one of the most uncomfortable, we're all very uncomfortable right now. One of the most uncomfortable things about our current situation is this level of uncertainty. And, you know, there's a need, I think, to just have some feel the need to have like this concrete answers about, you know, what's going to happen when. But I'm constantly reminded that even when we get to the state that we want to be, you know, the doors open. there's going to be different types of uncertainty that we're going to be dealing with. And so just this is such a fluid situation. It's so static. I mean, it's not static. It's, you know, so many different moving parts constantly. And it's going to be that way for a

188while. So, you know. Hats off to the staff, hugs to everybody. I think that's, I'm at the point where I just, you know, hugs to everybody because this is so hard. But, you know, I do see a light at the end of the tunnel. So if we just keep on track and keep doing what we're doing, I think our kids are going to be fine and we're going to be fine. So thank you, everybody. With that said, I would like to give everybody some time before we go into our special call meeting. So if we could recess, if everybody's okay, we recess and come back at 7.50, just five minutes.