001Okay. Good morning. It's 9:00 a.m. and I'll well it's 9:02, excuse me, and I'll call this meeting to order. I'll note that I've approved the remote participation of Miss McFersonson under the board's bylaws in 2.2-3708.3B4 2-3708.3B4 of the code of Virginia because she is in California visiting family. Before we begin on the first agenda item, the superintendent has some key updates for the board and the public uh that she would like to provide. So with that, um Superintendent Gullixson. Great. Thank you. Good morning. Um President Casy, members of the board. Um, first I want to recognize some of the individuals in our front row along with their team members. Uh, Chief Conway and the entire early childhood care and education team had a wildly successful VQB5 roll out last week and it includes our new
002honor roll system that you're going to hear more about in item A. But I had the opportunity to join uh one of our House of Delegate members, Mike Cherry, in Atlanta a few weeks ago with a bunch of lawmakers from 14 southern states. And we do not get to have the recognition enough about what Jenna and the team have established here in Virginia on the preeeminent public private high quality child care marketplace that's grounded in parent demand and gives incredible options for infants or birth to 5-year-olds as well as some of our school age kids. And so um this team has truly designed the gold standard of excellence for birthto five models in the country. And I want to put it on the record for the public who are not able to join us at
003that press conference that if you have not checked out our portal of late, they've been updated and I hope you will explore the options in your community soon. Um, and just know we are not done innovating and leading the way yet. The Early Childhood Commission will get an update from Jenna and the team later today on the progress being made with our new digital wallet and other options to continue to try to lower costs for families while maintaining rigor and high quality and excellence um for our youngest learners. So, uh, although you're going to hear more from her in a minute, board, I wanted to make sure that you were aware of just the deep respect, um, by other state leaders, we have multiple states seeking to come to Virginia with a flyin to study
004and learn, um, from the team. So, um, couldn't be more proud and wanted to make sure I started the day with that. Um secondly, you um we have been very thankful for all of the um collaboration with school divisions on making sure that um all of our data is set on their student outcomes um for our K12 accountability system that builds off the great momentum from our early childhood system. And so um we are now in the phase where we have uh made sure that we're complying with the best data governance practices and finalizing agreement with a third party that's one of our public higher ed institutions to independently validate our school performance and support framework data and outcomes for each school and division so that we can ensure transparency and the highest level of
005integrity for the board um to have great confidence idence in the work of our incredible team. And so once this independent validation is complete, uh our school division leaders will receive both their division and individual school summary reports along with resources to help with communication to their stakeholders and the accountability data will then be made to the public no less than one week after the school divisions have received that data. um we're working to avoid surprises so that they've had the opportunity to re review these final reports. So we're very excited about this external validation and delivering on these best practices as a norm at the agency and wanted to give an update there uh on federal funding because we get a lot of questions about that. So, I want to make sure to emphasize
006that for Virginia uh and the Virginia Department of Education, all of our federal funds are being delivered as expected daily. Uh and there's been no disruption or cuts to any of our reimbursements to the Department of Education. I'm going to emphasize that again for those tuning in now. Uh there have been no disruptions or cuts to the reimbursements for the Virginia Department of Education. Um I know board members, you have been getting questions and those in the field. So this is true. Many of you know we have a variety of funding sources from multiple federal agencies including the US Department of Education, Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, Department of Agriculture, and more. Um and so we um want to reassure everyone that's tuning in that the continued support has allowed us to
007maintain planned programs, staffing at the agency and services for our students during this school year without any interruption. And we are in close communication with the federal contacts and we'll be keeping the board um here and stakeholders aware and informed of any changes should that occur. But right now all dollars are flowing as intended. Uh the last major update I wanted to uh discuss is um on proficiency and this push to higher expectations. Um since our last board meeting, two more states have taken action um and actually worked towards lowering their expectations for students. And I am incredibly proud that Virginia is being recognized in local and national outlets for our commitment to having high expectations for every student. I have been very blessed with phone calls from parents that have said, "Thank you for
008believing in my child. We know it's a lot of work. Um, but we know that they're going to be set up for success." And um, you will hear more from the team here shortly. Um, but we have had thousands of Virginiaians who have either attended listening sessions over the last three weeks or written comments um to the agency to help us deliver on this commitment and make sure that we do it uh in a thoughtful and intentional way for leveling up on these more rigorous expectations. And I also want to recognize the department staff first um deputy superintendent Booker Dwire and her team. But also this has been a really great illustration that we've been talking to the board about modernizing the agency, breaking down silos and really instilling a collaborative community within the agency,
009moving from compliance towards collaboration and support with the field. And we have had department staff in addition uh to our assessment and accountability teams. They have had partnership from staff and leaders across multiple divisions um and offices who have attended listening sessions, who have helped to field questions, who have helped to inform additional supports that are underway, technical opportunities for educators, parents, and students to really be set up for success. And so, um, this is proof that this new shift in our agency is working and a lot of that is behind the scenes. And so, we wanted to make sure the board was aware, um, that these aren't just arbitrary uh, statements, but we're seeing the work in action and kids are benefiting um, as a result. So, while there's more to do, I can't
010be more proud of the progress made in the last few weeks. And just thank you, President Cesy, for the time to make a few remarks. Uh well, I would be uh remiss if I didn't say something too about um just the long-term commitment that um Jenna and her team have had to the outcomes that we are finally seeing. I mean, beginning years ago and um you know, starting with the school readiness committee when you first came on, Jenna, um you know, having been a part of that committee and then the early childhood advisory committee and then I mean, we have just taken all of these different forms and iterations of trying to get to the point where we have now come today. And so I know for your team this is truly a moment of
011um you know finality to some degree. I know we're never finished doing this kind of work um to make things better um to prepare kids better to get to our K12 systems. Um, and I just thank all of you for your commitment to moving this continually down the field to get to that goalpost that that you all um set for yourselves and for the Commonwealth and um for our providers across the Commonwealth, whether they be public providers or private providers. I just appreciate um the commitment that you all have had to ensuring the success and the quality, the high quality, not just quality because we can say quality, but when we really really get to the nitty-gritty, we want for our own children and your entire team has seen and has committed to and put
012their hearts and souls into what they would want for their own children, for the Commonwealth's children. and I'm so incredibly thankful and so happy to see um sort of this point where we have come today. So, it's been a long road um but thank you for your longevity and commitment to the process. We really do appreciate it and the Commonwealth appreciates it too. Um and so I'm looking forward to hearing for from um our presentations today. But I guess that brings us to your presentation. Um, and we will go ahead and get started with that. >> All right. Do you all have the slides? Yes. Perfect. Okay. Well, good morning um everyone. That was a uh a wonderful introduction and I very much appreciate the kind words um uh from the superintendent and thank you
013very much President Cesy. I'm Jenna Conway. I'm our chief of early learning and specialized populations. Um I want to take a moment to recognize at at this moment we have 175 members of the Division of Early Childhood Care and Education. um many who are out uh today inspecting centers, uh evaluating classrooms, preparing for deep dives, um making sure that uh folks get get paid and um you know, it truly takes a a team effort and uh feel very appreciative that I get to work with that uh extraordinary team located across across the Commonwealth. Um what I am pleased to cover today is an update on last week's release and to give you a point in time on what we know about uh quality in our public private early childhood care and education system. I know
014that some of you are newer to the board and so I'll start sort of more broadly with school readiness in Virginia. Um I'll then go into how we measure quality in Virginia. I think that's important. So, as we can sort of delineate some of the differences between VQB5 and our school and performance support framework, I'll then talk in details about the results and then I will note next steps. I also have as my lifeline today, Assistant Superintendent Erin Carroll, um, who has been working with me for nearly a decade in both Louisiana and Virginia to support the strengthening of early childhood systems. and then our true expert on VQB5, our director of VQB5, Chris Meyers. So, we'll start as we always do if you move to the slide on shared vision on what we're trying
015to achieve together. And as President Christie noted, it really takes a sustained effort moving away from a focus on what program am I? What building am I in? um to really recognizing a full system where whether you're in a in a school, in a private child care center, in a faith-based preschool, in a family day home, or in a Head Start program, that across those different experiences in classrooms, that there's a shared goal of making sure that every kid in Virginia has the opportunity to come to kindergarten ready. We know that parent choice and parents as our children's first and most important educators need to be able to choose across those options what you might want as for your infant child in rural Virginia might look different than your preschooler um in a more urban
016setting and making sure that we're thinking about that full range of public private options. We also know that parents want to choose quality as president Christie noted and that practitioners and stakeholders want to make sure that there is accountability for public dollars and I'll talk a lot about continuous improvement and how our system supports that. And ultimately early childhood plays has this unique sort of dual role as I'll talk about in some of the data around not only supporting kids learning and development in that kind of most fundamental first five-year period but also supporting our working families to work go to job training school and pursue greater self-sufficiency for themselves and for their families. Um so as we move on I want to sort of start with where we are and I think this is
017an important point um particularly because this current statistic on kindergarten readiness represents an example of how we have worked really closely with the field to raise the bar because that was the right thing for kids. So if you were to compare this statistic where 51% of kids last year entered kindergarten ready and as a reminder entering ready means that you're fully ready in literacy, math, social skills, and self-regulation. So we look at the whole child that this number is slightly lower in years than in years past. Uh this is in large part because we work very closely with the University of Virginia, Virginia Literacy Partnerships to fully overhel what was formerly known as PALS and is not now known as Vows and that we started in preschool and as you know and as you heard
018from my colleague Assistant Superintendent Wallace and others, right, is really really important work around supporting all all students in Virginia to be able to read. When we went from PALS to vows, we expanded what we were evaluating. we went just not just evaluating some of those skills that are necessary for decoding. So, uh you know, knowing letters and sounds, but actually looking at language, um how kids express language, how kids uh comprehend language, storytelling, some of those more complex skills. And as a result of that, you see a a drop uh from the prior year. On the other hand, when we talk with educators, when we engage with families and we think about this work, it's critically important that if you move to the next slide, that we really capture that language uh information, right?
019Because language is a very important predictor of of future learning. And so that's just an example where again under this board's oversight over the course of the last few years, we've been able to raise the bar, but it is the right thing for kids because if we can get our educators of three and four year olds to really focus on not only some of those key skills related to decoding and preparing to read, but also language development that that will carry with kids throughout their educational experience. School ma school readiness matters. Not only if you talk to a kindergarten teacher who will say can tell you on day one who which kids right whether it was in Head Start or pre-K in a school or in a childare setting in a family day home. I
020can tell you who is coming in ready to learn prepared to work with others. I see Miss Kilgore nodding like right. It's very different. But that's not all that it matters for. If you look at Virginia data, if you look at the kindergarten readiness predicts third grade reading, basically across thousands and thousands of different elementary schools with very different experiences, even across that, you know, how you look at the beginning of kindergarten and using the PALS is highly predictive of where you will be in third grade. and what that means. So what this chart means for those in that blue or navy bar that if we can get you coming into kindergarten ready, if we can think about the system as a whole, that regardless of kind of experiences across K3, we can get you
021to third grade and nearly all of you will be reading. In sharp contrast, if you come in least ready, and this is that yellow bar, it basically becomes a coin toss, right? And so how do we work as a system? we have extraordinary kindergarten, first, second, and third grade educators, but if we can get all of our kids prepared, then we will see much better outcomes um in elementary school and beyond. And so that's kind of an important point as we think about why this matters. We also know when we look at our data that it is sort of less important which program you're in that you just have access to a program altogether. So, we know that early childhood matters for readiness. That our kids who look least likely, least ready coming in are
022our children in low-income households whose parents report no preschool experience whatsoever. Right? So, again, our focus is on how do we embrace all of the various public private programs that want to take public dollars and serve our kids in greatest need um and ultimately think about that system and supporting that system. It looks different than just school buildings, right? We've got 2,000 family childcare homes, 3,000 licensed childcare centers, just up under a thousand public schools, religiously exempt programs, and 46 Head Start grantees who are located in over 360 sites in uh local government in private uh uh child day centers and in schools. So, it's again it's a very different mix. Um, and the last statistic I'll share for you before uh pivoting to VQB5 is just helping you understand why do we still have
023so many kids coming to us even as birth rates in Virginia go down. And there's sort of while birth rates are dropping slightly, we are seeing a persistent trend going back over the last decade of more kids than ever before under the age of six having all available parents in the workforce. So that's now up to seven out of 10 Virginia children under the age of six have all available parents in the workforce. And what we hear from parents and what I'll be sharing what we'll be hearing at the commission today where parents need to have a place to serve to to send their kid. And it's for them they want to be able to choose an option that is not only healthy and safe but will put their kid on track for success. And
024it can't just be babysitting or custodial care. It has to be an environment and where their kids are supported to learn and to thrive. So with that, let me tell you a little bit about VQB5 and as President Casey described our our path forward over the last few years. So this >> Jenna, can we pause for a second? I think um Superintendent Gullixson has a question. >> Sure. Jenna, last week at the press conference, one of the parents who spoke talked about that um she had had her earliest learners in a variety of settings. And so for those who are just tuning in, can you talk a little bit more about that flexibility of dollars? You aren't necessarily putting your child just in one of these options or at an increment of time. There's that
025adaptability. >> Absolutely. There is that adaptability. And so partly, and we'll we'll focus more on on on the quality today, but the superintendent raises a really important point. When you think of those settings on that slide, we have done a lot of work with our recent governors and the general assembly to also fund these programs in a way that parents can choose across them. So, we've taken uh the child care subsidy program which functions as uh vouchers. We've got something called the mixed delivery where we fund kind of classrooms in in childcare programs. We've got Virginia preschool initiative. Uh we work alongside with early childhood special education, Head Start, and Early Head Start. And basically what it means is the choice system. And when we talk about the programs that take public dollars, whether that's
026one voucher to serve one low-inccome or in need kid or whether that's entire classroom, um all of those programs when you take public dollars agree to participate in BQB5. And what that means is that for parents in the greatest need in Virginia, uh, including many, many working families, that they can choose across their program. They might start as an infant and with their when their child is an infant and choose a voucher. They might then switch to pre-k if their older children are there at a school. There is flexibility across the different funding sources and the different settings. What is consistent and this is important when you think about both our uh desire to improve outcomes for kids and to kind of have accountability for public dollars is that even though there's a lot of
027flexibility and parent choice we measure these in an appto apples way so that we can sort of help parents sort of think about how we choose what is makes most sense for me and for my child at this moment in time and as I'll talk about that we can also sort of come to you come to the general assembly and say these are the outcomes here's the experience experiences that kids are receiving across these different funding sources and across these different settings. It's a great question. So, VQB5, this at a very high level is required by law. So, it sets this this board in charge of establishing a measurement and improvement system. Um, it is nonoptional. It is required for any program that takes public dollars. And it's always a choice to take public dollars.
028So that's Head Start. That's if you receive these childcare vouchers, mixed delivery, Virginia preschool, early childhood special education. Its theory of change is that we have to focus less on inputs, but really get down to what is happening in classrooms. It's not appropriate at this age to kind of directly evaluate kids for stakes. You can imagine, right, if I were to bring a three-year-old here right now and we had a high stakes test, it wouldn't work well for us and wouldn't work well for for him or her. And so the focus is on what is sort of most approximate, what is most predictive of improving child outcomes while also recognizing um that uh uh you know we we we can't kind of directly sort of uh have high stakes testing for for toddlers right now.
029The two resources that Virginia relies on is are sort of measuring interactions. And so that gives that's very predictive of how much kids will learn using a nationally regarded tool known as the class or the classroom assessment scoring system. That is for infant classrooms three 20 minute cycles and for toddler and preschool four 20-minut cycles. So this is not a walkthrough. This is an intensive observation across multiple domains and dimensions with lots of notes and a very precise score. And then we also are encouraging programs to use a curriculum. We believe in high quality instructional materials. It is a choice. But if you do those two things, high quality interactions and you're using curriculum to support high quality actions, our theory of change, which is aligned with the research, suggests that kids in those classrooms
030will learn more and make more progress towards kindergarten readiness. Um, so this just talks about the participation requirements. So again, as the superintendent noted, it's an array of programs. It's not just schools. They uh if you take a public dollar, you have to be a part of this. And what being a part of it means because there was a concern and President Casy will remember this back in the early days that if we require put new requirements on programs that well private providers will just opt out, whether that's private schools or private child care or private family day homes. Um and what we found is actually the opposite, right? We have more private providers participating than ever before. It's a reasonable expectation. they have to fill out some information and link B5. They need to
031open up their classrooms for observations multiple times a year. Um, and just to make sure that they do that uh both fall and spring. Uh, if you move to the next slide, what you'll see is that then kind of creates a very different mechanism for continuous quality improvement. Previously, many of our other rating systems looked at things like inputs like do the educators have bachelor's degree, do you have the right number of books? And while that is can have some value, it is really hard. Like the option for the teacher who doesn't have the bachelor's degree is go off and purchase a really expensive degree or the center director has to go off and purchase a lot of books and certain equipment. BQB5 takes a very different approach. There's, you know, much less of a
032cost related to doing this, but it provides because all you have to do is let these observations come in, but then it enables every single educator and leader in the system to have insight in an applesto apples way what's happening in those classrooms, right, to get better. So, we do fall and spring observations locally, every single classroom. Um, and we have a third party that goes out and evaluates the consistency and accuracy of those observations. So, if Mr. Monk and Miss Kilgore are teachers in the four-year-old classroom, they will have an intensive observation in the fall, get that feedback, their leader will get that feedback, they'll have an intensive observation in the spring. They'll have that data that helps them get better at their practice. It's not a generic professional development or training and technical
033assistance. It's deeply rooted in what those educators and what's happening in that classroom. It also means when Virginia, as it did last year, completes 31,000 of those observations, which represent 2.2 two million minutes of insight. That's what parents find on that website, right? And they can really understand, okay, this is a place where I can trust not only is it healthy and safe as determined by our our office of childcare health and safety, but like kids are thriving because at the core of this, little kids, young children learn in the context of interactions with adults. Um, and so just a really important like from the outset, this is not only going to give you a specific three-digit score for every one of your 3,293 sites, but it also enables improvement as I'll talk about uh
034as we go forward. So we rely and a huge thank you should also go out into addition to the incredible staff of the division of early childhood to the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation who is our key state private partner um who then oversees our nine ready regions. So a relatively new entity in Virginia now codified in law uh businesses uh government nonprofits everybody has the opportunity to compete every three years to be a ready region. We have nine um entities right now that serve as our ready regions across the state. Some are United Ways, some are sort of standalone entities. Um they make sure we complete these observations, they build relationships, they get the data in the system, they help make uh enrollment work easier for families and they also do have family impact councils.
035So we think about some of the change in early childhood making sure that families are at the center of that work. That's hard to do from the state level. And so we rely on our public private partnerships with Ready Regions to uh make sure that families are engaged every step of the way. And uh we are so pleased and as President Casy noted, this has been a long road, but VQB5 is truly everywhere in the Commonwealth. We are 3,300 sites. Uh you'll see the kind of color coding in terms of the different types of sites, but we are in every city and county in uh Virginia. And it takes a lot. As somebody who has visited Highland County, our least populous county, uh it is a lot. Um and you'll see even over the Eastern
036Shore, a lot of locations, and I will note there were even Eastern Shore locations that were on our honor rolls, but we are truly statewide in a scale um that was was hard to imagine before. Uh and last but not least, just want to share I think we are trying to kind of really over time help families understand empowering choice having a dynamic marketplace really depends on making sure that families understand what quality look like, why it matters. We know it's really expensive for families. It's probably the biggest investment they make outside of of housing. And so doing work with Chris and the team, the ready regions, our site partners to help folks understand what BQB5 is and why it matters has been a a a key goal of ours. So with that, let's move
037into the next section and we'll talk about the results. So, as uh the superintendent noted, the governor, the secretary, the superintendent, elected officials, business leaders, and parents came together last week to recognize the release of 3,293 quality profiles on our one-stop family portal. I will note in the first 24 hours alone, we had 10,000 uh uh views of that site. And for point of reference, we were excited just to get to 100,000 in the first year and we got 10% there on the first day. In the first week, we were, as of the team told me yesterday, just under 20,000. So, it just you'll just see over time there's a real utility. I should note there's no other way for parents to get this information, right? They just can't be in the center for two
038or three hours to kind of observe. even if they visit and I always encourage families to visit when they're thinking about what the right early childhood choice is for them, but it's hard to kind of sort of really sit in the classroom. This data is saying we're going to do that work for you. We're going to go into every single classroom multiple times and we're going to give you an ac accurate reflection of what uh kids are experiencing. We have the key messages here and what how we've been sort of telling the story. one, it was a successful second year. Um, and we are so pleased to have more programs than ever before participating. Uh, we are engaging families through the resources that I described and the portal. Um, we were very pleased and the
039reason we selected the Circle Preschool uh, and Sprout for our uh, announcement last week is that they were both on the honor roles. And so we are elevating excellence and we are elevating improvement uh for nearly 500 sites across the state. Um and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. We are seeing uh improvement in quality while we have more programs coming on. Um and and ultimately as we've talked about before, thanks to the investment of this governor and general assembly, uh we are serving more kids with public dollars and impacting with VQB5 more kids than ever before. If you move forward into kind of a breakdown of the performance and I'll just sort of go through the highlights as uh Miss Northern knows I can get into the data data
040and she's gonna have to wave her hand if there are if there are questions but this is pretty wonky. You know Chris and I love it. Chris leads our deep dives in which we have 70 slides. So, this is only half of that, Miss Northern um that we spent two hours with partners across the state in our nine nine deep dives, but 31,258 class observations were uh were completed. The most we think in the country. Oftentimes, if the superintendent or I in other states presenting and I'll sort of say that number and they're like, I think you added an extra zero. You must mean 3100. I'm like, oh no, no, like 31,000 observations, 2.2 2 million minutes of insight into what kids are experiencing. And at its core, it's a fairly complicated and and complex
041tool. But if you as you understand that tool, um you realize that this is what is good for kids. And so I've had many a childcare teacher come up to me and be like, I was highly skeptical about this thing in the beginning. I've been doing this work for 20 years. I know babies, right? Like I know babies better than you know babies. Um and uh and yet when you look at the kind of the details what the kind of practices that this tool calls for, we find over time that it really resonates. We think this is the reason that 10 years in in Louisiana that they continue to rely on this resource because even though there might be some difference of opinions on sort of how we evaluated, I thought I did this. you
042know, there's some sort of healthy uh uh conversation there that at its core, folks believe these are the right practices for babies, for toddlers, uh and for for preschoolers. Uh as you look at the rating summary, this gives you a breakdown of kind of a couple of key key elements here. So, we see 99% of sites are either meets or exceeds expectations. Um and so that is an improvement from last year. uh as you look at the uh where we were 98%. It is important to note that we have bigger buckets at this point in time. So you'll see those points. So there's a ton of variability, right? So you might have someone who ranges from 401 points to 698 points, right, in that kind of bucket. So everybody gets a specific three um three-digit
043score uh and then you have these sort of broader ratings. We are extremely excited about those exceeds expectation. Those are national exemplars. that is a very high bar to meet and as we said before this is a national tool not a Virginia tool so we know that and we are raising the floor and I'll talk a little bit more in a moment about how the team achieved this but we went from 51 sites in that need support category down to 25 this year so cutting that in half um when we look at improvement this is a positive uh finding across the board I think if you were to ask where we'd like to see more movement. We can talk a little bit about that, but we'd like to see a little bit more improvement. But
044we overall, in addition to the ratings, which again, as I said before, are broad buckets. We really care about what those three-digit scores are. And what we see is overall improvement in our average score. We saw the sort of the greatest growth actually in family day homes. They actually have sort of the lowest o overall average, but we saw significant growth there. Um, and we saw growth in schools, we saw growth in childcare centers, and we saw growth in family day homes. So, we're kind of, again, it's not just about the ratings, but really looking specifically at um, uh, you know, how much programs are growing. We also asked the team to look at new sites, right? Sort of there's about 200 more sites this year and to look at those averages. And so you'll
045see again that those are slightly lower than the overall sites. Not not necessarily, you know, in that kind of need support range, but still a place where we have to really be thinking about um when we have new programs on, how do we support them at the outset. Um we have seen across the board curriculum is an option. It's a way to earn uh 100 points if you're using a high quality curriculum. And while we started VQB5, uh 99% nearly all of our Head Start and VPI programs are using curriculum because it's a program requirement. We saw really low numbers in family childare and childare. And so we have worked very thoughtfully over the last few years while keeping curriculum choice to approve a set of options as high quality instructional material to make a
046free option. We did an RFP or an RFI rather and have identified stream and three which is the the state's open educational resource is free for programs was piloted and built with family childare. So it can be used in all settings and that's how you help see pretty significant improvement in use of curriculum in child care and in um uh uh family childare. And then the one of the primary goals of VQB5 beyond kind of trying to drive systematic improvement through the series of observations and very specific measurement use of curriculum is really saying how do we make sure that no matter where a family is in the state that they can choose quality and so we have a really intensive focus on how do we raise the floor. We do that by prioritizing our
047resources towards those need support sites. This is a model that uh assistant superintendent Carol helped pilot in Louisiana and was incredibly successful recognized nationally and we've put in place here. So when we had the 50 the second we knew which 51 sites were in that need support category last year. Chris and the team went into action. We have quality consultants who went and met with them. This board said that we would have required uh improvement planning. So it's not a choice. You need to participate in this improvement planning. We didn't take anybody or threaten anybody's public dollars. Just said you have to participate in improvement planning. We partnered with the Virginia Early Childhood Consultation run by UVA and we basically had uh and we let the ready we worked with the ready region. So we
048did a a survey on what the kind of contextual needs of the programs were. We looked deeply at their data. We sent out the quality consultant to let them know what was occurring and then month after month they were assigned coaches who work with them to improve interactions to consider using curriculum for the first time. Uh and we were very excited to see that all 50 of those sites have moved out of of either of uh the need support category. So in one year kind of getting them to a place where there's higher quality interactions and more use of curriculum. No, we have another 25 sites that are in that category. Um, we would like there to be none. And so we're really looking at uh two things right now. How do we support those
04925 sites? This this process has already begun for them this year. And really looking at the data as who was on the cusp, what happened to those 25 in that year, nine, I think of the 25 are new. So that's so it's not entirely that these are new. Um, uh, but really looking at our data to say how do we raise that floor and how do we provide some protective factors. So we do also uh allow coaching and prioritization for those folks that are just above that cutoff and the goal being that we would prevent and hopefully I'll be here next year presenting to this board and that'll be a big zero in that in that category. So that's a kind of a way that we're we're raising the floor. One of the things that
050we talked about in addition to kind of our, you know, this key priority of making sure that families can always choose quality is we also wanted to elevate the excellence and the improvement happening. And so this year, thanks to decisions made by this body which put the kind of required us to create honor roles in the guidelines, we announced the roll out of three um sorry three honor roles to elevate excellence to recognize quality of infant toddler interactions because there's such demand and these are sort of the most expensive uh and and sort of high stakes classroom and to motivate continual improvement. And this in addition to the ratings and the scores helps elevate the sector and inform parent choice. We have just under 500 sites on our honor role. You'll see that centers if
051you move to the next slide you'll see that centers, family day homes and public schools are all represented um in those in those program and we have an extraordinary uh number of sites 19 sites statewide that received uh all three honor roles. I will take a moment of privilege to recognize uh Cecilia Suarez who has been on our advisory committee I believe since the very beginning runs uh creative day learning in Northern Virginia, does work in English and in Spanish and has many educators who uh do do uh early childhood and education in Spanish and really was uh very concerned, expressed very constructive feedback at an ECAC meeting a few years ago about BQB5, about whether this was too much for for her educators and for her program. Uh whether this could be fair and
052could work well in classrooms where languages other than English were being used and really sort of said like we have got to figure out how to make this work. Um and and put the charge in front of Chris and myself and the team and their ready regions and and our partners. And I couldn't have been more pleased than last week to be able to announce that Cecilia earned improvement, high quality, highest of quality interactions and overall excellence. And just this moment of going from somebody who had such great doubts, right, and was really concerned about how do we do this well, right? How do we make sure this works for some of our most vulnerable kids and families to come full circle and to demonstrate uh all that improvement and ultimately excellence. I also include,
053and you're gonna have to get out your reading glasses to see it, but I couldn't not put it out there, just the 101 sites that are receiving and exceeds expectation on this excellence. Like, this is extraordinary. These are high quality interactions. These are programs in rural Virginia and urban Virginia, suburban Virginia, kind of in cities and in towns. These are well-known programs and unknown programs. We have family child care scoring very high and we have Head Start scoring very high. And I just want you to take a moment to look at the incredible sort of range and diversity of those programs. I hope that if there are superintendent or community leaders uh watching that they'll take a moment just to recognize excellence in our in our communities. And it really is defy stereotypes. cannot judge
054these experiences based on the outside of the building or the funding source, but truly kind of look at these exemplars. This also means that there is excellence across the state. And if you sort of folks are like, how if I'm a brand new child care center owner or I'm a brand new teacher, where would I go? Um being able to sort of point to these 101 exemplars, um which is more than last year's of 79 is just incredible. Um, as you move forward, you'll see that these are the hopefully you'll start to see these certificates and we've seen great postings on social media and and other places uh uh uh uh across uh the state so far. I also really was struck by President Crey's point about the long run and I just wanna to
055tell a little story for a moment. Last Friday, I received a call out of the blue from a Louisiana area code and it was a child care center director in the Mississippi Delta uh area of Louisiana, a very historically underserved community. And uh after apologizing profusely for inadvertently uh mixing up numbers in her in her phone, she went on to tell me, you know, that she was so pleased uh with her program because they had finally earned sixes on class. So, they had finally earned the kind of equivalent of exceeds expectation. It taken many years. Um, but for a leader over a 10-year period to believe in this to in a in a in an area of the state where it's hard to find good K12 teachers, not to mention child care, to survive this
056pandemic and serve as such an essential resource. And the thing that she says to me after sort of saying, "How are you? How are your kids?" is, "Would you believe it? I got sixes." Um, and I'm so excited to be excellent. And so I hope that, you know, you know, as as we look forward, um, the lasting impact of this, um, uh, truly, you know, is if if Louisiana is any example, it, you know, truly can make a difference not only on the kids that, you know, happen to benefit from, uh, quality last year, but, you know, truly for for the next decade and just make sort of the the the work and the decisions of this board that much more important. and we're going to be there to support the next decade and to
057use information to continually improve the system because we now have VA connects. And so, as a reminder, we've got three systems supported uh in large part by UVA uh through another kind of research policy partnership. We've got Vows, which covers language and literacy. We've got Virginia kindergarten readiness program or VKRP which is uh school readiness for every single public kindergartenner in the state as well as for a significant subset of three and four year olds and we have link B5 which captures that data down to the classroom level. Thanks to the incredible work of our uh uh was supported by our ready regions and partners in the field but of our team and UVA we rolled out uh fully rolled out VA connects this year which kind of connects all these systems uh on the
058back end. there were some challenges around uh the complexity in the beginning and so huge thanks to the field for your patience over the course of this late summer and fall but it really helps us connect uh sort of experiences to longitudinal outcomes. So now I can sort of tell you well this kid was funded with this program and then this is how this kid did in third grade but I don't know actually what that kid experienced and the classroom not the funding source is the greatest point of variability. So if you go to the next slide and you some of you may have seen this, Grace probably saw this years ago. Excuse me, President Casey probably saw this years ago and when it was a pipe dream, but the idea is we now understand
059which kids are in which classroom. We know how those classrooms score on quality. We know the comp we know the credential of the teacher, the curriculum used, the compensation and thanks to smart probabilistic matching, we can then once that kid enters VKRP, we can sort of assign that kid or kind of connect that kid with their state testing identifier and then we can track them all the way through even into our longitudinal data system which captures college, career and beyond. And so what it means is you don't just have to take my word or sort of the national studies that suggests that interactions matter for kids learning. We will be able over the next two decades to demonstrate that at a very large scale. Um and we think that this is the nationleading kind of
060early childhood integrated data system because it's one the only one that's actually connected to a live measure of what kids are experiencing, not just how they're funded or where they might be served. So very very exciting um kind of multi-year work on behalf of our our partners and I'll give you an example of how we're even beginning to use this data on the um the next slide. So when we asked our folks in preparation for the deep dives I should note the deep dives are two hours and 70 slides which Chris does rinse and repeat nine time our internal deep dive was upwards of 180 slides. Um so we this is all a pairing down. Um, but one of the things that really stuck out for me when we reviewed that as a team is
061we were sort of really looking at how do you think at improvement? And what this slide shows you is you have to think of this very differently. This is fall to spring data. So this is looking at the fall of 2024 and the spring of 2025. The right bar is schools, right? Okay. And so what that is saying is that in the classrooms, if you look at who the teacher was in the fall and who the teacher is in the spring, 95% of the time it's the same teacher. Right? So as you think about improvement, you're thinking about and and and some of those teachers will leave over the summer, but like you are thinking about partnering with schools to build systems that are sort of focused on enhancing and supporting learning, right? You're going
062to have the same educators in sharp contrast in child care between the fall and the spring. So this is not year-over-year turnover. This is literally within six months you see 31% of those teachers are leaving. And so when we think about our need support sites, when we think about improvement, we have to really be thinking about who is entering this workforce, right? Because it's not going to be about the same repeated sort of enhanced professional development or technical assistance. It's going to look very different. This also contrasts with family childare where we know on average our child care leaders are and educators are there for eight, nine, ten years, right? And so this really sort of this data is so essential. If you were to say, Jenna, how will you improve experiences across the board,
063you have to use this data because it shows you even in this six-month snapshot of last year, taking a one-sizefits-all approach to improvement, excuse me, will not work, right? Because I can I'm going to work with that family childcare educator differently because I know she's going to be there in five years and probably 10 years, and I'm going to think differently about how I support this uh childare educator. But as we do with VCC, we're going to also think about the leader because the leader will be there in six months and that particular educator might not be. And that was a really sort of those types of insight are only made possible by having this type of data. Um, and being able to kind of really work with our improvement partners, with our sites themselves,
064with school divisions, with Head Start grantees to say, you have to look at your data. This isn't about just randomly picking a professional development and putting it out there. is that looking at your specific data on how you're going to improve and really thinking about each of those individual classrooms. And last but not least, um we also want particularly for our three and four year olds to kind of understand the direct relationship. And so we now that we have vowels in place, we have that rigorous language and literacy screener, we're able to look at for the roughly the 35,000 kids, we do have uh uh outcomes data on for three and four year olds. how to look at all three elements curriculum interactions and kids growth from fall to spring. And so that'll be sort
065of a new focus that was only made possible by the implication of VALS and VA connects in the last year. So with that um I just wanted to highlight again that from here we go out we do uh we've done two two of the but who's counting uh we have seven more uh deep dives to do uh and then we are will be coming back to this body as we are continually analyzing this data and saying here are the things that we think are necessary to continue to drive improvement as we bring the guidelines back to you for 2526 and beyond. 26 27. Thank you very much. Uh let me pause and see what questions you might have. >> Any questions, comments? Dr. Northern. >> Um awesome. Awesome job. I am so excited that I
066mean we don't know this the like onethird of teachers and childcare centers are leaving within the school year. Holy cow. That is like and we don't we don't have that data anywhere else. Like you know what I mean? Like the fact that that you know this is just like amazing. And the fact that what you're going to continue to uncover by linking these data sets is really exciting. >> I forgot to note uh it's on the slide but I forgot the note and that the teachers who stayed scored on average higher in class. Right. So we can already begin to connect, you know, beyond knowing instinctively that it's not a good thing to leave within the school year that we have actual data that shows that that does have a negative impact on kids. >>
067Yeah. Exactly. So my comment is I'm just really excited about the linking of the data and the fact that you can unc uncover these patterns because you're exactly right those knowing the issues exactly lead you to be able to keep pushing you know and improving and improving improving. Um I mean you know I was a little concerned before about like having such a high percentage. I'm like okay that's 99%. Obviously we want it to be 100% but at the same time we want to hold the the bar right up. And so this tells me that we can very consciously um and strategically know how to continue to raise the floor when we have the data that are pointing out the weaknesses. Um and and yeah, because I I get that we want 100%, but we
068also want 100% to actually be meaningful, you know, so folks can really trust that number. And this tells me that um that we're going to be able to keep doing that. So So thank you for all the hard work. Honestly, it's it's very exciting uh for us as a and you're right like uh uh just underscored what the superintendent shared at my travels. Everybody's talking about Virginia's and what we're doing in early childhood. So, thank you for you and your team. >> Absolutely. Thank you. And I think we will come back and I think we want to sort of think through, you know, how do you have folks meeting expectations, right? But then also how are we really driving improvement? I will say sort of the improvement honor role which basically takes mathematically what is
069the improvement and sort of takes the 10% has been a has really sort of provoked some conversation the field which we think is important in terms of supporting improvement. We also know folks are really sort of have feelings around some of those those places where it goes from kind of meets expectation to exceeds expectations. We also know that you know the overall averages you know were improvement but we also know it's not quite as much improvement as we want to see. So 53% of sites their numerical score was higher you know small number was exactly the same and 47% were lower and we would like to see more sort of improvement in terms of the proportion of sites and so we will come back to this is what we're analyzing right now is really try
070to figure out how do you get so every site is improving right rather than sort of some sites making larger improvements that then lead to kind of the overall average and that I think will potentially come back with sort of some some shifts this year to think about, you know, do we need additional buckets? How do we think about our incentives to make sure that everybody is improving? But the key part is even though it's saying that 99% of of sites are meeting those kind of those those expectations, we have that more precise data that three-digit score that allows us then to kind of come in back to you all and say, "Hey, here are the shifts to kind of further incentive better delineate for families." So that's that is our current work right now.
071Is there a particular criterion that they're struggling with? I don't I know that there's so many dimensions on those. >> So it's it's largely comes down to instruction and so that's part of um so there's you know the it's not it's class is not tied to any particular uh curriculum or kind of you know but so it's kind of called engage. It's part of the infant piece. So the infant is using language, right? And kind of constantly talking with children, thinking about about that work. For toddlers, it's called engaged support for learning. And then um in preschool, it's instructional support. And the example we give is, you know, and you start to start to see this if you look at the vows prek from last year. One of the areas in where kids are not
072making the most uh growth is expressive comprehension. And so class calls on asking how and why questions. building on the kid, prompting the kid to build. It's hard, right? I mean, if you're around a three-y old, I find myself I'm like, "What color is this?" Like, "How many fingers, right? How old are you?" And that is not getting kids to kind of think as critically, right? Is not kind of, you know, and we have to pause, right? Because sometimes it can take a little while for their things to get out and sometimes they're a little tangential. Um, but that's a to me we're we're very close and we're doing some really important work with this the the uh preschool VKRP and vows and VPI to start to connect like here we are struggling a little
073bit on um instruction curriculum is a big play right and we're going to sort of see you know it's one thing to say you're using curriculum it's a whole another thing to use it kind of takes about two to three years right to fully implement that and then to kind of connect it to if you want to see kids grow like we're really good at helping helping kids identify letters and write their names by the end of the four-y old year. We are, you know, we can improve in how we really develop those critical thinking skills and do some of that concept development. I think that that data that is starting to emerge, Miss Northern as a kind of a trend there. >> Thank you, Mr. Monk. >> Thank you. First, just awesome work. Uh
074I know this is uh not only showing impact now, but we'll see the benefits of this long term. So, thank you for that. and and as a newer member just trying to gain some context here. Um I noticed the approved curriculum and it looks like most of the scores as I go into the site are 100 and and you kind of hit it on your last answer there. Is that more of a checkbox of they've got this approved curriculum or they actually showing it in the in the visit? >> So um it is a right now it's sort of if you're using it in just one classroom. this board has uh agreed in last year's guidelines to sort of raise that bar in two years time to kind of all classrooms. Um the goal there
075is to kind of get is to encourage everybody to choose to use a curriculum. What we have found when you look at sort of the work and the research on it, it's very hard to at scale kind of evaluate how well they use curriculum. So you think of kind of curriculum as your more blunt measure and class as your more specific measure. Um and so what the hope and of the design of the system is that 100 points gets you to sort of begin to adopt it. What we found and the reason that we added curriculum in here in Virginia is because in Louisiana we were using class alone for a couple of years and child care folks started coming to us and saying I can't move on instructional support like my teachers can't make
076it up every day. And we're like well you should start using curriculum and they're like well can you help us pay for it? And we're like okay well this is clearly kind of this trajectory. So rather than just require curriculum, which sort of doesn't necessarily kind of you don't see it sort of things getting better, we sort of say, well, we'll incent you use curriculum. And the goal is that as you use curriculum, you're going to see those instruction scores go up. And so my um and we'll see whether or not at some point we decide because everybody's using it, it may not be as relevant to keep, but it's helped go from 40% of family childare and childcare using it upwards to 80%. And I think we're going to start to see the differential
077being the interactions, not so much the curriculum. >> And just follow up on the curriculum component there. I I know it says approved curriculum. What is the um obviously want it to be high quality. Yeah. But knowing that there's faith-based and you know what does that look like in terms of getting your curriculum approved? >> Yeah. So we um we will review all curriculum which was something that is a little different from uh how it works in K12 because of the history of early childhood. So we have had for example school divisions make serious investments in curriculum because there weren't a lot of commercial products available. We have some open educational resources. So for the last five years you've submitted your curriculum to us even if it was homemade. Um, and we have reviewed it
078in line with our early learning development standards as well as some kind of nationally accepted criteria on quality. And so we have a faith-based option that was is being used. We have some school division created resources. We have some of the more kind of traditionally well-known kind of creative curriculum. Uh, and then we have stream and three which is our open educational resource. Stream and 3 is our most frequently used because it's um a free or low cost. We also my experience in Louisiana around supporting use of curriculum is and kind of going back to the the stat about 31% of teachers leaving what you're really trying to do is not only think about kind of a one-time training for this teacher but institutionalize that curriculum within the ecosystem of the center right and so
079by having an open educational resource where anybody can offer PD on and it's not proprietary it is our hope that we can kind of build it into the system so when you're the assistant teacher you're learning from the lead teacher, right? If you're, you know, it's kind of everybody in that program is using it, realistically, that's going to take, you know, three to five, five years. But we did want to say, you know, rather than say you have to purchase an appric, if you've got something great and you're providing, you know, and it's meeting these standards, then that's going to and you'll see if you go, you can actually go, I should say this to you, board member Northern, you can go to our website, you can click data download and you get it all.
080So you can look at the top 101 in the state and you can look at what curriculum you're using and it's it's not all the same, right? There's various ones being used in different ways, but you'll see that um you know our highest scoring school is in a really rural community, right? And you know and then we have that right next to you know schools from Fairfax and Northern Virginia, right? So, it's really it's a the the the the data even on curriculum shows that it needs to be of a certain quality, but we shouldn't be necessarily pushing one resource for everybody and that it is important if you've developed it own or if your faith-based values are key to you and you can meet the quality criteria, we should be supporting that. Finally, if
081I may, um you and we kind of alluded to this, but tracking and you've done some of that data set here, but what ability do we have to track, you know, if student was in a meets expectation or exceeds expectation grade three you mentioned long-term, how can we track that student if if is that possible? >> Yes, we do. Now, this has been a work in progress. Um, and I'll try to do the the the high level answer, but basically we created something called classroom lists and we worked with providers, you know, to sort of do so that parents were aware and could, you know, opt in or opt out. Um, and then what we knew from years and years of doing PALS is that we can get that information, it's basically five fields about
082the children, the child, and then very safely match it on the back end with their state testing identifier the second they pop up at public school. So what it means is basically and this is why we had some of the challenges with VA connects this fall is these kids are coming in we're running numbers to sort of see okay were you ever in early childhood and then we're linking those records so that at some point we'll be able to sort of look back and say as a baby they were in a you know meets expectation as a toddler they were here they were you know and sort of all the way through the this is like the first year that finally we have these kids and sort of begin to do this so kind of
083the clock starts now um but yes Mr. month. We'll be able to do that. And when we roll out attendance tracking uh in December of this year, we'll actually be able to understand how much of the service did they get, what was the quality measurement, you know, what played in. We might find that interaction scores don't matter if you're only there 50% of the time, right? And so, kind of being able to kind of take all that data that the biggest challenge and and again, uh uh President Creasy knows this better than anyone. Everybody thought we were totally bananas when we proposed this. You know, we we began building the data system before even the law had passed, but we will see over time that we believe it will pay off for the Commonwealth. >>
084Other questions or comments? >> So, of course, I have lots uh but first I really just want to say um you know, one of the things to respond to Dr. Northern about you know that that that 31% leaving. One of the things that we looked at, gosh, Jenna, how long ago was it when we talked about um >> you know, salaries and how salaries even regionally were impacting um and how salaries um or pay scales um you know, between different types of providers were really impacting where um the workforce was sort of shifting. I think that would be an interesting maybe follow-up presentation if we're Note the other version of that slide has the comp for those two levels. So the for the uh childcare teachers is about $17 an hour. For the schoolbased teachers,
085it's 28 to 32. >> Yeah. So, I think maybe a really awesome follow-up presentation would be to talk about um you know, what that those differences look like regionally um within the different types of providers um because I think that just re-ups the >> the immediacy of of all of it for us just so that we're really connecting all of the dots and pulling it all together. I I think it would be also interesting to see that maybe, you know, perhaps our highest honores maybe aren't the highest paid. Yeah. Um, you know, I think that's a lot of very interesting data, too, that that the field would really like to see as well as as those of us sitting here. So, that would be um one point that I'd like to make. The second is
086um I'm really really really harping in my own mind on this development and continued support of our instructional leadership. So as you talked about leaders and centers being very uh or or being our most lasting uh piece of the puzzle within each individual provider um uh site. You know, I think it's it's imperative that we hone in very specifically, very intently, and very strategically to those leaders and how they they are able to provide that continuity when perhaps there may not be considering some turnover. Um, I think that's a lesson that K12 needs to learn, >> frankly. Um because I think that we have um we've really really really got to focus on how we continue to support principles in school principles assistant principles in school buildings across the Commonwealth to continue to do the
087work of that instructional leadership. How are we equipping them to be the best instructional leader to then help those teachers in classrooms that may be, you know, really do need that instructional support, whether it be from a pedagogical standpoint or from just a practical, you know, this is this is how we operate in a school building type type situation. Um, so I think learn we we have a lot to learn in K12 from our early childhood system. And I really I don't I I really hope that our K12 um partners are listening to this uh because I do think that it it it's going to be a dramatic transfer transformation of our holistic educational system if we are truly able to connect those dots between early childhood and K12 and keep them strongly connected. And
088you know, you guys have done a great job of doing that reaching out and holding hands um when people are probably trying to let go of your hands. But I continue to encourage you, >> not optional. We we don't let we don't let go of your hands, >> right? No. And I'm talking about the connection between early childhood and K12 handholding because it is crucial to continued development um and identification. And so in the future as we continue to get more data and information from you, another thing that I think that we would like to see is how are we using this system to also support educators in those early childhood um classrooms in that identification of special education and needs um there. So, another follow-up presentation that I know would be really informative to
089the board would be around um consistency and identification. So, our you know, I had I had a conversation with Clark Anders the other day and and he said, you know, Grace, we have a lot of of our students at our center that are then going into other divisions. You not all the same school division and we're not seeing consistency and identification. you know what we're seeing in an early childhood classroom identifying talking to parents about is not getting connected when we send parents for identification purposes to the local public school. So, um, some kind of, you know, how are how are you all supporting those, um, those early childhood educators in that identification and how to communicate that both to parents and then carrying that on to the school division. Um, and then lastly, I
090just desperately, desperately hope that the media grasps on and does a major service to the families of the Commonwealth by raising the excellence that this system in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the north star that you all are providing in in this area of education, We absolutely have to elevate this in the media to be able to get this in the hands of parents. >> And so I beg of our partners in the media to please please elevate this because it is crucial to the future of the Commonwealth of Virginia for parents to know the availability of these options for our youngest learners and for us to have the greatest state in the country. >> Absolutely. So, thank you so much for all the work that you all have done. >> Thank you, President Christie. >>
091Thank you. >> Sorry, I got on my little soap box. Excuse me. >> Um, anyway, we we are so appreciative of the work that you all have done and know that it continues and so we we will continue to thank you for that. >> We will we will be back with more data and uh shifts on how we can continue to improve the system together. Thank you all very much. >> Thank you. Um, does anybody need a quick break? Um, let's do that and we'll be back in five minutes, please. We are back and we are going with um presentation B on the technical advisory council. Uh are you starting us off M? >> I'm kicking us off. >> Wonderful. >> So um thank you board members. Good morning. And so I am excited today
092to talk about our uh advisors that we have, our technical advisory council um that really supports us with all things assessment um related. And with me today I have Dr. Maryanne Perry, who's going to share the outcomes of our last TAC convening um and give an overview of our um of our advisory council and their purpose. So, Dr. Perry, >> good morning everyone. It's good to be back and to see you all again. So, I'm here today to talk about the we call it the TAC, the technical advisory council. Um, and I think it's important for everybody to understand is that when we're creating assessments, working on accountability systems in this state, in any state, we have outside experts come in to actually advise us on the technical issues, review what we're doing. Um, there
093are times you need to to check the the vendor and see if what they're doing makes sense. So, we bring in these outside experts. So, we can do anything from assessment, design, development, implementation. Most recently, we've been spending a lot of time on standard setting and cut scores. Uh we also talk about scaling and equating growth models, item banks, uh new assessment items, automated scoring, test security. There's all kinds of technical uh aspects that we can talk about and we have folks with uh various expertise to come in. So I just serve as your facilitator. Um I you know me from being involved in the standard setting, but my background is as a psychometrician. Um, and I serve on six other state taxs. The other thing do is they bring in experience from other states.
094We can say, "Hey, Florida's tried this. Have you thought about doing something this way?" Um, so we we bring that in. So Dr. Suzanne Lane is um I think she's been on 10 is on 10 right now. Um, but she just retired from the University of Pittsburgh and she's been on your attack for a little while. Um, Dr. Denny Wei has also been on your attack for a while. He started out his life as a vendor psychometrician working at Pearson and I worked with him at ATS and he recently retired from the college board. So he's worked on uh state assessment SAT. Um we also brought in we we sort of reconstituted your TAC to bring in some um new members and focus on the expertise of where we saw what we would need in
095the future. So the first is do Dr. Molly Faulner Bond. Um she is uh an an expert on multilingual learners. She got her PhD at University of Massachusetts in psychometrics. Um and one of the reasons we wanted to bring her on is she's also a parent of elementary school kids in Virginia public schools. So she has a very personal investment for making sure we're doing everything right with the accountability and assessment. And finally, we brought on um Vince Vis who recently retired as the assistant superintendent in Florida. So he'd been there for 20 years uh working on their assessment accountability systems. So he stood up I want to say three different systems in that 20 years. So he's seen those kinds of transitions. He's worked with the federal government to get approvals. He's done all
096of that. Um he started but before that he was a uh mathematics teacher and prior to that he was a Navy pilot. So, what we're really looking to do is provide these expert guidance, recommendations. Um, oftentimes we're reviewing things that happened in the past, but we're looking to inform how should we do that better in the future. So, we just met early this month. Um, and you can see we had the four TAC members. Uh, I facilitated, we had four people from our Department of Ed staff, and we had some folks from the vendors. And I do have to say the the TAC to echo something that was said earlier this morning that the TAC said this was one of the most collaborative meetings they've had in the last three or four years. So they
097are really excited to see the direction that Virginia is going. So the first thing we talked about was going over the whole standard setting, everything you've heard about that's happened to set the cut scores. Um we have a technical report that the TAC reviewed and made some comments on. Um but overall they were very impressed. Said this was clearly a valid and reliable method. Um they actually recommended continuing with ID matching whenever possible. Um they really like the way we used NAPE and incorporated NAPE into the the standard setting process. Uh so gave us some kudos on that. Um and again as we said looking forward because we know we've got standard settings coming up in our future and we'll have more performance levels to set in other subjects. Um they really like the inclusion
098of community members and said let's keep doing that. Um, again, ID matching whenever possible. And the only other change they recommended was we brought all of our committees in and had them on one group the whole time, a big U-shape. And oftentimes in standard setting, we'll divide people into smaller tables so they can have really rich discussions and then they report out to each other. So the attack recommended that we consider doing that next time. Phased in. Um so to be very honest the the first reaction of being phased in was not positive um because we across the country we've seen this um not work. People lose the political will to keep phasing things in over time. So the recommendation is keep the phase in as short as possible. Um as much as we've got
099current policy makers, we want to keep that uh phased in. So we talked a lot about when do we start? And because of the accountability system um and the fact that we have fall testers that go into the accountability system, the recommendation was think about this year as a prep year. Think about this year as a communication year. Um got a lot of ideas about how to get information out to the public to the schools to help them prepare for the new cut scores. Um but to really think about fall of of uh 26 is maybe where we put in the new cut score. So, we have a full year in front of us. We talked about some of the other policies that are affected by the new cut scores such as the um local
100validated credit where right now it says if a student earns at least a 375 and that may not make sense in a couple of years. So, their recommendation is to start thinking about things as within a sec x number of points. As we know right now we don't have cut scores set at 400 at every single grade. So not so saying 3 375 doesn't make sense but saying within 25 points of the cut score could make sense. Um so we have what we call the standard error of measurement which is sort of the the variability around any score you get. So you can put a little confidence interval around that and say you have to score within the confidence interval is is the idea behind that. The other thing that came up this wasn't actually
101on our agenda. We went off on a tangent here but it's important. Um it was we got talking about the fact that Virginia allows retakes. And while that's generally a good thing, the concern is in practice sometimes people will have everybody who isn't proficient retake the test the next day. And for some kids that's going to be a waste of time. If you're scoring again within that confidence interval, sure, take it again the next day. Um but if you're somebody who's scoring 100 points below proficiency, taking the test the next day is not going to raise your score by over 100 points. So, they really said, "Let's spend some time doing some communication to the public about or to our educators, to our um school administrators about when it makes sense to do a retake."
102And as we learn of effective um professional development that can that can help, the training that will help the kids, things that actually can make a difference. Let's get that information out to schools so they can say, "When does it make sense to retest and when are we just torturing our students?" So the next thing we looked at is the entire item bank. Um and I should say at this point that we are um we keep our our meetings confidential. We keep our meetings secure partially because we do things like this next topic where we're actually looking at live items. Um so we want to make sure that things are that stay in the room um and don't end up on Twitter or X. Um, so we looked at the the health of the item
103bank and said, "Okay, we've just made a pretty big change in terms of where raising the proficiency and raising expectations." And we've we've talked about this before, Amber, you've pointed this out a couple of times that we need to um raise the rigor of the items and we've been working on that, but we looked at the health of the item bank and said, you know, we really still need to keep working on getting more advanced items into the bank. So Pearson's made some progress. We kept looking at that needs to go forward. Um, we also want to add a process to uh Pearson's approach where they actually have their item writers say what they're targeting in terms of the cognitive complexity. Is this item intended to to assess proficient or advanced skills and then use
104that and compare that to the data later? Pearson did a nice job creating materials for the TAC and it included sort of a heat map of where the items fall for each standard along the difficulty scale. And it was really an interesting visual and it showed you that there really are some standards that you can only measure up to a certain point. You can't measure the most advanced thing on this standard because it's a fairly straightforward standard. On the flip side, there are some standards that are so complex you really can't get below basic items out of them. Um, so we recommended is there a way to create this visual that in a way that'll help teachers, educators understand how the standards and difficulty kind of work together and complexity work together. Uh, we spent
105a lot of time talking about the integrated reading and writing assessment IRW. Uh, the TAC really does say it has a lot of value, but we're concerned that it doesn't seem to have a purpose right now. So, um, where we ended up with the TAC recommended using the IRW scores in grades five and eight as as the readiness indicator. We've got the readiness piece and Mark will talk about this uh later today. Um, but we'll talk about the if we use it as readiness, not as academic achievement, it has some oomph. It gives us a a reason to go in and really think hard about improving our students writing. Um, but it's not going to be one more test that adds into achievement. So, it does mean we'll need to set cut scores so that
106we can add something in here. Um, this is a short test. It's 21 points, I believe. So, um, the tax says, you know, we can't put in four cut scores and 21 points. Um, but we can put in two, uh, maximum of two cut scores to really kind of divide up some performance. high school. We spent a lot of time comparing the high school IRW to the end of course uh writing and the the tax final recommendation is they said, you know, let's let's just stick with EOCC writing. It doesn't make sense to have both and the EOCC writing gives more information. Um it because it's a longer test, it has a higher degree of reliability. Um and instead, Pearson's done some work creating these these IRW prompts in high school. Let's just give them
107to the schools and say, "Here, use this formatively in your classroom. Thank you Dr. Perry. So next steps we so typically our TAC is five members and as you saw we have four so we will be adding one additional TAC member and we meet with TAC so we it's October we met and then we'll meet again in March but we can call on our TAC members anytime we need them. So, while it looks like the meetings are far apart, uh we can actually they're a resource for us to to pull on anytime we need support with assessments. And so, um so with that, we'll end it there and open the floor up for questions. >> Are there any questions here? Dr. Northern >> the integrated reading writing as a readiness indicator. You said that we'll
108get that. That's that was my biggest question. We'll get that in a later >> session today. you'll get a little bit more information um through uh Mr. Jennings presentation when we talk about updates to our ESSA state plan. >> Okay. And on the additional TAC member, I don't know if you've got names and I'm not going to give you names, but I would say uh encourage you to look at Curriculum Associates, um NWA and the Center for Assessment. They're they're where a lot of people are pulling folks from. Yeah. >> Yes, definitely. Yes. >> Other questions or comments? Okay, thank you. >> Okay, thank you. And I believe I have the next topic. >> And so item C. >> Thank you, Dr. Perry. Okay, I'm ready. Yes. All right, come on up. >> Doc Dr.
109Ballard. So, our next presentation is updates on school uh supports. And so you'll see that um we have the slide deck posted and and if we go to slide two for the last few months I've been coming to the board sharing updates on how we are reimagining statewide support for school improvement. In August I talked about how we are grounding our work in data. Um and so I am excited when we uh can bring the accountability results to you and really talk about the data and how we're targeting uh supports for schools. Uh we even uh started sharing some of the projected impact data for schools and um divisions which we're going to use to help target support. Uh we talked about the customized support and how we're really looking to create these sustainable structures.
110at at the September board meeting, we discussed the organizational structure and funding. And so we talked about um how we the we're um undergoing this reorg and um and how we're hiring additional staff to meet specific needs. And I am super excited. We have been interviewing for the middle school math specialist. And I mean, I just want everyone who applied to hire them. They're just so we have some great math people across our state. And then um and we have about over 60 applications right now that we're about to start screening for our regional student support specialist positions. And so I'm just really really excited with bringing on additional staff to help uh build our capacity and um and extend our support across the state. And we also talked about some um some strategic funding
111opportunities and just how we are awarding doing grants a little differently now. And so um today in advance of releasing accountability results, we are going to focus on um how we are going to support these schools that will be identified through the accountability system. And so if we go to slide three, one of the things anytime you're working um with the accountability system and there are certain federal requirements and state comp requirements, it can feel like compliance like we're just checking the box. We're going to do a needs assessment, check the box. We're going to fill out an application, check the box. And that's not what we want to do. Now, we know that we have to do certain things to move students forward and to um ensure that we are meeting those requirements defined
112by the state and federal um government, but we also want to do it in a very intentional way um so that it it's not a compliance-driven tool, but something that's really used to move things forward. So what you'll see in this presentation is that we are revising the needs assessment and that whole process. We are revising the monitoring process. And so any school division and any school that was previously identified for comprehensive support and improvement, they can't just dust off their old plan and we're just going to uh make some tweaks and resubmit because we are truly um changing the process to um to focus more. Um so we're not focusing on everything. We're you got identified for this. let's dig deep into why you got identified for this and what's the specific data points
113and um and really focusing on those data cycles. How often are you looking at your student data and monitoring looking at those 30 60 90day cycles? So, we are super excited um you know that uh that we're going to uh start to do uh more of that. On slide four, what you'll see is uh the the Virginia school performance and support framework. And this is what's used to identify uh these schools. And there's been a lot of work done to ensure that we are aligning the performance categories with federal identification because it can be confusing uh to the public if there's a compre a school that's been identified for comprehensive support and improvement but has a distinguished status um as a performance category. And so um what Mr. Jennings and his team that what they
114have done is really worked hard to um ensure that the newly identified comprehensive support and improvement schools they will be in the needs intensive support category. So when we talk about what supports are available for the needs intensive support schools a lot of that is going to fall under that C those supports for CSI schools. Um and then also for the targeted support and improvement schools. Uh these schools are going to fall under the ontrack offtrack or needs intensive support. So once again when we look at what are the supports that are going to be available for needs intensive support schools a lot of it is going to align to um comprehensive support and targeted support um to those supports. And so that tight alignment is uh so critical. on slide five, it's just a
115highlevel overview of how schools are identified and this you'll get into way more detail about this um once all results are released. So, we're really just focusing on we're preparing for that release because as soon as uh everything is made public, we are ready to start um to kick off all the support. Another big part, so when we go to slide six is our memorandum of understanding school divisions. One of the first meetings I was in when we started when I came here was um looking at these school divisions, how long some of them have been identified asou um looking at theus to see are they ever even able to get out ofou status and what kind of supports could we provide them and so the great thing is under the our consolidated plan. So
116it's very clear that if um 40% of the schools in your division are identified for comprehensive support and improvement or additional targeted support and improvement, you will be aou school division. If 10 or more schools are identified for comprehensive support and improvement, um you will be aou school division. And there are certain requirements that come with that such as um the division level academic and resource allocation review. And so that is something um once these results are released and we identify those school divisions uh we will work with them throughout this process because the goal is not to keep you anou forever. Uh we want to make sure that there is a clear exit strategy and that it makes sense for uh your school division. On slide seven what you see are some of the
117resources that will be um shared very soon. Uh we are so thankful to work with our partners at Waypoint to take all of this federal and state uh complianced driven language and to break it into um language that's parentfriendly and teacher friendly and principal friendly. And so what uh school divisions and this will be um available uh they'll get customizable slide decks where they can drop in their own school's data um and they can talk through with their communities. uh that's this accountability and um the difference between accountability and accreditation because there's still a lot of confusion in the field about that and they'll also be able to you know really go through why did we get identified and then what's the the plan to so that we're not going to continue to be identified.
118Um so there'll be some very clear resources for school leaders. So in our listening sessions, we've been um hearing from principles a lot that they want resources that they want the state to send them resources because they don't always get all the resources that are coming out of the state. So we are going to make sure that they um receive these resources and um guides for families. So when a school is identified as comprehensive support and improvement or targeted support and improvement um what does that mean uh for a parent? What supports are available to you as a parent? So we want to make sure that is clear and it's ready to go as soon as those um as the schools are identified. Slide eight. So these are the two documents that define those requirements.
119So it's our ESSA consolidated plan and our standards of accreditation. Mr. Jennings. He's going to get up later today and talk about some revisions that we are um that that we want to start doing to our as a consolidated state plan so that there can be more flexibility with school improvement and um it and it so that it doesn't feel so compliance focused. Um because when you look at our SSATE plan, there's things like well you have to create the template, which is yes, we we have to create the template, but does that need to be in the SS estate plan? So, it's little things like that that um we we're going to start to look into and how we can do some things differently. Slide nine details all of the requirements like what are
120the mustdos and who's required to monitor? Is this a a department of education? Do we need to go out to your school? Is this a division that you need to monitor? Um and so this is just a snapshot of what's required by um for comprehensive support and improvement schools, targeted support and improvement schools, and additional targeted support and improvement schools. And once again, a lot of these schools are your needs intensive schools. And so if you're identified as needs intensive, a lot of this is going to apply to you. And so on slide 10, this is where um the office of school improvement um under uh uh Dr. Ballard is really going to come into play because they are working to coordinate this cross divisional support. It's not just his office that's leading this school
121improvement work. They are the point. They are the ones who are going to be working with the principles and the assistant principles and the the division leaders, but they are going to make sure that our um that across the board if a if a school needs help with attendance, we have people at the state who can help with that. If a school needs help with their students with disabilities, we have people at the state that can help with that. So they are going to um really work indepth uh with the leaders to ensure that systemic planning and sustainable planning is happening and that uh the supports are there for them. So I'm going to call uh Mr. Ballard, Dr. Ballard up to just talk a little bit about uh how they're going to do that
122through these needs assessment, supports plan, resource reviews, plan approval, and monitoring stuff. Thank you, Deputy Superintendent Dwire Booker Dwire. Uh to President Cesy, uh members of the board, state superintendent Gullixson, uh good morning. I'm glad to be with you all this morning. Um so, uh on slide 10, uh the office of school improvement, uh as Deputy Superintendent Booker Dwire just mentioned, provides guidance, uh technical assistance, and support uh to divisions and schools identified for improvement throughout the Commonwealth. Once schools are identified, as she's mentioned, OSI is looking forward to providing the technical assistance and cultural support through a variety of modalities to include virtual and in-person trainings and learning experiences, lunch and learn offer offerings, office hours, uh coordinating even individualized regional support and convening meetings as well with division OSQ contacts, principles, and other
123division and school leaders as she just briefly mentioned. So using a continuous improvement cycle that starts with building a team that is composed of diverse stakeholders who will support the work of improvement. OSI will be coming alongside divisions and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with school leaders to provide coach support and technical assistance when they are conducting their needs assessments. uh which is going to be focused on factors that lead to schools or school identification status in the new support performance and support framework the school performance I'm sorry and support framework. So information and findings from this needs assessment will be instrumental in the development of their multi-year school andor division support plan that was just uh referenced. uh which will include information regarding contributing factors that are related to those indicators around mastery uh readiness and growth,
124measurable goals, aid in the identification of evidence-based interventions and and outline strategies and action steps that will be taken to make progress and to reach the desired student improvement goals or outcomes that we're striving to see. In addition, OSQ will be uh supporting schools with their resource review and effective resource distribution uh around uh their school and across the school division. Now, upon completion and approval of the plans, as schools and divisions uh transition to implementation and monitoring, OSI will leverage working as Miss Booker Dwire mentioned across the agency uh more closely and collaboratively with our colleagues from other offices who are the subject matter experts as part of the review process and to support more focused and systematic improvement efforts. And so she just mentioned a couple of examples, but that is precisely right.
125If we had a school or division whose plan is focused on the acquisition, usage of professional development around HQIM, you know, OS, OSI would actually take that cross departmental approach. We would be working with our teaching and learning and instructional team. If it was around chronic absenteeism, special education, we would be doing the same thing uh if you will uh with the office of behavioral health and student safety. and likewise with the office of uh special educa special education instructional uh uh services and supports. And so uh we'll transition to slide next slide at this point slide 11. Okay, here we go. Uh and so as it relates to let me I'm sorry follow along. Uh so uh the 202526 school improvement grant uh uh opportunity actually provides I'm sorry continued support to schools federally
126identified as mentioned for comprehensive support uh and improvement targeted support and improvement and uh additional targeted and support uh and improvement. These funds that you see here um must support the implementation of the school's multi-year support plan and provide assistance to ensure the implementation of appropriate supports and evidence-based intervention to address their federal identification. Specific school improvement grant funding considerations are based on the school's federal identification and the needs articulated in the submission of a complete school improvement grant application which will also accompany that uh include rather that multi-year support plan that's accompanied with a continued focus on systemic improvement. These funds can be used to support implementation of interventions aimed at improving student outcomes and performance um around uh examples such as you know profession professional learning experiences, the acquisitions of math to learning
127coaches, tutoring support, attendance initiative, comm community engagement, just to name uh a few things. Uh and so uh at this time I'm going to turn it over to uh deputy superintendent Booker Dwire to talk a little bit more about the direct student services. Yes. And we mentioned the direct student services grant at the last board meeting and we are um are preparing to to have that released at the same time as our school improvement grant so that our um school divisions can think holistically about um all the supports that that they can use uh this funding for. And we also just want to recognize um from our general fund uh what's what's helping us do all this work. we have that $1.9 million that was um appropriated to to us and that is uh very
128important to that's the engine that's allowing us to do all of this work with the with the team. And so on slide 12, we know that there's all these plans and and and needs assessments that need to be completed, but we these have to be living documents, dynamic documents, not just check the box type of things. And so uh we're going to do some intensive support on how are you de how are you developing your plan so that it fits the school context to ensure that you are ready for the interventions that you want to implement and to ensure that it matches what your data says. So there's perceived need and the actual need and sometimes we think we need something but then as you unpack that data that's not really what you need. And
129so um so it's going to be some very deep professional learning around that. Um and we're encouraging uh leveraging the external partners. I mean when we started in August with this school improvement series, we brought in that partnership between Danville and um the University of Virginia and how they worked through their leadership to inform that the systemic improvement. Um you heard earlier from Hopkins um and from a different national expert series. Um and so bringing in some of these national experts to support school improvement and they can leverage these funds to do that. So we will um encourage that. And then with monitoring, this will not be a check the box monitoring. We're not going through classrooms with clipboards. Um that is not what we're doing with the monitoring process. Now we will be in
130classrooms. We do want to see teaching and learning in action. Uh but we want to ensure that there is clear outcomes that there is movement happening. We should not wait until the state assessment data and then be surprised at the outcomes. And so, um, when we are crafting the needs assessment in the plan, there needs to be clear benchmarks. And that's what we're coming out to see. How are you measuring your progress? And if did you meet that benchmark? If not, why not? And we're going to be looking at those benchmarks to see are are they are they right sized? Um, we don't want it too low. We also don't want it so high that a student can't that it's not practical for your school. So, we're doing all of that. um you know and
131that'll be supported uh coordinated through uh Dr. Ballard's team. And so the next step so when you go to slide 13, I am excited that we are able to dig into this ESSA plan because that's just going to allow us to expand options to for school improvement. And I'm also excited about the um about our Edflex application because not only will this allow us to expand the window upon, you know, how long you can expend these grant funds, um but it also just gives so much more flexibility to school divisions with how they use the funds and not just school improvement grant funds, but title one funds. Um and so we are um very excited about uh the the upcoming this upcoming submission of the application and um this process to revise the the ESSA
132plan. So with that I will open the floor up to questions. >> A question >> Mr. Hansen. >> Thank you very much. Thank you for your time the other day as well. Appreciate all the great work that's going into this. Um just on slide 11 with excuse me the breakdown of the grants. Could you maybe just give me a little bit of an illustration on um you know how this is actually going to impact um a district or a school. And then also um what is going to be the process on some of the evaluation or understanding um bringing uh some of the lessons learned from this of um and how those might be helpful and serving others along the way. >> Yes. So I so we I'll give you um a a breakdown. So
133the schools are identified based off of the the indicators in that school performance framework. So let's say math performance that's that's a problem especially at the middle school level and so when we look at their plan and the needs assessment we fully math needs to be on there and not just any math but middle school math and then even the math before that to make sure that your students are building up and then top on that we're going to look at what curriculum are you using because we know that even if I mean the shortage of math teachers is not going to be fixed next school year this is a longer term process And so we know that if you're using that high quality standards aligned curriculum, you increase the likelihood of students achieving. And
134so we want to see what curriculum are you using and is it aligned to the standards. We want to see what are the professional learning experiences that you're doing. How many provisionally licensed teachers do you have in math and how can we uh support them in getting full credentials? um do you need math coaches or lit some of the math coaches? Um and how can we partner? So like I'm really excited of this idea of kind of regionalizing certain things where we can learn from across the region because middle school math is a challenge right now in a lot of our divisions just looking at the data and we're also looking at the so data um and those outcomes and what are those concepts that students are um having difficulty with. And I'm so excited.
135Our math team, they are putting out the just in time quick checks for teachers right now. And we're hearing getting a lot of great feedback about that. And what it is, it allows a teacher to to use this document to quickly assess if there's a learning gap and then the strategies to address that gap. And so we're going to u make sure that all those resources are available. And then we want to see what are the external partners that you're using and what experience do those external partners have in improving math performance. We know that for instance um Zern uh we've been looking at data from that and we've seen that that that tutoring program has de has some improvements. They help students improve in math and so are you using highquality vendors that actually
136have outcomes that connect to your students context. So so those so that's we're setting that foundation with the planning and then when um Dr. Ballard's team and he's taking other people from the department out to into those schools. We want to make sure we're first want to look at the benchmark data baseline was here. You said by quarter one the kids will be here. So let's see where they are and if they're not there, why not? We want to look in the classrooms and see how is the curriculum and instruction going. We want to talk to students. We want to talk to teachers. We want to hear from the people on the ground. Is this plan being actualized or is this a plan that's sitting on the shelf? And so it takes those foundational elements.
137Um they have to be strong because then you can execute and hold people accountable when those foundational elements are strong. So that's where we are um right now. So we are excited to get the you know the accountability results out there and to kick off all of this um because Dr. Ballard's team is ready. We've been interviewing and hiring and bringing people on board. Um but that's what it would look like. And then they would have to fill out the application. They would get uh receive the uh you know the school improvement grant funds. And then there's a fiscal monitoring piece and this is where we collaborate with budget to make sure you're spending down. We don't want millions and millions of dollars returned to us. Um that is something that we just have to
138stop in Virginia. Um and so we're going to make sure are you spending down? If you're not, why what's happening? Um and and partly we have to make sure that our timing of releasing applications and funding is also um on time because sometimes it's us, sometimes it's them. So um so so that's what it looks like in a snapshot. >> Other questions? Dr. Northern. >> Um just two quick ones. Um since the school divisions who are in the I think you said in in need support category will be the only ones eligible for the grants. Is that correct? >> Well, no. So for the school improvement grant uh so they would be the only ones eligible for that grant but direct student services grant is open to all school divisions but it prioritizes schools. So
139when we're have the rubric there's extra waiting given to schools in that needs intensive support category. Okay. And we we we we've been doing that with a lot of the grants that we put out because we recognize schools in that needs intensive support category. They they need a little bit more. So we put a little bit of extra waiting in the grants for them. >> Okay. Um and just just to to note that sometimes they need help with the grant writing too, right? Because sometimes if you're you know you don't have the capacity to write a good grant, frankly. Um so just just to make us aware of that and maybe sometimes they're not even applying for the grants and they're the ones most in need. So just making sure that they're aware of these
140opportunities and encouraged and helped and supported in in submitting those grants. And the other thing is just on the substance side, um I've been encouraged, I mean just it's not necessarily the curriculum piece, it's the pedagogical piece, right, where we're seeing kids just disengaged in classrooms. Um, I would just encourage us, this Teach Like a Champion, uh, book by Doug Lamov has been used just in a lot of places in a lot of different contexts to just learn how to engage kids better. He's just got some very like concrete, uh, strategies like how to do a cold call for kids, you know, like that just can again, it doesn't matter if you're in a math, a science, English, doesn't matter if you're using a high quality curriculum or not. It's just giving you some really
141good tools to make sure that kids are engaged in classrooms and teachers. um the ones that I've interacted with who have used some of these strategies have been really grateful um for them and really thought that they were impactful and he there's there's free videos and books and resources um on that website. Um obviously I'd love to see us get some of those books out to teachers who are interested but um there are plenty of free resources on on that site and I think it would be a good resource to add to your list of resources. >> Thank you for that. And your point about grant writing, we heard that um from our listening sessions and and so we want to also just think differently while we have people at the department who provides that
142technical assistance to help guide them. Uh we're we're wondering could there be a a different approach? Does it have to be one person in central office responsible for it? There are teachers who want to build their skill set in grant writing. There are principles. There are there's other people even in the community that may want to build their um skill set. So, we're just starting to look at some innovative ways to think outside of the box when it comes to grant writing and that we can train those people um and build their skill set because if you know how to write grants, you know how to get money. So, that's a great skill set to have. >> Other comments here, Mr. Monk? >> Thank you. And you kind of dovtailing into what I'm thinking about
143here. U notice the the funds available, right? But we also know that based upon previous presentations and information uh the amount of dollars in education in Virginia um as an all-time high and so excited about that but is as part of your listening sessions and and kind of the boots on the ground what f flexibility and I know some federal can't do that but from a state level what flexibility are we looking at for maybe grant dollars or grants that have already been out there but maybe aren't working. they're not having the intended impact. And can we utilize those for that local division to to kind of as these groups are going in, especially for these ones that need more support, repurposing those dollars to help that local district. >> Definitely. And this is where
144the that ED flex waiver comes in. It'll help us with some of those federal grants and those restrictions. You can't do this, you can't do that. So that waiver will help to release a lot of those restrictions um and give us that flexibility. And then at the state level, well, number one, you need the people at the state who can help and monitor. So I'm just excited about the people that we're bringing on and the capacity that we're building. And then also, um you know, I hear from divisions sometimes it's just you're you're asking for too much. um it's it can be a lot to f and you feel like well the state already has this data why are you asking me again for it when you're the one who identified me now I have
145to take this and put it back in an application. So little things like that that can just kind of minimize the redundancy of information. If we have the information we shouldn't ask school division for it um because we already have it. So, it's little things like that I think that can go a long way um in making people want to apply when they can just focus on the core content and not like repeating things that we already have at the state. >> And it sounds like that will be a perfect kind of interlay with some of the grant uh the actual grant system that we talked about last month as well to make sure that our academic side is connecting with the operations side and and talking to each other. So excited about that. Thanks
146for the work there, >> Superintendent Gixson. >> Yes. Um, thank you, President Casey and member Monk. Um, we have been digging into every single state grant opportunity and really making sure what does it actually say. Um because in some cases our application or requirements were really narrow um and could be wider with additional guard rails for division and principal leaders to really stretch those dollars to work better on what their data was telling them. Um and so have been going through every single grant uh across uh the whole agency. So, I'm excited about the momentum and we're continuing to take feedback on areas we can continue to simplify but stay really focused on that systems change and is it moving the needle for students. I also want to recognize um Dr. Ballard and his team
147uh from the first month of my arrival. They said, "Hey, we could be doing this a little bit differently and much better for students." And so a few of these proposals seem like really small changes, but the concept that the agency would now pursue this EDF flex to allow for a multi-year improvement grant, it I I need to pause so that you can appreciate that historically the agency has done essentially nine-month cycles where you don't even have a full school year to implement. you're quickly turning around, reporting data, applying for the new grant cycle. And that was one of the biggest points um flagged for me early on in taking the helm at the agency um by Dr. Ballard and his colleagues as well as the field of it's almost too difficult given windows and
148time and turnaround for us to really maximize those dollars. And so one of the things we're really excited about, as you saw on uh slide 13, is that under this Edflex um pursuit that we're looking at, we can work in partnership um with the um federal agency where we can actually stretch some of these subgrants. So we could look at a three-year grant cycle, for example, with an extra often year because it's a maximum of four years. And when you think about transformational change, systems change, really being able to see impact like we did with Danville a few months ago, that is really exciting to make sure these dollars, every dollar is really working for students. The other part I want to emphasize that was flagged for me was the approach to these needs assessment
149and analysis on being grounded at data. Um, I think there was good intention on the approach from before. Um but it really was a bit more of the one-sizefitsall. Um and as we know these uh identifications on the federal level and our needs intensive support have unique nuances for their own schools or communities. And so um the team really helped champion this has to be um a shift in how the agency partners and comes alongside. And again, appreciation for some of the prior conversations from our deputy superintendent on, you know, the weight of this work cannot just fall on Dr. Ballard and his team. They're at this helm, but that we need these subject matter experts from the agency. great partnership and momentum from Deputy Superintendent Stacy Longis and others on really bridging finance and
150ops alongside um divisions so that we can really maximize efficiency and effectiveness for students. And so I know these appear like quick bullets, but this is really substantive change grounded in what's best for students and the transformation we're hoping to see in partnership with the board. And so thank you to both of you for your leadership on this. It's uh no small feat. So, I'm excited about the next steps. >> Other comments, Mr. Monk? >> I just want to and thank you, Superintendent Gullixson, for sharing that as well. And just want to highlight I think a lot of times we throw out these numbers, 24 million that can help. And when you're a classroom teacher, you're thinking, oh, well, that's somebody else will do that. That's the the grant writer, and well, we don't have
151one in our district, and so that's going to go to some other district. And, you know, you feel very isolated. And so the work that you're talking about of uh connecting the the uh academic and the operations side is really going to be powerful for all districts, but I think especially those that are um maybe smaller and more rural to be able to to kind of see where those congruencies are lying and have access to dollars that are directly impacting students. um but also hopefully freeing up time from those who are at the district level to really focus on what the implementation looks like of that grant as opposed to the minutia of uh the forms and the checkboxes and um all of those type of things. So just yman's work and appreciate all that's
152done uh in the agency on that end. I think that's a breath of fresh air for local school districts. >> Anybody else? So before you guys finish, I I always want to let everybody else go before me unless I get too excited. Um but um one of the things that I'd really like for us to try to weave in somewhere maybe within the grant system or how we are monitoring through theou process. >> Um I don't want to leave out the critical component of communication with parents. So while we are focused very specifically on ensuring what's happening inside of the school building is being supported very deeply, we cannot ignore the fact that student outcomes are directly related to how they are being supported at home as well. So that collaboration between home and school,
153we really need to come up with a strong component there on how um you know, not only are we supporting schools, but we're also supporting families to support the whole community. >> Um so I'd really like for us to think about how we can do that differently. >> Um because I do think that gets us to that deeper level that that we want to achieve. So that's the first piece. Um the second piece is um uh Dr. Ballard, you may be better at providing us with this information just from your um work closely with theou divisions, but if there's a means by which the board um can get some sort of historical presentation on those school divisions that currently sit inou status. We do have a number of new board members that may have never
154seen that particular presentation to date. Um uh and I do believe it's an important one to have. I'd like for those divisions that are currently in status to be highlighted in such a way that we talk about the the length of time they have been in status, but also the historical status. So we have a number of thoseou divisions that may have come out of stat that status for one reason or another at particular time periods and have ended have come back into status with anou um at other time periods. So just that historical perspective on those divisions would be very helpful. Um I think particularly as we get this new data that's coming out that's going to support you and your work um the department's work and also the work of the divisions moving
155themselves forward and what they need to accomplish in order to get themselves in better positions. Um I do think it's just kind of important for us to all be kind of on the same page and you know at baseline so that we know where forward is. Um, and I know some of those things are going to change perhaps as uh the new data comes out. Um, but I I do think it's important to kind of show those shifts um for for uh the perspective that the board needs in making further decisions. Um, anything else here? >> Thank you very much. We appreciate it. >> And Dr. Ballard has all the history. every time I talk to him. It's a history lesson and then we get into the So I I love it. He has >>
156I know a wealth of knowledge. Yes. So he can probably do that like off the cuff. >> The time of hit. Yeah. >> Mhm. >> On deck for next month, sir. >> Perfect. That would be wonderful. We always love seeing Dr. Ballard. >> Yeah. >> Um Okay. Road Show recap. Is that you again? >> I'm still here. Yes. >> Good. Good. Good. >> Do you need water? Nope. I am. Okay. This is this is all great stuff and it is all connected and uh at the last board meeting so this road show we were um very excited about this road show. We know that the board has taken some strong actions and some very needed actions to raise expectations through your approval of standards and um you know we've redesigned the assessments to make sure
157that uh the test items are aligned to these standards and in September you approved the the revised cut scores and on slide three you'll see the revised cut scores and we know that these scores are good for Virginia students. Because when you raise that expectation, we know that number one, Virginia teachers, Virginia students, they they rise up to that expectations. They are prepared. They have the skill set. Uh we we know that right now and it seems like there's a lot happening but we believe in our teachers and our principles and we know that they um that they can do this to prepare our students for future opportunities um not just in Virginia but across the nation. Um, and it also these higher expectations, it really gives our the families clearer insight in in a
158more accurate picture of where their kid of where their kid stands and how they can better support their kids um through the schools and additional supports that will be provided. And ultimately, we want uh that the excellence in our public schools. We want to continue that. Virginia has always been a top performing state and we just want to make sure that uh that that we don't lose any ground. And then raising these expectations is good for Virginia. I mean, we are aligning to national benchmarks. Uh you heard uh the superintendent talk about how states are are are backing out. They're lowering the bar um while Virginia is moving forward. And then it just makes sure that our state stays competitive. uh we want the stronger workforce. We want that talent pipeline. Um and we want
159to be able to compete economically with other states and countries and we are very clear that these increased expectations require strong and strategic support and implementation. So at that September board meeting, we shared some recommendations with you regarding the implementation of these cut scores. We um provided recommendations around uh high school seniors, so those graduating in the class of 2026 to maintain that 400 proficient cut scores. We talked about a multi-year implementation approach um adding this new approaching performance level uh revising score reports for parents and um providing some targeted professional learning. We did not want to uh propose anything for approval until we heard from our stakeholders, the people who were going to it was going to impact the most. So immediately after that board meeting, I was in the hallway um scheduling meetings
160uh to to to kick off this road show. And when you look on on the next slide, what you'll see is that we hosted 17 listening sessions. And you'll see all the dates listed. And some dates we doubled up. uh they we were there in the the afternoon and the evening. Uh and you'll see all the different stakeholder groups that we met with. Uh we started with superintendent and division leaders. Uh we met with elementary school principles, secondary school principles, teachers, parents, schoolboard members. We met with representatives um from different student groups. So we had uh a good representation of from stu from uh students with disabilities and we really listened. Um we dispelled some myth because there were a lot of questions and there were some things like okay let's get that accurate and
161then we really listened to what supports they wanted. Um we listened to their concerns regarding uh timeline and and implementation and we also listened to their support. Uh there were we had they it was clear h they're not afraid of the higher expectations. They just want the time and support to get there. So, it was over 1,000 participants um in our during our virtual sessions and then we had online forms and we had over uh 1,500 uh Virginiaians complete that online form and share their feedback and this represented teachers, parents, community members, school division leaders and students. And I'm going to share a high-level overview of some overarching themes. And the first set of overarching themes I'm on slide nine focus on the implementation um on on the time frame. And overwhelmingly this idea of
162use this year as a preparation year. They were very concerned if we had um two different cut scores, one in the fall and then the higher one in the spring. um what that would do to kids who are testing in the fall and then um the next group of kids who are who are testing in the spring and and school divisions they really want time and additional resources to prepare. So they we they want to take this year um to prepare with some strategic support from us. It's not just them. We want to provide some additional support to prepare uh the school divisions. Overwhelmingly we heard implement a five-year phased in model. uh some participants want it longer uh and when we heard from our attack uh from the recommendations is you know to keep
163it short and our divisions are saying make it go long and so we're trying to find that sweet spot. Uh we also talked about the approaching performance level. Uh we wanted to ensure that this was adding this performance level was something that the field wanted and overwhelmingly yes they want the approaching performance level. They want the approaching performance level to count as passing and they want the approaching performance level to um to count as proficient in the accountability system during this phased in period. On slide 10, you'll see just some uh quotes from that we've pulled from the surveys and from some of the chats that were written in our uh virtual feedback. Um and it all was around a lot of it was around the time um having a longer model, the five-year model.
164Um they're you can see that they're support in support of the recommendation, but um but they just don't want the change to happen this school year. Um having this uh what some people were calling the zero year. On slide 11, when we asked the participants, well, what support do you want from the state? Uh we heard uh they want guidance on some of the policy around verified credit, retakes, automatic enrollment in advanced math. Um we want to take this the rest of this year to make sure that we have that guidance nice and solid for them. We heard from principles that they want information shared directly with them that they don't always get the information that we share um at the division level and they recognize that some of this information can help them. And
165so we are planning to partner um even closer with our principal organizations to make sure that we're getting um materials in the hands of principles so that they can make informed decisions and that they are aware of what's happening, what resources are available. Um we we want to make sure that we are strengthening that communication with principles. That came up loud and clear during the listening sessions. >> Uh tutoring was a was another big thing uh to have more tutoring resources and more interventions. uh you know I think all-in kicked off a really great thing in the state and nobody wants it to stop and so having the um continuing those that tutoring and just expanding it across more grade levels and targeting it having some targeted tutoring um for our students with disabilities and
166and students who are uh uh performing at a lower level and then communication that was another big piece that we heard they want uh some of our leaders to like we just need some clear communication that we can easily share with parents that gives us the snapshot of why did we raise cut scores, what supports are available, why is this good for their kids, why is this good for Virginia? Um, and so they want that communication support. Uh they want to be clear on the supports for students and the implementation timeline and those instructional resources align to uh standards and to the test items because we know to perform well on a test. Yes, you need to know the standards but then also you need to understand the structure of the test and what it
167will take, what type of questions you need to be able to answer to get to that proficiency level. So all of those little things and they're like we want that and we want that right now. And then overwhelmingly what we heard was uh support for students with disabilities. Uh that came across loud and clear. We heard from parents, we heard from teachers. Um even in the our surveys, we we heard it. And so um we have our deputy uh here who's going to talk about uh support for students with disabilities. And I will turn it over. >> Thank you so much. I I just want to say one how appreciative the department is on the overwhelming participation of families and parents of students with disabilities and educators and administrators from across the Commonwealth. We know
168uh that our sped folks are always mobilized. So I'm just really grateful for all the opportunity that the deputy superintendent and particularly Mr. Jennings provided for us to participate in the listening sessions. And I 100% echo the information that was shared today. I think what we hear from folks is that they are they are 100% behind the board's mission and vision around uh expectations for students. And I had so many folks talk about the improvements they've seen with implementation of the Virginia Literacy Act and work the department has done thus far. But we did hear very clearly that while they are excited, they need time and they want time to receive information and support from the department that we are uh very focused on providing. And so that phased in approach uh will give time
169not only for the agency but for school divisions in order for us to broadly disseminate guidance and information to help articulate and further identify alternative ways to demonstrate students with disabilities growth and performance over time and to help support those individualized pathways for learning. We know that school divisions have the ability to make this work for students with disabilities and our role is to support them in doing that. And most importantly, we need to conduct outreach to ensure that school division staff and families fully understand our guidance and can support their students along the pathway to graduation. I'm happy to answer any additional questions. I know the board has also received a lot of feedback from the field and so I'll remain on stage as the deputy finishes her presentation as well in case there
170are any specific questions. Thank you. Now, what I am really excited about and what the team has been working hard on um are revised reports for um it'll be for parents, for divisions, for schools. We have been working very very closely with our um assessment partners. And on slide 13, what you see um is the current student performance report. This is what parents receive. And um and it provides a overview. It's very clear of how your child did, what performance level they scored in, and then there's a page two that gives information about the reporting category and how your child perform in that performance category and then how you can support your child's learning. So, this was a great first step and with these new cut scores, I'm like, we have the opportunity to really
171take this to a whole other level. And so, it has been great working with Mr. Ellis and his team and Mr. Jennings and his team and um hearing from the listening sessions about the type of um how they want things communicated. And so in spring of 2026, you will see uh new student reports uh for the what will be for that administration of that spring 2026 assessment. And what these reports, they're going to provide a clearer and more supportive picture of student performance. So what you're going to see is both the how the student performed under this current cut score of 400 and then where they're expected to and then how that with that same score where they would perform with the revised cut score. So this will give parents that clear picture even before
172the cut scores are implemented. This is how how your child is performing under the current. This is where they would be under the uh revised cut scores. Uh there'll be some very clear parentfriendly language and we're going to get very clear about what are the the questions, what are the items that the students did well on and where did they experience challenge. So when you go to slide 15, you'll see our initial mockup and we are going to take this around and get some additional feedback. We're looking forward to um going to the the superintendent conference and taking this with us to get their feedback on some of this. Uh but what you'll see are these gauges and you'll see two gauges and it'll highlight. So the bars are grayed out. The gauge is grayed
173out except for where your child perform. And you'll see on one side is the performance under the current cut score. And then on the second the second gauge is the performance under the revised cut score. And then right beneath that, these are the overarching categories that the student um was tested on and how they performed. And you'll see um where the child will need additional support or where they demonstrated a strong understanding. And then when you go to page two, you'll get that detailed breakdown of where they needed support, where they um where they they met the the learning goal, and um where they really excelled. And so you'll be able to see very clearly if the test item was a hard, medium, or low test item or high medium or low test item. And
174um and then there'll be some more resources to support um that parents can access uh on this page. And so we are very excited about these revised uh parent reports and we're like I said, we're getting more feedback and we're going to work with our assessment partners to to get this right. um so that the next iteration of um reporting you'll see it in a very different way. And so our next steps, we recognize we we didn't hear from all parents. We didn't hear from um there's still more principles we want to talk with. And so we we're going to keep this road show going. So, we're going to hold additional listening sessions and we're going to keep the feedback forms open until November 6th at noon. And so, stay tuned. We're going to collect
175we want to make sure that we are hearing and we're honoring the voices um from the field and um and we're going to host some more support sessions for principles. Uh we heard them loud and clear and we're going to make this a continuing thing. We don't just want to come to them when we need their feedback. We want to make this an ongoing thing with our leaders across the state. And then we're going to continue preparing to support to preparing support for divisions. So um for instance, we are um we know that Mr. Ellis team, they're working on the performance level descriptors and and test items that can be released and uh and item mapping. We have the instruction team, I mentioned the just in time math quick checks. Uh they're doing some small
176virtual learning uh sessions where teachers can log on to these self-paced modules um to to see some effective uh literacy instruction and learn some some things around just some foundational reading skills. And we're going to uh release and start going out into the field uh a lot more. And so we are very excited about just this next steps. and we are going to finalize revisions to uh the assessment reports in preparation for that spring 20 in preparation for spring 2026. So with that, we'll open the floor up to questions. >> Hi, thank you very much for that presentation. I'm um excited to hear that we're being uh uh cautious and and picking this right and doing this timeline right. Um, you know, I' I've said in previous meetings the impact, the impact is the other
177discussion, right? We're setting the scores and we've done that. We've done the job and we all believed in that unanimously. But impact and now we're here, right? Now we're at that that impact discussion and and obviously I've heard a lot from my colleagues in the field of special education and what this means to them. Um, and and this may not be a question. It may just be more consideration for you all as you're you're collecting data for November. But um and maybe it's time too for the the board to hear one of my favorite educational quotes of all time. It's it's Charles Schwab. He said this in a Fortune 500 magazine. He's a financial guru. He says, "The A students work for the B students. The C students are the CEOs, but the D students
178own all the buildings." Um and one thing I love about re revolutionizing all this is we're kind of countering that what's broken in education, right? I mean, I think this is really trying to address that. And there's so many key I try to tell folks when I talk to them, there's so many key components of this change that's geared for students with special needs, like these parental reports. I think it's my favorite part of the whole process for parents to have insight and how their students are performing on these assessments and assessments that they may have to take for entrance exams into colleges and other things. It kind of informs them in that way. But one thing I do uh want us to consider is uh you know the one of those answers to Charles
179Schwab challenge of the A students and the D students is differentiated instruction right um those of us in the field actually a lot of us should know about differentiated instruction because it's not just rooted in special ed anymore it's it its roots are in gifted ed ironically but special ed is notorious for it but when you do special um differentiated instruction you also do differentiated assessment and so I know we already have some things in place already in Virginia. Um, but as we're considering these scores and what it means to, you know, I I think it's great for the schools and the teachers to have that level of accountability, but yeah, I when you're in special ed and and I know Dr. Hollands can appreciate this, we get to think about Johnny, right? Like we
180we have a name that goes with the score and um so just making sure we're being mindful of of uh the type of accommodations differentiation that we can also do with this type of assessment. and maybe there is something in that you can speak to or it's just for consideration. But definitely hearing from our colleagues, parents, as I'm sure you are as well. So, >> absolutely, and we're so appreciative of those remarks as well. I think what I appreciate most about the board's approach to this work is not only the consistency in the goal, but the flexibility to think about the impact component. And um I spent my day yesterday with 101 out of 131 of our school divisions and 600 plus special education teachers, general education teachers and building level administrators doing exactly what
181member Aman just talked about. And that is helping to support them in the building blocks for success for students with disabilities. Getting them the professional development and the technical assistance and support they need so they can go back and lead their buildings focused on that work. And the more time we have to do that, um the more time we have to assure our school divisions of what they're capable of and support them appropriately, um the better it will be for our students and families. >> Other comments, Dr. Northern, um I've got one for I guess you and then one for um uh Tiara. I I'm wondering on the IEPs for the students with disabilities and I know we're reoing that and trying to make that consistent. Um, but will the will those IEPs be tied
182to these X's where they need additional supports? Like can we make the connection between the IEP and where we know students with disabilities are struggling? >> Absolutely, Dr. Norm. I mean, I think you just spoke to the fact the whole purpose behind an IEP is to be an individualized plan for a student. And as Dr. Akerman just commented, there are so many things to think about in providing a high quality instruction for our students with disabilities. But that IEP should be focused on specially designed instruction to address the impact area of a student's disability on their educational performance. And so you heard Dr. Ballard talk eloquently about ensuring the high quality tier one instruction for all of our students. That is only going to contribute to enhanced outcomes for students with disabilities. It's our role
183in special education to bridge the gaps there with things like specially designed instruction to make sure that those plan one our students are found eligible. Right? We talked a little bit about earlier today uh great uh President Cas's remarks on identification and evaluation eligibility. We need to know who our kids are and how their disability impacts them. We need to build a plan and a blueprint to help them be successful. That's the IEP. And then we need to make sure that that work is being done in our classroom and alongside their general education peers because we know that inclusive environments impact academic performance for students. So absolutely that's a huge part of what we're focused on in our professional development from the department. >> Okay. I guess my question is really more on the infrastructure
184like will the IP that format that we're building will it be able to actually pull from the data that's you you know where they have these needs additional support areas. I will those two to your knowledge will those infrastructures be able to talk to each other the IEP infrastructure and the school report card infrastructure to to sort of you know pull from one from the other in terms of how these um you know where the kids specifically need help. >> The way that we have built Virginia IEP it is talking to a student um information system at the division and schoolbased level to share that information data across platforms. And you might remember previously the updates on the new state funding that was allocated to support Virginia IP also funded increased progress monitoring for students
185on an individualized and holistic level. So absolutely. >> Okay, that's great. >> Yeah, a great question. Thank you so much for bringing that to our attention too. >> Go ahead, Tiara. Um I'm just wondering and this is like a huge step forward on the um you know on the student perform uh report card. I'm just excited about what I'm seeing with AI already being able to leverage um very specific student supports um and and um direction to parents. And I don't know, I think you're working with um what's it >> waifers? Um I don't know whether they have and done this in other states yet, but where you can literally say, you know, dear and then you it fills in the parents the guardian's name and then it fills in your child. It's like a
186paragraph literally that like talks to them, you know, instead of like a chart or whatever. and it'll say, you know, because your student doesn't, you know, do this and it's all written in parent friendly language, here's a resource that other parents have used, you know, click here. Like, it's really like, I've seen it like a narrative that occurs at the, you know, at the bottom that's just like a letter to them, like a words and it used their names, it used our kids' names, and anyway, it just has a more of a personalized element to it. Um, and I really think that um, some states are just starting to see how AI can be used to customize a parental communication in a way that feels more personalized um, you know, than than other ways that
187we've done it in the past. We were actually talking about that. We so that did come up in our discussions with our assessment vendor and what are what are your capabilities on doing that and we are excited that we will be starting the innovative assessment group and we're going to definitely bring that to the table because there's there's a ton of things you can do now with reporting and how can we leverage that uh you know even down to there's some states where you you could get the data very quickly to and we give data can come very quickly to our school divisions and at the state we have to do a little bit more but how can you take that data and then immediately inform instruction. Um so there's a lot happening now with
188assessments that we are so excited about that innovative assessment work group that that we're about to launch uh to get those ideas going. >> Anything else? >> Mr. Monk, >> just quickly appreciate the new um report card for parents. think that's just an integral part of of all of this and the communication to them. Uh, one thing would just encourage the framing around and I see some language here but um maybe revisit what future expectations means uh because I I think now with um unfortunately the politization of education it's all you know raising the bar and all of those things but I think just grounding that in reality of of where um why that happened. I know we've only got a small paragraph, but I don't want folks to say, "Oh, that's um this entity
189or this group or this fraction that is saying that," but this is really a level set of of where our learners are and where we know that they can be. >> Um and I think that just that messaging is so important, especially on this report card piece. >> Definitely, we're going to be working with our partners at um at at Waypoint for that. So, yes, we'll get that language right for parents. So, I I mean you guys have heard me harp on this time and time again with all of these things. Um, but speaking of the report, how what's the plan for supporting schools and teachers and how they communicate with parents? because we've talked about, you know, all our different measurement tools, you know, our growth measurements um and our um so results and
190how, you know, how are we going to be using these tools so that it's literally not just a piece of paper that goes home in the folder at the end of the school year, but that teachers are are really equipped with how to sit down with parents and talk these things out or to be, you know, to have that open time to be able to say, "Parents, please come in or let's do a Zoom or whatever it is to be able to communicate effectively on how do we move the needle. Maybe maybe we're not where we should be this year, but let's talk about how we get there for next year." Um, because I do think it opens up a totally different line of communication with parents and families and the school uh to be
191able to do that. Um, and so, you know, as we continue to talk about how we've got this well-rounded um, means by which we improve student outcomes that's inclusive of families, I just want to make sure that we're reiterating that piece, too. >> Definitely. And so this is where that training on first we need to make sure we have we've built the capacity of the teachers to to know how to read these reports, how to use them, and then the the different test items and those performance level descriptors. What do they mean? How do you use them in instruction? We want to make sure they have strong capacity around that because then that'll totally shift how they're talking to parents because they have that deeper understanding. And with the raised cut scores and um students
192answering and responding to more rigorous questions, we have to make sure the teachers understand what do these questions look like? What type of skills are they are they um addressing? You heard from the presentation earlier from Dr. Perry around like the complexity of the item and the difficulty level and the cognitive load. We have to break all of that down for these test items and ensure that our teachers understand so that then they can when they're talking with the parent they can communicate that in a way that's very clear. But if our teachers aren't sure and they're not really then it's not that communication um won't be effective. So that is what we're spending the time for this preparation year doing. Um and then finally just another um question on um really the report and
193the specifics of the distribution. How is that happening? Is it going to be well first are the how are the reports um how are they created number one are they coming out of the test system? This might be for Jason. Uh, a te the test system itself individually per student and then are they being electronically delivered to parents? Are they being delivered in paper form? You know, how are we ensuring that parents who may not have the ability for one reason or the other to receive it in electronic form are actually getting it. Um, just want to make sure that we have all of those bases covered for those who are um in the public watching us have this conversation now. >> Yes. So, I'll turn it over to Miss Ellis who's going to go
194into detail with that and even talk about the turnaround, how quickly parents can receive these reports. >> Good morning, everyone. Good to have an opportunity to speak to you again. Um, in regards to reporting from u our standards of learning and and even the the VAP assessments as well. Um, reporting is often available within about 24 hours after the student has completed the test. And that's assuming that a test is not in alerted status, that there's not something that has to be cleared up or accommodation coded before it can be reported. So, Virginia is is is pretty strong at getting the information from the assessment back to schools and divisions. Um, it's been um policy for as long as I can remember that school divisions can create their local policy and how they disseminate that
195information to parents. Um, we have some school divisions that will roll it out very quickly. We have some divisions uh school divisions that will hold that information and send it out with the next report card or send it out at the end of the school year, you know, depending on when they were testing. So, I I don't know that we h that there's one answer to your question. I think there's many answers to your questions because we have allowed divisions for years to create their policy for how they provide the information to parents. Um the reports themselves are available in several different ways. Um divisions could print them themselves if they wanted to incur that cost. Um we do have as part of our contract with our assessment vendor um school divisions are able to
196request printed reports. Um once the test administration is over um they finalize their data and then they are able to say we would like this series of reports. There's many they can choose from. The parent report is one of those. Um so so our vendor would print the reports, send them to them and then they can disseminate them however they would choose to. Um one of the things that we also would need to consider is we allow school divisions, it's again it's it's been um our practice previously is school divisions aren't required to use our reports, they're required to provide that information to families. Um, so we do have some divisions that take the information that we provide and then they have their own data systems and such that they use and they will create
197their own reporting um that will then go to families. So we like I said there's no one answer to to all of all of those questions because we've allowed divisions flexibility. >> Can may I Dr. Acriman follow up on that? I have the luxury of working with about a hundred different school systems and I can verify what you're saying is they all come to us very different differently and and also to address Dr. Northern's um comment around the IEP. The Virginia IEP will be a huge solution for getting that disseminated quicker to parents and other partners to the school divisions like who I'm familiar with. So, um I think that would be a solution for some continuity among among how all the different counties and cities are doing it. Um, but it but it's fascinating
198as I'm sure people who work with multiple communities know uh the different ways they get that information on the assessments out to people and whether it's timely or not to be honest. So um I do think the Virginia IEP sol but that will only then address the students with disabilities um and other parents I think still get them at varying times at the in current practice. So >> So that kind of leads me to a thought but I'll let Dr. Northern go first. >> Um, this may be Tiara again. Um, as I'm studying this, um, couple things. One, what some states do is they also put the course grades on here because we've been talking a lot about the quote honesty gap. And what happens is the test scores and the course grades, you know,
199often look very different. And so some states are including the course grades and saying, you know, here's why you might see some differences or, you know, here's why they don't align or here's why you would expect them to or not to align. And I get like this could become a a report card book. Um, and I so I understand we want to keep it. Um, but I do I'm looking at Ed Navigator. They do a lot of good um, you know, they they look at report cards all across the country and um, they make that point that sometimes it's very powerful to include the course grades. think about when we were in school, that's what this was, right? It was your course grades that your parents had to sign. Um, so I I I do
200think we ought to have that discussion and as you go around and and see what folks think about putting that in addition to the test scores because I think it's an important piece. And the other piece is absences. I don't see a place on here where we have absences. And that's another piece that would tie into, you know, our push on absenteeism that, you know, we need to kind of wave the flag here for that. No, thank you for those suggestions. We'll definitely take that back for consideration. >> So, I mean, that's going to, you know, that's maybe maybe we need some more information from Mr. Ellis on whether or not we're capable of determining what school divisions are actually using the reports that DOE is providing versus their own reports. Is it something that,
201you know, the board can say, "These reports are what you need to use." Um, or is it something that the board can say this is the timing in which you deliver those reports outside of extenduating circumstances? I mean, I would imagine that's probably within the purview of the board, but I don't know that to be certain. >> I may I sorry, please. >> Just because of my experience with it, I think it depends on the resources that the school division has to do things and then how we resource them to be able to do it. So if the DOE and the board provides the resource in form that makes it automated or simple or the use of AI or the the way the systems speak I I I think that could be something we could
202consider but you know when you have those smaller systems who the one person you know your superintendent's also your testing coordinator um I think that's where we have seen we are slower to get a response on students progress so I was just with you. I was sitting here the whole time he was he was speaking and sharing that and I was thinking >> does it have to be that way? I mean can we not have >> I I don't know not necessarily require it to be a certain time but at least a window of time because I just don't think it's >> I think it's crucial. Yes. becomes an effective date >> and I I know we'll get this to this later in the day but talking about board's priorities and a student information system
203and so I don't know the legality of what uh is within the board's purview but I think that if we were to look at a student information system at minimum we might be able to provide that information to a parent directly in that way. Um so food for thought there but kind of a agree if we're doing all this work and the information isn't shared directly or timely then um you know causes some challenges. >> Sorry Mr. >> No, not not at all. I mean >> perhaps it's been a a point of uh constrnation for you as well. We we receive calls every year. Um and so I I can I'll refer to this anecdotally. So we receive calls every year from families asking for their so reports. >> Our office's policy has always been
204that the the owner of that data is the local school division. So we refer that parent back to their local school division. There's no way we could verify that we're actually talking to correct Johnny's mom or dad. So we leave that as a responsibility for the local school division. With that said, sometimes we're receiving those calls in August or September when testing happened the previous spring. So anecdotally, I can tell you that there are some places or some people that aren't getting their assessment results until much till many days or many weeks or many months after the actual assessment was taken. So from an effectiveness perspective, if I'm a parent, I'm highly engaged in my child's education, I lose a summer's worth of time where I could possibly be getting them support in areas where
205they're they're struggling. Um so yes, this conversation is something that um we have talked about many times. Um you know, how do we get the reports into parents hands more quickly? Um to speak to um a point that was brought up earlier, we we have utilized um what I think are some innovative things um with our um the parent portal that we have. It's optional for divisions to use, but we do have a a personalized video that lives in that parent portal um that basically takes what you see as page two on that parent report and it explains to them how to utilize that information. It's a short video because no one's going to watch a 20 minute video on how to use it. So, it's really just kind of a highlight about a process
206that they can use. Um, but it is personalized to their student. I mean, it calls their student by name. It it gives them information about the, you know, the report that they're looking at with some real examples. >> Um, so we have we have stepped out on that ledge a little bit to provide some more innovative things. Um, so consternation. Yes. Um, and does the board have the ability to say something needs to come out this many weeks, this many days after, you know, the assessment's been provided? I don't know. Um, would it be helpful? It may be helpful to some divisions, um, or some families that are in divisions where maybe the report doesn't come out as quickly. um we would have to survey our divisions to find out what their individual policies are
207for when they provide reports to families um in order to kind of give you some some more feedback or some more um information. Um we could certainly do that um and you know at the direction of the board. >> Do we have do we have any idea how many divisions are actually using the parent portal? >> Um >> and how and how are we communicating? I mean, are we considering leadership turnovers and all kinds of things like that? How how regularly are we communicating this option? >> So, we we have trained divisions um typically in the fall, the last several years of of about the parent portal, its availability. Um I would say very generically speaking, it's a small percentage of school divisions that are using the parent portal. Um we have some school divisions
208that that use it a lot. um it's it's their means for getting information out. Um they utilize it in part because then they they don't have to print the reports. They can use that portal as their means for getting the information to families. The good part about the portal is information is updated in the portal every every Friday. And so typically if a student completes a test in let's say week A, at the end of week B, those results will be in the portal. um we need a little bit of time to set everything up and push it out. Um again, all that's through our our current assessment contractor, but um I mean it it it certainly is I see it as a valuable tool. I understand from a division perspective. Many of them already
209have their own education portals that parents are familiar with and have access to and this is something different that they would have to access. Um, from a division perspective, um, there's a claim code that has to be provided. >> Me and his mic don't get along. Um, there's a claim code that has to be provided to families every test administration, which in Virginia that's a fall spring um, situation. So, it's two a year uh, potent potentially. So, there are some things that, um, I could see could be a a little bit of adherence to divisions to want to use it. Um, but I do think it's a it's a valuable tool. We not only put um the reports out there and the videos, um, but they have access to that historically. So, a parent who
210has had access to the portal for the last three years, they have a historical perspective of all of their students test history. Um, so again, I I think it's a a valuable tool that if we could find a way to generate more, you know, more usage, it it could be a very good thing. >> Okay. >> My next question, how what can we do to >> get the word out, so to speak? >> I mean, >> I know easier said than done, obviously. I know you've thought about this many times, and I'm just thinking out loud. You know, I I'm old enough to remember when my children were taking SOS in third grade, and you wait, you know, it was probably June or July before you knew the results back in the dark ages. So,
211we're not there anymore. So, I would think there surely some way um to to make it more to make it more aware to more people than it is now. And I don't know what that is. >> Sure. Well, I I don't I don't necessarily think it's an awareness issue as much as it is a it's it's another thing to do for some of parents. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. Sure. >> Not of school systems, right? >> Other comments here. >> Okay, I think we're good. Maybe we want to look at, you know, what what is the flexibility of the board to put some parameters around release um you know uh score release information um that would help parents and families uh have a little quicker turnaround and be able to support their students better during
212the summer months. Um, and then, you know, let's let's try to figure out, you know, is there a means by which, you know, because I hate for the amount of work that's been put into to this particular new report mechanism to not be fully utilized the way that it should be. Um, so, uh, let's look at what our our purview is there too if we can. Thank you. Thanks. >> Uh, Superintendent Gixson, I know you had some things that you'd like to add here. >> All right. Well, we can definitely come back um with the help of Mr. Ellis and his team on what are sort of the most effective and best practices that we know of to help um inform the board and get back to you on the score release parameters next month.
213Um, I also want to note that in addition to all of the great data points from just the last board meeting to now, um, the team also, um, touched base with over 600 additional Virginiaians prior to our last board meeting to help inform and be thoughtful about once we set these higher expectations for our students, what do you need? What does that look like? And so we're continuing um those input um sessions and are so appreciative of the active um engagement information uh full sessions of feedback um in chat in written form verbally uh and our team is so grateful for that. We uh have heard requests from families that they have more would like to be able to participate. Um and so as uh you heard from our deputy superintendent, we're going to continue
214um for those next two weeks to get more input from families. um and have heard from our educators on, you know, we are fully supportive of higher expectations and need some help on communicating this why um to our uh parents and families and helping them bridge how we're going to help get every student there um which uh the teams underway. We also uh I want to underscore the note on the PowerPoint about continue to host support sessions for principles. Um some of our principles have already been deeply collaborative um with their division leadership um looking and digging into their impact data making adjustments. Um and others have requested a direct line of communication uh with the agency. And so whether uh some of that data is not being handed out or it's being handed out
215but not actually reaching those individual school leaders um we want to make sure that they've got a little bit more time and we're happy to help get that to them uh directly. But those were some of the elements. And so as you all know uh we do have an additional board meeting in two and a half weeks. And so we're going to keep uh the board up to date on the additional inputs uh for finalizing some of these next steps. And with that'll pass. Um we are going to move item E to after our legal issues close session. So um with that I would ask Mr. Hansen if he would read us into our closed meeting so that we can receive legal advice. >> I move that the Virginia Board of Education convene in a
216closed meeting for the following purposes. Consultation with legal counsel employed by or retained by a public body regarding specific legal matters requiring the provision of legal advice by such council pursuant to section 2.2-37118. 2-3711A88 of the Code of Virginia and that legal counsel to Virginia Board of Education and staff whose presence will aid in the board's consideration of this matter participate in the closed meeting. >> Okay. Dr. Arian or I need a second. Sorry, I need a second. >> Second. >> Uh Dr. Arian, >> I Mr. Green. >> I >> Dr. Northern. >> Hi, >> Mr. Hansen. >> Hi. >> Uh Miss Kilgore. >> Hi, >> Mr. Muk. >> Hi. and chair votes I. Okay, we are going into close session. Thank you. Um, we are back. Um, so Mr. Hansen, will you read our
217certification to re return to open session, please? >> We convene today on a closed meeting pursuant to a recorded vote on the motion above and in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act. Section 2.2-3712 2-3712 of the Code of Virginia requires that the board certify that to the best of each member's knowledge, only public business matters lawfully exempt from open meeting requirements under this chapter and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion by which the closed meeting was convened were heard, discussed, or considered. Any member who believes there was a departure from these requirements shall so state prior to the vote indicating the substance of the departure that in his or her judgment has taken place. The statement of the departure will be recorded in the minutes. >> Okay. >> Second.
218>> Uh, I need a second. >> Second. >> Dr. Aerman. >> I. >> Mr. Green. >> Hi. >> Dr. Northern. >> Hi. >> Mr. Hansen. >> Hi. >> Miss Kilgore. >> Hi. >> Mr. Monk. >> Hi. >> And chair votes. I um we will be taking a um 20 minute lunch break. So we'll be back here 2:05. And um we'll see you then. from lunch. And what we are going to do from here um is we will be um moving items E and F. E is our federal updates as estate plan ED flex and then our discussion of the board's prescriptions on the standards of quality. Um those will be moved to tomorrow's agenda. E and F will be moved to tomorrow's agenda and we will conclude our day today with our lensure cases. Um,
219so we will um be back after our lensure cases are complete. So that being said, um, Mr. Hansen, will you read us into close session for lensure cases? >> Thank you, Madam President. I move that the Virginia Board of Education convene in a closed meeting for the following purposes. discussion or consideration by the board of education of information relating to denial, suspension, or revocation of teacher licenses subject to the exclusion in subdivision 11 of section 2.2-3705.2 pursuant to section 2.2-3711A40 2-3711A40 of the code of Virginia and consultation with council regarding specific legal matters requiring the provision of legal advice pursuant to Virginia code section 2.2-3711A88 of the code of Virginia and the legal counsel to Virginia Board of Education staff whose presence will aid in the board's consideration of this matter participate in the closed
220meeting. >> Okay. Dr. um >> second and I >> thank you >> Mr. Green >> I >> Dr. Nor >> I >> Mr. Hansen >> hi >> Miss Kilgore >> I >> Mr. Monk >> I >> and chair votes I we are in close session thank you Okay. Um, Dr. Northern, would you please read our motion to come out of close session? >> Yes. We convene today in a closed meeting pursuant to a recorded vote on the motion above and in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act section 22-3712 of the Code of Virginia requires that the board certify to the best of each member's knowledge one only public business matters lawfully exempt from open meeting requirements under this chapter. and two, only such public business matters as were identified in the motion by which
221the closed meeting was convened were heard, discussed, or considered. Any member who believes there was a departure from these requirements shall so state prior to the vote indicating the substance of the departure that in his or her judgment has taken place. The statement of the departure will be recorded in the minutes. >> Dr. Arian, >> Mr. Green, >> I. >> Dr. Northern >> I, >> Miss Kilgore, >> I, >> Mr. Monk, >> I, >> chair votes. I Okay. Um, let's see. >> It'll be all right. She'll figure it out. >> Um, in case 2025-36, uh, I the chair would like to entertain a motion to revoke the license of Ashley Mâé Corvington. Second. >> Okay. Uh, Dr. Arian, >> I, >> Mr. Green, >> I, >> Dr. Northern, >> I, >> Miss Kilgore, >> I,
222>> Mr. Monk, >> I, >> and chair votes I. >> Okay. Um, in case 2025-39, the chair will entertain a motion to issue a license. >> So move. >> Second, >> Dr. Mr. Arian, >> I >> Mr. Green, >> hi. >> Dr. Northern >> I, >> Miss Kilgore, >> I >> Mr. Monk, >> I. >> And chair votes I. In case 2025-37, the chair will entertain a motion to issue a license. >> So moved. >> Second. >> Dr. Arian, >> I. >> Mr. Green, >> I. >> Dr. Northern, >> I. >> Miss Kilgore, >> I. >> Mr. Monk, >> I. >> And chair votes I. >> Okay. Um and that concludes our lensure items. And um just as a reminder, Miss at the beginning of the meeting, I had noted the remote participation of Miss
223McFersonson and just wanted to reiterate that uh for the record. And um Superintendent Gixson, before we uh adjourn for the day, do you need to make any remarks? Okay. All right. And with that we are adjourned for the day.