001this January 23rd 2025 regular meeting of the Fairfax County School Board will now come to order please stand for the pledge of aliance followed by a moment of silence and a performance of the national anthem by the West Springfield High School students under the direction of Dustin Brandt oh say can you see the dawn light what so brly we at the Twilight last [Music] GLE who brought stripes and bright stars through the fight for the parts we were so [Music] streaming and The Rock the boms bur in gave Pro through the night that our FL was still there do that star SP for the land of thee and the home of the in accordance with changes to the code of Virginia Section 2.2 37083 B Miss seore Heiser has notified the chair and Clerk of
002the board that she is using remote participation as she is caregiving for an individual with a disability thus she will be counted as in person for the purposes of Quorum tonight and does not need to be voted in by the board Miss seore Heiser could you check your audio and video thank you welcome can you hear me yes great thank you thank you I'd also like to have our student representative uh Miss Swant will you test your video and microphone yes can you hear me okay yes thank you very much if you would like to review a copy of the meeting agenda please see the back of the auditorium to obtain copies of any items or supporting materials being presented tonight please reference the QR code on the agenda or visit fcps.edu boarddocs tonight's meeting
003is being brought broadcast on channel 99 and live streamed on YouTube and our website fcps.edu livestream agenda item 2.03 volunteer and Mentor Appreciation Week Proclamation I call on Miss St John cunning for a proclamation thank you Mr chair whereas School volunteer week is nationally observed during the third full week of April to encourage parents and citizens to volunteer in their name neighborhoods schools and whereas Fairfax County Public Schools has the Good Fortune to have many persons willing to volunteer their time and services in our schools and at school sponsored activities and whereas every school whether through formal or informal Partnerships counts among its volunteers those who give generosity generously of their time to improve the academic cultural and athletic environment of the school especially through tutoring and mentoring programs and programs that sustain parent involvement
004in school activities and whereas National mentoring month is an annual campaign to recognize mentors for the exceptional support care and guidance they provide our students and to focus attention on the need for mentors as well as how each of us can work together to increase the number of mentors to ensure positive outcomes for our students whereas Fairfax count County Public Schools honors volunteer mentors and staff who support students by showing up for them every day and demonstrating their commitment to helping them Thrive and whereas by sharing their own stories and offering guidance and advice mentors instill a sense of infinite possibility in the hearts and minds of their mentees demonstrating that with hard work and passion nothing is beyond their potential whether simply offer offering a compassionate ear or actively teaching and inspiring curiosity mentors
005can play pivotal roles in young people's lives now therefore be it re be it resolved that the Fairfax County School Board hereby proclaims January 13 through 17th 2025 as volunteer and Mentor Appreciation Week in Fairfax County Public Schools and honors are committed School volunteers and mentors and therefore be it further resolved that the Fairfax County School Board encourages all students and employees to recognize and applaud the contributions and services volunteers provide to our school communities and therefore be it finally resolved that the Fairfax County School Board honors all those who continuously strive to provide young people with the resources and support they need and deserve and we re recommit to building a society in which all mentors and mentees can thrive in mutual learning relationships thank you Miss St John cunning is there a second
006second Dr Anderson all those in favor of the Proclamation as read Miss Marin Miss Dixit Mr movine Dr Anderson Mr McDaniel Miss Anderson Mr Moon miss lady Miss St John cunning Miss seore Heiser and myself that is unanimous for board members at the table with Mr Dunaway from the deis agenda item two the motion passes congratulations agenda item 2.04 has been postponed until February 6th uh for our regular meeting agenda item 2.05 the 2024 2025 Exemplar Awards I call on Dr Reid for a recognition of our 2024-25 Exemplar award schools thank you chairman frish tonight we are honored to recognize schools that have received special recognition from the Virginia Board of Education the Exemplar performance School awards recognize schools that exceed board established requirements or show continuous Improvement on academic and school quality indicators to
007achieve the 24 25 Exemplar performance highest Achievement Award a school must earn a state accreditation reigning of accredited and meet the following criteria the school meets the state Benchmark for reading which is at least 75% mathematics at least 70% and science at least 70% based on the current year pass rate not including growth measures or multilingual progress for the all students group and for each student group in the school in addition for schools with three or more student groups there are no more than 10 percentage points between the lowest performing group and all other students in the school the school meets the state Benchmark for chronic absenteeism rate 15% or lower and for schools with a graduating class the school meets a state Benchmark for graduation and completion index at least 88% and a dropout
008rate of 6% or lower there are three Fairfax County schools that ear in the Board of Education highest Achievement Award and these are sster Elementary School Allison jenovich principal [Applause] uh Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Michael mukai principal and CG Woodson High School Kevin gr principal congratulations on earning this award and to earn the Exemplar award for continuous Improvement a school must earn a state accreditation rating of accredited or accredited with conditions and meet at least one of the following criteria the school demonstrates an increase in the combined rate for math reading and science for each of the past three years with a total increase across the three years of 10 points or more the school demonstrates an increase in the combined rate for two or more student groups in reading and
009math reach of the past three years with the total increase across the three years of 10 points or more and the school demonstrates an increase in the graduation and completion index the GCI for each of the past three years with a total increase across the three years of 4% or more and school demonstrates a decrease in the dropout rate for each of the past three years with the total reduction across three years of 15% or more of the first Year's dropout rate kind of sounds like a story problem a math story problem however Fairfax County Schools receiving this award for continuous Improvement our Fairfax County Adult High School Michelle Morgan principal key Center an Smith principal and West pic High School Jessica stots principal see the Wolverines are in the house um congratulations on earning
010this award thank you Dr Reid we'd like to welcome the West pic High School Community recipient of the 2024 25 Exemplar award for continuous Improvement to please join the board for a photo at the front of the Das e I would like to welcome the key center community recipient of the 20242 Exemplar award for continuous Improvement to please join the board for photo at the front of the dis I would like to welcome the Fairfax County Adult High School Community recipient of the 2024 205 Exemplar award for continuous Improvement to please join the board for a photo at the front of the Das e I would like to welcome the CG Woodson High School Community recipient of the 20242 Exemplar award for highest achievement to please join the board for a photo at the front
011of the dis e I would like to welcome the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Community recipient of the 20242 Exemplar award for highest achievement to please join the board for a photo at the front of the Das I would like to welcome the Sangster Elementary School community recip of the 20242 Exemplar award for highest achievement to please join the board for a photo at the front of the Das I would like to welcome all those here in support of the volunteer and Mentor week proclamation to please join the board for a photo at the front of the dias e all right Mr chair that's the conclusion e agenda item 3.01 Community participation the next order of business is community participation we welcome all community members who are here and those who signed
012up to speak this evening additional information about signing up to provide comments at Schoolboard regular business meetings and public hearings can be found on the school board's website at fcps.edu Schoolboard during the sign up process community members acknowledge they were informed of the school board's expectations for proper deorum when providing comments these expectations are also available online and with the printed M uh agenda and meeting materials at the back of the room we ask audience members to be respectful of one another shouting and outbursts will not be tolerated please hold your applause until the conclusion of a speaker's remarks audience members may not join speakers at the podium and should remain at their seats including when recording video or taking photos we are grateful to those who have come to speak to us today and
013thank you for your cooperation school board members will be listening but not responding Madam clerk please call the first Speaker Michaela Danner I am a sixth grader at Pin Spring Elementary School I Am a Girl Scout and I am learning about effective advocacy I start middle school next year and I am here to talk about healthy school start times your delay on this important decision directly impacts me I wonder if each of you really knows and understands the now decades old research on healthy school start times because I can't help but think that if you really understood we wouldn't even be in this conversation my friends and I the students you represent um know that starting middle and high school at 8:30 a.m. is recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics we know that doing
014so positively impact so many of the outcomes that you say you care about for example increased attendance and engagement in school decreased depression and decreased suicidal thinking better academic performance even less car crashes please reconsider pairing this decision with your conversation about School boundaries you have five viable options available to you right now honor your original timeline make a decision for the upcoming School year it is not too late FCPS has changed Bell schedules as late as may but it is urgent we know that if you decide by March it is best for a smooth impl implementation discuss the options that have been provided CH choose and choose the most viable one for FCPS and Implement for fall 2025 thank you Luke loretti good evening fcvs members my name is Luke loretti and I'm here
015tonight as a representative for my community awareness product for Deca called vaping stops here my partners are Anthony berm and Dani Gully we're sitting over there and throughout our time in middle school and high school we have noticed that vaping has become a significant problem not just in our schools but in many schools around on FCPS on the surface this may not seem like a huge problem however countless students are affected by this horrible activity whether it be the health of the students vaping or their peers around them it has come to the point where students are unable or scared to even use the restrooms at school as a result of the space being taken over for the use of vaping or vape dealing while vaping stops here originally started as a project for school
016we quickly realized our opportunity to inspire change in school communities everywhere this led us to set a goal of transforming the school project into a legitimate Youth Organization that works towards reducing the amount of vaping occurring in schools and minimizing vaping among teenagers we hope that we can continue working on this organization inspiring change even after our Deca competition at the end of February so why are we speaking to you tonight our purpose is to raise awareness about the harmful effects of vaping we noticed that you are piloting a program of using Vape detectors in a few schools and we would like permission to fundraise those same Vape detectives for other schools including Masson whereever if that is not possible we would like the contacts to get the fors for permission to fundraise and send
017the funds to the section of the fcbs to speed up the pilot program and send detectors to more schools we feel this is very important because vaping in schools has Sky recorded over the last few years and thousands of children are hospitalized every year due to a volle and other harmful vaping diseases we think that with your help and The Vape detectors installed this could cut down our vaping across the school district and help solve this crisis we hope this has helped change your perspective and if You' like to contact us you can contact us at vaping stops here at gmail.com or visit our our website at vaping stops here.org we would love to be certified and start fundraising as soon as possible thank you so much for your [Applause] time haa Shazad hello I'm
018haa sherzad and I'm a sophomore Justice high school can we hold the speaker's time please ma'am will you return to your seat please restore to speaker's time so that she may begin again thank you hi I want to talk about the fact that middle schools should start their days too early should not start their days too early as it's unfair for students who have to raise as early as 5:30 a.m. many of these kids face demanding schedules that require them to juggle homework extra homework extrac kular activities and family responsibilities which often make make it difficult for them to get at bed at reasonable timing this lack of sleep can lead to exhaustion and decreased Focus during the school day ultimately affecting their ability to learn and grow with good sleep students are more likely
019to participate actively in dis discussions retain information better and contribute positively to their learning environment additionally improved sleep can lead better relationship with peers family members as well as enhanced overall wellbeing therefore we must we must act urgent and not delay until boundary work is completed our students deserve better thank [Applause] you Angelie Seuss Lillian Sada good evening thank you for the opportunity to speak we all know the health benefits of changing middle school start times tonight I want to stress the urgency of acting now we need to be proactive not reactive we are waiting are we waiting for the media attention or the petition with over 700 signatures to force our hand we need to do what is right for our kids not what is necessarily easier for the adults inconvenience can be managed
020harm is irreversible I ask our school board you to support this change without delay why wait for external pressure to make scientifically proven changes reports presented to the FCPS family strategy meetings highlighted significant concerns in Middle Schools showing a trend of declining student interest in academics coupled with a rise in mental health issues Dr Anderson thank you for highlighting that Region 2 including Glasgow has an extra year of middle school this means 3,500 students in Region 2 will benefit from this change starting in Fall 2025 when we know better we must do better as a parent of a middle schooler I understand how crucial this change is for our families it impacts every student and every family in our community we need this change now not at some undefined point in the future it's still
021possible to implement for this year as the FCPS web page indicates was our goal if our top priority will always focus on doing what is best for our students this cannot be delayed I urge you to discuss the options refine them make healthy Middle School start times we cannot fail our middle schoolers during their most vulnerable years let's address the declining interests in academics and raising mental health issues headon actions speak louder than words let's show our kids that together all things are possible thank you Kathleen an Brown good evening I'm Kathleen andne Brown while my son Peter kther graduated from Justice last spring I remain committed to and volunteer at the PTSA resource Pantry for our amazing students and have served the past year and a half on the community working group safety of
022our students is Paramount as they travel to and from just High School the two biggest problems are one lack of adequate parking and two the lack of safe routs to to and from school we estimate that there are nearly 500 students using the sidewalks and Roads from just the one side of school from calmore Vista nolwood Drive neighborhoods yet there are no high visibility crosswalks curb Cuts enough sidewalks and an inadequate number of stop signs to ensure our students safety safe routes to school and the office of Safety and Security and our working group members collaborated on a report to identify mitigation strategies and that's an addendum to the working group's report the school board must instruct your staff to work with v do and FC Dot and the community to develop solutions to these
023problems and not erect barriers and excuses for why it can't be done your staff's resistance to developing Solutions have been detailed in our working group report these proposed Solutions are at minimal cost and virtually no cost to FCPS the simplest solution to the inadequate parking problem is for VT and FC dot to restrict parking on the cafeteria side of Peace Valley Lane for students and staff in a similar way that they restrict parking on the opposite side of Peace Valley Lane for the residents of R Ravenwood Park our working group's rough estimate is that this would provide approx approximately 50 parking spaces for school use during school hours thank you for the hard work you do providing valued leadership thank you ma'am Robert Rigby Jor Victoria Sneed Victoria Sneed Matthew Levy hello um High School
024Board um I'm here tonight to talk to you about uh request of the Justice High School uh uh working group in our desire to get more parking uh around the school um uh we've been uh meeting over the last uh three school years and we've made a modest request for more parking near the school via the acquisition of Northbound Peace Valley Lane um it's currently I believe County run and we're asking to use those spots uh and to restrict them for students and teachers during the school day um we met with um with the community members and they are on board with this plan um it should be a minimal cost and would be of great service to uh all of us um teachers students Etc um of course the plan really only begins to
025meet our needs uh you know when I started teaching at Justice 20 years ago uh we had 1500 kids we have like 2200 now uh we just put up a new addition which reduced some parking so it's been a bit of a struggle for uh some teachers and the morale in the building so any extra parking would be just super beneficial for The Vibes at Justice high school thank you very much for your [Applause] time Vanessa Hall first I agree with them on sleep and parking but I'll talk about something else uh my daughter was physically ill on Tuesday after she witnessed Nazi salutes on the inaugural stage and executive orders designed to create chaos and harm and upend the rule of law we're in an unprecedented time where violent criminals are pardoned kindness is
026out of fashion and the Constitution is undermined with the swipe of a presidential pen where science and Truth are Rewritten by ideologues and ice is Unleashed on schools Hospital hospitals and places of worship which is terrifying our entire Community civil rights and public education are under attack nevertheless all of us we must do the work educator and former Congressman Katie Porter says not to let the chaos and fear distract us instead we must stay focused on the real people who are harmed by these policies and all work together to mitigate that harm stand up to bullying be an upstander not a bystander work cooperatively as possible but never compromise on values or civil rights speak truth to power FCPS must continue to offer safe meaningful educational space for students staff families by prioritizing kindness and
027patience offering mental health support and maintaining the trust policy to protect immigrant students and regulation 2603 which protects transgender students we need to be loud about this you are the first line of defense for staff so please protect them and provide resources support and pay that they need to do their best by students no matter what happens at the federal level you were elected to do the work here and you are empowered by the Virginia Constitution to support protect and educate our children regardless of race religion gender immigration status gender identity our world is being turned upside down which is why we all must do the work to ensure safety Equity excellence and opportunity in FCPS Beyond thank you very much kimela new uh good evening everyone my name is Kim lenu I am the
028parent of four children to whom grad uated during Co and I have a senior and a junior uh all of whom came through the Justice High School pyramid Elementary Middle um and high school um I am surprisingly to myself here tonight to speak to you um about fairness um we teach our kids about the concept of fairness in order to approach fairness we have to have Justice in order to have Justice we must have equality in order to have equality we have to have parity Justice High School does not have parity with its peer high schools in an inexcusable number of measurable and amendable areas in order for parity to exist FCPS and the school board must provide the individual school with what they need to be on a Level Playing Field I am here
029to ask for one such individual need to provide parody we have an incredibly dangerous traffic walking and parking situation at our school which is has the smallest footprint of any school in FCPS um and this problem is being shuffled down the road Road once again we historically and currently do not receive the same support as other high schools in FCPS which our students truly feel and express so I am a member and I was appointed to the Justice High School Community working group as commissioned by the Board of Supervisors and the school board in order for FCPS to comply with their legal requirement for this group to exist uh in order for our renovation to have been approved we came up with a plan which we have presented to our sponsors and that includes a
030very simple solution to allow us to take over ownership of one side of the road by our high school to add an 40 or 50 parking spaces to alleviate a major traffic and safety concern which is both supported by the neighborhood and the school system and can easily be accomplished in the current CIP thank you chair frish that's our last public speaker thank you madam clerk agenda item 4.01 student representative matters I call on Miss Swant who is joining us virtually tonight miss Swant thank you Mr chair while I regret that I cannot be in person tonight as I'm feeling under the weather I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year and first I'd like to express my appreciation to our custodial facilities transportation bus drivers and ground Crews who have been worked who
031have worked to keep students safe during this cold and snowy weather with over 45 5,000 bus stops walkways and sidewalks that require attention their work is critical in creating a safe environment for Learning and a safe place that students can come to learn at the beginning of January I had the opportunity to present student remarks on school safety at the ferax county prehearing for the general assembly here in FCPS we've implemented several security measures such as school resource officers the anonymous safety tip line and the phase construction of vestibules at school entrances the vestibules at the front of each of these schools have been well received by students from the construction at chanelli high school to the improvements here at Luther Jackson making sure that we protect students from those entering and exiting the building
032during school hours building on our discussions from our December meeting I as well as the students of the superintendence advisory Council are excited to see that the fiscal year 2024 midyear budget review includes an adjustment of additional Financial Resources to enhance school safety measures specifically installing additional security cameras Vape detector Panic alert systems and expanding the safety screening pilot program as proactive measures however as I shared at the prehearing we must also acknowledge the growing concerns related to online threats and the rise of school shootings Across the Nation with which impact students safety and mental health incidents such as the recent tragedy at the school in Nashville Tennessee have made it clear that gun violence in schools is an epidemic over the past years several FCPS schools including but not limited to Rocky Run Middle
033School Katherine Johnson Middle School Thomas Jefferson High School Glasgow Middle School Lake bradock Secondary School and Luther Jackson Middle School have experienced false threats that were made on social media which were lat later spread through school buildings while thankfully no one has been harmed these online threats coupled with the rise of school shootings that we're seeing Across the Nation right now have created a climate of fear and anxiety within our communities in a discussion with a high school student from Falls Church and another from Woodson they both agreed that incidents like these at their schools or even threats made had an impact on how safe they felt while they were learning I want to share a personal experience from this past May at Thomas Jefferson High School a threat written on a restroom door was
034then spread rapidly on social media which caused several anxiety throughout the school community and where more than half of the student body did not show up to school the next day despite the extra security staff that we had on hand and support from our current principal at the time it shook our school community I walked into a nearly empty classroom during first period where only 10 students were present similar incidents have occurred at these other high school and middle schools where some of the threats reference weapons or violence which again leave a lasting impact on our sense of security in our school communities as Dr Reid has mentioned in several Community announcements this fall our schools are committed to ensuring safety and media education for students and families to know how to deal with these
035threats when they arise however when we find ourselves in the same situation again it leaves us wondering how do we prevent these events from occurring again and how do we address the lingering impact of these incidents even after the immediate threat has passed in light of the recent events that have happened in Nashville and the concerning prevalence of gun violence Nationwide it is essential for FCPS to prioritize the next phase of the safety screening pilot program this program should incorporate strategies that address the root causes of false alarm and and threats including the expansion of digital monitoring tools and proactive education for students and families about the consequences of spreading such threats and how to deal with them when they arise I'd also like to recognize the incredible work of student organizations like March for
036our lives at Woodson and done with guns at Thomas Jefferson High School which focus on gun violence prevention and mental health awareness as I urged our state legislators I encourage all of us to think about how we can better address the false alarms that create this unnecessary panic in our schools what steps can we take to mitigate the Panic how can we ensure consistent long-term safety at our schools and how do we Empower students families and teachers with the tools and the resources that they need to feel secure this issue cannot rise and fall with the news cycle or when the next big thing occurs it requires ongoing attention and action I hope that these questions are considered as part of our safety and security screening pilot program and that we'll continue to explore how
037to better Safeguard our schools students and our staff thank you thank you Miss Swant agenda item 5.01 action certification of closed meeting compliance in order to comply with Section 22- 3712 D of the code of Virginia it is necessary for the board to certify that since the Fairfax County School Board convened to close meeting on January 23rd 2025 to the best of each member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully Exempted from open meeting requirements and only such business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board during the closed meeting do I have a motion Mr mavan do I have a second Mr Moon all those in favor Miss Marin Miss Dixit Mr mine Dr Anderson Mr McDaniel Miss Anderson Mr Moon miss lady Miss
038St John cunning Miss seore Heiser and myself that is unanimous for board members at the table with Mr Dunn away from the de agenda item 5 02 action confirmation of action taken and closed there were no actions taken and closed meeting tonight agenda item 5.03 action item new intergovernmental contract award James Madison University teacher pipeline bachelor's pathway I call on Mr Maven for a motion I move that the school board uh one approve the intergovernmental contract with James Madison University for Teacher pipeline bachelor's pathway and two authorized division superintendent or the director of the office of procurement services to execute deliver and administer the contract on behalf of the school board is there a second second Mr Moon Mr mine would you like to speak to your motion uh just very briefly so um as
039folks will see uh in the agenda item um JMU uh through this will provide educator PR preparation programs and courses of study leading to toward ba degrees and teacher lure uh to FCPS staff who participate uh in the grow your own uh program uh I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that FCPS needs qualified licensed teachers to fill critical needs in special education and Elementary education in particular uh and that need in FCPS is further underscored by The vdoe Who also identified prek K to6 Elementary education and K12 special education as the top two critical shortage endorsement areas in the state um with that I encourage my colleagues to um pass this thank you thank you Mr movine Mr Moon would you like to speak to your second no thank you Mr chairman I
040was the one who asked this to be pulled out from the conscent agenda because I think this is very important program uh that deserves a little more explanation from our staff maybe superintendent and one of the things I noted uh in the agenda material was that these programs if I'm not mistaken uh are not available in the same way as other educator preparation program and is or for those who may not have a bachelor's [Music] degrees so we providing stipend so this program in general is a program that enables it's a tuition share program that enables some of our um staff who are not currently teachers perhaps uh par Educators or um instructional assistance uh to go to school with a um an assist from us in these high as Mr mline said High need
041areas special education and special education Early Childhood uh spaces and JMU uniquely has this program so we're very excited to uh be able to support upscaling uh with our employees who have a high interest in this area so is the expectation for our employees some of our employees take advantage of this opportunity and be able to do it virtually or do they have to JMU which is two hours away um I would say that this program we currently um have 12 staff members participating and I think um let me just look here real quick uh there are two and it's a two and a half year program um over six semesters Summerall spring and summerfall spring um and I'm just trying it's used one time only Grant funds supported with title two um I don't
042know that it's completely virtual it's not like the It te program which is our avans program um but I think some of it is possibly virtual and some is I would have to get back to I'm sorry Dr I didn't I didn't send you my question you advance which I should have done no that's okay you know those are some of the questions that I had on my mind you know to share this information this opportunity not just our employees but general public because as uh we are committing about half a million dollars for this uh uh you know five all together is it two years initial table contract correct that not only just our employees but I think in the community members in FIS County who support us need to know that we are
043offering these to uh strengthen a a a you know teacher rank for you know special education yes sir and I it really was intended for us to take um current staff members uh who were instructional assistants or uh par par par professionals who'd worked in uh special education classrooms for years here in uh Fairfax County enable them enable them to successfully transition into a teaching role uh with tuition support and their passion for children and um education I think has really LED them to this and it is extra work but we share the finance burden with them and then we uh celebrate some amazing teachers so I think we're working very very hard I appreciate uh you and Mr mine wanting to highlight this it's an important program thank you Mr chairman thank you Mr
044Moon Dr Anderson thank you and I'm also very glad that this was pulled out to to be highlighted because I think it's an opportunity to raise awareness that it does exist so we can kind of advertise it in this conversation um but I did have a couple of quick points um there are three areas in which um those candidates can receive a lure it's ele education prek and um special education it's not just limited to the special education component because you mentioned that there are people who are working for years it could be in any of those areas could that be coupled in any way with our students who participate and teach for tomorrow bringing them in into our ranks and coupling this program because we have space for 195 and I think you said
045we have 12 currently it's just a wondering so um I you know essentially it is it has been historically teachers who have been or excuse me uh instructional assistants or professionals who've been in the classroom working for several years at least and generally our teachers for tomorrow's our high school students who have not yet uh transitioned to that Workforce so I think we could contemplate a program that might match uh teaching for tomorrow's students but I this would be a different program I I was just thinking if there would be a possibility to to to for those who are graduating of course to know that this is a possibility if they come and work in our systems perhaps as instructional assistants and have this be something that is waiting for them again it's just a
046wondering because I know we have to be pretty um creative in terms of growing teachers I'm just shocked that Elementary education is one of the shortage areas you know I remember years ago that was was a glut and it was you know math and it was science it's always been special education so I I'm very glad to be able to support this and I hope that this little commercial gets some more folks to apply for it thank you Dr Anderson Miss Marin I just want to point out the N the number of very creative ways that the superintendent and her staff have um used to produce more teachers and fill teacher shortages including the avansa program which I believe is already launched or launching this month that will curate um applicable candidates from internally uh
047we've got the Great Beginnings program that brings uh staff from abroad and then this initiative so this is how we help fill teacher vacancies but there is a national teacher shortage so when you know families wonder why do I have a substitute and why don't I have the teacher like we are doing the best we can but it is a very dire situation um and we need more teachers so so thank you thank you Miss Marin seeing no others we will vote for the motion on the screen all those in favor Miss Marin Miss Dixit Mr mlan Dr Anderson Mr McDaniel Miss Anderson Mr Moon miss lady Miss St John cunning Miss seis Mar Heiser and myself that is unanimous for board members with Mr dun away from the deis uh the motion passes all
048right agenda item 6.01 performance review technology el12 monitoring report each year the school board assesses the superintendent in part on the basis of the school division's read reasonable progress toward achieving the 2023 2030 strategic plans goals and adherence to a set of 13 executive limitations found on pages 14 through 31 of the board's strategic governance manual the superintendent provides annual monitoring reports to the board for each executive limitation the board then votes on whether the provided report is in compliance or if corrective action is needed I call on Dr Reid for a monitoring report on Executive limitation 12 technology Dr Reid thank you chairman frish so it's my pleasure this evening to present executive limitation 12 uh and as Mr frish mentioned uh this is an exciting uh executive limitation and one of uh the
049operational guard rails around which the division uh achieves its strategic goals so we're excited this evening to talk about uh technology and I want to again report that at the time of this report to the best of my knowledge information and belief I've gathered information and evidence that I believe supports compliance with the board's executive limitation associated with this topic and I'd like to share some of the highlights this evening so I'm not sure is it uh okay can we go ahead and move to slide three please thank you so there are eight areas of executive limitation 12 and items uh 134 can be seen here for those following along at home the full report monitoring report is attached to the board agenda this evening and I will be just highlighting certain sections of the
050report I want to share that items five through eight um are here and these are just really exciting topics and foundational to everything we do in the school division so I'll be excited to uh make commentary on a number of these this evening first of all um item number one with regard to this executive limitation talks about Innovation future focusing um comprehensive and efficient approach uh in providing accessible and Equitable technology resources to support student learning and activities so I just want to give an update on our FCPS on program which ensures that all FCPS students have on toone access to age appropriate division purchase devices since 2021 our department of information technology has scaled student advisability availability to ensure every student has access to a device that is less than five years old um
051and that is significant not every school division is able to ensure that and that makes uh it clear to be able to have future Focus devices that are able to manage software that our students are using in current and real time the table on this slide shows current investments in these student devices across all grade levels the total number of managed devices are currently 9 5,941 so there's a lot of excitement and a lot of Technology use going on on a daily basis in our County continuing on with item number one just want to remind our community and staff that we are committed to using the latest technology this includes updating laptops servers and wireless points every student We Believe deserves access to the tools they need to be successful we're supporting wide range of
052instructional applications and tools that also support a diverse learning style and sets of needs including supporting basil resources assessment tools databases um and quite honestly I think our data uh usage and data planning has like multiplied uh exponentially in the last couple years as we uh work to achieve our goals of our ambitious School strategic plan item number two um addresses uh the experience and to make sure we have uh the fastest smoothest most experi or the most efficient experience for families uh who've invested in building new tools here we support now digital parent engagement and an online registration system those are new um and we've expanded those to include online verification update and impact aid forms uh for school year 2425 the parent digital consent system is available for families uh which hadn't previously
053been available to families and this allows consent to additional resources quickly from phones or computers School staff can also efficiently manage track and act on these digital consents rather than paper consent forms and the system does support multiple translations to ensure accessibility for families and you know I want to just make sure that I because sometimes I feel like we sort of read through some of these slides but that one small project is a huge access um opportunity for our students and families and I just a big shout out to our team each of these improvements uh really means something in that experience for our students and families I'd like to also move on to share that our multi-tier systems of support were integrated into our uh student information system for all schools this year
054this served over 37,000 students with over 13,000 plans that were created our department of instructional technology continues to reinvest in new technology and systems modernization such as robotic process Automation and low code development platforms and I don't think I can answer questions on either of those Mr sey so I'm gonna have to look to you on those topics but I can say that the integration of those plans with our student information system makes those plans accessible uh for students families and our staff in ways that they weren't previously so a lot of excitement about that on item number three um as part of our commitment to modernizing this aging technology infrastructure we continue to upgrade our Wireless Systems and it's quite interesting um the uh cell phone uh the lack of cell phone usage during
055classes creates a really interesting uh Wi-Fi uh bounce uh at the end of the school day um which we um it's very interesting to look at the heat map now on the wireless system this project began in 20123 and expects to be completed by FY 2027 uh as we want to do this project within budget and by the end of FY 2025 the estimated mix will be 58% uh new wireless modern access points and only 42% old access points so by far the majority of our access points will be new and modern and the design goal is to ensure 100% strong Wi-Fi coverage in all instructional areas as we continue to support increasing bandwidth um demand so you can see an example of Bailey's Elementary School with their 27 access points um and what needs
056to happen for full coverage so lots of infrastructure work going on uh moving on also want to mention that FCPS manages a large and complex infrastructure with approximately 3 00,000 devices connecting during Peak usage that's 300,000 devices Our IT team our operations team works with a goal to operate the network with 99.99% uptime during instructional hours so we're always on access to Internet uh the dit staff also schedules maintenance during off peak hours which is much appreciated uh to minimize service disruption so this means late evenings weekends and so forth requiring IT staff to flex their time as well I also want to share that we do partner with our County Partners to operate a shared fiber Network which connects our buildings to the internet uh these fiber connections while highly reliable are susceptible to
057damage uh with the constant construction activity in our area sometimes those uh wires are the fiber is cut um and it can abruptly shut down all internet access and must be repaired by boots on the ground so so this fiscal year since July 24 we've had six documented cases of fiber cuts which have affected connectivity at our building during instructional hours so we continue to work on minimizing fiber cut events so moving to number four which is providing for a safe and secure Computing environment we have now implemented light speed classroom management which allows our teachers to focus all student attention away from their devices to the front of the room or to a specific instructional website as of December 2024 as recent as last month light speed classroom management has been integrated into 185
058of 199 FCPS schools and centers teacher feedback shows that light speed classroom positively impacts the classroom learning environment Our IT department again utilizes Advanced intrusion prevention alert detection and Industry leading endpoint detection tools to protect the security of our technology number five um we're looking at establishing appropriate boundaries and ethical guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence in educational and operational settings and I'm really proud of our team they've chosen a cross departmental approach which means that we're not having the AI conversation in one Silo Department because we know AI actually permeates across the entire School Division as AI capabilities are added to our existing tools they're validated by review teams before being enabled for staff use currently we have available tools with AI such as Google Gemini Ai and zoom AI 2.0 for FCPS
059staff you'll hear a little more about this it's kind of a spoiler alert in our academic matters presentation this evening we try to match those to match our eels number six in terms of the training provided tools and accessibility resources that support um instructional needs and inclusion for all Learners uh our instructional software review process now includes criteria from the IST teacher ready evaluation tool to help select highquality tools for teaching and learning and that's the international Society for technology and education um and these teams have been training with school-based technology Specialists to implement Universal Design for Learning for the past three years um so it we really want to make sure that any software is accessible by all students and the curriculum developed and adopted by instructional Services is checked for accessibility before being
060published for staff and students um as well as copyright training and accessibility is included in summer curriculum development projects so number seven um the ensuring staff and students are provided with training and support to effectively ethically and safely used technology tools uh I want to share that during school year 2324 15 FCPS schools earned Common Sense recognition it's an interesting title Mr sethy but we did 15 schools earned this for providing digital citizenship professional development to staff and teaching digital citizenship lessons to students and expanding family awareness of digital citizenship the department of in instructional Technology upskilling Academy Fosters continuous learning for IT staff with over 521 employees enrolled in 676 courses in 2023 and 762 courses in 2024 so there's a lot of continuous learning which we think is very important for our staff
061the FCPS um instructional technology Career Academy for students offers up to a thousand FCPS high school students access to entry level industry certificates currently we have 838 student Learners participating in 1,51 courses um this program is driven purely by student demand to learn in real time demand skills no credit associated with the program just the opportunity to learn more which isn't that the purest form of motivation so item number eight the ability to deliver transparent information for families about the purpose and frequency of Technology use in the classroom and the division again light spe Parent Portal remember I talked earlier that teachers are able to use it parents also are able ble to Monitor and control their children's internet activity on FCPS devices we're seeing a steady increase in the parent signups for this tool
062and if you're a parent watching tonight we encourage you to sign up and check in with your student I'm sure they'll help you with that sign up and if they won't or they're not sure how please check in with their teacher and I'm sure they'll be able to help you um the FCPS digital ecosystem Library provides information to parents about instructional digital resources including private policies in terms of use and finally FCPS requires parental consent for the use of online instructional tools which is Now supported online by the parent digital consent system so Mr chairman this concludes the presentation for executive limitation 12 technology I'm happy to take any questions thank you Dr Reid we will open the floor for questions Mr McDaniel thank you um want to talk a about cyber security um there
063was a newspaper article that talked about a power school data breach can you my understanding is that didn't actually impact us is that accurate that's correct we have a contract with power school for certain of their products but we did not have a contract nor did we use the product that experienced the power the data breach so none of our data was actually breached no sir okay that was my understanding so I just wanted to make sure that was in fact the case case um on on and again on that same line of cyber security and I'm kind of curious as especially as we're going to be talking about budget later what I mean how do we determine Staffing levels for cyber security I think it's kind of a nebulous thing so one of the
064things we've chosen to do and we did this I think two years ago is we Benchmark around divisions similar to our size Andor um our uh pretty much really our size in our technology use patterns and as we Benchmark um both organizational structure for cyber security also Staffing Resources and tools so our primary uh plan is benchmarking with other divisions okay is that mean I would assume that's probably based on the number of devices number of Technology products number of users those types of benchmarks met yes sir okay all right um and as we get into budget do you think that there's opportunity to potentially centralize some it services with either the county or the school systems um to look at Cost savings and more efficient Service delivery whether it's cyber security or other it
065products so I think there's always a possibility to streamline operations and perhaps integrate operations we do partner with our County Partners um on certain cyber investigations at times um I do think that there are we can we continue to work on finding efficiency as we look at um budget dollars for sure okay thank you thank you Mr McDaniel Dr Anderson thank you as a frequent user of light speed I'm going to ask all the questions that I I come up with when I do review it with my own personal children on a weekly basis it only seems to capture information for that current week uh you couldn't go back can you explain why that is is that a user ER or is that the limitation of the system well I was thinking of a river
066that flows downhill and rarely flows back but I'm not sure that's helpful I I don't know how much storage system that the light speed system has but I'm goingon to ask Mr sethy uh because I there may be a cost in some of our video systems there's a limited time because there's a cost to storage but Mr sethy um good good evening um I do believe the system should capture we have data in the back end for all of the logs which go back a little longer than um just one week but on the parent portal side you're just seeing the opportunity to go back one week that's all that I can see as a parent I can certainly check in with the with the staff on this and get back to you I'm sorry
067say I can check in with the staff and get back to you on the process for that yes thank you because I think it's really a great tool um because it also allows for parents to do what teachers are able to do which is maybe shut off the um the internet piece but I I think it's limited by how many people are using it and evaluating the um number of parents who have the parent view um sis accounts which is predicated for you to be able to use the light speed what is the range of that I know in these documents you have um that I think you have you have it broken down by school level you know 88 I think they're all in the 80s um but we have some schools that are
068on the lower end we have some schools that are on the upper end can you speak a little bit to the range of access to parent view it there is a range and we did run those numbers and I think and you are correct that the light speed portal you have to have access to access the light speed program uh and actually in our parent panel meetings uh parents have really been interested in knowing what sites their children are visiting right because it really I think generates a conversation but uh either Dr prido or Mr sey do you have a sense on why the perhaps disperate distribution of access to parent view so um the range uh in terms of the parents who have access to parent view which is the sis system we see
069somewhere from 40% all the way up to 90s and you might see the distinction where it's lower on the elementary side and much higher engagement on the secondary side and that could be just naturally how parents engaged with the technology but also schools who help communicate that over and over again bringing parents in to help them sign up because a lot of access hinges on that sign up and our goal is to get everyone 100% And that's sort of an ongoing engagement with the schools who can engage with the community to have the parents come in sign up once they're signed up then they can manage the account obviously on their own I definitely agree it is definitely lower um with the elementary schools but we have some high schools that are in the low
07050s as well and I just want to make sure we have a little bit of a push there just so parents are available they know the tools that are available I want to move a little bit to the AI work um can you speak to any of the tools that teachers can potentially be using right now to reduce their workload so I did mention a couple tools that are available but in terms of actually reducing the workload um I think there's a Google tool and a zoom tool that we have given uh teachers access to and it might be helpful Mr sethy if you could maybe give an example of what e each of those tools might be able to do uh in a workload uh pattern so thank you yeah so a couple of
071things I think as we go through AI adoption you would see a typical pattern of you know the crawl walk run approach where staff engages with these tools they learn how to use it and then you have to change how you do your day-to-day activities right currently a teacher may be set up to kind of I'm going to go into a Word document or Google doc and write up what I want to write up but having the tool integrated into the same platform where if you use the Google Gemini platform you can very quickly go to the chatbot and say hey help me write something and it can give you a starting point to go from there this requires both a different way of thinking about how you approach your day-to-day work and a new
072practice and we have seen that approach kind of slowly organically growing through the system but currently we provide Google Gemini access to staff and primarily because we want to vet those tools out before we put them in front of Staff where they can engage with it and we want the Privacy to be absolutely crisp the security aspect of it to be tied and make it really simple where it's already plugged into the tools they use on a day-to-day basis the zoom AI tool is is pretty interesting it's used a lot in the central offices where when you're having a meeting instead of taking notes you can just switch it on and it will take all the notes for you at the end of the meeting it sends you an email where here's the transcript and
073you can go back into it and you can use it really really powerful and we have had some ideas with teachers where teachers are able to kind of use that tool in a classroom session and when they're done they can actually transcribe those notes and be able to share it out with students as a document in schooo or as a Google doc so lots of opportunities and lots of great ideas organically coming through the system and we hope it will continue to expand there's definitely a lot of opportunity and it's really exciting um but one of the things that always causes me some concern and you've heard this before in some other areas is when we provide guidance rather than expectations I know there's a lot of concern on part of Staff regarding how students
074can use Ai and I know there's concern about academic dishonesty and in the documents I see that we have guidance those tend to be more optional than an expectation that it is going to be the law of the land if you could speak to that a little bit because I do worry about desperate application and maybe acceptance of student use of AI products that are being made available in classrooms across FCPS so I do know that um the AI on slide 12 we did sort of try to quantify for example the zoom tool and over 3,500 meeting summaries have been undertaken but in terms of the AI um directives versus guidance um I think as we're rolling it out there are a number of projects that and we're going to highlight one of those the
075lighthouse school project which is again new where I think what we often want to do and I don't know if the term beta test is still current but we often want to try pilot be a test or Pilot um certain new tools and smaller spaces before they move larger so some of the guidance enables the opportunity to do that and then once those become uh tools that we believe should be taken to scale that would be when the guidance shifts to directives so um did you have a particular tool in mind that you noted on that but I I think the pattern should be um we used to we talked a little bit about um pilot pilot scale or Pilot pilot proof scale Right Where You pilot something and then you pilot a little bit
076larger a little bit different then you take a proof of concept and try it in an even larger more challenging space and then you bring it to scale and when it comes to scale is when it would move to being a directive is really kind of our uh work plan in that topic area and I would assume that when you get to that point then you will develop regulations which will require that we have some clearer board policies on AI because we haven't anything substantive at this point yes ma'am it's been referred to here or there so that's just something that I want to put out here for us to consider what that could look like because that should be driving those regulations um I want to say I want to give a big kudos
077to talking points it is something that my um personal children in my schools they use all the time and it's really quick and it's really easy that's been I think a fabulous tool and I'm glad to see that it's been growing um one of the questions that I had and this is kind of going back to um light speed if parents are e are observing that their students are in or have accessed sites that they shouldn't be accessing where is it written in terms of what should they do who should they be contacting is it the classroom teacher is it the technology person at the school because I've received that question quite a bit from parents who are engaging in the light speed review of their kids um digital Footprints I think it's always good
078um to contact the students teacher directly uh because that's the ecosystem whichin with the student is operating I think that we've had uh some concerns that have been escalated by the teacher perhaps to building level administrative staff or the esit uh within the school and then there are times when uh some circumstances are escalated up to the dit department but I would always start with the classroom teacher first maybe that's something we could add on that page where light speed information is held on the website absolutely because that question comes up quite a bit this chart I I that's my time so I'll come back to it thank you Dr Anderson we put you on a go back Miss Marin thank you I poured over this report um as you know Dr Reed I'm very
079passionate about how we in particular use schooly and all the communic ation uh routes especially during this time of year when our students are selecting their courses half of the school division is selecting half of their courses um all of their courses so um so I want to start with some really exciting growth things and thank you for in this report including what we asked for which is to really show that growth and the benchmarking there's some outstanding outstanding exciting things happening so um all of that SPF FCPS on program data when I think of FCPS on that was like before covid the previous board members we were deciding should every student have a device and then Co hit and here we are but knowing how many devices we have how we upgrade how we're
080saving costs by using things like Chromebooks um making online registration systems and things that are easier for families to um navigate some integration of key business leads like the weda and the um multi-tier system of support cost savings moving to the cloud um teachers reporting that the light speed classroom management system is having a positive impact like these are really great things that I hope that you will share and we could show the community that we're investing in technology that's really making a difference for our students and um economizing what we're doing also some really impressive operations things to share 177,000 wireless access points 99% Network availability from last school year to date key infrastructure updates um but on that point I will pivot to something I know we all love which is cues in
081terms of like making a list of things to get to so I saw in the report that there were updates to certain areas and certain technology well I wondered how are we keeping track of what needs to be updated and when and who got this upgrade you know at that point so I don't know if you know uh Mr Gotham has a queue Allah Miss samansky and chief of uh our chief of facilities but I certainly would love to see um some of that so we can get a sense of where everything is just like we're doing in our facilities um my concern s and and things I want to elevate are there's a number of software applications for teaching and learning like a lot like hundreds and there's apparently more in the queue and
082I would just like us to be clear on like what are we using for optimal use for instruction and learning because we don't need 500 options we need a few that work really well um unlimited choice is not really um it's it's very it can really sty people's choices um what are the goals of some of the tools used like the performance matters provided 3,000 unique assessments is 3,000 a goal is that a good place to be do we want more do we want less um what we okay so apparently in some construction projects our fibers are being cut are they the same companies that keep accidentally cutting our fibers and causing our business operations to LAX like that's something um I know I'm going on on but I I really like this report so
083you know and being sure in the reports of the data is Meaningful like um I don't need to know exactly how many materials are schoy but I'd like to know is the interactions with schooly is it being effective is it doing what it was designed to do I will take a go back because I have support thank you Mr Moon well thank you Mr chairman a couple of broad questions uh related to cyber security first we do understand need to keep our students our schools everything that we have our ask safe so there's that need versus there's some other needs such as be able to use for to help students improve and their academic achievement and also realize a operational efficiency how do you balance those two I'm not saying that they are necessarily against
084each other but sometimes when you focus on something we could lose our sight on the other side so I think the balance between flexibility and tools and security um is one that's in front of us every day right on almost every topic in the school division um but in technology I think you have to look at the cost benefit analysis and um we want to make sure that our risk appetite um is reasonable but acceptable and so we want to make sure we choose tools that are vetted that the Agreements are procured urement department does an amazing job of negotiating contracts uh with software and all the apps that Miss Marin was discussing or the tools our HR management tool or um tools that are used in the classroom to make sure that they have
085the protections that we would expect in Fairfax County Public Schools um but it is a it is a balance I think that we review at the um reup of every contract on every proess at this time so when when you do that when you balance those needs are you the one who's making a final decision to see whether something is worth the risk the risk you said risk appetite well I think that we our um instructional technology department in partnership with our cyber security department assess that risk and more often than not determine um rather we're going to move forward with instructional Services who usually bring the product ideas I would say that when there's a disagreement about it then it certainly it does land on my desk um and we want to make sure
086that whatever that product is um that it does have um sometimes we might ask an external person to take a look at it we may look at industry use patterns across other divisions uh but you know we have some in our some of our IT staff here this evening um and they work very hard uh to do that research um so at the end of the day I trust their judgment and uh we I think have a very strong process in the school division to make those evaluations and level of our risk appetite could it change well it does and I think Miss Burton talks about this sometimes I we you know the level of risk appetite in negotiating a contract for chicken nuggets for example versus risk tolerance in choosing a software that's going
087to include student information is going to look different like I have probably a lower threshold of worry around ordering chicken nuggets than I do about I'm going to have a much higher heightened uh sense of security need when something involves student data and that's where um sometimes it's by type of product that I think we want to make sure um we have an you know that other I have less of an appetite for risk when it comes to our student or staff data okay thank you Dr Reed I another you know second broad question that I have is we are using technology we are utilizing a lot of technology and we are investing a lot of resources to do that for bottom line purposes of first helping our students improve in their academic achievement second
088again I think something that I mentioned earlier op operational efficiency and E your executive limitation 12 which has to do with technology does not seem to uh give a data related I'm looking for some quantifiable data how a how much of efficienc I don't know whether you can put the dollar figure or is worth investing in a certain amount of money to realize in a certain amount of efficiency whether you can ever quantify that whether you can quantify the academic growth academic a growth in the similar manner I was trying to find whether whether you had presented that in the last year's report and I didn't see that and I don't see that this year and look looking at uh those eight items under gold two it does not specify for you to report to
089us in that regard is that something that we should be looking into or what we should just assumed the more technology we use will just become more efficient so just continue investing more and more money well I think that um I I think these are really good questions right you're talking about a return on investment and I will will say that digitizing I think one way we're looking at measuring efficiency is digitizing some of these forms so we're not sending paper out and paper um uh paper getting sent from a school or a department to the central office and back I think it saves a lot of time I don't know that we've Quantified that amount of time that we've saved but I do know that the more we are able to digitize and create
090online digital approval trees for different topic areas we're going to save staff time that could otherwise be repurposed so so Dr R uh you know I would like to see at least one example you can give us in the future so that when I want to when I have a conversation how we are investing our resources in technology I can have that I can use the data yes sir thank you thank you Mr Moon Miss Lady thank you um thank you for this uh this is technology is moving fast I think we're doing a good job to keep up uh I just had a couple questions one on slide 11 it references the fact that uh in terms of light speed classroom it's it's integrated into 185 of our 199 schools what's with the other
09114 so we are probably still working to finish out that or what do you have a an update a late breaking report Mr SE it's it's between training so switching on the tool doesn't does take much effort it's the ability for the staff to use it they have to go through training they have to learn how to use it it has to be set up for them so that aspect we give schools the choice and only because every school has different things going on right within their day-to-day activities so they have that little bit of flexibility we imagine especially with the success this year the few schools that are left will certainly be signing up and and getting the time to train up on the tool okay thank you um the other the other comment
092I had was in relation to AI it seems to me that mostly what's referenced in the report um is sort of AI guidance for staff I'm not really seeing any AI guidance for students um and they're distinctly differ I just know my colleague asked some questions about both so um I that's an area of interest for me um I think at some point um my understanding it's now on teachers to sort of have the parameters around AI use for their students in in their individual classes versus having a schoolwide policy is that something we're going to look at eventually I think there's going to be I'll talk a little about that with the lighthouse school project in academic matters but do you want to make any comment on that I know we have a committee
093that Dr Presidio and Mr sey are jointly supporting again remember I talked about cross departmental approach you want to talk a little bit about where we are now I I think you in some of your earlier comments talked about you know the Readiness of of staff to be able to use tools and we're still at the kind of the initial stages of you know know um I think Comfort comfortability with the AI tools just in general um so really where we're at right now is we have guidance for students that they are not allowed to use AI in their coursework right they can use it obviously in their personal life and could even use it to support studying um many students do use AI to support you know creating study guides or different types of
094things that are going to help them academically but they're not permitted to use it as part of their coursework unless it's approved by their teacher and we have that in the srnr we have that in our acceptable use policy and then we have additional guidance to support teachers with best practices for using AI if a student was going to use it in a particular assignment um but again we're still at the initial stages of trying to figure out how we want to integrate the use of some of this these Technologies into the into the classroom environment thank you um and then the biggest question for me is in relation to AI um and and and your reference of Lighthouse schools and the training of staff so what is the plan to build capacity in teachers
095around AI uh especially in light of all that's on their plates from benchmarking to instructional planning um to you know IEP meetings to collaborative team meetings Etc zp goals I mean these things Trump Tech teaching in schools so what is the plan for teachers to be trained on this uh because it's moving so quickly and it's so important yeah I can certainly start I think the approach we have taken with as talking about crawl walk run is our ability to give staff the support when they need it and we see the organic demand for some of the staff which are willing to put some time towards it it's it's an it's an interesting Paradigm because the more you use it the more time you could potentially save on the other task that you have to
096do so once you get that flywheel going we see adoption going up pretty rapidly and we see those Sparks in individual buildings our long-term hopes since you don't want to bring everyone in and say hey everybody's going to sit through 10 hours of training so you know what to do with it is that we can get some champions in each building where there is more organic conversations happening between teachers who are championed the idea they know how to use it and you will see in the lighthouse how we kind of approaching this those teachers can and that staff can then help the other staff see value in it the the other thing which is is important in this as we've kind of done this this is not training that you can give generically right it's
097not generic training you want to spend some time helping teachers say here's a potential way of doing lesson planning and to do that here's a prompt for it and prompt is sort of the modern programming language for AI it's in English so it doesn't take a whole lot of technical knowledge but you learn how to speak to the machine in its language and then you can work much faster and it can produce much better output I think providing those prompts seems to be a good starting place for someone who hasn't been in the system doesn't want to get in there to say hey this is you you can't break it it's just a matter of being able to engage with it and use the tool having the tool universally available so there is no friction
098around how do I get to the tool and then giving some ideas of how to engage with the tool we feel those two things would bring adoption and understanding which will then increase with time okay so there's really no do no plan it it's sort of just like it's catching fire right like I I I hear you I I I have a couple concerns one is this one of model right so you know our es spits do fantastic work but there's one per school and so if you're a chanelli that's 2900 students and you have one espit versus a high school that could be of a much different size you know maybe that that fire spreads faster to all those faculty but I just think that there needs to be a specific plan and maybe
099it's instructional Services right like if I'm a is person in mathematics maybe I can provide I don't know if it's happening some training on how to use AI in your lesson development in your design of of um assessments whatever I just want to make sure it's coming there's there's several opportunities and eventually I think because we have some people who won't ever adopt with technology I think there eventually has to be a point where you have to you have to step into this space um in order to be effective in your work so that's just my concerns we have to make time for because you're right once people dip their toe in this water and they start to see how it can help and it's a Time Saver it's fantastic but if I'm you know
100just doing my thing and and I'm responding to my Daily Grind as a teacher um and no one around me is sort of planting those seeds then I'm not not going to be aware thanks thank you Miss Lady Miss St John cunning thank you um Dr Reed I wanted to ask you if you could provide an example of like in terms of the data bites and school P pulse that um aims to provide actionable insights to relevant division leadership and school administrative teams if you could give us some examples of how that's working uh to support our students and our you know the outcomes of students and support our staff yes ma'am I we um as I've shared with the board before every Monday morning at 6:30 senior leadership myself I get a data what
101we call a data bite that has tiles of what I consider high-profile data points that I'm tracking in the division and that senior leadership are tracking um also every Monday morning every school principal in the division gets a school pulse which is a data bite of tiles of data that each principal gets at 6:30 Monday morning on tiles that um they with our chief of schools Dr Pon um Dr King and Dr pidio have worked on uh to make sure that those are uh actionable data in real time I will share that uh attendance is one of those we're tracking attendance rates I'm tracking uh filled and unfilled teacher positions across the division by region and school we're tracking immunization uh Records um we're tracking graduation rates and plans we're tracking algebra registrations and algebra
102um achievements across uh grading periods um I know the schools specifically uh our high schools middle and elementary have some differences uh I know our high schools are we're transitioning the state has gone from requiring CCC as part of an accreditation to now it's the 3E um framework so we have to shift it uh but we want to make sure we're tracking data in real time so if we see patterns we can intervene in real time and not wait like till the end of the year to say oh attendance sure looked poor here or there whatever so I probably didn't enumerate every tile there are other tiles discipline disproportionality and so forth but those go out and they are a combined effort of uh interdepartmental data teams that uh bring those reports together to enable
103those um to be at our desk I think another one we're tracking is professional development are people completing the required professional development and in time and by region by school and department so just making sure we're checking in into engineer success um we want to make sure we're a division that sends reminders supports and resources to make sure you know everyone's able to show up as their best professional self when they come to work every day thank you um also I I was looking at the schooo numbers uh from August 2024 to December 2024 which it shows the active parents and parent sessions and I don't know if you all know what percentage of households this represents are you able to track that I will defer to Mr sethy I know we've been trying to
104capture data that's quantifiable on a lot of these data points do you have a percentage like it's the same parent over and over and over again or is it what are the discret households I think is the question is that correct the the parent count would be unique so those would be the total number of parents who are signed up so if you're looking at a total student body I think top of my head it was a 28,000 number so that's the percentage of parents who have access or who have chosen to set up access into schooly the engagement on when they come in and check the system um we can go and pull those records uh what you see right now is just overall engagement by all parents that's sort of what the data
105is out of the box so what I'm trying to get it is then can you also see what regions or what specific student you know schools or populations to we so we can see who's accessing that who isn't and where we have to do work yes we can do it for both the CIS parent logons and I think we have some other the data and also for schooly where we can see which regions what what level of schools is it mostly you will see schoy in secondary schools than elementary schools and that we can we can certainly discern that that finer details of Engagement because I I mean what I'm going to go to and this is just something that has that comes up to me a lot uh and I'm sure other board members
106have heard heard this is that there's a lot of different you know components like there's you know schooly CIS uh talking points and is are we disseminating that information in a readable accessible way to everyone and saying this is what this specifically does this is what this specifically does because I think there's a lot of confusion and and there's confusion from highly educated native born parents that are like I'm so confused and if they have two or three kids one in elementary one in high school when you know this school does it this way this school does it this way I'm getting all of this information I don't know which way to go um I mean do we have like toolkits out there for our parents to understand it and then and do we have
107it translated or do we are are we providing that I mean I think I agree with everything that everyone's saying here technology is great if you know how to use it yeah we certainly don't want want to leave we don't want to leave anyone behind in terms of access right access leads to engagement engagement leads to outcomes we we recognize that and our goal is to continue to increase the access and engagement so we work with a Communications team they they send out the parent uh the principal um talking points which we provide information to say hey principles at certain time of the year so at the beginning of the year they sent a lot more information to their homes saying these are the tools that you can sign up we also have or reorganized
108our public website so the parent engagement tools are all on one page so parents can very quickly see what's on what's available what they can get into um we can certainly go back and and engage on how much more dissemination I think another great idea which having hearing this conversation is possibly we could include uh tiles in our principal dashboards to give them a sense how many of your parents are engaging right because that engagement is probably going to start and stay best when the principles or the schools engage their families and this is this is a great idea I think we're going to work on this this year to make sure we can get schoy engagement and maybe the CIS engagement on a principal tile in the school pulse dashboard so they can get
109realtime data how many parents are coming into the system thank you um finally I mean I'm going to touch on the AI as well um this comes up from a situation that occurred in my district where um there was um a situation where a teacher gave out an assignment and didn't tell the students that she was she was going to use um the free version of grammar grammarly to check FP for plagiarism and anyway whatever happened she flunked all the students the students didn't know about it and apparently the parents complained and there really wasn't plagiarism involved and I don't know the exact details but that brings up some of the questions that have been brought up like in terms of you know how are our teachers being taught to use these tools how do
110they communicate it to students going to Integrity for students how they can use it and what and I know this is all moving quickly was that my time okay so I do know that we are working on units to make sure that we remind students about good digital citizenship um but uh I think there are times when our students are um moving at a quicker speed with some of the tools than we are um as adults uh but I know Mr sethy probably I know that's one of the things that uh the AI initiative is with teachers is as we're able to bring them on board sort of what tools um that we will be working with at some point and then the digital citizenship work yeah a couple of things and and welcome Mr
111presid to jump in Dr Presidio the plagiarism side is is has been a complicated conversation a lot of universities lot of school districts have tried to find a magical tool which can assess student work and they truly the false positive on those tools is just so high that we do not recommend to our staff to be able to rely on one tool I think their best judgment is knowing their student and how they perform and if if you see changes dramatic changes in their output then that's certainly a conversation they can have but we we have not authorized a plagerism checking tools so when teachers use them they're mostly doing it on their own because these free websites allow you to do that work but our guidance is not to go in that direction um
112in terms of uh the student engagement I I know we updated the srnr to talk about some of these issues and also the acceptable use policy that is shared out with the students which they they must acknowledge that they've seen and received it so there is guidance embedded in those in those documents which already capture a lot of these um what you can and can do and what you shouldn't do thank you sure thank you Miss St joh cunning Miss Dixit thank you Dr Reed for the presentation um I actually wanted to ask about the the page uh which talks about um Common Sense recognition the certificate given to 15 High School uh schools I don't know high schools out of these how many of our high schools and how many of Middle School are
113they only going are you guys doing only to those secondary schools or it's primary schools as well so yeah great question Mr exit and I I we probably should have had a listing of the schools but do we have a rundown uh Team whether these are primarily secondary or elementary schools I we I don't think we have the rundown right now but we could get that for you one thing to point out about that is that um The Common Sense certification has I think a five your window of time and then a school has to recertify so these are just the number of schools that did it this year but schools have been working on Common Sense recognition for a number of years um and we have many more schools that have earned the recognition
114than what we've represented here although potentially some of that recognition might have expired so it kind of is a moving Target a little bit but we could break it down by level um I do know a lot of elementary schools had worked on this really hard uh in the past so we can get the breakdown by level though and the reason I ask is and I don't know the the the what is all entails and that but uh cyber bullying um online harassments talking which are happening obviously for many many years now and um and sometime it's just too late for them to they're already feeling bullied already so if we can start teaching them early on when stud because technology is now on their fingertips since their fifth graders or sixth graders so um
115do you know if that is part of the program it it is and and again obviously I mean the curriculum looks different at different grade levels developmentally but at the elementary level there's a there's a lot to introduce students to the concept of using technology responsibly even starting to think about your own digital footprint that you're creating when you're using technology and certainly um not using technology in inappropriate ways including cyberbulling thank you uh my second question is about the smart Cloud approach of software software service I wanted to know it's a great uh way of obviously moving into the uh Cloud servers from the physical servers um and you also mentioned here Dr E that this strategy avoids uh typical large Capital expenses and uh with the Aging server so what kind of um
116savings we see by moving to this opt option um so in the early stages of the work and what is happening in the education Market if you see majority of the vendors are now selling software as a service and that completely shifts the notion of you have to run the server on your own the new etcm product that we purchased from Oracle typically currently we run our own um S servers to maintain the xcl product but the new service is going to be softed as a service which means there's not going to be a whole lot of server footprint and that saves the the capital cost cuz servers have to be replaced every X years right 5 years or 7 years depending on how far you can push them and that is a huge Capital
117cost when you kind of do the replacement Cycles when they move into the cloud the vendors move them into the cloud those Capital costs go away obviously it becomes more of an operational cost of running those systems inhouse we still have infrastructure left over where we are running certain things but almost everything that we are investing in at this point is hosted is software as a service and is not going to require us to install install a lot of infrastructure in house yeah right and that's where industry is moving like you said um I uh I would like to see some numbers actually the you know just the percentage wise that over a period of five years or something like that's going to be the saving uh we bring to FCPS because as the budget
118is getting tighter we need to show where we are doing really good job for like saving long-term uh our funds uh and uh I think I'll just ask one more question is about uh everybody asked about Ai and I would say that the Google Gemini I use that actually for my work um that is a very great tool that you're already um using here n FCPS and if this could help our teachers to take some of the admin burden off them um maybe just like more support for them to you know even lesson plan anything like that uh I think that's a great tool to to use um my last question was actually about uh do we use a virtual reality um in any of our classroom instructions I believe we do and I believe
119we've been piloting some of that as part of our Lighthouse project but I'll let Mr sethy uh respond but I do believe we are in certain content areas we we engaged on a tool which was available through the math department and there's certainly a lot of excitement on that tool set the hardware that comes along with it to scale that you have to purchase the headset and the headset Market is also evolving really fast I think uh meta Facebook uh company is the one which had the most available headset then Apple came into it but it was really expensive so we're watching that market evolve it's still early stages in that realm but it is certainly a new and very interesting way to engage students and not every student we we've seen in our testing
120not every student engages with it you know some have had motion sickness and all those other aspects that that they and especially the younger kids we don't want to use it with younger kids so early stages some testing going on with the vendors understanding how the tools work we had them attend our our midar annual conference where they were able to provide those tool sets to engage with lots of excitement around it I think it's going to show up in the next couple of years in our in our district yeah that excites me sorry you said last question but one tiny thing um we have grow our teachers program we have lot of PD and everything I want to see how we can grow our own own uh software developers sort of in our school
121system so if this this uh for smaller projects and we talked about Miss Le uh miss lady uh you remember about our maintenance um you know program which is kind of outdated and we talked about how we can use our students to and I guess dit is an excellent um you know Department to address that yes ma'am we'll uh work on our software developer acmy I think our students are um definitely ready so thank you m diit I'll take a turn um first I I want to say the very first motion I made on this board in February of 2020 was to bring light speed to our parents um which has a bit of symmetry with the same parents who were advocating over Middle School start times many of them share the same concerns about
122the use of Technology by their kiddos and so uh on two points one I I'd really love to see the number of parents using light speed explode I think 10,000 is great given where it started which was Zero um but uh we have a lot of parents who don't even know it exists so um I think we've got a little bit more work to do there secondarily on the Middle School start times question just for the public so that they're aware um the board has asked for a report back from the superintendent on our options which will beginning in February and then the board will be deciding how to proceed on the question of Middle School start time I want to talk about numbers so my parents are among the 1.3 billion uh people who
123use iPhones in this country and in 2023 they began using the address book technology on their iPhone that is probably the only piece of their iPhone that they use they don't download apps they don't listen to music uh they might take photos um although it might just be their face rather than what they're intending to take um and so while 51 million user sessions of schooly is a great factoid um what I would I think more like to know is what are the optimal uses by families of schooly what are the optimal uses of schooly by staff and how are the devices being used to accomplish those things obviously the optimal uses are things that drive student achievement and Student Success right um and then the disaggregation actually means something because even if we disaggregate
124the 51 Million number it doesn't tell us anything about the tool and so I know that there are some great Tools in there and uh you know we have colleagues who use the tool regularly everybody should have the opportunity to help their students succeed using these tools so I'd love to see um some more intentionality behind that and I have been talking to some colleagues about how we might might get there um the other thing I would note uh first I want to thank Mr sethy because we have come so far in just a a few years and this is just this section of the Els but if you go back and look at the Els that we do throughout the year every one of them is seated with new technology that has come to
125fruition thanks to this superintendent and your leadership and your team as well so thank you very much for being here and thank you for all of your incredibly diligent hard work um it has not got unnoticed and uh you're very much appreciated um to that end uh information technology security this is a perfect opportunity to talk about jar um what we spend on that front is used efficiently and effectively but we need more resources desperately so I hope our friends in the general assembly are listening tonight and that they will make progress on jar so that we have additional funding to fund this and other critical infrastructure needs so we will take some Gob backs oh Mr Dunn for his first turn uh thank you um I want to Echo what uh the chair said
126um I'll have some other comments but um the robustness the strength um that's really a worldclass it system um so uh I feel that very strongly uh and uh that being said um schoology I haven't met a single teacher parent student uh who likes schoology I really feel very strongly based on all my conversations that that's horse that needs to be taken out back and shot um I sorry to be blunt we really need a comprehensive reassessment of schoology if we have 27,000 parents and 183,000 students that's not frequency of use if we have I'm I've I've dealt I come from a background in the federal government where we build 12 it systems each doing one thing rather than having like One-Stop shop that really all the functionalities are used so we really need to
127look at schoology with frankis cuz I was there when I was first introduced and it was hated from the beginning and it's hated now now maybe there are parts of the county that it's not hated but my district definitely hates schoology so I hope that there can be an assessment of whether that's the right platform for us before we start trying to get everyone to get on schoology maybe there's a reason people aren't using it right maybe it's not one click easy like Amazon to buy a product maybe it's 15 steps to do a particular action and the information is just not accessible so I would appreciate Dr Reed if you'd be willing to take a look at it through that lens not committing necessarily just because we have it but should we have it
128is that the right platform to move forward yes sir um um I I think uh from for this El there was a great article in the Wall Street Journal recently um talking about you know there's so much technology and you know the pandemic catapulted us you know years forward in our um technology use and at this point I think it's not just a matter of keeping up right I'm not interested in keeping up I'm interested in should we keep up so not just how can we move faster but should we move faster with technology use because there are studies lot of data coming out showing that students learn better from taking notes by hand rather than typing on a computer um and you know learning you know listen less effective than teaching someone else taking
129notes summarizing right there's a whole mental processing and um I'm embarrassed Honestly by the handwriting the signatures of a lot of students I see in high school it looks like what you know kids learn when they first learn to write you know people don't can't read cursive anymore which is a problem they can't read letters from their grandmother or grandfather um and they can't take notes because they don't know how to write properly and a lot of kids don't learn how to type we don't seem to teach typing so if we're going full bore into Chromebooks in the future why aren't we teaching typing why aren't we teaching handwriting these are methods that work right we seem to be moving I've talked three minutes yeah okay i' like to go back all right Miss San
130thank you I just wanted to start with thank you Dr Reed um thank you Mr safy and the team there's been so many improvements these last year and i' just like to name a couple that have changed the way students approach it one is the parent digital consent forms now it's easy to like send it home to your parents get it digitally signed and you can come in the next day and use it without turning any papers in so thank you for that also the absence reporting insists especially for parents who have kids who go to different schools or maybe a middle school and a high school having it all streamlined where parents can go into sis and Report absences makes it so much easier than like doing one form and doing another form so
131thank you for that as well as keeping CIS open until the last day of the quarter especially with second quarter coming to an end students really appreciate being able to see their grades until the last day and having that clear transparency um one thing that I did want to talk about was the FCPS Chromebooks um that students have available um they're not always effective especially for students who may be in coding classes or art classes where they have to download software for that specific class um for example um in like an apcs class when you have to download like Java or python or whatever that platform is that you're using sometimes it's not available on the Chromebook for students to be able to download or it's just not possible to download it on a Chromebook
132um and I know that at chantilli TJ and Woodson students have the option to switch out their Chromebooks for other laptops where they may be able to download that software but I was wondering if that was the case across all schools or what the numbers are were the Divi on the divisions between secondary students using Chromebooks versus other laptops thank you Miss and you rais good questions right because some of those softwares are essential for success in certain courses so Mr sey I think they should be available at all schools to change out do you want to share our practice there yes so the the practice that we we set up for this is for classes where the teacher deems it necessary for the student to have uh different device I.E a Windows device they
133can certainly and very quickly request that and the students can go swap their Chromebooks out to the Windows device it's just not restricted to those three schools so if there is any any misunderstanding that we had to clear up we would be happy to do so this opportunity for all and even at the middle school level the other um hope as all these Technologies evolve is that the idea of installing software on your computer becomes a historic action simply because of cyber security and other risk that come in when you install software on your computers you you can bring in issues which you do not want and working through the browser is becoming the uniform default choice for most modern Technologies and I understand our curriculum especially from the state takes a long time to
134change and so they might dictate because it was six years ago it was the only practice that was available that you must use a certain kind of device and a certain kind of software but I'm hopeful and we will certainly be making those uh those recommendations that they move towards web- based platforms where students can very quickly engage and do the activities without having to rely on special software when it comes to um uh Photoshop and other tools like that we also provide highend labs in schools and at least in high schools where they can go in and do the work on those highend lab those highend Windows computers because that that kind of work generally cannot happen on the student Windows devices they're very low power devices to begin with yeah yeah and I
135completely understand that um and I do I do know students who choose to use like um like a virtual interface or whatever it may be to use those platforms and I do understand the risk of like not being able to download software on your computer just because of whatever the safety risk may be um but just what I've heard from students is that sometimes it is easier to just run that platform instead of trying to run it through a virtual interface especially when you have your assignment open or you have other tabs open for instructions so um just a thought for the future thank you Miss want thank you Miss SW we'll do Gob backs Dr Anderson thank you if you could speak a little bit Mr sey to the change and um timeline regarding
136changing or updating the devices that students receive it says in the document that we've gone from four years to five years yeah so we started this year with teacher laptop replacement traditionally we had been replacing teacher laptops every four years and we feel as the technolog is evolving the Reliance on the browser to do most of your activity doesn't need you to have much more complex new CPUs you know there was a there was a time when Intel would sell you a new chip every year pushing you to keep upgrading your laptops those are not the cases anymore so and and also in the light of the conversations we're just having around budget efficiencies our total footprint of devices is now substantially high if we keep replacing them every four years we certainly incur much
137larger costs and our go goal to stabilize those costs is to spread it out a little bit and we are committing to providing support for the devices for the full five year life of those devices and if if one is damaged or cannot be repaired we will figure out a way to kind of get them a replacement laptop so our students are always have a device in their hands no that's very much appreciated thank you um because I know a few years ago one of the concerns that I had that I raised was about the E-Waste can you give us a sense to how much we um we gener right so couple of things I think the team which is right here and they spend a considerable amount of time before something is wasted they
138piece it apart take out all the parts and pieces because that can be used to repair other laptops which are still active right it it it goes through a series of reviews before something is is given up as waste we also talk in this report and we had previously mentioned where every employee connected initiative that Dr Reed asks us to move towards where we're taking all laptops refurbishing them installing lightweight Chrome OS and then repurposing them to give to devices to staff who typically does not get devices I think there's a number in there that last year we had done about 2,000 something and this year we added another 1,800 devices into that mix so we're constantly trying to optimize with 40,000 staff We Believe technology is now a gateway to many things and giving
139them access to technology is an imperative and also an opportunity that we feel strongly about okay thank you I just want to talk about schooo a little bit and and um parent view as a very frequent user I definitely help your numbers in those areas I have to say I don't hate it but I also do not love it it is very cumbersome there has to be an easier way to make it a little bit more user friendly and I think Miss um St John cunning really hit the nail on the head you have some parents who are very techsavvy and it's still it is multiple clicks to get to where you need and and also in order to get a full picture of your child's progress you have to go to schooo G and
140then go to uh parent view you can't just do one or the other because they don't have all the same information I I think there they could talk with each other a little bit more um seamlessly in order for it to be a real One-Stop shop so I don't know what the possibilities here are Mr sethy but I'd love to hear your thoughts there are certainly opportunities I think uh we've been told by the vendors who Supply apply some of these tools that they can actually provide a portal which combines like CIS data and schoolagy data because parents are typically getting in there to review performance grades output pending homework and those are options that we can engage on and we are taking all of the schoology feedback to Heart right we engage with the
141the vendor who supplies as this software pretty frequently at the pretty high levels um we will certainly make sure they're aware of our concerns and figure out a strategy of bringing them in and engaging deeply on on the product to say are there improvements they can make to the product we are a large customer of theirs are there other opportunities that they can provide to us so it becomes much easier for our families to use and also for our students yeah thank you and and also having a more consistent approach from schools because once you're in secondary schools um it's really challenging to figure out what the seven teachers are doing differently in schoology and having to keep up with that so that's also a point um I I know you're a huge proponent of
142having um textbooks something in the kids hands that they're taking home how is that impacting our investments in digital textbooks I don't know that we have a big investment in digital textbooks at this time um Dr precidio um I think I think what most of the vendors have and what we've tried to take advantage of is the hard copy resource as a classroom resource with the digital components that can more personalize The Learning Experience to students based on their level of need um and that's really I think where the market is in most with most of the Publishers right now so it's really kind of a hybrid uh with hard copy and digital uh resources combined together is typically how the Publishers are marketing their materials and I think that's probably true for the uh
143literacy materials or for math the student do not have a math textbook It's All Digital that's cor that's correct but we're in the process of initiating our uh math adoption right now that's on the I think on new business tonight is for board members to appoint their committee members and we're looking at a hybrid uh environment again for math as we um go through this basal adoption process thank you Dr Anderson actually it's my expectation that we have a text for mathematics moving forward um I think all text currently have some resources that support online but we definitely need a text and written materials that go home with students for family support um for homework so I think right now we have pacing Guides Online and a lot of online activities but I'm not aware
144particularly at the elementary of an Elementary online math textbook I don't believe that currently exists but I think there are online materials but I don't know that that's a textbook because I see a lot of variant materials um school to school and class to class in mathematics right now but is there a publisher that's um published an online math textbook that we use right now yeah I mean that's what we adopted in the last cycle seven years ago so again um under Dr Reed's leadership we're definitely looking at increasing the investment in hard copy resources y 100% thank you Dr Reid Miss Marin yeah I appreciate the topics my colleagues have brought up including about textbooks and writing and intentional teaching of Technology I'll try and be succinct in this uh little clip here but
145you know I want to underscore that we just need to have consistent use of Technology Platforms in practice for our students for their benefit and for our teachers so they are not looking at a million different apps to make something work um I also want to continue to advocate for consistent and intentional required professional development um you know are our teachers getting professional development on schooly when they are hired or at the start of a school year to see upgrades um do they know how to teach students how to use schooly um and it's not only limited to schooly I'd really love to see some consistent business rules for electronic communications is e notify in the report it said it was used for certain types of more operational things but I've gotten you know as
146a parent e notifies about hey check your email I just send it or don't forget to you know pick your kid up well that's kind of operational or other things but you know it's not clear like when are these Avenues used for the messages um and again just more information about this master learning management system I also think it would be helpful to have budget and cost numbers so and I know we're going to see your budget soon but you know is where are the Investments being made are they working should the even more globally the executive limitation reports include crosswalks with the budget and um costs like what's our run rate on all these things um and then I just again think we need more training or usage um that is required there's too
147much in here about if things are offered or staff may do it or webinars were held well okay even if you know people showed up what did they do with that information was that a useful you know use of our resources so um I also want to put a plugin for that dit upscaling Academy I mean that sounds great uh an online uh education offering but only 338 students and 521 employees are using that so what's the goal there thank you thank you Miss Marin Miss Lady thank you I appreciate the comments but I I also do from a teacher perspective I feel like I want to talk about schooly um here's the reality it's very similar to my AI question what's the plan for training because the situation is that early adopters and self-learners
148love it um those who only did that to what they had to do to check the box they're not maximizing it and what what consumers what parents are seeing is the discrepancy which is the multiple clicks and the lack of understanding um it's a fantastic communication tool has the ability to increase accessibility of materials and assignments for students with disabilities and multilanguage Learners and allows for udl enhancements to meet more Learners where they are increases ability for students to access learning and time place pace and pathway and best use scen scarios take teacher engagement to learn how to facilitate them in the digital space so you know there are a lot of benefits but you know uh additionally teachers can assign modified assignments to students with disabilities multilanguage Learners that roll at the same time
149as the rest of the class allowing them to work at an appropriate level simultaneously as the rest of the class without everyone seeing their differences and how the instruction practices are different so the problem is similar to my question about Ai and that is that the capacity gap between those who know how to use it and those who don't so again early adopters they're running with technology so there has to be a point to where we spend this money and we have a Maserati it seems like but we have people who are driving it like a pinto um and so my question again is what's the plan for training so that our instructional staff can maximize this because when used appropriately it's fantastic IC for differentiation and also as a communication tool for parents so
150it sounds like we need a plan for training so um I will work with staff to develop um a plan for training thank you Dr Reed Mr Dunn is there a plan to teach students typing Dr precidio do we have a instructional plan for teaching typing we don't do that universally no um so I mean I think the answer is no sir yeah not at this time why if we provide every student with a laptop why wouldn't we teach them to type well I mean there is research that would say that students just even using hunting and pecking methodology can type almost as fast as people with technical typing training so there's that aside but I think a lot of this just comes to in this this is back to Miss Lady's comments about training
151a lot of this is just time in the school day to do these things um where would we put that into the curriculum we're we're struggling now to cover all the things that we have in the elementary curriculum and at the secondary level if we're going to teach that class then that's obviously a class that students aren't going to be able to take an elective of their choice so it's it's trade-offs and balances maybe we've had that wrong in the past but that's just kind of how we've gotten to to this point right now can I ask for a plan because if we're going to to teach them how to use schology they can't learn it very well if they don't even know how to type what um I will certainly commit to at least
152bringing back some research on that like how many divisions are still teaching typing and maybe some research on the benefits of that would that be helpful before we set off on that Journey okay I do remember would it also be possible to bring back research on teaching cursive handwriting yes sir I can do that um can I ask uh you know learning online summer courses such as Finance I've looked at the personal finance it's a great curriculum we pay good money um but it's taught in the summer taken online by uh by students and there's rampant cheating so they're not really learning the content has there been any assessment of actually looking at teaching something like that in person rather than online and the effectiveness of using technology resources actually achieving the educational goals so
153I'm I'm not aware of rampant cheating um and would be disappointed if that were true if you if you Googled the questions they're all on those uh flashcard websites I see so I think um I know that often students are taking that course in the summer online to make room in their schedule for other courses right perhaps U the Arts or Another World Language so um have we ever taught that course in person Dr Presidio is that a course we I think we offer it during the school day but you can choose online for the summer so is your question I think do we ever offer it in person during the summer versus online during the summer is that the question if I'd like to see an assessment of whether it should be continued to
154be offered online given the fact that all the answers are available on flashcard websites and are we actually chaining the like why offer the class online at all if kids aren't going to learn the content well if the answers are online whether they'd be in person or virtual would they still have access to the answers or is it a different type of on it must be asynchronous online then is that perhaps Mr or Dr precidio you could comment on I'd have to I'd have to hear the question again I was taking notes on the other two uh next steps of research I apologize this would be the online personal finance course during the summer have we ever offered the reason yeah the reason we have that is when the state pass that requirement it was
155another course that students needed to complete which again is limiting their choice of of availability for electives so we came up with actually I think a dozen different ways that students could fulfill that requirement and one of the ways is to do it online through the online campus and many students take advantage of that and then that frees up room in their schedule to take a different class of Interest Dr Presidio the question was do we ever offer it in person during the summer because of a concern around the possibility of rampant cheating in the online well again I apologize for not hearing the correct question um we have a pretty limited course offerings during the summer and our summer Extended Learning Program is really focused on credit recovery so we've not offered that class
156in person during the summer we've really focused on those courses that students need to to repeat for budgetary reasons could there be an assessment of whether there is rampant cheating and we have evidence of that just Googling online I mean I've done it so I know there is but um you know whether that should continue to be offered online given the availability of all the answers yes sir I think we'll do a deep dive into the possibility of rampant cheating in personal finance thank you yes sir thank you Mr Dunn I now call on Miss seore Heiser for a motion thank you I move that the school board finds a superintendent is in compliance with executive limitation number 12 technology I further move that the school board approved the monitoring report based on the superintendent's
157reason interpretation of executive limitation 12 technology as outlined in the Strategic governance manual is there a second second thank you Miss Lady Miss seis Mar Heiser would you like to speak to your motion yes thank you I'd love to speak to this motion um I'm while there's always room for improvement with technology because technology is changing so rapidly there's always more that we can do and um more um that we can come up today too I'm actually very impressed with what we've done and this is a little foreshadowing of my remarks later on but this is I think an example all the work we're doing on technology of both the promise of Technology as well as the realities of schools today public education is being asked to do more maintaining an entire it infrastructure and
158I think we're doing it pretty well um than we've ever had before and this is an example but it's also the promise um in terms of the data dashboard that I know you've created and the ability to have um the information that you mentioned Dr Reed every morning 630 and for the principles to really be able to um in real time and every day adapt to the the needs of their students and the teachers and staff I think even that the use of AI has a lot of Promise has a lot of um potential for harm as well so we need to be careful as we tread there but there's a lot of potential I like some of the work that you're doing around that um and just the amount you've used technology to make
159people's lives easier whether it's online registration to online impact Aid um making Cy available all all of these things and integrating mtss into CIS to make it easier for schools to provide support is huge so I'm happy to to to do this I just want to make a couple comments as I've listened to my um colleagu speak I do think that if we're going to prepare our students for the future we can't shy away from teaching them responsible use of technology and teaching them how to use technology I think one of my um colleagues mentioned earlier um software engineering classes I think that's great or a techn I I think a te Technology Academy we have TJ we're really focused on technology policy psychology and integrating technology into society I think is such an important
160thing that we need to look at um not just giving our the kids the tech skills but sort of the responsible use of Technology um I did want to just mention around personal finance I um I think if we're going to look at rampant cheating in one class we probably should look at just in general all of our classes I know for a lot of students have personal finance available online has helped them to achieve a standard diploma to be able to have for students with disabilities be able to have four to six years to um use their idea time to get what they need it has helped students be able to access electives um that they want to takes so I I I think we maybe I want to have a broader conversation around
161online classes but I'd hate to sort of focus on one I know um for my two kids one took it in the summer online and one took it in person in during the school year and they both had good experiences with it so I think it's maybe a broader conversation about what we offer online um I do think I appreciate the Wi-Fi that we're doing I I do think we really need to look at how we're teaching both our teachers and and students on the possibilities of technology and the responsible use of Technologies but in the meantime I think you demonstrated a ton of Innovations and improvements you've done in our use of technology so I'm happy to move this thank you M Heiser miss lady would you like to speak to your second no
162thanks thank you all right the motion is on the screen all those in favor Miss Marin Miss Dixit Mr mline Dr Anderson Mr McDaniel Miss Anderson Mr Dunn Mr Moon uh miss lady Miss San cunning Miss seism Mor Heiser and myself that is unanimous all right uh we will take our moment after we do the policy review so we will go ahead and pick the next item up um agenda item 7.01 policy review technology el12 the next order of business is the policy review for el12 annually the board will review each executive limitation at the time of the monitoring report is provided to determine if revisions are needed board members may offer amendments to Executive limitations at any regular meeting provided they send final Amendment language to the board and clerk at least 48 hours
163in advance of the meeting at which it is is to be considered at this time no Amendments have been submitted in advance of the meeting but board members May provide comments on el12 technology policy before we vote on maintaining the current language for the year ahead I call on Miss seore Heiser for a motion I move that the school board maintains executive limitation 12 technology as currently detailed in the Strategic governance manual is there a second second thank you Miss eisar Heiser would you like to speak to your motion no I think this is a pretty comprehensive so I'm good thank you thank you miss lady would you like to speak to your second no thank you Miss Marin yes uh colleagues I will be working with Miss Anderson to develop some language for an
164amendment on this policy at our next meeting and it's been agendized tonight as a new um item new business item I look forward to receiving your input and support thank you thank you Miss Marin seeing no others with the language on the screen of the motion we will take a vote all those in favor Miss Marin M Mr mine Dr Anderson Miss Anderson Mr Dunn Mr Moon miss lady Miss St John cunning Miss seore Heiser and myself that is unanimous for board members present we will take a 10-minute recess five minute recess I know it's going to take us 10 minutes but we're going to take a five minute recess [Music] board members please return to your seats e e board members please return to your seats agenda item 8.01 academic matters I call on
165Dr Reid for academic matters um thank you chairman frish and this evening uh we are bringing the light into the board setting uh with the discussion about uh our Lighthouse schools initiative as part of our academic matters uh this project is a multi-year partnership um with ist which is the international Society for technology in education and represents a strong step forward towards supporting our strategic plan goal five leading for tomorrow's Innovation and I want to start by sharing that this project provides coaching professional development and builds a community of practice um to support realtime Real World Learning experiences that are authentic relevant inclusive and aligned with essential skills of future learning and work many of our Lighthouse schools are piloting teacher AI tools this year and these schools uh were were selected to Pilot Advanced
166AI tools um and are learning validating and aligning future teaching practices uh where AI is available um honestly where when AI is available ubiquitously is a purposeful way to empower Educators enhance equity and prepare our students for a rapidly changing world I think Mr sethy you said a number of our team are here from our Lighthouse schools program so thank you for being here this evening appreciate that um this is exciting work I want to share that we have a year one year two uh and central office cohort this program began in January of 2024 with an opland application process for all secondary schools to be part of the cohort and the year one cohort had six secondary schools um secondary meaning middle and high schools and an alternative school the year 2 Innovation cohort
167expanded to include Elementary and central office with a total of eight schools and two teams uh joining the program the program design um is really a combination between IST and ascd and for those keeping track of the um acronyms that's the association for curriculum development uh supervision and curriculum development and um provides um a sustainable community of practice and professional development lined to the um Technology International technology standards throughout the year coaching is provided on the concept of design uh Sprints supporting Innovative school goals school teams use a human centered approach which is um one that's designed to reflect on their work and create use cases to share their learning and staff are also supported with webinars online courses and access to membership and resources additionally these Lighthouse schools have exclusive access to Pilot approved
168AI tools um like AI geminy or Google's uh Gemini Advanced wanted to share this evening just a short um slide on data and as you can see we do have 17 teams across the division that are supporting over 1,800 Educators close to 2,000 um as you also look at it there are 840 hours of shared conversations between the coaching staff from isty and the uh instructional technology Lighthouse team leads and the school teams there are a significant number of hours uh over 12,000 uh for professional development with school Champions and leaders uh self-paced PD for teachers um and the number of teachers almost 18,000 Educators um that have IST portal membership I want to share a couple examples of the Innovative projects that have been underway these are at four of our sites and you
169can see obviously on the screen um examples uh Lemon Road Elementary School currently is redesigning communication channels um to Ure inclusivity and equity for All Families uh with ideas like shadowing families to better understand their experiences and aligning with strategic plan pillar two Center Ridge elementary school is leading efforts to prepare students for their future with career and College college readiness portfolios um their processes and ideas are really more aligned with Goal five of our strategic plan and Cooper middle school has been using AI tools to refine and expand a cross-curricular project that creates historical figures into superheroes it's an interesting project I'll have to learn a a little more about that um more some more spotlights we have Hunters Woods Elementary focusing on designing their steam lab and empowering student ambassadors to help lead
170work and uh mlan High School AI is being leveraged by teachers for data analysis helping to create newsletters and streamlining operational work supporting instructional staff and as we had in our previous conversation these are opportunities to beta test or Pilot um strategies that again pilot pilot prove and scale and as these we work out the bugs with these uh projects we're able to bring a proof of concept and potentially bring them to scale across the division at Bryant High School uh staff are using support for students unable to attend school by using neat board technology to set up highdefinition hybrid classrooms again uh maintaining student uh academic consistency and engagement so the lesson Les we've learned um from Lighthouse schools are not confined to those selected schools and I want to make sure that um
171there's an understanding that um all schools will benefit from the work that these early adopters have chosen to do this initiative is laying the ground work for broader districtwide adoption of AI tools and practices um and wanting to make sure that what we do Implement across the entire division is purposeful Equitable and scalable throughout our partnership A playbook is being developed to guide Innovation and Technology integration in schools and this spring the lighthouse schools will begin a series of learning walks to see each other's innovation in action as they collaborate to improve shared outcomes now I'd like to share a video of our year one Lighthouse schools mlan high school Bryant high school and Madison High School so let's go ahead and roll video please [Music] the lighthouse program gave us an opportunity to um
172really come out of you know Co and all that and when we were kind of just at a loss of where we were in education it felt like it just felt like we were stuck in this place and were we ever going to find Improvement we we going to find that we're going to find creativity again and so when that project came about when they started explaining what it was about it was it seemed to me like a good opportunity for us to to start looking at ways of improving education about improving things for students for teachers and for our community so when AI came out we saw was going to have a big implication um in education and lots of different Industries and so Ai and education is one big use case but we
173wanted to see how we can focus in a little more on what that looks like and so because of our partnership with Google we were able to Source their AI tool Gemini so that all teachers and FCPS all staff and FCPS have access to Gemini chat still within our digital ecosystem still within our uh Google workspace and still you know covered by our data protections now our our Lighthouse schools have an additional layer of Gemini access they have Gemini Advanced which is another level of this tool that works inside of your Google Drive so when I am working with Gemini a lot of times initially I will use it to see if there are other ideas for how to present some sort of lesson so for instance I was doing a um lesson on how
174plants grow with uh our cat B program and science is not my forte so therefore I wanted to see what Gemini would suggest for um lesson planning different activities and the like I had a loose idea in my head of what I wanted but I wanted to think outside the box and I wanted to approach it maybe a little bit differently I am now isty certified so going through the modules it's like we think we know about technology but I don't know if I would know how to teach it I don't know if I would know how to have a a strong conversation with somebody about it until I got the knowledge and the vocabulary and an understanding of what it can do in the classroom so Brian is super grateful to be a lighthouse
175school um this is an opportunity for Brian to have access to technology resources we can leverage those against the needs of our students at we have students that come from 11 different pyramids they come with a myriad of needs and being able to have these conversations about how to use technology to reach our school Improvement goals to improv student achievement student engagement is probably the most critical at Bryant and these tools have helped us reduce the amount of time on task to evaluate and look at all the different components of feedback is we look at redesigning a mission statement or what is that next thing that I need to be considering to move Madison forward Lighthouse has given us the tools the space and the time to be able to do those things Madison being
176a lighthouse school I'm able to get support from my colleagues on a different level and then also collaborate with people across the county and it just opens more doors and it's not just isolated like I said to my one subject so when I started I originally jumped into ways that I can help and make my instruction more fun and like engaging for students and then it started kind of morphing into how I can give my students better feedback and how I can use uh Gemini with my drive to almost like as a thought partner with to it's like reflect how my rubrics my lessons and my assessments kind of go together so those are kind of the three big things that I've done um so student engagement self-reflection and feedback what does it mean to
177be a lighthouse school what it means is we are given permission to innovate we're given permission to try new things to push the envelope and you can't do that unless you have good solid instructional Vision you have to have Technology support and you have the have the willingness and the mindset of your teachers to try new things you have to make an environment that's safe for them Lighthouse School gives us permission to do do those [Music] things so just want to close this topic out by reminding uh folks that uh this is a key initiative to help prepare our staff to support our students for a future really that is yet to Be Imagined and we're proud to lead the way um in providing every student and educator these benefits and opportunities um and as
178we look ahead it's really important to think about how we're creating these Dynamic learning experiences um and that culture of innovation that several of our principles talked about we're not going to be able to make those next moves without uh folks trying something new and feeling uh creating that safe space for them to try new things so very excited about this project and happy to answer any questions the board might have about it thank you Dr Reid Dr Anderson thank you this is very exciting work it's just nice to see how um engaged the students are and how excited the educators are about the possibilities um my one question that I have is how are we quantifying the impact of all of this work on student outcomes because we have to have the through line
179to whether it be quantitative data or um portrait of a graduate skills how is this being incorporated or being thought about since we're still with a small cohort right so it's um relatively new program obviously and um the intent is to provide tools and training to Educators to enhance the um teaching and learning experience for children right as we move forward in this um and so trying to capture uh return on investment data uh right now on that um I think we'll have to contemplate what that will look like uh you know how do you measure engagement I think probably there variety of ways how do we measure excitement um I think quantifying Innovation almost makes it um is just an interesting concept so I I think I would have to think about that U
180Mr sey do you have sort of uh thoughts I know I've talked to the team because part of the proof or Pilot pilot proof scale before we're going to bring anything to scale we have to understand its impact right and you run that cost benefit analysis but Mr sethy thoughts early thoughts on that because we are early days these are early days and and much of the engagement is with schools I think this is installing the practices which can help them support and engage with their students um so the quantitative data it's going to be a lagging indicator and it's likely going to show up in a few I will say years plus we we're only in 17 buildings and we are trying to sort of organically grow this instead of kind of mandating it
181across the division because it's it's a it's a it's a need which requires commitment of time and resources from every school and we recognize time is is a tight commodity currently in the buildings sure thank you um it it's definitely something for us to wrap our minds around because one of the things you said in your response to me was we want to enhance the learning environment we have to be able to describe what that is yes ma'am and if we're not not able to articulate what it is to look like when you've arrived we won't ever know how much growth is necessary um but just kind of as another side one of the things that I I get concerned about there are a lot of wonderful things that are going on and and it
182typically is that schools are left to self- select to participate and it just seems to be that it's the same schools that are participating in some of these activities and again this is just anecdotal this is just me just running through in my head what I have asked about and what we've had where it's been a self- selection I just wonder if there's a better way to do that because we end up clustering some innovation in in in only a few places no fair point and I think because it's an add-on or an extra and we're not ready to bring it to scale we're not ready to require it so I think the question is where do we engineer excitement um or engineer um interest um and I I think it's a question we wrestle
183with on a variety of topics so fair point thank you Dr Anderson seeing others we'll move on in the agenda the next item on the agenda and thank you by the way to everybody from the team who is here yeah the next item on the agenda is agenda item 8.02 strategic Plan update Dr Reed thank you chairman fris and members of the board uh this evening uh I want to talk a little bit about um our strategic plan uh food and nutrition services topics around goal two and as you know our strategic plan has a variety of goals goal two is our safe supported included and empowered goal and I'll wait till we bring it up uh this evening um and and uh one of the this particular goal uh the measure we're going to
184utilize this evening that we're going to take a look at is a positive School climate inclusion and a sense of belonging and this evening I will be highlighting how our FCPS food and nutrition services have been championing student voice uh through offering new student driven menu options and I think we sometimes look at student voice in more traditional ways but I think it's important to amplify these prti practices across other division operations and the program goals here are listed and it's really something I think that uh we know that healthy food fuels learning and this program helps ensure that every student is well nourished and ready to succeed so we're very excited about that and Melissa here tonight oh there she is okay uh Melissa D'Angelo is our director of food and nutrition services in
185case I need to phone a friend uh Melissa's here so um I do want to say that the menu driven options uh that this office actively seeks student feedback throughout the year we also have a food show and focus groups on February 27th we'll be hosting um at the Westfield Marriott we'll be hosting the future of FCPS student food show where over 200 students from all grade levels will sample and provide feedback on various breakfast and lunch recipes um based on feedback from last year's uh food event over 20 new scratch made menu items were added to the fall cycle menu including Korean barbecue chicken drumstick chicken Tiki Masala and chana masala so there are a lot of menu options that are the result of this work and our students are um enjoying uh healthy
186food and the scratch cooking is really a commitment we've been making um to healthier nonprocessed foods throughout the school year here the office of food and nutrition holds student focus groups as well and these focus groups uh give students the opport opportunity to try dishes that are upcoming and share their honest feedback with our chef and our dietitian these student surveys are used to gather valuable insights and ensure that our meals are delicious and student improved um these cycle menus happen at least twice a year so at this time I'd like to show some highlights of our students sharing their Keen feedback on new menu options Madam clerk if you would please play the video food and nutrition services has really been trying to make sure that we're putting students at the center of our
187every single one of our plates one we do it through increasing student engagement and increasing student voice one of our strategies is doing a food show that we host every single year now and it's a way for us to invite a variety of different diverse students populations whether it's elementary school middle school or High School making sure that they're sampling out at least 20 different menu Concepts and then giving us immediate feedback for that as well which one do we like better the one you just tasted or the one before before are focus groups a smaller focus groups where we bring in a few students where we go out to a school and have a few students sample out a few different menu options provide us detailed feedback about those menu options and what they
188would like to see in the future we really want to make sure that every single menu option that we launch on our on our menus is student tested and student approved so number one is going to be a chicken Philly which is on the sub roll it should be up top on your plate I tried the chicken Philly Stu I think it would be better if there weren't any Peppers because the peppers add too much sweetness thank you for that I I thought it was just perfect and I gave it a five heart I'm not even going to tell you what the spice is I'm just going to say it's a Southeastern spiced chicken I thought it was it was good but it's really salty it's like the same chicken that my uncle my dad
189makes it I think there's some kind of sweet sauce on this that I'm not a big fan of but otherwise I like it this is our special sauce that we're going to start serving for your chicken nuggets your chickenless chicken put on your hamburgers dip your p Pizza in it's called Fairfax sauce the Fairfax sauce is really good I like chicken spicy I like it spicy I think this is really good but I think it I rub this down cuz it's a great a great a great sauce and I'm going to give this to my mom so that way she can help me make it that way we can have it every night and day for dinner it's like um my sace wow good Fairfax County Public Schools food nutrition services is really focusing on
190just elevating student voice and making sure that every single decision that we make is through the lens of is this best for our students and is this what our students want students uh need to know what they're eating before they just eat it and if they're going to like it or not also because adults don't have to make food choices I think that student voice is important because if we take a sample of students um they have different pettes than the adult so whatever they like is most likely that the other students will like it too we know that food is fuel food is fuel for students to really succeed in their academics but it's also more than fuel it's Traditions it's family it's part of our comfort and it's part of our celebrations and
191we want to make sure that FNS is providing food to our students that can represent at all Excellence equity and [Music] opportunity and so um our students actually are quite well informed about um their pallets um and what they really uh value and the exciting uh piece is that I am so proud of all our food nutrition services staff the excitement that they have in serving healthier food the um scratch cooked food versus the highly processed foods there's just a different level of energy and I'm really proud of all of our staff our kitchen staff and um um our central office our dietician staff and Melissa and Shan uh really turning what's a ginormous operation completely uh turning the dial to some seriously healthy food so very proud of the team so thank you uh
192Mr Fish I appreciate the opportunity to update thank you Dr Reed several of us up here are wondering when Fairfax sauce is going to be for sale to the general public so I know if there's a secret ingredient I don't know if Melissa can give it up um are you ready to disclose Fairfax sauce secret ingredient don't tell I didn't ask for the secret ingredient I asked when it's going to be available for sale a secret come on up Melissa Your Eyes Only football games plays like yeah all right all right thank you Melissa thank you uh Mr mine thank you Dr Reed thanks Melissa and thanks to um Sean in CA as well as our new Chef glad to see him on the screen um and obviously as you said all of our FNS
193staff for all the work they put into this I would just say uh very briefly that um seeing something like this a decade ago was unheard of um and the progress we've made in that time is is truly incredible just as you said um you know at that time we were essentially just meet meeting bare minimum federal guidelines and now we've just elevated it um so great and I one thing that you didn't mention is the the new um standards that we've Set uh for our food and I think that's something that should be shared with the board as well I don't know if you want to speak to that about uh so we have a group of six registered dietitians on staff so we're very proud of the number of dietitians that we have
194and about a year ago we got together and we said what are the standards that we're doing internally right we have our federal standards that are federally mandated then we have state standards then we have those local standards we really wanted our local standards to reflect um the the quality of food that we wanted to be providing to students and so we've um made a commitment to work on ensuring that our foods do not have such additives like high fructose corn syrup um uh no um additional uh like fillers when it comes to our proteins right so you're not going to find soy fillers in our in our chicken and you're not going to find soy fillers in our in our Taco beef um and then also uh removing all MSG and so really trying
195to make um our food items as clean label as possible which then again it elevates the quality of it but then also helps increase also um for those students who may have food allergies there's less fillers in there right and then it's also we're able to go ahead and meet their needs in a better and easier way well thank you so much and that's just one small slice of the work that you've done so congratulations again thanks thank you Mr mavan Mr Dunn um congratulations food um food safety and uh providing delicious food that's healthy nutritious uh is is so important um have you made any efforts to partner with organizations like World Central Kitchen which um does work around the world and has really pioneered how to deliver you know uh very tasty you
196know almost restaurant quality food at incredibly low prices so this time with World Tindle kitchen exactly no but that's also why we have a new Chef on board right to be a ble to bring in that industry experience from the outside so then that way we can go ahead and continue to work on not only bringing student voice to the table but then Elevate our food when we we do have that student feedback um and so it's definitely something to consider for us to continue continue to look at our Partnerships do what existing Partnerships uh do you have right now with outside organizations that might be in this field yeah so um currently right now right we will we do work with real food for kids um on a regular basis we also do have
197Partnerships with capital AA Food Bank um various food um uh Fairfax County Health Department um uh as well so for like the food Council um and then we also regularly engage with uh Virginia Department of uh education and then we are also a member of the urban School Food Alliance which then represents a um High number of the largest school districts in the country and then that's when we're also able to learn from them their practices um we're able to definitely do some knowledge sharing and we're able to um uh look at our processes alongside with them and just continue to be more efficient and and um to be able to just Elevate our practices um in addition to getting rid of uh soy fillers and things like that uh do you uh track at
198all the use of artificial dyes such as red Dy 40 that was just banned by the FDA yes so we actually do not have any additional um like dieses or artificial colors on our serving lines to students so that was something something that did not impact the food that's directly on our service line and do have we entirely banned or eliminated the use of high fructose corn syrup yes we have at this point that's fantastic and when was that achieved that was achieved probably about a year ago we looked at the foods that we had we didn't have many we did have some that were affected um and then we went ahead and we were able to get rid of them we put new foods out to bid and then through our procurement process we're
199able to go ahead and procure items that were um high fructose corn syrup free and did you uh replace it with cane sugar or did you find other sweeteners or did you just adopt new types of food that might be like spicy or have other flavors so I would say probably more the latter than the former um so like for instance uh our barbecue sauce right it did high high fructose corn syrup we were able to go ahead and eliminate that and it was replaced with an alternative um you know natural sugar um the exact one I'd have to get back to you but then what we also have done is with um diversifying uh our flavors those products as well they all have been coming in um high fructose corn syrup it is a
200standard that we provide to our vendors so then again when we put out um a bid and we go through the procurement process we are very adamant about do not come and bid um an item you know that is going to contain these particular um additives that we do not want and to be serving to our students and to what extent do we use you know local farms or local DC region rather than you know distant farmers in other countries yeah we're really proud of the increase of local food products and produce that we've been able to also provide to our students um so last year we were keeping track and uh we were able to increase so we had about I want to say 17% of our produce uh was local we are now
201actually um also tracking our local food products along with our our produce so like for instance we have um like our corn chips they come from Abita which is a plant in Manasses right so we know that that's just right down um the way our fresh fruit and vegetable program uh we have 10 schools that receive uh that Grant and so we're able to go ahead and bring a lot of local produce and that's where students get exposed to fresh fruits and vegetables uh two to three times per week and so we've been able to really also increase those Partnerships we also work with a food Hub called 4p and they are able to go ahead and help us procure those local food products can you provide an update on the scratch kitchens are those
202in all schools now so our scratch me Foods is is um they have been increasing so we do not have kitchens that are outfitted to do um meals completely from scratch we just have not been outfitted um in that manner for quite some time uh but what we are doing is looking at scratch made meals so what what the equipment we do have currently and then what we're able to go ahead and do so again that's where Chef Tim Jones comes into play to be able to bring in that experience because we're not going to have like an open skillet for instance um and so he's able to go head and help us evaluate this recipe that we want to go ahead incorporate and how can we have that work with the equipment that we
203do have I thought there was some effort underway to transition kitchens to scratch kitchens from what exists right now that's correct we're looking at Central kitchens creating scratch cooking options at Central kitchens that we then able to package food and deliver from Central kitchens to schools that they're able to reheat or warm and we also talked about renovations providing kitchens that would look different as part of our Ed specs uh for new building and Renovations but I think our plan was really looking at um some of the work that an Chef an was doing in Colorado actually um and really thinking about how to Retro uh Central kitchens we have what eight eight Central kitchens in the school division that prepare food that then hubs out um to schools and if we can uh I
204think we have a cycle of those to move into more scratch cooking with really large kettles we have to have space for um those items um but that certainly we worked on a plan to to provide that remodeling are those where are those Central kitchens located oh dear are they in school buildings or um no they're in our high schools so um hearnden High School Marshall Hayfield South County uh Mount Vernon Westfield chanelli did I get all eight perhaps I think I did thank you thank you Mr dun Miss Dixit so thank you Dr Reed for the presentation I just uh have just Praises at this point to to say that 10 years ago like my colleague said when I was in a cafeteria with my son I'm a vegetarian I couldn't find anything to
205eat um everything was either meat based or it was something I would not eat as an adult so I was struggling to go for those lunches and now seeing those new options and salad bar and all you know even beans I I think I can eat in pretty much every single cafeteria of our school so that changes that speaks volume of the work done um I I did have wanted to ask you how many meals do we serve in a year we did provide that data and it's do you have it off the top of your head Melissa of course you do come on I love it um we're at about 20 million meals per year to include our breakfast lunch and um then our special programs and that would be per day how many
206um so right now we are averaging oh my gosh the team's going to kill me uh so we're about uh up to 35,000 breakfasts and 75 to 85,000 lunches depending on the day and that's done by a a very cohesive team working together and um our students are fed and there are a lot of students who depend on these meals because those are like the only healthy meals for them for the day um and so any all the work you've done I think we really appreciative of that and I just wanted to be at the next event uh which you're holding because I can taste the food too all right thank you your invites are coming thank you thank you Miss Dixit Miss Marin well Dr Reed I'm delighted that you mentioned Renegade cafeteria lady
207Chef Anne Cooper who I actually met at her office in Boulder in 2013 after she came to FCPS with real food for kids right so that's got to sometime before then I mean real food for kids was really the impetus to get this work going and I'm just so delighted to see where it's been um the lack of the ultra processed foods is so great I just read an article about how ultr processed foods could actually be one of the next things that we really have even if it's healthy stuff like soy protein or the stuff in your protein bar that that's really it's that Ultra processed stuff and so glad that there's no D um I wonder if just for a moment you could speak a little bit about the the costs and how
208that's going with covering and funding our meals I mean in light of trying to provide as many meals as we can to those in need but also like this is a revenue generating office and so how's that how's that going so um do you feel comfortable talking a little bit about the cost uh piece okay sure we can talk about the C schools I know um really I I'll go Melissa so we do have 47 C schools uh this year and so those schools are where students are able to come in and get meals at no cost right so breakfast and lunch and that is where we see our highest participation as well and that is also where we are we do know that there's a greater need and so we're happy to be able
209to to do that and to be able to put in those additional um Avenues to increase participation um for instance like our breakfast increased participation is really thanks to the breakfast kiosks we've been able to install in those schools um and so when we're looking at the cost right we do um look at the type of foods that we're bringing in what is it that uh you know local as possible and then the cost around that I mean it's something that we're always always analyzing we're looking at we're monitoring on a weekly monthly basis um and so in regards to the cost per se it's something that we just continue to look at and knowing that there are a number of bills that for instance are in the state we've got a possibility of having
210uh breakfast for all uh possibly coming up we'll see how that uh could possibly work um in our favor and be able to just increase our Revenue but it is something that um is something that we look at when we're weighing and what is it that we're able to bring in we're not going to be able to bring in really um you know just these products that um are going to be just higher cost so we are we do take that into account but we're still very proud to ensure that again those internal standards that we've created are being met every single time yeah thank you I I know when we do our quarterly budget reports that you present Dr Reed that's you know something we in the past we've asked about that so just
211knowing are we in the red or the black are we making money and um I loved in the video how the students were using those portrait of graduate skills to communicate about their food right have those interpersonal skills and teach like what we should be doing when we eat which is to eat slowly and perhaps even be communal about it so I as much as we can incorporate that into learning is just fabulous so thank you great thank you thank you Miss Marin Dr Anderson thank you and I was very excited to be able to participate in that tasing last year and the kids were so excited they're like the chicken wings are over here like chicken wings we're doing that at our schools so there's been a lot of enthusiasm around it um to
212the point to now our high school students are particularly sensitive to the fact that they don't have enough so my Wonder is do we differentiate servings based on levels or do we provide the same amount of food at elementary than we do at high schools because it seems to still be a want at the upper grades for larger serving interesting so Melissa so again our federal standards to require us to provide more um servings um in our high schools so we do build right so our elementary schools have a they have two entree options right and we're always providing a vegetarian option um and then we also have our power packs and then our Middle School we're adding on again um to that menu and then our high schools have the most robust menu so
213we're always building on to what we have in our elementary schools and yes by federal standards we do have to provide more calories um and our requirements are uh more more servings for our high school students can you quantify that a little bit Yeah so it's really where you see it in our fruit and vegetables um and then also in our um grain options I could get that to you um more specifically we could go ahead and follow up with you and give you the exact sure that would be helpful because a slice of pizza a slice of pizza is a slice of pizza they're not necessarily getting more at the upper grades but that's definitely been a a concern um and of course they're using more calories so having that information would be helpful
214we'll provide that in an upcoming Friday letter likely in a week thank you Dr Anderson Miss St John cunning um so I would just like to take an opportunity to highlight the work that our cafeteria workers do um they're in early they're getting the meals prepared they're serving the meals and um particularly where I come from working in Middle Schools they're helping kids open milk boxes um they really do a lot for our children and when we talk about this on the global level I also want to always highlight the people that are actually in the schools and doing the work and thank them for that um and I also want to highlight the program that you have for after school snack for our students when any after school programming is involved what is served
215as a very nutritious what is really considered like a light supper and I've seen kids um you know it's provided to the kids that are in the program but I've seen kids save some of that to take it to their siblings and um it makes a difference and I just want to thank you for your work Miss Anderson so my children are um four of those meals often during the day um they often go back and and and purchase two meals at a time so what I would wonder um even my 10-year-old is very interested in making sure that there's enough and he often talks about the fact that more so I I Echo um particularly my older one that is playing sports six days a week and is starving all the time um and
216so what I what I was wondering is do they have do we have any ability to allow them to buy a second entree without having to buy the full second meal because I often worry about the waste that may come with taking you know things that they're not going to use and so I well well I personally I'm working on making sure that they are are bringing food when appropriate from home to supplement I'm just wondering whether or not there's a way for them to just buy the entree yeah I can personally relate to that uh I have a son who eats uh and I tell this story often he eats breakfast at home he eats breakfast at school he eats lunch at school and then he goes back for a second entree um so
217yes just to go Ahad and purchase the entree is a possibility it's an an all a cart option for just the entree that's wonderful to know however I would like to plug in that for students who are still hungry they do have the option to go back through our salad bar and again unlimited fruits and vegetables a second time at no cost wonderful thank you so much thank you Miss Anderson I'll take a turn I I really do want to uh commend everything that's happening in our nutrition programs uh a few years ago secretary vilsack came from the Department of Agriculture to tour and see some of the early work that was being done in this effort and we've come so far since even then and I thought then we'd come so far uh on
218top of that I do want to uh again stress that I think there's an opportunity here for maybe the DECA clubs at schools to be selling this Fairfax sauce to make money we're going to look into this I I've not even tasted it but we're going to look into it you haven't even tasted it no but I'm sure it's delicious it looked delicious so uh looking forward to that conversation because I think it's a golden opportunity um and maybe we can even have the kids name it um so all right thank you very much thank you tman for thank you Melissa and also thank you Andy muick who is our chief operation officer that oversees the food department so definitely uh props everybody Mr Moon came in at the buzzer Mr Moon all your buzzer
219all right uh just one quick question about the food show uh out of over 30 different menu Concepts could have we adopted any of those menu concepts for our actually in the cafeteria absolutely yeah yes so those menu Concepts uh the top 10 were really looked at in in adopting uh we added them into our fall and they're also being added to our spring cycle menu so again like the chana masala the ticka Masala we have a fish taco unveiling this spring uh we have a lasagna rollup unveiling also this spring so that's directly from uh the results from the food shell oh so C and barbecue did not make the list uh Green Barbecue you no no yes it it did it did yes so it was there okay all right thank you thank
220you yeah thank you Mr Moon and now we are officially moving on all right agenda item 8.03 Financial year 2026 proposed budget I call on Dr Reed for a presentation of her 2026 Financial year proposed budget thank you chairman frish um and I want to begin this evening um as you know the budget really is our backbone it provides the resources for us to engage in um all of the work that we've described this evening and all of the work that we describe over time and um thank you I I want to start by thanking our budget team um first our board budget chair Mr Kyle McDaniel and our budget Vice chair Miss rachna seore Heiser and just the guidance that they've provided throughout this process has been uh just remarkable and very helpful and
221also our chief finance officer Lee Burton uh Matthew Norton and Alice Winnington just big props to our finance department I think the best in the country so um this evening I'm gonna work really hard to try to um present this budget in a way that uh tells our story here in Fairfax County um and our story is one one um that's a story of incredible achievement and a reminder that these budget dollars represent more than charts and data they represent the hopes and dreams of the children in this community and the hopes and dreams of the many many families who moved to this community because of our Fairfax County Public Schools so as we walk through um the budget presentation this evening I want to begin um by acknowledging that um our current situation that
222we're facing a tremendous funding Gap um that is not of our creation or of our County's creation honestly our um Team Miss Marin our board our elected board our elected Board of Supervisors have worked tirelessly to share the information which I'll share a little later about our jlar funding and the lack of um funding uh in terms of meeting this Gap uh from our uh Governor's budget that was recently presented and I know that our uh Commonwealth lawmakers those lawmakers from this area continue to work hard to provide funds uh from the general assembly and we just want to acknowledge that there is a tremendous gap between um what we believe is necessary and what we're actually receiving and this is I think exacerbated by the changing needs and goals of our public school system
223and our children the world is changing technology industry the workplace and so too what we present and prepare our children for needs to change and adjust and these changes require resources um to have the success we're used to having requires resources to support the high expectations we hold here in Fairfax County I also want to ackn knowled that many of our citizens in Fairfax County do not currently have children in school and to those citizens I really want to speak to how important public school is whether we have children currently in school or not and um as a recent grandparent myself I know that there are many grandparents in this County who have a Next Generation uh that will be coming through our schools and are counting on the high quality and the tradition of
224Excellence that we have maintained here in Fairfax County and to sustain um those high quality instructional opportunities require our support um across the board whether we have children and uh classes currently or not and in recognizing um a bit of the tax fatigue that is out there because I mean let's face it things are more expensive today than they were a year ago than they were five years ago 10 years ago and those cost escalations do create a budget impact even just to maintain the level of support that we have needed much less increase the level of support as we work to increase academic standards and provide those activities for our young people um that are so important finally just want to make sure that we understand that we're in a real competition for Talent
225right now in this country and as we think about outstanding Educators um in every role in the school division we want the very best uh for our young people here in Fairfax County and there's a cost to that and for us to be able to compete with not just our regional colleagues but our colleagues around the country it's critical that we maintain um salaries that are uh competitive um because as you'll see in some subsequent slides those also provide the Bedrock of what we consider um respect for the profession and the hard work um that occurs so I want to make sure that I thread those themes this evening and make sure that in the coming days and weeks that we continue to come back to those key themes one of the things I want
226to also remind our community is that um these charts and the data I'm going to talk about this evening are representative of real children and real real families and real hopes and dreams and as we look at the investment we're thinking about making here in what I am providing in this needs-based budget we're making huge gains in our academic work and we're maintaining our excellence in terms of high expectations which again will require High support I want to remind our community in our board that this year we have 10% more students that were named as National Merit commit ended Scholars then year-over-year last year our SAT scores were 77 almost 80 points higher than the state average and continue to outperform the global averages even as we have more than 80% of our students taking
227the SAT while the state has only around 50% of students taking the SAT so we've provided access opportunity and continue to maintain Higher Achievement than our state and global peers also want to make sure that our families and communities know that 75% of our high school students complete at least one college equivalent course during their career with us and our graduation rate at 94.6% far exceeds the state average and is a a really um proud data point for a division of our size and finally I wanted to make sure that I dialed in to one of U our students who as you know was was named time kid of the Year recently and you're going to hear a little from him in beala um he is one of our students who's represented by this budget
228and budgets before us uh Hamond story was um he was born in Ethiopia and came to Fairfax County as a preschool student who spoke no English and his family his mother is now a teacher for us and he's been honored uh as you know for inventing a soap which treats skin cancer and I will tell you Heyman just also was recently honored at quite a star studded event in Atlanta um this past weekend and spends many of his weekends at John's Hopkins doing cancer research uh and hymon is one of thousands of students in our County who is doing incredible work day after day inspired by incredible Educators in the school Division and I continue as I know you do to be very proud of the work we do here and the many many young
229people who were launched from this County who go out and change the world also want to share that one of the things that's really important as we think about resources and why our budget is going to be a slight increase over last year is we want to increase our academic expectations and as we look at one example um in mathematics we continue to outp outperform the Commonwealth um in math science and reading with improvements in math and science but even more important we're close to 10% more students year-over-year of our eighth graders that are at least in algebra one or higher and almost 7% increase in our fifth graders taking advanced math at this point this continues to be a high focus area for us we recognize nationally mathematics is a challenge and we know
230that math accounts for 84% of our career choices now for children it's critical that we invest in increasing and upping requirements in this critical content area because we have to maintain high expectations and high support for all of our students and as we think about mathematics the credentialing of more staff to enable this to happen the clarity around resources that you heard this evening are going to require resources and it's a necessary um body of work I want to share that our student needs are changing while our enrollment increases are flattening or leveling in other words we're projecting a 2% increase in enrollment the increase for example in some of our student groups who do require extra supports continue to increase and so as we have a higher need for certain specialized supports for example
231some of our students in special programs require smaller classes sizes require teachers at times who have more planning needs require multiple assessment and perhaps supports that may uh require more um funding and more resources we have career coaches social workers um therapists at times and these are critical uh resource needs for our students without which our students are not going to be able to achieve the high expectations that we have here in Fairfax C County as I move forward and think about the importance of our high expectations and those systems and structures that support them I want to contemplate our class size comparison and I think it's important to note that with the funding that we have been provided Fairfax County Public Schools ranks fifth of eight schools in our area when you look at
232students per classroom across all grade levels and individually for elementary middle and high you can see see that we do rank you know third Sixth and fourth but this does say that while our class sizes are a reasonable size we're middle of the pack that's with our current resource allocation it's critical to keep up with those resources to maintain these class sizes to support that well-rounded education for all of our students I want to remind our community about this data point which we're particularly proud of as you know I think I I've often talked about our hearts beating strongest when we're in schools that's where the action happens and I can say proudly that most of our funding is directly allocated to instruction with 92.5% of our employees designated as school-based and this is the
233highest among all of our wavy participants in the Washington DC area so we focus the over 90% of our um expenditures on school-based employees conversely I want to share that our ratio of central management staff is 1.1% compared to two to 4% at surrounding jurisdictions in other words our administrative Staffing is lean it's well below our surrounding divisions and that's because we've worked very hard to be fiscally responsible as a School Division and make sure that we direct the bulk of our funds over 90% to our schools and classrooms and those that directly support our schools and classrooms we believe that as a School Division most of our budget should be spent as close to the classroom as possible one data point we haven't talked as much about over time is actually the amount of
234money that we would say the actual funding that FCPS puts per pupil based and compare that to our surrounding division and I would say at this point that based on budget numbers we provide about $2,940 per pupil which actually uh puts us number uh five of all the Wy districts so if we as an example if we use the same uh classroom or the cost per pupil funding that Arlington uh County schools had we would have an additional $69. million annually in our budget if we were going to fund um at that rate that would enable us to hire 6,000 additional teachers to significantly reduce class sizes well we're not likely to have that kind of funding but what we can say is that given the funding we do have uh we rank five out
235of eight but it definitely um is funding that we would certainly want to uh we have our expectations for achievement to be higher than five of eight and therefore we're going to need to Resource our work at a higher than five out of eight level let's take a look at um our teacher salaries and why that's important and I'm gonna um actually if we could go back to the slide before Madam clerk I presented this to Educators this afternoon as a dry run kind of a practice run and one of the things our Educators that I shared this with in a practice run said they said Dr Reed if you go to the board this evening and publicly talk about this it makes it sound like no matter what we're going to be able to
236continue to get high results year after year with perhaps less than adequate funding and it's honestly not sustainable and because here in Fairfax people work longer harder I think care deeply we also have to rec recognize that we need to adequately resource our programs and our staff so that we're not burning out our Educators and that this is a sustainable workload as we work to maintain these expectations so I want to make sure that I say that um because I did commit to seeing that this afternoon so let's go to salaries please I want to we're going to take a look at three levels of salaries last year we looked at uh the Master's level and we were asked to make sure we looked at beginning teachers and teachers at the end of um or
237at the more experienced end and I apologize I need just a little bit of water all right um so for beginning teacher salaries currently we rank fifth of eight um with uh teachers starting a salary in the Master's Lane and after the compensation increases included in the budget I'm presenting this evening uh we would would likely rank first in starting teacher salary this is important because we're all competing for a diminishing talent pool and we want to make sure that as our students come out of University or teacher colleges and so forth that we are a School Division that recognizes the importance of the professional uh preparation that our Educators have undergone and that we are able to provide that top uh salary for uh beginning teachers we know that the quality of the Educators
238in classrooms and schools is directly connected to the quality of the educational experience that's why this is so important let's take a look at the midpoint of our teacher salaries and this uh data is less positive obviously we currently rank seventh of eight at the mid at the midpoint for the Master's Lane and even with the compensation increases I'm proposing this evening uh that were part of our historic collective bargaining agreement we will likely rank fifth in teacher salaries at the midpoint even following um the application of those salary increases and let's look at the maximum teacher salaries currently we rank seventh of eight at the maximum Lane um for the Master's Lane at the maximum for the Master's Lane and we expect to remain the same seven out of eight even with a 7%
239uh increase in salary uh based on the collective bargaining agreement and a lot of this is largely due to a lesser number of steps on our salary schedule and uh we end we top out at 25 and many of our surrounding jurisdictions have 30 or more steps so we are going to be a bit challenged at this Lane as well even with the 7% salary increase possibility so let's talk a little bit about striving for smart savings it's so important that we talk about the work we've done to try to trim our budget and trim our initiatives to become um lean and um still uh work towards maintaining the support for our high expectations one of the things that we really had to reckon with is as we think about trimming our budget making sure
240that um we've provided some type of um cost cutting and clear Direction around being more uh trying to be more efficient and look at reductions to afford um some of the uh collective bargaining agreement uh dollars as well as our continuing initiatives we realized 93% of our positions are school-based and that makes it very difficult to make Cuts without impacting the student experience I will say year-over-year we have cut 51.3 million which is 1.4% of our budget because we no longer are receiving eser dollars and those dollars we either Sunset initiatives or Sunset programs and those post-pandemic needs are still persisting so we have collapsed programs we've also said that there are no new initiatives we're only funding those that we have currently uh have in motion and that's really important for our community to
241understand we want to be and intend to be and believe we are fiscally responsible and good stewards of the money that our taxpayers work so hard to provide to us so our need for highquality instructional resources continue and we are going to hope to continue to see future Savings in training and professional development based on the fact that if we make maintain Works spaces class sizes and salaries we will retain our Educators and when we retain our Educators it costs less for new professional development repeatedly new training and in general provides a better educational experience and I'm proud to say that with our board's commitment year-over-year for the first time in four years our year-to-year teacher retention rate exceeded 90% last year and the division retained almost 400 more teachers in 2024 than we had
242in 2023 so that is a significant number of Staff um that did not need to be retrained but are excited to continue the work here in Fairfax County so that type of efficiency um is so critical to our Missi driven work we we also continue our Baldridge efficiency review where we're taking each department and running through lines to see how we can Titan and Titan which is part of how we were able to um arrive at our $ 51.3 million budget cut year over-year and again our continued commitment to not begin new initiatives at a time where we recognize we have to fund our priorities I want to remind our community and board that our proposed budget our needs-based budget that I'm presenting this evening aligns with our strategic plan both our five goals and
243our four pillars and we are a very large division uh the ninth largest in the country with over 180,000 students this framework this strategic framework allows all of our schools our departments and our offices to move in the same direction and with that alignment we'll continue to see uh funding efficiencies and efficiencies in how we use and spend our time so I want to share at this point our budget priorities to to meet the changing needs of our students to meet the changing needs in our workplace we have budget priorities that must uh provide competitive compensation for all of our employees in Fairfax County the changing needs often require different resources which have a gear up time and these changing needs will continue um probably in an exponential flywheel Movement we need to continue empowering
244our Educators to provide differentiated services and the multi-year initiatives the board is committed to must be seen to their um logical impact end so um I will share that the budget summary I'm presenting this evening uh provides an FY 26 School operating fund budget totaling $4 billion which is a net increase of 297.00 the County transfer request is actually an increase of 268.2 million or a 10.4 which is a slight decrease from last year's requested percentage which was 10.5% I will also say that we've worked uh between the fiscal forecast numbers of 275 million to get it down to 268.2 million and this would be uh the County transfer request for the needs-based budget that I'm proposing this evening we are looking actually let's stay there for just a minute the state revenue um could
245we go back to thank you the state revenue we look like we are expecting 23.2 million the federal revenue we expect to decline by 1 million which is idea and Perkins dollars and this is um in a a key uh Factor here with our beginning balance so the request for our County transfer is 268.2 um I will make uh or I will share that uh the um Board of supervisor request again is 10.4% increase which is a slight decrease most of the Wy participants budgets have yet to be released however we do know that Lowden and Montgomery County in Maryland have released and they are requesting local transfer increases of 9. uh 7% and 13.4% respectively so we feel like the 10.4% increase is well within a reasonable um expectation and satisfies or meets our
246needs-based budget um request so next slide please as we look at the compensation adjustments I want to be very clear about why competitive comp compensation matters and I want to share just a bit about um one of our Educators who happens to be the 2024 Washington Post teacher of the year Laura Centuria who is a fourth grade teacher at Colin Powell Elementary School and she received this award because of her excellence and inspiring learning encouraging individual growth and demonstrating subject matter expertise by fostering collaboration and leading by example teachers like Laura Centuria and many many many others thousands and thousands of our educators are committed to the Missi driven work we're doing here in Fairfax County Public Schools and we were able to negotiate um under uh in the last uh calendar year um a
247collective bargaining agreement which is historic here our first in Fairfax County uh which would provide a 7% compensation increase um also transportation and Food Service salary enhancements and health rate changes this is going to be uh the F the change from FY 2025 budget um is 24.8 million they're also retirement rate changes in the base savings from turnover again um 23.7 million would be the specific um amount of money here uh related to um providing competitive compensation and this again is based on the collective bargaining agreement which um I really am proud of the team for uh negotiating I also want to just point out that this 7% increase for employees is very much so in line with our surrounding divisions um for example Lowden County recently is asking for a 6.5 increase 6.5% in
248salaries and Prince William county is asking for 7% so we're right in the ballpark if we want to Simply maintain um competitive salaries within our region as we think about meeting our communities uh shifting and changing needs it's not just our young people that are uh changing our community is changing we know our schools are the center of our community um we know that companies settle in spaces where schools are effective because Workforce um development is a critical Bridge um to the economic drivers here in Fairfax County want to remind us that um the funding of 23.6 million represents the recurring costs of baseline or of adjustments for quarterly fund review and other Baseline adjustments such as substitute teacher incentives and you can read through the topics on the slide further we have 20 million
249um which includes 27.9 positions to uh impact these student need adjustments that are driven primarily by increases in special program Services as well as routine funds to support summer school major maintenance contractual services and existing lease and so on now let's take a look at our multi-year initiatives so as you can see we have Inclusive Preschool um and again these are very similar these are programs that were on the deck last year for Budget there're are continuation of funding we've made commitments and we need to see those through and these commitments are um for a total of 4 million and um this is a the FY 26 proposed budget for example represents the third year of multi-year implementation to establish a dedicated family liaison with with benefits at an additional 50 School sites this year
250in addition to the topics addressed um and these budget budgeted positions um are established through a position conversion of existing hourly positions and therefore won't require addition additional fundings so they're not represented here but I know those are a commitment that our board has made and want to make sure that um I note that that's something that we're doing we know Learning Happens best in community and there's never been a more important time for our family Liaisons and their work than a Time such as this so let's look at our targeted Investments at this time we do uh want to make sure that our community understands that we have been listening and we want to make sure that we're able to devote um funds to Safety and Security there different topics listed as well as
251the differentiated learning credentials we have have a high need for micr credentialing and support around Universal Design for Learning multilingual learner initiatives and as I mentioned earlier if we're going to continue to make the progress we need to make in mathematics we're going to have to have more teachers algebra credentialed uh than we currently have and that's going to require resources We cannot put a stake in the ground around increasing academic expectations and not support the uh professional development and resources necessary to continue to increase academic expectations it's not good enough to just continue what we've always done we have to put a stake on the ground and say that mathematics again is going to be impacting 84% of career choices we have to increase our expectations in that content area especially which will require
252resources so I wanted to share some of the funding needs not explicitly addressed in this budget uh we do want to we do have budget to continue our Middle School sports but we are looking to try to do an expansion and we'll have to see where that's going to be possible we have also in this particular budget not addressed additional funding to accelerate addressing the maintenance backlog which continues to increase at 8% a year and I will say that um some of my concerns around the budgeting process is that um in addressing some of this maintenance backlog I don't want to take money from our classrooms and therefore it is so critical and again this needs-based budget concept that we effectively and efficiently address what we need to meet our educational outcomes even as we
253still have our maintenance backlog that's Rising uh we're not uh planning to lower class sizes we haven't yet looked at Middle School start times or electric buses and Jet goals so those are things yet to be contemplated um as we think about uh future budgets so let's take a look at the revenue overview and again this is sort of where all the different buckets of money come to us we have state federal other and the County transfer request um and the other um in thinking about that represents an increase due due to projected increase related to tuition at Thomas Jefferson um but the County transfer request as I repeated or as I mentioned earlier is um set at 268.2 million and that will create a total revenue increase of 297.00 [Music] looked like really when
254we think about the percentage of Revenue of the county and we talked a little about this last year where uh there was a fiveyear historical trend of about 52.7% and um that 52.7% down to 51.5% represents A $64 million gap last year so we're hopeful that we'll be able to bridge that Gap this year um and be able to fully fund our transfer from the county and we appreciate um the support and the focus on uh public education that our County Partners share with us and um appreciate certainly their efforts and we'll look forward to continuing to collaborate with them I have spoken to our County Executive and I know that it's important that we collaborate with our County Partners as we develop our budget um moving forward I do want to call out jayar
255um and just I know this is a slide that we have talked a lot about but I just want to remind our community that uh Virginia school divisions do receive less funding per student than the 50 state average and also our regional average and again this is an opportunity to take a look at Maryland West Virginia Kentucky and um Virginia which again we sit at 14% below the national average uh for funding per pupil again we don't have expectations that are below the national average because our students are performing above the global average so it's not sustainable however without adequate resources so um we believe this needs based budget will provide those in round numbers for the community if jayar um was fully funded or our schools were fully funded um that would be about
256$3,100 per student or a total of 5687 million so what you see on the screen is our uh General assembly's work right now and there are several key areas uh that they're looking at uh the elimination or incremental raising of the support cap exploring enhanced support for special education f focused on the proposed percentage add-on to special education based on student level of need and additionally the subcommittee highlighted the importance of addressing data and infrastructure needs to provide better cost data for the recommendations however at this time we don't have any concrete legislative reforms that have been adopted and we continue um to wait um on the outcome of those jar deliberations I want say um that thriving schools equal an economic Prosperity we know that um the schools are the center of a community
257and we know that investing in excellence for our schools invests in excellence for our County and I encourage each of you to think about what kind of a community would you like us to be in five years 10 years 20 years what will history look back and say about this group these decision makers in terms of what we did to prepare our young people for the next decade and decades ahead our community support helps anchor FCPS as our region our Region's education destination for students families and staff high quality schools bring new residents better Workforce Development new businesses increased opportunities for student upward Mobility education an excellent education has often been talked about as the first r rung to Upward Mobility increase property values and reduce social costs so we are grateful and continue to
258be grateful to our partnership with our Board of Supervisors with whom we know we have a shared interest in the Excellence of our schools and we appreciate our state leaders and elected leaders who share our belief in public education and look forward to their continued financial support of our community's most important asset our children so here is a way to stay involved D attend Schoolboard meetings we're going to continue to have um we have a work session upcoming this evening the board will not be um asking questions this is my presentation but we'll be having a work session and many other conversations about the budget so please take a moment to learn about the critical needs of this great school system and why we must continue to support our Educators our support staff and our
259students today is just the beginning um of the conversation and so we'll have many opportunities for board discussion these dates above are listed as a point of reference and we do have a work session to discuss student needs and compensation in more detail on February 4th I know you're going to have many questions at that work session and as always um the community um and obviously the uh board and Board of Supervisors are able to submit budget questions via our normal process thank you for your time and attention this is the most important work happening in our country at this time it is critical work and it is work that's transformative um there's never been a more important time to invest in public public education because um together all things are possible so I'd like
260to finish the budget proposal with a word from our students at the end of the day that's why we're here that's why we're doing the budget and that's why we need to continue contemplating the critical nature and the transformative difference that our Educators here in this County make each and every day so Madam clerk we'll give hmon the last word now we're doing so many different types of labs in science and bio and chemistry there's always been this kind of Choose Your Own Adventure but at the same time be Innovative be creative and just give a great final product and that those experiences are what have kind of shaped my curiosity today so a huge shout out to Fairfax County all my teachers have been here since kindergarten it's just been a wonderful experience so
261so Mr chairman that is my superintendent proposed budget this evening thank you very much I would like to turn it over to our board's budget team starting with our budget chair Mr McDaniel thank you and uh thank you the superintendent and Alice Lee Matthew for all your work um there there's a lot of stuff that goes in behind the scenes to this as a reminder to my colleagues our budget work session is going to be February 4th in a couple of weeks and we will have lots of time to ask lots of detailed questions after we've all had enough uh time to really dig into this so thank you for this first budge presentation tonight um the budget for this school system is fundamentally built upon shared values and it's it's a statement of what
262we value and how we plan to turn those into reality we fund the things we believe in year after year and in this community we believe in things like taking care of our most vulnerable running the school buses on time we believe that on a 90 degree day the air conditioner should actually work we believe in serving students high quality meals we believe in having the latest technological products in the classroom we believe in paying teachers a fair wage treating them with respect supporting them and treating them as the professionals they are and we believe that the best teachers deserve the best administrative support behind the scenes now if the community over the next few months decides that the expenditures we're proposing are too much then they can tell us that and I'm looking forward
263to having that that conversation I welcome ideas for savings for Efficiencies For Better ways to do business because fundamentally we need to be looking at that all the time um in fact I'm pulling together a community advisory committee to help me look at the budget and to come up with ideas of how we can potentially do things better so we're going to be having that conversation over the next few months but I think I know this community pretty well and I think I know what this Community Values and I don't think that we're going to tolerate and I don't think the public would tolerate cuts to our budget that will result in cuts to Service delivery I don't think they'll tolerate cuts to Mental Health Services that our kids have come to rely upon and
264I don't think they'll tolerate us allowing kids to go hungry or even feeding them cheap junk food as we have worked so hard to correct over the years and I don't think they'll tolerate things like higher class sizes and at the end of the day budgets have real impacts on real people day in and day out in our buildings I believe in this community and I know how much we value the services that we've come to expect from our school system and Fairfax county is a place that we can all be proud of and while these are challenging times and I appreciate the recognition of the challenging fiscal environment that we are in it's time to meet the moment and I'm looking forward to the community Conversation Over The Coming months around this budget and
265quite frankly I'm looking forward to telling the story of Fairfax County because that's why we're here we know how great our community is we know how great our schools are and I know that we're going to be telling that story because fundamentally that's our job so thank you for the budget proposal and thank you for all your work thank you Mr McDaniel Miss seore Heiser our budget Vice chair thank you and I wanted to start first by thanking Mr McDaniel for his leadership as the budget committee chair and especially superintendent Reed Chief Financial Officer Lee Burton and her staff for their leadership and hard work there was a lot that went into this budget and a lot of thoughtful conversations um as my colleague mentioned this budget is is much more than a bunch of
266numbers it's a policy document that at the end of the day reflects our system and our community's values and priority through how we choose to allocate limited resources simply put where we choose to spend our money is an indicator of what we believe is important and I'm proud that this budget focuses on fiscal responsibility while continuing to deliver on the promise of an excellent education for every student who walks in our doors and prioritize the compensation for our Frontline workers our teachers and staff so they can provide that excellent education I believe our community expects that excellent education for our students I believe that our community expects our students to be fed well supported with their mental health needs given an excellent education that sets them on success on their path so I'm grateful for
267our County and our County Partners for their strong and continued support of our schools our schools not just educate our students but they're the heartbeat of our communities over 500 th000 events happen in our schools our schools are truly a community resource and most importantly our Public Schools educate our Future Leaders creators entrepreneurs voters and innovators so I'm proud that this budget focuses on maintaining that track record that FCPS has in providing the best public education in this country we're known for that best public education and I'm proud that this budget continues that we cannot allow our system back and to do that we must be good stewards of our resources and make sure we have resources to educate our students couple data points I wanted to lift up I'm proud that 92% of our
268staff are school-based serving our students highest in our jurisdiction meanwhile we have the lowest ratio of central Administration staff the second lowest ratio of school-based administrator staff to teaching staff and our Pure per spending is fifth out of the region we are working hard to be fiscally responsible and aere but we want to not just stay current with what we do but we want to meet the changing student needs and continue to meet our high Community expectations this budget simply allows us to maintain our current status we acknowledge our taxpayers retired we acknowledge we that there are demands for our taxpayers funding and while we have no authority to Levy taxes raise revenue we are so grateful for County Partners and their commitment to our schools we are committed to work with our County and
269state Partners to address funding gaps but also I want to recognize that these good schools benefit everyone not just those with students in their homes much like the public safety professionals whose roles have expanded as our society has changed in recent decades the roles of teachers and staff is more complex than ever before our education professionals are expected to be social workers security Personnel Communications and Technology experts as we heard earlier and much more to do that requires resources and I'm proud that most of all this budget prioritizes the most valuable resource on the front line our teachers and staff thank you simply put if we can't pay our teachers competitively we risk losing them thank you to our community to our team for supporting our schools I think I heard my time was up
270I apologize I can't see a timer my apologies thank you Miss seore Heiser as as a reminder to colleagues we have a work session coming up so there is no obligation to dive in uh with an hour of questions and answers at this point but we will go ahead and dive in with board member comment questions Mr Dunn um Dr Reed can you address the potential impact of the elimination of federal funding if the Department of Education is abolished especially on Title One and special education programs yes sir I think if we go back to unless Miss buron has has that on the tip of her tongue I'd have to go back to the revenue slide um and the percentage or the um Let Me Miss buron do you have that right off the top
271of your head let me go back to the revenue here oh we had the revenue change less than 1 million I know we had was it about six the impact of the federal if we receive no federal dollars yeah I mean most of our only idea and Perkins support the operating fund as far as Federal funding goes the other Federal funding is in the grants fund so it's really only those two uh revenue streams and we're expecting the idea to go down a million which is what we're seeing here um the last that we talked to um others about you know what might happen at the federal level um it was believed and I don't know if this will actually come true is that the funds of the federal government would then be shifted to
272the states to manage not that the department of Ed would be completely eliminated and all the funding would be eliminated as well um but of course that um begs the question does the state have the capacity to handle large influxes of money and pushing that out to divisions how much money do we receive from the federal government every year for the general well the school operating fund it's 51 million um if you add in food nutrition services which of course gets Federal reimbursement grants and self supporting PRS Title One title to those kinds of things um it's 168 million in total and and again what would be the impact on our special education program if we lost the federal funding um based on the information that I got from aasa um idea is not expected
273to be reduced and I I heard uh someone say that if our B our proposed budget increase is not granted suddenly kids will not get the healthy food that was discussed uh tonight is that a serious risk that will actually happen if we don't get this budget increase if we don't receive the budget increase we'll have some difficult conversations and decisions to make and one of those will be adding back in soy fillers and red dye 40 I can't that I don't want to speculate this evening about whether or not we would add soy fillers and red dye back in I would hope we're not going to come to that um so I don't I don't want to speculate on that this evening but I suppose it's certainly um uh you know a conversation that
274could be had but I I don't believe that's where we're headed okay thank you thank you Mr dun Mr Moon well thank you since we have a work session coming up February 4th I'm just going to um uh just to mention a couple of things a first of all I I appreciate the work done by budet chair and vice chair and the presentation by the superintendent but one thing that was a little at least a little disappointing was that uh we didn't get the presentation material until like a few minutes before the meeting started I mean we were by the time we received an email with the material we were in the close session so really didn't it to really be able to take a look at and and you know unlike Bud chair and
275vice chair who are able to provide very thought for remarks and presented a budget the other 10 of us or eight of us were in dark so that I found a I must to say disappointing hopefully from the next year they won't happen again I mean that's my request uh I can speak to that Mr Mo if you like um tonight is not a work session tonight is the uh presentation of the budget by the superintendent and budget team and part of that budget team is our budget chair and vice chair so we do not have a history of putting up this particular budget document well in advance of the meeting it the historically at least in Last Five Years thank you Mr chairman thank you Mr chairman I there must be a new practice
276uh you know pre 20109 board we always had more advanced notices of uh materials to be presented a in public having said that uh some of the question that I will bring up at the work session will include uh amount of s funding that will be lost obviously because uh federal government is not going to continue funding that anymore and another question is uh whether we are discontinuing any of the programs uh because I am trying to anticipate questions from a funders funding authorities whether we did take a look at all our programs and these things that we have decided not to do when resulting in certain savings Etc so if he could share with us at the work I will appreciate it very much yes sir and also you know looking at the salary
277comparison I think you mentioned about 25 years and 30 years being ours is 25 years 25 steps and other jurisdictions 30 steps you know obviously the midpoint when you talk about Masters midpoint ours could be after 12 years and others could be after 15 years whether I am interpreting that correctly and that may make some differences in the amount of what other jurisdictions pay versus what you pay yes sir we'll have an answer ready for you okay thank you thank you Mr Moon Dr Anderson yes thank you and none of my um thoughts here are for you to answer right now it's really just preparation for next time um I would definitely like to see some greater detail um particularly regarding the targeted Investments it's kind of a big block with many different initiatives I'd
278like to get a sense of the disaggregated allocation of each of those initiatives I would also like to have some sort of update in terms of where we are with the Baldridge work um because I know that's been a longterm conversation and lastly you talked quite a bit about 53 million that's been reabsorbed or Sunset if we can if you could please provide some details in terms of how were these reabsorbed and what was cut par specifically um if you could provide those details for the fourth I would appreciate it thank you yes ma'am thank you Dr Anderson Miss St John cunning um thank you for the presentation of this budget I'm not going to ask a question I just want to iterate that this is not a needs-based budget this is a basic needs
279based budget I mean we are at the lowest level of what our needs are it is not there's not any fluff and I think that we can't lose the importance of that um we all know that the best investment any Community can make in the future success of that Community is to invest in the education of their children and I seriously hope that our funding Partners can hear that and that we can come up with a difference because all of our children deserve more than just basic needs thank you Miss St John cunning Miss Maron the success of our public school system is not solely the responsibility of this school division our funding comes from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors who manage the Fairfax County government it's time to work differently between our public
280schools and the County government we need the county to step up to do a new way of doing business we have Collective bargain tting instituted by the state this is a new way of working and a critical way to retain our employees and the county and School Division should be partners actively working together to maximize our outcomes we have sustainability goals joint environmental goals yet I see our two entities working in silos on this partnering on the provision of services and economizing on joint costs is a no-brainer I see room for improvement we have pedestrian safety needs and as recently as last week we heard a proposal for our Educators and principles to be taking assessments speed zones and crosswalks we must remain Mission critical Traffic Safety is not our mission and our facilities while
281facility funding is not included in this operational budget maintenance costs could have been but needed to be omitted based on limited funding the bulk of the maintenance of our $8.7 billion dollar in public facility assets falls to the school Division and yet in addition to instruction of 18,000 180 um th000 students during the school year our schools with a location of 500,000 community hosted events as a range through the school division's Community use program and the proposed budget was just talking about maintenance not even improvements which of course is in the capital Improvement program which tells its companion story of funding woe when our children's when our children enter our schools they are still constituents of Fairfax County the responsibility to Steward them into adulthood is not the sole responsibility of the school division I've
282seen our superintendent be unimaginably creative in ways just tonight we talked about ways to recruit teachers we need to do work differently and work with the County Board of Supervisors and our superintendent and our County Executive need to work in different ways together thank you thank you Miss Marin Miss Dixit thank you Dr Reed for the budget presentation I will only say this um and I my colleagues have shared most of it is um we are at the cusp of uh you know losing a great public education in the country it's uh and Fest county is doing a great job and sustaining that and uh being a I should say word leader in this however if we do not meet the needs of our Educators um the cost of living is really high and living
283in a county or working in the county in commuting we will lose our educator a lot of them are waiting for this budget to go through if this is fully funded we will not only retain our teachers we will attract more teachers uh we will get to the Excellence and we'll do better and better but right now we at that stage that we could lose um and we are not a losing team we are not Fairfax will not lose so I would appreciate everybody in the stakeholders to support this and um and make this a full fully funded budget thank you thank you Miss Dixit agenda item nine consent agenda our adopted rules of parliamentary procedure Robert's Rules provide for a consent agenda into listing several items for approval by the board by a single
284motion many items listed have gone through Board review and documentation has been provided to all board members and the public in advance items may be removed from the consent agenda at the request of any board member prior to the meeting the consent agenda is about to be on the screen and when it gets there here it comes uh is there any objection to approving the consent agenda hearing and seeing no objection the consent agenda is approved agenda item 10 new business the following are new business items agenda items there will not be a vote on these items this evening but action is scheduled for a future meeting agenda item 11 superintendent matters I call on Dr Reid I I will be extraordinarily brief which is to say um happy New Year and I appreciate everyone's
285patience and grace through our weather decisions and I'm proud to announce that it's going to be 50 degrees next week so I want to go a full week without discussing weather but I do appreciate the communities efforts patience and Grace so thank you very much and let's have a great rest of our H winter week next week thank you Dr Reid agenda item 12 board committee reports I call on Mr movan for a report from the audit committee the audit continues audit committee continues to review its annual audit report thanks thank you I call on Mr Dunn for a report from the comprehensive Planning and Development Committee we had a very productive cpdc meeting um out of that we referred um the recent uh public private partnership report to the facilities planning advisory committee for
286uh them to review uh and provide their analysis both of the report provided by facilities and the staff response in addition uh we voted on two motions to uh request the chair and vice chair to schedule work sessions uh the first work session uh would cover um new construction management approaches including design build and construction management at risk uh and the second work session would focus on public private Partnerships and swing spaces through the combination of these efforts we will be building on the great work that's been done in recent months by uh Mr Manan her team in the facilities department and we will uh chart a new Direction uh for f CPS to accelerate the construction of school buildings School Renovations and do so at lower cost and uh faster time frames thank you
287thank you Mr Dunn I call on Miss Lady for a report on the governance committee governance continues to work on policies uh we are currently trying to uh work together with the superintendent's office to develop a plan of attack um because of the backlog of policies we have not reviewed uh in previous years due to things taking president like the boundary policy and the gring policy but we are hard at work and hopefully we'll be bringing policies to the board to approve sooner than later thank you very much agenda item 13 board matters without objection we will skip board matters this evening seeing no objections agenda item 14 at 11:25 PM we are adjourned