001this june 16 2022 regular meeting of the fairfax county school board will now come to order please stand for the pledge of allegiance followed by a moment of silence and a performance of the national anthem by the navy elementary strings under the direction of robert salzberg [Music] [Applause] beautiful job navy agenda item 3.03 announcement i'd like to recognize mr moon um who we have in the audience today many of you know him the former school board member at large thank you for being here this evening ms tollin has submitted a written request to virtually attend this evening's meeting due to a personal conflict all those in favor of approving her request please raise your hands okay that is unanimous with those of us at the table the new safety procedures gun-free schools and school board
002buildings and property policy has been moved from the consent agenda and added as an action item at the request of a board member item 5.03 policy 5011 purchasing and supply in item 5.04 policy 5015 procurement of professional and consultant services has been removed from today's agenda and will be scheduled for a future work session at the request of a board member if you would like to review a copy of the agenda and any agenda item that is being discussed tonight that information may be found at the back of the auditorium or on the website at fcps.edu school board slash board docs tonight's meeting is being broadcast on channel 99 and live streamed on the website of at fcps.edu tv slash ch99 the board would like to congratulate the office of communications and community relations for
003being awarded a gold medallion from the national school public relations association for this year's vacsup fcps communication plan the award recognizes excellent educational public relations programs and campaigns grounded in strategic communications best practices congratulations to helen lloyd and the entire occr team agenda item 3.04 resolution honoring the 2022. okay agenda item 3.04 immigrant heritage month resolution i'll call him to sizemore heiser for this resolution whereas many of the founders of the united states of america were immigrants and immigrants have played an important role throughout american history whereas more immigrants live in the united states than in any other country and contribute to the diversity of every aspect of our culture and the strength of our economy whereas immigrants have made great contributions to the united states in all fields and as of 2020 nearly half
004of the fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children nearly 30 percent of physicians were foreign born immigrants were responsible for half of the total labor force growth in the previous decade and immigrants are about 80 percent more likely to found a firm compared to u.s born citizens whereas immigrants also have played a crucial role during the pandemic as they made up a disproportionate share of workers deemed quote essential unquote and expected to work in person whereas as of 2020 over 350 000 immigrants live in fairfax county fairfax city and falls church city and over 217 000 of them have lived in the united states for 15 years or more whereas the top five birth countries of immigrants in fairfax county are india korea vietnam el salvador and china whereas fcps serves a
005diverse student population of approximately 180 000 students in grades pre-kindergarten through 12 speaking over 200 languages whereas many of the children of immigrants in fcps often share a common experience of bridging two cultures embracing and celebrating their heritage while growing up in the patchwork that is america now therefore be it resolved that the fairfax county school board recognizes june as immigrant heritage month in celebration of the many contributions of immigrants to our school system community and country i so move and i will be seconding this resolution miss seismor heiser would you like to speak to this i would be honored to speak to this resolution i am um incredibly honored to bring this resolution and celebrate the many immigrants in fairfax county public schools i want to start by thanking two of our students devin
006and sabina hagan who i believe are here tonight right over there please stand up i want to thank our students for who were the ones who brought up the need for an immigrant heritage resolution when they spoke during our public comment time at the may 12th meeting thank you for your advocacy this is certainly a resolution our board should have and personally for me this is very meaningful as the child of immigrants who grew up who came here not speaking english where english was not my first language when i started in pre-k and i remember that feeling of fear as growing up experiencing two cultures trying to figure out how to bridge my culture and be all things that i saw all my friends were and given that the history of america is really the
007home of waves of immigrants from different countries to students who are not immigrants themselves or students who are children of immigrants but share that common bond some translating for their families some celebrating their heritage some figuring out how to celebrate their heritage but all of them a celebration of the uniqueness of america's diverse culture because i really value student voice as many of my colleagues do i want to read a poem from our class of 2022 graduate from a young man named sagar gupta who was recently awarded the amanda gorman award for poetry for his poem entitled conversation starter how is your english so good i'm reading this poem because what he describes is what i lived through and many of our immigrant students lived through i would like to read this poem in full
008how is your english so good by sagar gupta you see i was devouring books since before i lost my baby teeth ravenous for distant lands and wise dragons that sprouted proverbs wash it all down with warm onyx ink and drowned in the mildew and saccharine of aged leather and wood pulp i grew up watching world war in sesame street but you speak so well where are you from oh you mean how is my english good i was born and raised on the east coast lived in northern virginia all 16 years so i don't have the southern drawl that my kindergarten teacher had sometimes she mixed up her eyes and a's anyways i pick up new words from cheesy rom-coms and sunday crosswords and the shakespeare we analyze in school my friends and i make flash
009cards just ready for grammar but where are you really like where are your parents from yes my parents speak english too they were taught it in school just like us i picked up hindi from the dinner table banter but it felt clunky and awkward in my throat carved himalayan contours in my mouth uncharted yet to be mapped with tongue and so i never bothered repeating it back instead i worship taylor swift and bruno mars fill the voids with their autotune soliloquies learn of heartache and young love belt out each lyric like its gospel wow i didn't know they spoke english there and you don't even have an accent well actually it's the second most spoken language in india but don't take it from me take it from my grandfather who sees scarlet color his ancestors
010blood staining pale british hands where you and i see the same scarlet color and picture targets bullseye take it from his father who hid for his life in the hollow of a drum only a child when they descended upon his village so no i'm not proud of my english of these fourth force-fed diphthongs and stream lower fricatives i'm not proud of a choice i didn't get to make but please no need to be impressed i'm just playing by your rules and i will um speak to my second thank you ms sizemoreheiser for bringing this resolution and thank you to the students for really coming and speaking to the sport and your advocacy as to why this is important [Music] we have a total of 28 fcps students who were born outside of the united states
011and countless tens of thousands others who are children of of immigrants who have come to this country our top immigrant birth countries of our students in fcps are a little bit different than fairfax county i wanted to share that with you el salvador honduras guatemala afghanistan india south korea ethiopia pakistan vietnam and china are our top 10 birth countries of our students according to our latest student enrollment data i am the daughter of immigrants it is a very unique way to grow up to to be in a country where your parents are struggling to learn the culture to establish themselves to learn the language to make connections but at the same time ensure that they don't lose their customs their heritage their language and pass them on to their children and growing up here as
012many of our students still have to do trying to navigate how do i bring my two worlds together my home world my greek heritage but also my american customs it was difficult and it is a very unique experience that i know many of our students struggle with these these days as well however what i what i have seen in our schools and the experience of my own children now is just so welcoming that our schools are our staff is and how much our students themselves want to learn about each other i rarely spoke of this tension um that i was living uh for many many years but our students um want to share their heritage with each other and i think that's a beautiful thing and i think that's how we learn from each other
013that's how we celebrate each other and i'm so thankful to all of the families who have chosen f fairfax county as their place to educate their kids and to bring a little piece of their home back here to all of us so i thank all of you again thank you students for allowing us to celebrate our immigrant families and students tonight we appreciate you oh wait i have to call for the vote unless ooh there's lots of folks who'd like to speak miss darren at cofax thank you and thank you for the students who brought this forward and thank you ms eisemar heiser and mrs bukarski for reading this um i am a second generation immigrant that may not be a parent to many people but i am i lived in a neighborhood with a
014rich culture many also fleeing war because i am a little bit older than some of my colleagues um they were fleeing world war one in the eastern european bloc and they were there and my father um you know he was the first in his family to go to war my gran in world war ii my grandmother had four sons in the war um fighting for the u.s so the one thing that you say miss picarski that was evident to me and what isn't evident any longer is that those who come to the u.s are now very proud of where they came from often times what happened and miss pikarsky you referenced it we were we were not necessarily embarrassed where we came from but we didn't embrace it the way you all do i think
015each generation is teaching us and i appreciate that because i think it's important to share your heritage not hide it to be proud of it but to understand that we are a country and a community of immigrants and people who you may not think are recent immigrants are they share your struggle to assimilate to be part of this community to be part of what is the united states of america but also to be part of another community so i thank you for bringing this forward and allowing me to speak to it it's not something that i speak too much either but i appreciate it and um i am happy to celebrate uh the immigrants that are making us the united states of america so thank you thank you miss mclaughlin followed by dr anderson thank
016you i know it's going to be a long evening so i'll keep my remarks brief but like ms kofax i am the granddaughter of immigrants and when my father's parents came to this country they too were seeking a better life for their children they did not even have high school level education and they knew that the united states provided such incredible promise and so i just want to say that this is a particularly meaningful resolution for me personally um and absolutely as a member of this board for our entire community it's a blessing and i'm very proud to live in a community that is not just richly diverse but celebrates it so i look forward to supporting this very much thank you for bringing this forward similarly to mr moon as the immigrant um amongst
017you this has been very exciting to see develop so i'm very pleased to be able to support this you know my family was one of those families that have been described by miss picarski and ms eisema heiser as we attempted to assimilate and learn the language so this is really an important one for me this evening i don't want to reiterate some of the challenges that have already been shared but i want to make sure that i share that those challenges are not just happening in fairfax county but across the nation and while we celebrate our immigrants of this evening and talk about how we appreciate their language and culture and cuisines i also want this to be an opportunity and because those things do enrich our lives here but i'd like for this to
018be an opportunity and a reminder that there is space to engage in activities that enrich their lives as well we take from those communities i would like for us to think about how do we give back to them with patience and understanding and tolerance when they're not exactly where we need for them to be when the language skills are not as fine-tuned as we would like them to be and being mindful that there is a space for us to know that we might need to have some accommodations for language because of our very diverse community i love the fact that my children live in a live in a diverse area and attend a very diverse schools diverse school i've always appreciate the fact that my first grader used to come home and share with me
019what she has learned from her classmates who are chinese who are vietnamese and coming in with language is that she would not possibly get some in in other places in the united states so i am very grateful and thank you for naming those countries that are also high because that was on my list to share but i also want to give a shout out to the rest of our families that have not been mentioned from guatemala mexico colombia haiti jamaica the other caribbean islands which i represent so thank you very happy to support this this evening and mr moon please stand up as the former immigrant on this board i want to be sure that you are recognized as well because your country as we're talking about contributions to the board your multiple decades of
020contributing to fairfax county should not go unnoticed so i'm glad to see you to see you here this evening thank you thank you dr anderson miss marin followed by miss tolin yeah last night i was reading a book that i got from our fairfax county public library and it was the national geographic's weird but true facts about new york city and it said that new york city has 200 languages spoken and the first thing in my head was well so do we here in our public schools so take that new york city um but what an asset what an amazing place to be living and be raising children and i know the constituents of hunter mill value our immigrant population especially lately helping our afghan residents resettle i've seen faith-based groups moms groups even had
021um someone from our school board office her neighborhood her street was adopting a family who had students that were going to be attending our school so i'm really pleased that we're able to stop for a moment and offer our gratitude for the diversity of our community go ahead miss stollen okay can you hear me all right we can hear you thank you um i want to thank devon and sabina hagan for their advocacy to help us bring this resolution to pass as was mentioned their words at the may 12th the school board meeting were moving and told the story of their family coming to america and building lives here we are a richer community due to their arrival and hard work once here now sabine is doing award-winning work in writing and promoting immigration recognitions
022i was thinking about this the other day as i was working in the school board office and i looked up to see this quote hanging on the wall and i think it summarizes some of the things we're talking about here tonight it's entitled the responsibility of america the price of freedom is responsibility responsibility to accept without malice or prejudice the rights of everyone to live the lives they've imagined responsibility may not always be easy but freedom is seldom granted on easier terms freedom is an undeniable spirit that offers the bold assertion that anything is possible for everyone thanks again for bringing this resolution forward and thanks again to governor sabina hagan miss corbett sanders yes thank you madam chair and thank you to the makers of the motion for bringing this forward we are often
023asked why the school board undertakes certain resolutions and they say ah you're doing this and how does that impact academics this resolution directly impacts academics as the uh wife of an immigrant and the mother of immigrants i can tell you that it has always been fascinating to see how rich the classroom experience is because of the contributions of people from all around the world and the perspectives that they bring to the classroom experience as our students unpack key issues associated with english language why do we say it this way why do we say it that way how do you write a poem how do we bring in the experiences of the different cultures into the poetry that is written in our classrooms as was evidenced by messimer heiser's recitation of a recent graduates poem it's
024also that our classrooms are richer because of the immigrant experience that our educators bring to the classroom many of our teachers come from around the world and they bring that experience into the classroom and by our children listening and hearing and experiencing that education for educational perspective they too are able to [Music] adopt some of that experience and it infuses the way that they look at different problems that we solve and so i think that this is a wonderful resolution because it recognizes not only the diversity of our community but more importantly is how that diversity impacts the positive academic outcomes for all of our students so thank you i will now call for the vote all those in favor of the resolution please raise your hands that is unanimous yeah my light was on
025okay um go ahead and so much okay um uh i want to thank sabina and devin for bringing this uh to us and uh it's a testament really to the fact that student advocacy of course makes a difference and that every student out there should be encouraged and empowered to come out and make their voice heard and bring good ideas and of course there's no doubt you know i was actually not going to speak to this because my i mean my identity my background my dad having come spoken no word of english in fairfax county public schools uh to be a successful physician today who raised me and uh you know my whole family being born here but um i'd be remiss not to say just a specific thing that today we're honoring of course
026uh the legacy of what this means in our country that we are a nation of immigrants that were a place where uh you know from the founding of this country right the founding fathers fled religious persecution coming here as immigrants themselves of course uh with the history no doubt of indigenous genocide and whatnot that needs to be acknowledged but no but nonetheless a nation where people came from all walks of life and all nations to form what we have today but i say that because we celebrate this today and in uh in concert with that celebration we have to also take it upon ourselves to recognize the the deep challenges uh that are out there in the narrative of our nation and in in the push and pull of finding our place uh and to
027say to recognize that celebration also means standing by uh and and standing against uh the oppression that does uh exist right and and whether that's xenophobia fear of the other uh whether that's you know challenging laws and policies and uh realities in our country that make it difficult for immigrants to not only come here but to exist and thrive even when they're here and when they're our neighbors in that pursuit of sanctuary and trying to build a place that truly is for all um so i'd really be remiss not to say that as we celebrate we make that commitment and we renew that commitment in each and every one of us to make sure that that's uh um you know a com a a a stance that we take and and a fight that we
028take on uh in support of of our broader society and the world we want to build right because as we increasingly globalize we realize that borders perhaps are more arbitrary than we thought right and that our common humanity binds us from here all the way across the sea and and the globe so i hope that we can all remind ourselves of that that it that it takes real and intentional work to um to stand up and and to uphold the celebration that we're lucky to have here in fairfax today thank you let's please take that vote again all those in favor of the resolution raise your hands all right miss stolen there we go that is unanimous thank you if we would like to please invite the honorable il young moon former school board member
029members of the korean american association of greater washington the hispanic educator association board members um and lupe members educator representative devin and sabina hagan and the cappa nova members to please join us for a photo okay agenda item 3.04 resolution honoring the 2020 laura ashley piper scholarship award recipient recognition recipients and their supporters will be invited for a photo with the board after the reading of all the recognitions and i'll now call on mr frisch thank you whereas tariq aldalu has remained consistently committed to excellence in academics community service athletics and student leadership responsibilities throughout his years at mountain view high school and whereas tariq has shown great potential for continued academic success by maintaining a strong gpa and working towards his diploma and whereas during his time at mountain view high school he has
030demonstrated maturity responsibility and determination and is supported and advocated for education for all and promoting peace by being the 2021-22 recipient of the student peace award of fairfax county and whereas tariq has contributed to his community by being an engaged member of the loya society supporting the food pantries by collecting organizing and sorting food donations and tutoring and assisting children individually or in small groups to aid them in the mastering of assignments and reinforcing learning concepts and whereas through his overall excellence in academics and activities including athletic success and soccer and enthusiasm for computer engineering coding and mathematics he in every way personifies the characteristics and ideals to which laura pipe laura ashley piper adhered and now therefore be it resolved that the fairfax county school board awards the laura ashley piper scholarship to tariq
031aldahu aldalu in memory of lieutenant piper and in recognition of both for their drive determination and dedication to excellence iso move and i second this resolution mr frisch would you like to speak to this yes um after serving on this year's award selection committee i have to say i'm delighted to tell you about tariq i first became aware of him earlier this year when he was as i said earlier awarded the peace award he's been a student with us at mountain view high school since april of 2021 coming here from lebanon tariq and his family originally lived in syria but were displaced by war and left for for lebanon where they worked to collect the documents necessary to immigrate to the united states while in lebanon as we heard during the resolutions reading tariq worked
032as a volunteer teacher and administrator for loyac a non-profit that designs and develops programs to support underprivileged and vulnerable communities during this time he packed and delivered food boxes to people living in refugee camps and soon began teaching them math arabic and english not only to the children but to their parents as well tariq eventually took on more responsibilities developing curricula for varying age groups he also worked with adults to help develop their business skills here in fairfax county public schools tariq has distinguished himself academically and in athletics while continuing to demonstrate true souvent servant leadership for all of these reasons and more i couldn't be prouder to present tariq aldalu with the laura ashley piper award [Applause] so a tariq so i would also like to share a few words as the magisterial school
033board member and i had of course the honor of calling you to congratulate you and let you know that you have been chosen um and i was able to attend your graduation and i was very much moved by the story that you shared with everybody and it is quite fitting that this resolution tonight celebrating you also falls on the same night that we talk about immigrants because part of the story that you shared with everyone was how about your journey about your journey to get here and once you were here um trying to acclimate and and part of that was sharing with others the wonderful rich parts of what you brought with you even though you had a long and difficult journey to get here and i i was particularly moved by that some of
034the words that your teachers used to to describe you was always searching for academic excellence grit your flexible disposition and just always trying to find the good in every situation you are in and and your thirst for knowledge and how you had to go through several not one war-torn countries to get to the united states where you had to work very hard to finish your high school degree that is a very different path than many of our students take but the resilience that you've shown your grit your desire to excel and keep going is is incredible and it's very inspiring and it is to be commended and i was very inspired by hearing your story and i wish you the best of luck i have no doubt that you are going to do very incredible
035things um just seeing from the humanity that you were able to share in your path to get here with others and teaching them things from sewing to english just always looking for the good uh wherever you work so please come back to us tell us all the wonderful things um you have accomplished we will be cheering you on from here so congratulations and i know we have at least one more board member who would like to speak mr mesh um yeah thank you uh i was i did not have the pleasure of being on this committee but i did obviously have the pleasure of finding out that uh was the was the winner of this prize um and uh you know i'll say this because i know this sometimes affects the heart differently that just
036means congratulations you really lifted our heads up and i we just want to take this moment to actually read um in his own words because i guess he doesn't have the chance to say anything about receiving this but uh i met zlarek at the mountain view graduation where he was also a speaker and um made the class proud uh there was a lot of energy around his uh he was received very enthusiastically but um without further ado i'm just going to read in his own words so tarak is saying that i'd like to express gratitude for the opportunities i was able to gain in the united states to share my background and my history as a palestinian that made me one of fcps's successful students and my goal is to reach my dream and to
037be a role model for immigrants that are here and i want to direct a message to all of the immigrants here that their voices are heard that and that it that it is here to stay and that their presence does not reflect a weakness and that their immigrant title in quotes indeed reflects their strength that they were able to overcome and succeed despite their difficult circumstances that are not befitting of them so again we're so proud of you [Applause] yeah if without objection i would like to invite you up to receive this if you'd like to say anything you can walk up to the microphone if you'd like to just okay so uh first i'm grateful for the chance from the united states of america that gave me and uh [Applause] first thing i was
038i want to share like i was in arabic in arabic country and i uh in lebanon they did not let me finish my education because of some political situation and because of my nationality but here in the united states they did not ask me where i'm from also things like this just like to finish our documents but the point is they let me get my diploma and let me get my dream and studying my computer engineering and that's something uh people could not notice how great it is until they face uh they like they did not have it um i'm i want really to thank fcps fairfax county and mountain view high school for this i'm so nervous so yeah and i want to say that immigrants here like they faced many many problems and
039many difficulties but the point is we have to we have to see that they are successful in many parts and that's that's reflect how how the strength and how and how strong they are and i and i will try to be a good person reflect those immigrants not just uh palestine or the middle east all the arabic immigrants and all the muslim and all or anyone i can relate to i want to share my uh my nationality as as a palestinian and reflect how how the how how we are just people we can share our background and we we we have a beautiful things that we can we can share far away from the war and blood yeah thank you very much congratulations and good luck thank you so much all right okay i forgot
040we didn't take the vote yet okay wait a minute [Laughter] all those in favor of the resolution please raise your hands that is unanimous all right excellent um we still have more agenda item 3.06 recognition of the 2022 school board character award recipient i'll call mr frisch again for this recognition thank you the school board character award was initiated by former student representative to the school board chris gioverelli and established by the student advisory council in 2001. the apple federal credit union education foundation has generously funded the 500 award that accompanies the recognition since 2007. the award is given to a junior or senior who demonstrates a continuous record of high morals strong integrity and good character and who is recognized as a role model for students in fairfax county public schools the recipient of
041the 2022 school board character award is christopher marquez alfaro a senior who graduated this year from oakton high school christopher is a resilient patient compassionate and caring student he values the importance of making a difference in the lives of others and dedicates his time to helping his fellow students he was a tutor in the oakton high school center program where he took on the role of creating weekly tutoring sessions gathering needed support materials assisting students with organizing their work and tutoring students in their native languages christopher truly believes in improving the local community and the world he lives in and happily devotes his time to making a positive difference once a shy and reserved teenager christopher is grown into a charismatic caring and outgoing young adult his presence within the classroom is unmistakable he will
042continue his studies in college to pursue an early childhood education degree christopher is the pinnacle of integrity and good character and has always seen challenges as an opportunity to inspire others he possesses a positive spirit and strives to create an inclusive community christopher is an inspiration to all who meet him he is truly deserving of the 2022 school board character award if you're here stand up so we can celebrate you please all right you can if you'd like if you'd like to speak we we welcome you if you don't have to okay all right congratulations we're very happy to honor you agenda item 3.07 resolution honoring student representative pranav chaudhary and i'll call on ms sizemore heiser whereas pranav chowdhury has enthusiastically served as the 51st student representative to the fairfax county school board his
043tenure for the 2021-22 school year held many special challenges with lingering effects of the covet 19 pandemic and whereas pranav has never wavered in his commitment to the students of fcps and his duties as the student representative he attended meetings and special functions and contributed many helpful observations as well as the student perspective to discussions on issues before the board whereas pranab advocated to provide equal opportunities for students with disabilities and brought much needed awareness on student suicide prevention and mental wellness he also advocated for student academic support and to expand access to advanced academic programs pranav has truly strived to be a representative and a voice for all students and whereas as a langley high school student pranav maintained an academic excellence while enrolled in a rigorous advanced placement ap classes and whereas during
044his time in fcps he was a founding member and board of directors trustee for the national school board member association a member of the langley high school theater sac delegate school reporter and a cappy critic which takes a lot of time i know now therefore be it resolved that the fairfax county school board acknowledges with the deepest gratitude the service of this the student representative to the fairfax county school board pranav chaudhary during the 2021-22 school year expresses its sincere appreciation for your contributions and extends its best wishes to him as he continues his education at northern virginia community college and as the executive director of the national school board member association i so move i will second this resolution miss eisemar heiser would you like to speak just briefly i just brought up thank
045you so much for serving as the 51st and that incredible student representative it's been a historic year and it's been a tough year for you coming back into in-person learning for all of our students and you've done an excellent job being at the table being that strong advocate for the students making sure that you advocate for students to have access to that academic enrichment advocating for student mental wellness and really being very vulnerable and sharing your story along the way which has really spoken to me and i know to my colleagues and to our leadership team i really appreciate all that you've done to elevate elevate excuse me the experience of students with disabilities that you know that's near and dear to my heart um and and just your passion for our students and your
046willingness to challenge our thinking on our ideas you know willingness to speak up that is that is going to take you far as you know i share your passion for theater and i will tell you i think it is the most important class that you've taken outside your academic classes for your success and the skills that you've learned in theater your public speaking with your excellent ads your ability to listen and respond in real time your teamwork and collaboration will serve you really well as you move on into college i applaud your participation in the cappies and i'm really grateful that you're going to continue to bring your voice to serve on school boards through your participation as the executive director of the national school board member association congratulations on your graduation good luck next
047year at nova don't be a stranger you can be just down the road hope come back and visit thank you print off from the bottom of our heart um i'm i'm also honored to be able to second this resolution i think um when you came on the board uh right off the bat my first impression of you was just so much enthusiasm and desire really a deep desire to to to help and to be that student voice and to try to make sure that we understand that experience and as ms seismore heiser said i've really been blown away throughout the year just your vulnerability in being able to share your experience your challenges what you found difficult in the system the things that got in your way the ways you thought that we could and
048should be improving fcps for all students and you have never shied away from sharing that you've got incredible public speaking skills i am really anxious to talk to you and hear about what the next step for you is after fcps and i think you're going to do some great things especially as the executive director of the student board association you've got big ideas keep pushing and and people will listen thank you for serving this year i know it was a difficult year and with that miss keys gamara thank you i i couldn't pass up this opportunity pranav because it has been such a pleasure to get to know you and to watch you really honor the people who sent you here um you have been a voice of courage and of truth and humility kindness
049and inclusiveness you have spurred this board to growth respectfully you have told us when we were wrong whether we listened or not and you never gave up i personally want to thank you for your support and establishing the john lewis leadership academy and your kind words in making sure that student voices were heard uh for gathering those voices and the concerns of many and so i just really want to thank you for being here and i want you to understand that i know that the voice you raised was not your own you listened to so many and amplified who they are and for that i am very grateful thank you thank you ms tolen yes um pranav i have certainly enjoyed getting to know you over the last several years pranav was active in langley
050journalism and advocate for his fellow students during his time at langley high school he was a strong member of the student advisory council and was my langley representative on my constituent advisory group when we did our mclean high school langley high school boundary adjustment his research into a variety of topics around the boundary of change was impressive he is a walking encyclopedia and always universal improvement and this was all before miss one moment please spanish somebody virtually needs to be on mute thank you go ahead miss tolen it's okay now um during his time as our school board rep he shared his path through school despite its bumps to help the school board district and school staff and students always see a way forward pranav has advocated for sources across high schools and middle schools
051to help all students he's talked to students across the district to ensure their concerns and hopes could be heard especially this year when we all came back from an unprecedented and evolving school experiences from the previous year and a half he provided a window into the student experience and their realities on many issues this year to remind us about how our work on the board affects our students he has done work nationally to promote the work for school board reps across the united states pranav i'm so looking forward to following your next journey and know that you will continue to study the problems you see around you champion for those around you and continue to make differences please check in with us and let us know how you're doing thank you so much for all
052of your time and effort that you spent with the board ms corbett sanders yes thank you madam chair prana i could not let the evening go by without just um thanking you for your student leadership your quiet way getting your views known the excellent example that you provide not only to your colleagues in the student community but to your colleagues on this board about the importance of reaching out listening with two ears speaking with one mouth so use it proportionately you have done that consistently and you have represented the full range of students in fairfax county i have been impressed with the fact that you went to all of the various schools and when you made the student appointments to the advisory boards you made sure that there was geographic representation from across the county
053as well as the full range of students representing fairfax county and so i am just impressed with the the focus and the leadership that you have shown in this position and we wish you well and please do check back in with us because we want to see where you're going thank you miss cohen i remember our very first zoom when we met and you were so excited that i don't think you stopped talking for the first 10 minutes and then finally you ran out of breath and went okay um and your enthusiasm is truly contagious it's so obvious that you love what you're doing you love being up here um you're never afraid of um letting us hear your voice and treating us as colleagues and we appreciate that and appreciate the passion that you
054bring um and i think a different voice maybe then sometimes we hear and so we're so grateful for your advocacy for everything that you've done you have made a difference by being here and we look forward to all the great things that you're going to do let's start at gofux i just want to say thank you for your enthusiasm i uh really appreciate uh how you bring your ideas to the board and and share them and so i want to thank you for your dedication for your enthusiasm and for your passion as a student rep it takes a lot of time to do what you did you have to juggle lots of things and i even learned some new things that you do tonight from other colleagues so congratulations on a job well done and
055um i wish you all the best in your next adventures at nova and with that i'm going to call for the vote and then i'm going to call on you for now i know you'd like to speak as well unless you no thank you so much um i really just wanted to thank everyone for their mentorship um their compassion their empathy throughout this process i would not have been here without the individual relationships that i was able to build with board members here tonight um as well as dr brabrand dr ivey dr king all of our leadership team and our board clerks miss cornell and miss medeja who have been so instrumental in my ability to do well in this office i also wouldn't be here without my mom and my dad my grandparents who
056are here tonight stand up stand up come on come on um [Applause] grandma can get up too come on [Applause] and my late uncle who was a very big supporter of this work um and thank you all for being such amazing partners such amazing cheerleaders mom thank you for driving me um this has just been an incredible experience and i think for me as someone who had a bit more of a circuitous path through the school system this has really gone to show what is possible when we cultivate the relationships and when we invest in the potential of our student body thank you so much and with that i'll go ahead and call for the vote all those in favor of the resolution [Applause] ms corbin sanders are you voting with us okay [Laughter] that
057is unanimous congratulations agenda item 3.08 lgbtqia plus pride month recognition and i'll call on miss mclaughlin for this recognition thank you chairman picarski uh i can't remember with the recognition do i get to speak first or i read it first you've got to read it okay so so then i'll i'll give my little prologue for those of you who have heard me speak to this before i am a very proud parent of an lgbtqia plus child my son ryan mclaughlin was a junior at woodson high school when he thankfully was in a very loving academic and educational environment where he felt he could come out to his school community to our family and so every year this is um a particularly important recognition that i am always so honored to be a part of because
058it is what makes fairfax county um really truly a beautiful place to raise children we're not perfect but i can certainly say how meaningful it was for me and our family to know that there are so many loving caring and supportive members of our community and so it is with that that i am really pleased to offer this recognition today june marks the anniversary of the first lgbtqia plus pride parade more than 50 years ago which served as a call to collective action just one year after the stonewall riots where lgbtqia plus people led by transgender women of color like marcia johnson and sylvia rivera resisted police harassment and violence during early morning bar raid in new york city the decades since have been one of struggle and celebration for the lgbtqia community despite increased
059understanding lgbtqia plus young people still face many challenges without accepting families they are for more likely to attempt suicide or experience homelessness in fact recent studies show most lgbtqia plus middle school and high school students in virginia say they have been verbally harassed because of their sexual orientation and often hear negative remarks about transgender people in school additionally middle and high school students in virginia report experiencing physical assaults because of their lgbtqia plus status students of color are disproportionately impacted by anti-lgbtqia plus hostility with recent surveys showing large percentages of latinx and black lgbtqia plus middle and high school students experiencing bullying the fairfax county school board celebrates its lgbtqia plus students and staff recognizing the urgency of its charge to foster a responsive caring and inclusive culture where all feel valued supported and hopeful
060and advances policies that seek to protect lgbtqia plus students and staff and enhance their experience in fairfax county public schools furthermore the fairfax county school board appreciates the many contributions made by lgbtqia plus students staff and families to the vibrancy of the broader school community fairfax county has a richly diverse lgbtqia plus community that includes people from all walks of life who should be able to live without fear prejudice discrimination harassment or violence on behalf of the students educators and families of fairfax county public schools the fairfax county school board proclaims june 20th 22nd as lgbtqia plus pride month in fairfax county public schools in the spirit of one fairfax the fairfax county school board urges all to respect and honor our diverse community and to build a culture of inclusivity and equity not only
061during lgbtqia plus pride month but throughout the entire year as well thank you thank you mr mclaughlin thank you agenda item 3.09 juneteenth recognition and i'll call on miss marin the month of june is the time that many in our nation recognize juneteenth as the holiday that celebrates emancipation day juneteenth marked the day in 1865 when enslaved texans learned that they would be free two months after robert e lee surrendered and ended the civil war and two and a half years after president abraham lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation june 19th also marks the day that african-americans in the southern states exercised independence from those who benefited from their enslavement and labor in the founding of this nation the educational institutions of this nation including fairfax county public schools has a particular responsibility to recognize the
062painful realities of our history and to ensure that our curriculum reflects these realities working with the community is one fairfax the fairfax county school board is committed to identifying actionable items to advance policies and improve processes to enhance access to opportunities that ensure that students families and staff do not experience inequities in fcps the fairfax county school board values diversity and is united in our opposition to racism and hatred we stand in solidarity with our african-american students educators staff and their families fairfax county public schools hereby officially commemorates juneteenth as a day to celebrate and emphasize a collective call to action against injustice of any kind thank you miss maron and with that we'd like to start inviting folks up for um our photos mr aldolu your family and your supporters please come up for
063the laura ashley piper scholarship award at the front yes we would now like to invite christopher marquez alfaro and his family and supporters to please join the board for a photo we'd now like to invite pranav's family to please join the board at the dies for a photo [Applause] if you're here this evening in support of lgbtqia plus we would like you to please join the board for a photo if you are here this evening in support of the juneteenth recognition please join the board at the dyess juneteenth recognition all right very exciting things tonight but we do have our folks waiting agenda item 4.01 community participation the next order of business is community participation and speakers must limit their remarks to no more than two minutes in length at the conclusion of the two
064minutes the microphone or video will be turned off school board members will be listening but not responding to individual individual speakers the school board will not hear statements evolving issues that have been scheduled for public hearings such as a capital improvement program budget and boundaries school board members may also step away however they are able to hear commentary in the back comments targeting criticizing or attacking individual students are not permitted during public meetings complaints regarding school-based employees should be directed to the appropriate school principal or other school officials speakers should refrain refrain from using personally identifiable information in connection with an individual student or school-based employee additionally speakers should be respectful and observe proper decorum in their statements avoiding profanity inappropriate gestures shouting and comments are on counter to the spirit and letter of the
065school divisions non-discrimination policy all statements should be directed to the school board and speakers should remain at the podium until concluding their remarks as a reminder speaker substitutions are not permitted a speaker may not yield their time to another individual before or during their remarks shouting and outbursts from the audience will not be tolerated and we're grateful to everyone who has come to speak to us today and we thank you for your patience and your cooperation our first speaker is ruby persky [Applause] hi my name is ruby and i'm an incoming student at woodson i'm glad that the school board has recognized pride month and has asked everyone to respect and honor our diverse community i wanted to talk about the recent discussions over people wanting to ban certain books from school libraries as a
066student who reads frequently i can say that having book characters that represent you is a big part of feeling represented in the community when a kid reads a book and there's a character that is like them they feel included respected and accepted in the community if we were to take away these books we would be taking away a fundamental part of children feeling like they belong isn't that what fcps is supposed to be about everyone feeling accepted and included with equal representation again i would like to thank the school board for their efforts to promote inclusion thank you our next speaker is robert werty robert where did oh good evening so standing here i have some idea of how daniel webster must have felt facing the rogues gallery jury summoned from the infernal reaches by
067a certain mr scratch to judge the case of mr jebez stone as recounted in the devil and daniel webster however unlike that villainous panel you on the dais have demonstrated an imperviousness to suasion for all the talk of diversity inclusion and equity this board has displayed a complete lack of desire to engage with parents and other concerned citizens over the direction and policies of fairfax public schools now with this latest iteration of the srnr you seek to impose a tyrannical straitjacket of radical gender ideology that is unscientific and entirely untethered from reality upon the youth of our county a ucla study released just this month concludes that only about one half of one percent of those aged 13 and older identify as transgender so what the hell are we doing and why the schools are
068not yours the kids are not yours and you clearly do not have the consent of the parents or most citizens at large we will remain engaged noting the actions of this board and targeting every seat in the upcoming election cycle we are aware awake and ready to reconstitute the membership of this board thank you our next speaker is anamash gupta anamesh gupta dear school board representatives i'm here to voice the concern of an unfair treatment and lack of transparency at my son's school he's sitting up there he had a net gogat risk five scores and the class data reflecting a higher 99 percentile he was rejected in level 4 screening as well as in the appeal in foya people with lower scores were accepted why i want to know the reason for rejection ap staff
069is not ready to provide the answer why parents and children spend time and effort to apply for level four they get added to the pool of candidates for screening just don't add these people i mean why are you letting kids go through all this and then given a rejection why are these games being played with innocent children why can't we why can't the acceptance be data driven in review of my child's school packet data it is it is incorrect in the number of areas i don't think he was given a fair opportunity as opposed to other children in the class it appears that the school selected the people whom they wanted right in the beginning of the school year the enrichments or advanced workshops were only for those kids his class materials are in contradiction
070to to a lot of the way the school had written the gbrs rating the school staff actions are not in alignment with the child data i would like to request an audit or an investigation at my child's school for the second grade level aap packet and revaluation of the aap admissions so every child is given a fair treatment this should not be a crystal ball or something that is magically predicted by the school staff member at the beginning of the school year this is my story as an immigrant and i know you supported immigrants but this i mean this is right happening right in front of your eyes so please fix this thank you our next speaker is laura hanford i'm a mom of five with kids in the school system for many years and
071i served three years on fleek parents want partnership but you've staged a takeover for years you've pushed your ideology into younger and younger grades and now you want to punish kindergartners who dissent finally the pronoun police can march our little thought criminals out the door the srnr claims it's based on federal and state law but this is false it's wildly out of step with both and teaching gender ideology in elementary actually contradicts state standards of learning you've destroyed decades of victories for girls privacy and opportunities by opening all their safe spaces to males no questions allowed you replaced fle medical terms with ideological ones thus endorsing your appointees claim that biological sex is meaningless your policies push this toxic fiction that biology is meaningless but feelings are immutable studies show tremendous harm and recklessly punishing
072pushing children to transition including by masking underlying mental health issues detransition rates are skyrocketing france england sweden are all putting on the breaks based on the science but you are pushing full speed ahead a culture of respect does not compel children to deny biological absolutes and force them to affirm your ideology or deny them their statutory right to education if they don't respect does not teach kids to lie to their parents or give them covert transition teams you require parents permission take a tylenol but not for transition when you set the same punishment for arson and speaking truth about biology i have to infer you see truth as incredibly dangerous but the beautiful thing about truth is that it wins in the end and it sets people free truth teaches children they're beautiful as they
073are and that their biology is a gift not a curse thank you our next speaker is kristin sylvia degenero good evening my name is christine sylvia degenero i'm the parent of two current fcps students i stand before you here to register my strong support for scps's policies supporting lgbtqia students and staff june is pride month as we've talked about i recently saw a chart that showed what the public might think about that pride is it speculates that the public thinks it's about parades and rainbows and sure rainbows and parades are a wonderful part of pride but a second chart showed what pride is also about celebrating living your life as your authentic self being a part of a community and honoring those who led the way and gaining rights we now have continuing to fight
074for equal rights feeling gender euphoria instead of dysphoria ensuring that transgender youth are safe and protected and knowing that pride should be felt all year round but here we are again dealing with right-wing efforts to attack students over their gender identity no doubt an effort to continue to turn lgbtqia students and their rights into a political punching bag before the midterm elections these attacks spread lies and fear causing untold harm to many students in our school district and the rhetoric does not represent the views of the vast majority of fcps students and families i am grateful that my students go to the school district that they are learning that diversity of all kinds makes us stronger that celebrating our differences makes our community better and that we learn so much from those who have different
075perspectives or backgrounds or experiences thank you to the school board for your continued support for lgbtqia students and for celebrating and honoring the tremendous diversity represented in our school community those who disagree and instead look to drag our school back school district backed decades do not represent the views of the majority of fcps families thank you also for looking out for trans and non-binary students so that they can go to school more comfortable in their own skin and position to succeed in school and beyond thank you thank you thank you our next speaker is jeffrey aqui [Applause] hello jeffrey akin thank you so much for for the moment to speak here um first of all mike uh i commend all of you on your efforts to try to bring some sensibility over the phone policies
076uh as i was studying these things that's gonna be a problem forever so thank you for that effort um i'm here to discuss srr and the uh compelling of speech which all of these uh immigrants that have come this country and i've been around the world and i've seen embassies wrong with people that want to get a visa to come to the united states because it is one of the greatest countries on the planet it has provided freedom to peoples across the globe this is not in the hands of the right people if we're going to have a policy like this if uh the bias and miss heiser i don't mean to bring attention to this but the comment i heard about the poem so negative about the you know the country it's not you
077know this kind of subjectivity is only going to chill speech and not create inclusivity and camaraderie among students those are the efforts that need to be had to happen instead we should focus on basics like history india is filled with places where it didn't do a great job treating its neighbors but so isn't everybody so how about math and basic stick to the basics we need to get kids out of politics we need to protect their innocence and let them explore and discover this great life of theirs and instead i think some of the efforts that fairfax county schools should focus on is training adults on how to keep their biases out of the way of child's discovery thank you very much thank you our next speaker is heather foglio heather foglio our next speaker
078is harry jackson with the struggling economy on the verge of ending a recession with parents now struggling more than ever to pay for their bills to pay for food and to pay for the ever increasing property taxes taxes that are having an impact on the affordable housing in fairfax county and taxes that are used to fund our schools as public service servants your priority should be on what matters most at this moment addressing pandemic learning loss dealing with human trafficking and assault issues in our schools and providing services to our special needs students it's heartbreaking how fcps is neglecting special needs students these students are most vulnerable they need our help the most and went a year without school because of you fcps will deploy care teams to a child to support their gender identity
079transition but special needs children see no support whatsoever fcps already has in place mechanisms to address bullying of which malicious dead naming would certainly fall under the proposal to compel speech let's face it possible suspension is not only unconstitutional it is misguided and short-sighted such a policy ignores those whose religious beliefs conflict with such policies fairfax is diverse and freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion passing the proposed change in the statement and the students rights responsibilities handbook will surely lead to lawsuits forcing scps to pay more in excessive legal fees which have amounted over 60 16 million dollars to date under the school board due to other lawsuits for neglecting special needs students and with the racial amicus targeting the asian community in regards to admission policies at tj communities of faith
080are not the only ones impacted by such a policy the proposed measure will also impact those that are likely to resist social engineering efforts attacking masculinity and will have a disproportionate impact on minority communities as we see an increase in school sup and school suspensions of persons of color and a widening of the discipline and equity in our schools in hard economic times we want to see our tax dollars go towards educating our children not partisan pet projects that will surely detract from that [Applause] thank you our next speaker is jen hands i'm speaking to you today as the product of fairfax county schools and a fairfax county mom with a love of all people it wasn't enough for the fairfax county school board to offer age inappropriate pornographic books now this same school board
081will change the rules so that they can be the arbiter of what is considered malicious and act as the speech police take this for example two fourth grade boys mike and john friends since birth but now john wants to be a girl meanwhile the parents have no idea of this plan and the child has all the same male body parts but mike continues to call his friend john and uses he and him so the school board suspends mike under the vague term misgendering the highest level punishment available think this won't happen it's already happening in this country and it is why the school board is pushing for new authority authority that parents did not request which just shows the school board is not working for the taxpayers while we support protecting children from harm this
082policy aligns with the school board's plan to push not just support transgender sexualized and political ideology on our children they want to take away the first amendment take away religious freedom and take away parental rights expect fairfax county school board to allow transgender in the future transgender students to take over girls sports like they are already doing at the virginia universities it will never end time to stand up americans do it for the kids [Music] thank you our next speaker is jeffrey shapiro jeffrey shapiro good evening um i rise in opposition to punishing students who engage in a new crime the school board has invented called malicious misgendering and uh i'm going to tell you a story biographical so when i was ages 11 to 13 i was in love with basketball and wanted more
083than anything to excel in basketball it was actually a key part of my identity and then i was in my opinion quite good at it but uh it i was short and in a sport that favors height i was at a great disadvantage it felt like a cosmic injustice at the time that boys who were taller but not as skilled or dedicated were effectively better players than me my role model was calvin murphy the shortest man in the nba at five nine my hope was for a growth spurt however by age 13 or 14 i realized that was not going to happen and i was bitterly bitterly disappointed i can remember it like it was yesterday but with time i reconciled myself to the reality of my body and this process was very important to
084my transition from boyhood to manhood who's reconciling myself with reality and and making the best of it in all of this my teachers my school the school system did not intervene uh they did something better which was imparting the academic building blocks that i needed to flourish for the next 50 years and counting so imagine if they had encouraged my basketball delusion by catering to it had prolonged it intensified it or if they had forced the other kids who didn't pass to me on paying a punishment to treat me as if i was the next calvin murphy would that have led to a better outcome so what have i been offered major surgery or hormonal drugs thank you our next speaker is barbara ekman barbara ekman hi i urge you to vote no to the
085proposed changes to the student rights and responsibilities in particular to the increased penalties for dead naming and misgendering in fourth grade and above i've heard multiple requests from parents for a town hall to discuss these changes but it seems that these requests have fallen on deaf ears you are elected board members i worry about that you don't care about parents at all to be clear i am both a loving mother and an ally to the pride community and when my sons came out i welcomed them with open arms and i was comfortable and comforted noting that they had found themselves and i have never been an impediment to their journey and i support them always with love just as i do my other sons my two youngest sons are in elementary school and i'm homeschooling
086them now because i had to do the job that fairfax county couldn't and they were so far behind i was doing the public school's job of educating my children we're watching now we're watching you try to slip your activist policies right by parents in fact that i do not support an overwhelming reaching activist policy that violates first amendment rights it has nothing to do with how i feel about the gay and transgender community it is however indicative of how you feel about your constituents and their needs i have liberal and conservative friends and when i discuss your proposed policies the co-ed family life education and transgender unit in fourth grade the potential suspensions and mism misgendering and dead naming the for kids as early as fourth grade they're all astonished so this leads me to
087one question who are you really representing you left the overwhelming majority of your constituents long ago you need to focus on pulling parents into the education process and pushing your politics out thank you our next speaker is alexandra dixon folks we can't we can't hear the board clerk alexandra dixon good evening school board my name is alexander dixon and i'm here to tell you you aren't doing enough for lgbtq students you have members of this school board who are pitting lgbtq students against disabled students we are one and the same and to pit disabled students against lgbtq students is not right because that which affects the lgbtq students also affects me 30 years ago 32 years ago we passed ada before ada it was perfectly legal to discriminate against me as a disabled person i
088don't want that to happen for my lgbtq students that is why i am here as a disabled person fighting for lgbtq students it is not okay to separate us second of all there are school board members who are waiting to see what yankin does yunkan is going to hurt our transgender students we know this we know this based on who he is the planet already so it's up to this school board to be the resistance to yunkan and to say no you will not hurt our students stop stop young be brave be the adults stop him thank you our next speaker is tyler willis good evening i'm speaking to you tonight based on my concern for this board's obvious ideological position an overt focus on social activism rather than academic excellence if we can assume
089for a moment that all in the audience have good intention i ask you to listen with an open mind the student rights and responsibilities book has enumerated many rights but it is missing some very important negative rights or liberties and i want to share them with you now students have a right to attend schools that are free from social and political activism free from ideologies that teach them to relate to the world and expect the world to relate to them not as individuals but as aggrieved groups and free from the fallacy that speech or silence is in fact equivalent to violence or harm parents also have rights they have rights to send their kids to schools that are free from policies which undermine their moral instruction free from the threat of disciplinary action against their
090kids pitting families against educators free from accusa accusations of bigotry when disagreeing with proposed policies i make these comments not to provoke you but to ask you to reflect not on your intentions but on the foreseeable dilemma that you're creating if you genuinely want to create the most welcoming schools i strongly advise you not to distance yourself from parents who with whom you disagree but rather to work more closely with them i ask you to consider the contradiction between these student and parent liberties and your proposed policy agenda our next speaker is holly hazard [Applause] thank you madam chairwoman and members of the board i'm holly hazard chair for public education the recognitions this week of juneteenth immigrant heritage month the lbgtqia pride month in fairfax county public schools exemplify how our public school system
091is for all children parents guardians and families that is what publication public education is and why it's invaluable in maintaining our democracy and our civil society these recognitions don't mean that our work is done of course there's much to do to meet the ideals of one fairfax but they in combination with other recognitions of other communities throughout the year show that public schools are irreplaceable that's why for pe came into existence we will fight for the existence improvement and funding of public schools in fairfax and throughout virginia thank you [Music] [Applause] that was our final speaker thank you miss madeja agenda item 4.02 superintendent matters i'll call on dr brabrand thank you chair picarsky and members of the school board a couple of things i want to share first pranav i just want to say
092to you you heard from board members tonight about the kind of person you are the kind of school board rep you've been this year and i just want to say briefly i've really loved working with you you were passionate you were a humble person a humble person it was an honor to have your your mom and your grandparents here tonight that really moved me um and one of the things i don't know that the board even knows that you brought a group of the sac folks in we've been doing sac student advisory council the same way for probably 30 or 40 years and you just brought them and said hey can't we just sit down and talk about new ways and i'm just proud of the atmosphere you created of making people feel comfortable adults
093to feel comfortable students to feel comfortable it's a gift and it will take you a long way i'm proud of you and please stay in touch and super proud for you to be executive director of the national uh association you're going to be great godspeed a couple of other things i just want to share boy tonight listening and seeing the student awards and the immigrant stories we're a nation of immigrants and you know i'm i'm i'm wrapping up my time when i'm going to get to be here and hear everything from the community this is an amazing community there are a lot of diverse points of view and we have to continue to find a way to bring people together in public schools and sort through all of these these these values these these ideas
094and try to find common ground i believe we still can and i believe that's the promise if you didn't believe in public education you wouldn't be here even sharing these ideas today and we've got to continue to push through in a country right now where too many people are interested in what else we can do to divide us how can we come together how can we find common ground our founding fathers did it uh and then our mothers along the way we brought more and more people to the table and we have to keep doing it in this country and in the school system i want to congratulate our school uh class of 22 graduates we had all of our graduations everybody's graduated i want to wish our students if any are listening tonight and
095they probably aren't a great summer our seniors going off to all the next things that they will do and a lot of our less than 12 month staff have just finished up this week their contracts and we wish them a restful summer break just real quick a couple other quick things we're still looking for people to switch careers including you in the audience right now and come out and become part of our school system and we are hosting a career switcher information session on wednesday june 8th military veterans community members anyone interested in becoming a licensed teacher um we actually did do this two weeks ago over a hundred people attended and we had several uh folks from the department of eds we had a troops to teachers representative we had several universities just really
096proud of all the work that we're doing to continue to bring people in um in another week we're going to have an instructional job fair and we're looking to hire exceptional people to be a part of our system as a teacher counselor librarian all the different jobs ia public health public health training substitute teachers yes we want substitute teachers please think about joining the fcps family we're going to have a lot of our summer program around summer meals which we've done each summer that have really been a lifeline for families that are economically uh you know economically and we all are right now frankly with the the the inflation pressures that we see trying to pay the bills and have meals and so we'll be having no-cost meals for students this summer and giving out
097that at several sites so please go to our website and learn more about it and uh really really proud of the work that we continue to do to feed our students and our families and community particularly during the summer tutor.com even though it's the summer our tutor.com access remains 24 7 on demand we really encourage students and parents to go on and learn more about the site even if they don't feel like they want to study any subjects they can start self-paced study for s-a-t and a-c-t prep which often a lot of students like to take in the fall and again please go to our website learn more about how you can access tour.com and students details for students about it can be through their archived courses in schoology and just look up that or
098go to the tutor.com online tutoring services website and look for summer access and then i think i want to finish with just we partnered with the national wildlife foundation and worked with the national wildlife foundation's echo schools to provide a framework for students to engage in environmental action in their schools this is our get to green program and our fcps echo schools and schools can earn bronze silver and green flags for their work on this we have 146 get to green schools in the division that's unbelievable number and we continue to see we just saw on the budget a continued expansion of our work with get to green across all of our departments i want to give a special shout out to riverside elementary in the mount vernon this uh district manchester district they earned
099their second green flag this year congratulations to them that's all i have thank you chairman picarski thank you dr dr brabrand agenda item 4.03 student representative matters i call him mr choudary good evening madam chair board members over the past several weeks i have been really excited to work with our incoming student rep as the transition process has gone into full swing michelle and i have been talking quite a bit and she has so many plans for communication and really making sure that every student in fcps is aware of who represents them and how they can make a difference which is such a critical baseline piece of student involvement it is one knowing that you have a student representative and two really really being made aware of the opportunities that this district presents to you
100a lot of the way that things are structured as of right now depends on word of mouth and we really seek to change that and make sure that we can communicate to students hey here's how you can get involved here is how you can make a difference in the education policies that affect you in your own district and so there were two things that really stood out that caught both of our eyes one was that michelle would really love to examine the board's current policy on the student representative and ensure that that policy is up to date and reflects what this job looks like there is a lot of time that goes into this job and um i know she has been really focused on making sure that we can enshrine excused absences for board
101related work which would be deeply helpful when it comes to conducting school visits attending work sessions and just all of the pieces of this job that do take place during the day it really is a balancing act for people who are in this office to manage both school and this job um and i think it would be a major help to have somewhere formally an ability to work in this job in a full professional capacity um and not just make it so that it's up to the student themselves or their parents or their school's individual attendance office um to pre-arrange every time um something takes place during the school day um the other thing that we both talked about and that a lot of other counties have done is looking at a more small d
102democratic process for electing our student rep to the school board in future years we have seen districts just as large as fairfax used direct elections of the entire high school student body for a number of years and it has yielded great results i know there's a common adult concern of not wanting elections to be a popularity contest but what we've found is that when we give students the space to engage in substantive policy discussion that becomes the focus of who gets brought forward and allowing the entire student body to elect its representative and know who serves them is very very critical for civic engagement for making sure that kids are able to come to this board to come to their student rep with concerns um and this has already been done in montgomery county baltimore
103county san diego and so many other large districts so it is possible even when we do have 25 high schools to do this and that's something that i think is worth exploring as does michelle the other thing that we were excited to talk about as dr brabrand mentioned earlier was the board's policy on the superintendent student advisory council we've had the same setup for more or less 30 or 40 years and we really think it's important that our formal vessel for student voice in this division has the flexibility and the framework to actually uplift student voices um i know there were a lot of comments on a standardized election process making sure that kids are at every school are aware of what sac is and how they can run um and michelle also did get
104to take part in some of those discussions with dr brabrand and with other leadership team members as vice president of the superintendent's advisory council so a lot of really exciting things are coming i know michelle has just started scheduling her one-on-one meetings with board members and i'm excited to see all that she does thank you thank you agenda item 5.01 confirmation of action taken in closed meeting this is a portion of the meeting where the board will confirm any action regarding issues that were discussed in the closed meeting these issues may include action taken regarding student disciplinary matters board members have discussed each individual case and at this time we'll have several motions to confirm the recommended action i call on miss cohen i move that the probationary teacher identified in closed session be dismissed
105at the conclusion of the 2021-2022 school year and their contract not renewed for the 2022-2023 school year is there a second seconded by miss mary and all those in favor that is unanimous with ms tolen away from the table i'll call on dr anderson for the next motion okay i move to excuse from attendance at school certain student identified and closed meeting pursuant to virginia code section 22.1-254 b-1 is there a second seconded by ms corbett sanders all those in favor all those opposed all those abstaining emotion passes with miss elaine tolen away from the table agenda item 5.02 will be regulation 2601 student rights and responsibilities and if there is no objection from the board i would like us to take a five-minute break if possible thank you all right colleagues i think we
106have taken longer than five minutes um if you can make your way up here please so we can get started we've we've still got a long night okay i'm going to call on miss keys gamara for the motion i move that the board adopt regulation 2601.33 p student rights and responsibilities as detailed in the agenda item is there a second oh second seconded by miss maren mesquiz gamar would you like to speak to this yes i would thank you one of the most important duties that we have as a school board is to review the students rights and responsibilities and to do the best that we can to address the concerns of our communities it enumerates the expectations of students and their rights within our schools and it is a continuing process to improve this
107year uh we took additional steps uh to try to make sure we were really listening right we we had this has been scheduled for a vote um a few meetings ago since that time we've had two town halls we conducted a survey talked to a number of our staff members and did the best that we could under these circumstances to listen we are working toward a more inclusive document that recognizes the vast needs of our communities updates in this version include changes to the cell phone policy that strives to protect the learning environment in balance with the need to have communication available to our students and community it includes some concerning changes by our virginia legislature that requires additional reporting to the police some of which will require ongoing advocacy to ensure that we are
108not consciously rebuilding and reinforcing the school-to-prison pipeline it also includes expansion of guidance for the use of technology changes to protect and maintain a respectful learning environment that does not weaponize technology with misuse or misdirected aggression it expands the list of interventions for us special education students are those who have not been identified as needing additional support to thrive within our school environments and we have expanded and clarified protections for student identities that allow our students to feel that they will not experience reprisal because of their identity this is a work in progress and that's good it means that we need to continue to listen and refine and minimize our language i think we've we're up to 60 pages um and find more effective ways to communicate so that we own and build a caring
109culture for every student by name and by need i believe every person at this diocese is committed to that we have talked about expanding our communications and listening to one another this is not perfect but we are continuing to try to have continuous improvement and that is the point thank you ms maron yes thank you in the years that i've served on the school board i've worked to provide input that has the srnr clearly delineate the rights of students and also their responsibilities i think there could always be continued improvement on that but i do think that this version of the document does continue to delineate that and and with that i think that this document is a real prime example to show that even if we had the perfect policy so much of how
110children succeed is based on their first teachers which are their parents particularly when it comes to cell phone policy which we'll talk about tonight we could have the perfect whatever that may be a cell phone policy but unless students are learning at home things like it's inappropriate to take pictures if you haven't gotten permission to share those things if you haven't gotten permission to not be on the phone late at night so you're not ready and sleeping for the next day we can't do our job without parents so i'm saying that i listen to parents i think the board listens to parents it doesn't always mean that we can do what we're asked here's just some of the things that the board has to weigh when we make public policy particularly this one legal obligations
111research-based instruction and age-appropriate practices for children professional development capabilities in the near and long term staffing funding and engaging with the other agencies that provide dovetailing services especially when it comes to public health services counseling all of these support services that allow our children to thrive academically and lately i've been reflecting on just how much of the work lately seems to be about talking about these complementary pieces of instruction to instruction we had someone tonight talking about stick to the basics math and reading well children can't get there if they feel unsafe to learn or if they can't communicate or if they're on their cell phone or they don't know how to express their frustration as a parent of a child with special you know special needs i see it and there's all this stuff
112that happens and so these kinds of policies try to to balance that out i'm so excited that we're going to have a cell phone policy really clearly delineated i've heard loud and clear from constituents and from principals what the research backs which is that cell phones interrupt uh student learning so i i think that you know this is an annual event an annual um reauthorization so to speak and we have offered community engagement and it's unfortunate that times i see the cycle that we offer community engagement some people are able to take that opportunity and they hear about it and some don't despite lots of outreach and then when the proposal comes out then we hear a lot of passion about it but you know we can only do so much so now you know
113this is our annual cycle of work we start to look at this every spring early in the year so come to those conversations and we can continue to make it better but we have to protect the learning environment for our students so they can thrive academically thank you miss marin are there other school board members um who would like to speak to this motion uh madam chair i have a process question yep go ahead uh it was my understanding that rather than speaking to the main motion because the main motion may be amended by the one amendment on the table i would introduce the amendment you're right go ahead thank you okay uh i moved to amend the main motion by deleting this separate section number two for grades seven through eight and adding grades
114seven through eight to number three which is grades nine through twelve in section o of the sr under cell phones and to remember the sections accordingly is there a second second did my missiles were hyzer miss mclaughlin would you like to speak to this yes i would um i'd first like to um perhaps help set the tone here um i i appreciate a lot of what my colleagues have been saying and the intent of my amendment is absolutely from what our superintendent said how do we find what unites us how do we find common ground and when the school board discussed its most recent recent work session about cell phone use policy changes and having a district-wide uh universal directive on this it wasn't shared with us where the middle school high school principals stood
115on this issue because there is a different distinction between middle school and high school and i have concerns about that when my amendment was published this morning we then did hear from the middle school high school principals association um they did share with us that uh 19 principals do support uh having more restrictive cell phone use during the school day and seven of them would prefer to mirror the high school the only difference between middle school and high school predominantly is that the middle school is going to say a way for the day students arrive at school it goes away they do not see their phone again until the end of the day at high school students can check their phones during passing between classes and at lunch all students would be restricted from locker
116room and bathrooms to my colleagues my concern is the following we have had varying practices around this county some principles have been piling up to for piloting up to four years now away for the day and they say it's working my concern is we've got seven middle school principals who say what they're doing is working and it's not a way for the day we only had two thousand parents respond to our survey to tell us how they stand on the cell phone policy when i think about how families utilize their cell phones with their middle school students to communicate about doctor's appointments about after school activities about pickup about anything that a parent might need to reach i do have concerns about a way for the day i also have concerns that we are all
117in agreement that we don't want students looking at their phones and using their phones during class instruction but when students spend more than 35 hours a week in our schools controlled setting to not give them that opportunity for small little breaks to communicate with their friends who are not in classes with them maybe they have lunch and none of their friends are there this is a communication tool and i just have concerns that i don't believe we have fully vetted this i would prefer that we go ahead and have the middle school and the high schools match up earlier today the superintendent made an adjustment now our secondary schools will follow the high school model so that means that three middle school populations in fairfax county will have the latitude and ability similar to what
118we have at the high school level so now i don't know what we're trying to control and that's why i put forward this amendment but i really want dr brabrand for you and and your team to understand this was never about battling with our middle school principles i respected each and every one of them and i hope that they would also understand that you know we also would like to have their respect for sometimes a different difference of concerns difference of perspectives i i frankly feel that all this is a bit premature i would have preferred that we just not put this policy in place for this year but at a minimum if this is going to pass then i would appreciate board member support and let our principals continue to do the good things
119that they're doing so thank you and then dr brabrand um if you could just again speak to the seven musical principals who don't want the away for the day what were their what was their advocacy because we've heard nothing about their perspective the board's only hearing why middle school principals wanted a way for the day i don't have direct knowledge of that i don't know if dr boyd has some of that feedback let me just say one thing before we get started the srnr i think what um miss marin said earlier is true this is an annual event um and uh it's gotten more and more i think attention and more importance because it it is it's about who we are what we're trying to create in our schools and um i'm so proud of
120our staff we've done the best we we could this year each year we try to learn lessons and what i think frankly srnr my lesson learned is more and more time more and more community engagement and this is one of the things i think the board has to just make a priority every year we get caught with so many other things this is one of those almost like the budget we need to spend more time just throughout the year doing the stakeholdering so this this feeling at the end of was it rushed or added what we're trying to do is still even from tuesday take some of your feedback and make some tweaks and even that perhaps without maybe lack of communication on my part leaves people on the board feeling well why are you
121making these last minute things because i am honest true to who i've been trying to bring people together trying to bring the board together but let me find out specifically to your question dr boyd if you know anything about the um the group of uh middle school principals who preferred not who weren't even though i we did get an email from you all did i think just a few hours ago from the president saying consensus was reached and the consensus was to go with the language that we included dr boyd yes thank you dr brabrand and thank you miss mclaughlin for the question we began engaging with principals early in the process both at the elementary middle and high schools levels and through the respective associations each level principle had discussions and in different formats
122as to what they thought would would be best at their respective levels mspa or middle school principals association when they did their initial vote if you will or sync or seeing where persons were um there were seven principals who including the secondary school principles in that seven um that initially said that they would rather prefer to mirror the cell phone expectations for high school as opposed to being closer to that for the elementary however based on additional dialogue and discussion amongst those middle school principals there was consensus built for the middle school level to mirror that more closely with middle school we do know that there were some concerns about secondary schools being that there would have to be two different standards implemented at a building for those three secondary schools we did consider that
123information and on today did propose an additional change for secondary schools to have flexibility during passing time but during lunch times they would still follow their grade level expectations because middle school is separated from high school at the secondary level i'm also joined with me is miss cindy conley one of our middle school principals who can speak firsthand to that level of engagement at the middle school level miss conley i'm sorry dr boyd before miss conley speaks my my question to you and dr braeburn is i we've had really great advocacy for the middle school principals association and all of their advocacy for why they want a way for the day i was really hoping for me and the board and the public to hear about the what is the advocacy to not have a
124way for the day since we had principals who didn't want to have a way for the day that's the voice we haven't heard yet sure so i can speak specifically again for secondary schools the voice that i got regarding why not to do away from the day was a difficulty in discerning from some of our secondary principles was john foster a middle school student in the hallway or was scott brabrand a high school student in the hallway and so that was the the rationale for their wanting to have the high school application because they would be able to apply things consistently across all levels given that their schools serve grades seven and eight that is akin to our middle school and nine through 12 with our high school i mean again yeah i appreciate that
125but again there are five middle schools that that we heard did not want a way for the day and they're not secondary schools it's those five middle schools that i continue to have concerns about that don't want a way for the day do we have any specifics about why they feel that way because i cited concerns i've heard but i'd like to hear that first that additional perspective from those principles do we have anyone who can speak to them certainly miss conley's here and she's going to help us with that go ahead ms conley good evening thank you for allowing me to speak um during our meeting we the the schools who would prefer the high school language were looking to increase the digital citizenship conversations and kind of help provide lessons and guidance for
126students about how to appropriately use cell phones and so as we continue to talk about that many of our schools who are away for the day in irving um which is a school i'm principal of is in a way for the day school and we shared how we could incorporate those lessons into our advisory period for example but we wanted to work on providing a more robust cell phone and appropriate use lessons and so kind of in conjunction with our away for the day so we can hopefully help students learn how to use their cell phones appropriately because a lot of the issues that we experience at middle school in those unstructured times are students using phones texting and appropriate things amping up altercations or using social media inappropriately so they were looking more for
127how do we provide guidance and lessons for students and then help students be able to use it more successfully and they felt like we could do that and allow them ultimately the the full association agreed that we would go with the elementary language of a way for the day throughout the day i i truly appreciate you joining us here tonight i would like to ask could you please clarify then to the concerns that have been shared with me especially for parents trying to reach their children throughout the day on things like pick up child care after school activities emergencies doctor's appointments how does that get handled when it's away for the day sure so we have a phone in every classroom and we've worked with our teachers because our teachers support this um in in
128such a high volume that teachers allow students to use their phones the classroom phones we also have a main office phone that students come down and use they use it during passing periods we have parents who bring or excuse me who sent emails to our aaa or um and then or would they call in and we get messages to them we've been doing this for three years and it hasn't been an issue um and then if it's a if it's a an emergency sometimes parents prefer that we are with the student when that emergency is shared so that we can provide support as well as opposed to getting it through a text message or a cell phone call i i appreciate that i i'm glad that it's worked at your school when i think about
129the number of times i was texting my own three sons through middle school to coordinate everything from doctor's appointments to child care to physical therapy appointments i just can't imagine that i've been bombarding the front office every time i had to coordinate with them so i my colleagues i just that's a big concern for me and thank you principal conley thank you miss seismer heiser would you like to speak to this yeah i think i think this is a really important conversation to have and so i wanted to support ms mclaughlin's amendment i will say that i have um i fully support having a way for the day in the classrooms and a lot of the research that the principals have talked to me about and i've seen talks about the distraction in the classroom
130so i'm really glad that at all levels we have a way in the classroom i'm glad we have a way in the bathrooms and the locker rooms prevent those i think these are all very very important pieces i wholeheartedly support them um the questions that i had were and the advocacy that i got was from a lot of special education parents whose kids have executive functioning organizational skills needs and there's a lot of applications on phones that students use to help with organization with social skills with communication i've had students share with me that the only way they can handle the sensory of the lunchroom is by listening to music i know many students use a com app they use music to listen to during breaks to regulate and for self-regulation and so to me
131the hardest transition executive function organizationally is between elementary school and middle school and students use organizational checklist apps to know what classroom do i need to go to what books do i need which time is my lunch period because that changes and the most difficult time is at middle school and so to me it makes more sense to have the middle school and high school policy mirror especially when we have secondary schools where the seventh and eighth graders are in the same building and passing during the same time as high school students so if you have a way for the day in the classrooms in the locker rooms and the bathrooms but you allow students to have it during passing periods and allow students to have in the lunchroom it mirrors the policies the students
132who have the most difficult transition and have all these applications available on their phones if they have it and if they don't then and they have documented needs the schools provide support um and i and i have tried for weeks to talk to middle school principals and i appreciate all the time the middle school principals have spent talking to me about this but i i've not been able to receive a satisfactory answer outside of the student can carry a laptop open in the hallway which seems unwieldy to me maybe not um so i i just and then when secondary schools are being given the same latitude as high schools it makes me wonder is it really that bad if we're able to allow a certain set of seventh and eighth graders to have their phones
133in passing periods and not so in short i think this makes more sense logistically for our secondary schools i think it provides a need for some students because if if the students who need it for organizational executive functioning supports have it in their ieps and 504s they can have it but now they're the only ones walking down the hallways with their phone and we have just now pointed out to every other student who a student with a disability is and that worries me so for those reasons i'm concerned i also do understand that there's lots of accommodations that um schools can put in place and schools are using it for away for the day but i have a concern i think it's an important conversation to have and i respect our principles for being able
134to make this work but i think these important things to point out all right folks we've got a very long list of people who want to speak and we've got lots of amendments and follow-ons so i just want to put that disclaimer dr anderson thank you thank you um i just want to start by saying that one i did have the opportunity to speak to the principals of my schools and make in the mason district and as i shared just this tuesday i was concerned with the original language that said what was going to be happening for students who were middle school students if we are going to do this if this amendment is going to pass then we will be right back to the issue that i raised on tuesday because glasgow homes and
135paul and poe have six seven and eighth grade students so we will have the same problem with whatever mr fog you know john foster will do versus scott how will they know in the hallways who is a sixth grader and who does not get that accommodation and who is a seventh or eighth grader and gets that accommodation i do want to raise that concern because we're shifting the problem to the three schools that i have um dr boyd can you speak a little bit to the parental feedback that we received during the survey that was something that i raised last tuesday the the narratives what did you find that parents shared i know it was 2 000 which is not a large um percentage of fairfax county but it was still 2 000. can you
136give me some fee can you provide us with some of that data please yes dr anderson thank you for the question based on our disaggregated data regarding feedback on the srnr survey the following parents by level indicated that they agreed or strongly agreed with the cell phone recommendations for pre-k through six eighty-two percent of parents agreed or strongly agreed for grades seven through eight seventy-nine percent of parents agreed or strongly agreed and for grades nine through twelve seventy-six percent of parents agreed or strongly agreed with the cell phone expectations that are drafted in the srnr okay thank you and i also got some feedback from um some of my principals and i will read a few of them from parents i want to thank you for the new cell phone policy this is what they
137were trying out um this year they're not enough ways for me to thank you for implementing this policy thank you for this i fully support this decision it goes on and on but i know my time is limited i must have i'm a middle school parent i i'm not waiting until that day to make arrangements for doctor's appointments my child carries a cell phone i text him at 2 12 because i know his bell rings at 2 15 and i know he'll be able to access this and i do this on a regular basis right now hey don't forget to go here i also have worked as a middle school principal you could still call the school phone so i'm happy to hear that this is something that is still available for our students their
138cell phone is not their only mode of communication um dr boyd one more question regarding accommodations for students who um who require it that is being provided in this srnr correct yes ma'am it is other accommodations that are provided for our students with special needs in the classroom um these accommodations can you give us a few examples of accommodations that could be provided for special needs students that may be visible to other students but not available to them so students again based on their individualized iep teams students may receive a copy of the teacher's notes students may have a read aloud or audio accommodation some of our students and a small percentage of our students have direct or targeted adult support so there's another adult in the classroom there to support the student so that's
139just a few examples some of our students have assistive technology devices that they utilize for communication or for other existing purposes as well i share this because it is seen by students when accommodations are provided so i don't see the cell phone being very different from that another question that was raised earlier because i would love for somebody to speak to this from staff i know that one of my principals may be here i'd love to hear your thoughts miss barnes what is it that you all are trying to control that was a question that was raised sure good evening everybody i'm margaret barnes i'm the principal at holmes middle school can everybody hear me okay yes ma'am okay that's weird i'm kind of looking at myself so i gotta adjust for a second um
140so um yeah in terms of what we're trying to control you know it's um i have just been thinking as you all have been speaking about um how important it is for us to remove that distraction as a barrier to learning um so i don't want it to it's not that we're trying to control students or control their access to communication with their their families it's just that we have seen um so many conflicts that have come up as a result of access to the phones during the school day in addition to the significant distraction it causes in the classroom it also is a big distraction in the hallways when there are might be you know conflicts between students if there is something that comes up sometimes the first thing that comes out is that
141cell phone um i know that you all are aware that we have seen some um really concerning things that you know students choosing to do things that they should not with their cell phones um on school property during the school day um so we do appreciate um the the language that you have included about not having it in locker rooms not like having it in bathrooms that's that's important but we also agree we also believe strongly that um we need to that a way for the day for our middle schoolers who are still developing and learning how to make those decisions about when it's appropriate to use it and when it's not i think it's important to stress as well that yes while there were seven schools that in the initial vote said that they
142preferred the high school language that we did believe in that we came to a consensus that right now until we're able to have further discussion we should choose the more restrictive language we should choose the language with the with the elementary school and that was consensus with all 26 um principles from the middle school principals association so we appreciate dr boyd engaging us early on this topic to give us some time to really process and think through it we do welcome continued conversation but we would just ask that for the upcoming year that we look at that that we continue to have a way for the day that it's a more restrictive policy and we can have discussions moving forward thank you so much miss barnes i realize that my time is up um but
143i do want to say that i think there's some space for us to gather to use this year this upcoming year as an opportunity to gather the data and make some changes subsequently after thank you ms cohen thank you um you know this is one of those i think where there's several of us who are struggling up here um between our own experiences and some of the experiences that our own children have had um and trying to reconcile that with what we're hearing from our principals and so i did have the opportunity to talk to all my middle school principals today um and yesterday and one lovely one who's sitting here from irving middle school one of the best um and you know i i think it's it's always interesting as policy makers to be
144at that impasse where um the input that we are getting is is somewhat divided but the input is pretty consistent from our middle school principles and so the last principle that i spoke to today was one of the schools that didn't um ultimately in the beginning didn't support the away for the day policy that wasn't what they used last year they used a green yellow red system and i think we're more interested in refining that but what they felt like was at the end of the day that the best thing for this year going forward was everybody moving forward together with one policy one collective voice so that every kid wherever whatever middle school they went to that they would understand the expectations that said i still worry you'll see a follow-on that talks about
145collecting data to make sure that we're not disciplining our kids in a way that i think is if the point is engagement and i 100 percent agree with that that we have to make sure that we're teaching our kids um how to engage and and the cell phone is a barrier to that it is for all of us as well my worry though is that just prohibiting it and then punishing it we're still not getting there so it's very meaningful to me that you said look we're still going to be doing these cell lessons we're going to be working with our kids to talk about appropriate uses to talk about addiction to talk about all these things that i think all of our kids are struggling with because my fear is it's great to be
146away for the day and then you go home to completely unregulated cell phone use and what have we what have we really taught kids other than just punishing them into compliance so i i will respectfully side with my middle school principles on this one but i'll be paying attention so continued conversations uh miss cuse-gamara yes thank you um i was thank you for the discussion um i did want to just see if i could get some clarification doctor dr bray brand i know we as i've talked to these principals it seems as though they were looking for a tool to try to control or try to address concerns that were arising and i think that those concerns were arising more post covet because students had we we hadn't been in practice of being the we
147together in the learning environment and so we had to come back together and and relearn that behavior i i am seeing this as part of that uh process but for those who um we're uh and thank you laura jane um cohen completely support gathering data for those who feel that they wanted more flexibility dr brabrand do we have any um you know while i understand this is the rule do we have any avenues for them uh that might uh address some of the concerns we heard today yeah and miss conley what i heard you say the five or so that were like let's go to the distance so the five who were most against it who wanted to go let's go the digital citizenship route let's keep teaching the compromise was we're gonna do away
148for the day next year and by the way this is the thing i keep saying to to you all this is an annual process this is not a way for the day forever and i know chair picarsky made this point tuesday hey is this really gonna work what about now next year we need to moderate you need to look at the data we need to give you feedback and i believe i'm committed and i believe dr reed and i know this leadership team is committed to doing that feedback with you but the compromise was that the digital citizenship could be wrapped into advisory this coming year even though there's a way for the day to still do the digital citizenship lessons and miss conley can you confirm that dr conley can you confirm that i've
149said that correctly or not yes dr bremer and that's correct okay so the five who were sort of got there by saying look we'll do digital citizenship during advisory and just a reminder of the board we made advisory a requirement in every middle and high school this year coming out of the pandemic and it remains so moving forward okay so they came up with their own compromise and we're going to be watching that data and and working that out um there were also some concerns with respect to special education students and dr boyd i'm hope i'm wondering if you would like to speak to some of that and how maybe the discussions uh went on in terms of addressing those concerns sure thank you so much ms keith gamara so in the updated red line
150following the initial post of the document in april we added language to ensure that students who had accommodations be it for through their iep 504 plan their health plans etc english language plans that they would have access to those accommodations for cell phones or other personally owned devices as determined by those respective multi-disciplinary teams i'm also something that i know massage my heiser has been very very passionate about and i thank her for her advocacy is ensuring that we communicate outward and i won't go into details because i know there is a follow-on motion but ensuring that um because this is a change in some schools um while we've heard from principals this year who have already enacted a way for the day for some schools uh should this pass that would be different and
151so it may not currently be documented in a student's iep that they need such accommodation and so there will be communication going out to parents and guardians to inform them again should this pass about their ability to request those respective meetings iep 504 health care plan meetings etc to have those teams consider the accommodation and also communication to staff to ensure that they are looking at students who are currently on our caseload who might need access to those accommodations whereby they can too can convene those respective meetings thank you and you've had these discussions with the middle school principals and and this was part of how they felt these issues could be resolved yes we have shared the draft document and had a number of communications through our associations and we know that you know
152i'll be the first person to say that um we're not perfect right we're not perfect there's always things that we can enhance and we can improve um and i can say personally that i'm committed to doing that work i'm committed to leading that work and working collaboratively with my colleagues so that we can support schools around being as we work to improve across the board and so they're aware of this discussion we're going to support the discussion we're going to provide professional development and coaching to ensure that they have those supports and also work closely with our department chairs that we will now have at all levels elementary middle and high school to be that extended arm of the office of special education instruction and procedural support to be those building level special education experts
153okay i do see this as an ongoing improvement process uh i know a number of principals have told me how they've tried to grapple with just getting a hold of kids being used to being back in school and etc so for that reason um you know i i do support the main the language of the main uh motion but i wanted to have this conversation because i it does sound like we're moving toward really addressing some of these concerns so hopefully this conversation is helpful to parents and that we will have conversations as we go along and i think that you know we can be nimble on our feet sometimes all right thank you miss tolin followed by miss corbin sanders thank you i wanted to make a couple of points um one of the
154schools that originally you know said that perhaps they didn't want to go with the middle school model is one of my schools and i did have the opportunity to speak to all of my principals um you know longfellow is on that list and what you know i think what we need to understand that this has been an evolving process for a number of these schools um they put some things in place over the last year and they you know the year before and um that you know now they've been able to see what's working and what isn't working and so the feedback i'm getting from longfellow is that although they had perhaps more of a high school model this year their teachers still were really really asking for um the software to be put away
155for the whole day so they're very willing to you know move in that direction um for next year um the feedback that i got from another one of my schools heard in the middle um the principal said i've seen a huge difference in the climate of our school when students were consistently held to the same expectation about phones and when they were finally freed from the distraction of having a phone in front of their face during all transitions and in larger locations she goes on to say um you know parents are very supportive of this teachers are supportive when students go on their phones in between classes in middle school they have a very hard time putting it away when they enter class the posts comments responses continue so um you know my other schools
156are have been using you know a way for the day over the last year and they're huge fans of it uh they also have said that they would much rather in the office be helping parents with some of the logistics of you know pick up or you know appointments or whatever versus um dealing with the discipline issues around cell phones they've seen such a decrease in the discipline around cell phones with a way for the day that they much much prefer that and they will are very happy to support um parents um you know trying to get hold of their kids during the day i'm certainly very sensitive to the the needs of our special education students and we've got a couple of follow-on motions that i believe our middle school principals will support and
157then i also support and dr boyd already talked to a lot of this she's prepared to provide the professional development and the communication that needs to be done to support our special education students with this i'm a little nervous about collecting a lot of data around this of course we want to see does this work over the next year and what are changes and improvements that we can make but we also don't want this to be a huge area for discipline and we've talked about that many times um this is something we want to put in place the principles to date have not had a lot of discipline issues around it and i'm a little nervous that if we start um requiring our principles to record and administer the data analysis and report that we
158are going to make it more of a discipline issue than it needs to be thank you miss tolin your time has expired it's corbett sanders yes thank you madam chair and i do want to um start by thanking uh dr boyd and mr rao for all of your work on this uh issue it has been a challenging issue for our middle schools and our high schools for well over a year it actually started to be a problem prior to covid and what we saw was that especially for young women that the stress and anxiety associated with increased social media usage is real and it does have an impact on our children's ability to fully participate in the learning uh environment and so i did speak to all of my principals in uh in schools located
159in uh in the mount vernon area and i've also spoken with the president of the high school the middle school principals association and what i heard was that learning is substantially better when children have less stress associated with the social media and that in a social media free learning environment that they thrive and that everybody can more fully participate in the learning environment and so i do support because of the challenges associated with the secondary schools the language that expanded the high school model to all secondary schools although the one secondary school in which students from mount vernon attend actually have been using the away for the day model for their middle school students i do think that the follow-on motions are really important and that i fully support because we do need to have
160clear structures in place to ensure that those students who need the accommodations of using a cell phone during the day are able to do so and so i will be supporting that uh that motion or there is actually a few motions associated with that so thank you miss omesh followed by miss marin yeah thank you um so i i do want to just bring back kind of one one piece that i i suppose hasn't been resolved which is uh the six through eight middle schools i think that that's that remains an issue in this case i don't know how that's gonna be pulled off and i appreciate dr anderson for mentioning it but um i guess i'm struggling a little bit here because i mean you can argue convincing cases for either perspective you know
161there's you know kids being identified for disability or otherwise but then you have kids who don't have or don't afford cell phones in middle school and then you have like how it factors into anxiety especially with covet and kids on devices and all of that and not being socialized properly but then it's also a tool for people if they're being bullied etc for them to find some something to resort to and rather than being isolated i mean we can go down kind of the the list of arguments on either side and i'm struggling because we're all sitting here giving our opinions about it and and i don't think that that's a constructive way to arrive at what is good for kids or figuring that out and we're giving good reasons it's just that at the
162end of the day it's people's sensibilities as opposed to and i don't mean staff by the way i'm just saying you know for us and taking positions here as opposed to perhaps the consensus of staff which i know the middle school principals association has said you know they favor the the original language um and then the surveys that we've done to get a sense of where folks are at so other than those pieces what else would we be relying on other than 12 people's opinions i just so given that that's the case i do i just go with my opinion and say that you know what i think that maybe i'd prioritize socializing kids uh and and helping them develop healthy habits before we give them access to these devices especially given you know the
163likelihood of addiction to various things whether that's screens or or other things i won't name i because that's what a lot of middle school kids use as the principal mentioned so i mean that's kind of where i'm at if we're not finding ways to substantiate this beyond everyone's judgment personally i don't know that we can make this decision but the most i can offer is maybe we we should pilot this like maybe you know megan i know your intentions are good here uh i find this really odd because i'm always a very pro student agency and i'm very inclined to say you know what let the kids do their thing but i think we also have to create the environment for them to get to the place where they're ready for that so um maybe
164maybe that's something we consider we can pilot it i'll leave that to you and how you want to take that if you want to amend your your own motion because i think the majority have spoken to not supporting it but um otherwise i think i'd have to incline towards uh leaving it as is mostly because the current position has been far more thought out than where we are today and and i don't want to just rely on subjective sensibilities okay ms marin yes well i i don't make public policy based on my own opinion in whims i i'm really striving to make public policy based on facts and best practices and um i also like to make public policy based on lots of input and work and um so i just want to share these
165facts to my colleagues first my constituents i haven't heard much of anything opposing away for the day those individuals who are both constituent and employee pretty much consistently ask for a way for the day fact the research research shows that students at the developmental ages of when they're in seventh and eighth grade that's a big time for learning and they're practicing a lot of habits and making a lot of healthy choices the good choice for them to make during the school day is to put the cell phone away because research shows that it is a distraction from academic learning they have real people in front of them they're supposed to be forming real in in person you know relationships this also aligns with our strides that we're trying to make an outro learning and in
166whole child wellness and in being active not just being hunched over on own cell phone wandering through the halls screenagers has been widely viewed throughout the school division i was invited to see it years ago by an elementary school teacher who offered it for professional development and her learning cohort so if you haven't seen that i encourage others to see it fact our staff are advising the board to do this not that they advise us but our staff of professionals who are expert and professional educators are informing us to do this 76 of the principles of middle school are want this to go through the rest they're not a hard no but they're not saying you know they agree wholeheartedly it's a little bit they're still figuring out 76 percent i'm comfortable with that principles
167individually again i trust our teachers i trust our principals we are paying them to be experts in education if they're saying this is what it takes to best instruct our children i support them the teachers i want to protect our teachers from becoming the ones to having to enforce reminding students to put the phones away every day that has been my priority from the start our teachers are there to instruct they have enough to do without you know we we in our schools are seeking to protect children from all sorts of things distraction gun violence weather i mean you know can we make it a little easier on the job please and i will say opinion lastly is my own experience i visited advisory classes in middle school i've walked the halls during breaks during
168transition times the middle and high i've observed for myself also i'm a parent with a rising seventh grader i'm actually one of the few parents with current fcps students and one of an even smaller number of school board members who have a current middle schooler i can tell you the job in this day and age is to protect our children's focus and creating authentic connections with people and the world and not on being on their cell phone so i think that we have to honor the requests that our educators are asking us and advising us so i will not be supporting this motion this amendment mr kofax yes thank you i appreciate miss mclaughlin's advocacy on this and um i will tell you that i was not able to attend the work session and i'm
169sorry about that i had a personal commitment but in the last day because that's all we've had since the work session which i did watch in its entirety i have been contacted or reached out to by several middle school principals in my area and there are strong opinions on both sides and they are not all in agreement um there is you know the idea i've listened to all my colleagues and i feel that what we are doing is we should be keeping on teaching our kids in a real world place and i think if i liked one of my colleagues who said we need to continue to do digital citizenship and we need to do that strongly in elementary schools particularly in fourth fifth and in those elementary schools that have sixth grade i feel
170like a lot of responsibility is given to middle schoolers you know you have passing you have a whole new world you're in front of and i feel that there is they are responsible at that point that this is a privilege that should be given to them i feel it feels punitive to me to um make 13 12 13 and 14 year olds put their phones away i don't know staff has there been research i have not done the research and i did not ask this question but is there research out there what other large school systems are doing um new york city los angeles chicago florida is there research on that do we have data from those schools other school systems thank you for that question ms darren at kofax we have not um pulled
171that specific data we've looked at a lot of the research around away for the day and attention and things like that globally but we haven't pulled specific counties data because we've been talking with our our leaders and our teachers who are dealing with our fcps students so gleaming from that experience in conjunction with the research-based evidence around a way for the day and i appreciate that and and i do know um as uh i spoke to dr brabrand about this and he said tammy when there's consensus there's consensus and consensus doesn't mean uniformity of every every opinion and i think that's why you see us struggling up here we are trying to do we are using opinions we are do using facts we are using data we are using talking points given to us by
172principals on both sides so at this point um i i will support megan's amendment but i don't believe that obviously it will pass given the consensus here but this is for me also a potential deal breaker on voting for this version of the srnr and i i will listen carefully and i will make a decision later this evening as we talk about this but i feel right now that i do want our children to learn in a way that is real world not punitive and allows student choice and doesn't um doesn't invoke anxiety in in some kids which i think this this will do because it's such a portion of the real world right now thank you miss darren at cofax mr chowdhury we'd love to hear from you on this um so in terms
173of this amendment i do really appreciate the case i think of the overstimulating environment that a cafeteria can be and kind of needing that escape or refuge but i think that we are kind of poking at the wrong bear here so to speak in that i think that in the future it may be beneficial to for the srnr set a clear set of expectations for what is provided to middle school students at lunchtime in terms of making sure kids aren't just trapped in a cafeteria trapped in a loud environment and that they are provided the option of alternative spaces that are not as overstimulating i would especially say that because not every student who has a disability or has sensory issues is on an iep and not every one of those students has been identified
174as having a disability um and so i think it's really important to acknowledge that but simultaneously i don't necessarily think that it's an issue of just allowing phones in the cafeteria i think it's more hey you know we might need to provide kids alternative spaces we need to allow for some level of flexibility in ensuring that kids can be in a safe and caring environment um so that's kind of where i stand i know for me when i was in middle school i was one of those kids who sometimes like i didn't have the same lunch period as my friends and my middle school did not allow phones and so it didn't feel the greatest but there i don't think the failure was necessarily in the fact that phones weren't allowed i think it was
175that we need to do more to be proactive about connecting our students and about cultivating those friendships for all of our kids thank you i'm going to go ahead and take my turn um i've got great reservations about this cell phone policy being in the srnr period i've shared them repeatedly i'm going to speak i'll speak to that later i'll speak to this motion right now i have been a long time advocate of restricting cell phone use inside classrooms dr brabrand you probably don't even remember this but when you first started i came to meet with you with another parent advocate begging you to put in place regulations um i fully support that students do not need to use cell phones in the classrooms i've thought that for many years i never thought that was
176a good practice lots of research to support that beyond that i also don't believe that the way we best serve children is an absolute total bands don't work developmentally for kids um they just don't i don't believe it's best practice i don't think the research shows its best practice somebody asked about other large school systems well new york city did try a total ban in 2015 they got rid of it because what they found was that it had a disproportionate impact on students of low socioeconomic status students of disability students of color and it was enforced differently in different schools i also think that when we're making policy and providing cutouts for certain schools it's okay in these middle schools but in in the secondary schools it's not because it's difficult to identify who is
177a middle school student who isn't takes me back to why are we doing this period i don't understand that so for that reason and also for the reason because the majority of my middle school principals were on the list and of the mindset that we need to teach kids to be part of the 21st century do not allow this in classrooms but give them some flexibility there are few things that they control in their life that is one of them for some of them you know they've got lots of activities they do after school they need to check in with their parents etc etc i've got a middle school student now i've had three others that have gone through middle school in the last few years and my experience is that i think this motion
178makes the most sense for me but i also understand other principals have found other things that work for them which goes back to me speaking to the main motion when it's time as to why this is in the srnr um to begin with uh regardless i will not i will be voting for this for the reasons that i shared and i see there's a couple of more folks who want to speak again to this miss omesh yeah thanks um so in trying to be fair if we if we stay with status quo given that i guess more thought has been put into that up to this point i am still concerned about the students with disabilities peace is that something that maybe we can develop guidance around we can do something assuming this motion fails
179miss miso mesh can you speak to the amendment at hand and then i think that speaks to the main motion when we get to the sr uh okay i mean this influences the vote on this is how i'm thinking about it right because okay uh at least to me i mean the idea is that um if we're trying to be more inclusive and we don't want to out kids with disabilities or have them be bullied for having a device that others don't i would feel more assured knowing that we have a contingency for that should we decide that uh it's only k through it is k through eight right that we maintain what we have so dr boyd can you talk about that a little bit i i i really need us to have that
180fixed or like resolved sure thank you miss omesh um so a couple of things so um as shared earlier there is the opportunity for students who need to have access to those cell phones or personally owned devices to have that utilization as an accommodation one of the things that i do want to share and i share this with some board members as we engaged and collaborated around this topic is that bullying and picking on students for any reason is a violation of the sr and r and we have processes to deal with that not only to address it and hold students accountable but also to teach that student who's doing the picking or the bullying to correct their behavior and remedy it so the same way that we would address that if someone was picking
181on me because they didn't like my hair or i had big feet whatever it might be we would address that the same reason if somebody was saying i'm picking on you because you have access to an accommodation because bullying is unacceptable picking on other students is unacceptable and it goes against our culture and our caring culture and so all of that is akin and so again we would continue to have that process in place for this and be very very direct and explicit again as we teach our students because we understand change is difficult and so we have to educate and again it's not about coming down hard with the stick but supporting the environment in terms of instructionally and safety is shared by our principles yeah i mean i guess it's unavoidable like this
182still lends itself to that uh likelihood but even if we were to okay put aside the student part the staff piece like kids and hallways kids and bathrooms um kids again some of my colleagues mentioned whose disability is not documented necessarily etc um right i mean that if there's not guidance around that or even like a training or some kind of understanding we instill in our staff that hey not every kid who you know needs to use their cell phone for health reasons whatever it might be has an iep right or when you see a kid with their cell phone in the hallway don't just jump to say you know uh put that away right because you don't know and you don't want to make them feel bad in that situation as a for what
183you know for their need correct that that's the piece yes correct and and i could share but miss conley's here and again she can speak from that building level perspective so i'll give her the floor so we have students who have it written into their ieps that they are allowed to use their cell phones and then we also have students who utilize it who are students with diabetes who check frequently their blood sugar levels and we it's sort of like for example like wearing a hat if you have a medical condition versus not wearing a head covering students i recognize that there's there's reasons that some kids get to do things and others that they don't um we've done this for three years now and i know other schools have done it for four years
184and i can only speak to my school and what i've heard from peers who've had a way for the day is that we don't have the issue of of kids being pointed out because of those reasons they utilize it for what they need it we we make aware our staff and you know it has not been an issue but we fully support as as the middle school association making sure that we're training and providing the information for our staff to have the conversation about you know why are you using your phone as opposed to put that away or some kind of you know disciplinary matter i think the conversations and the and the training that goes along with that i think would be um accepted by all of our colleagues yeah yeah no i can
185appreciate how on the school by school level you you know you have ability to do that but i think dr boyd i'm thinking a little more systemically as always uh just in terms of how we're supporting principles to instruct staff or us instructing staff or whatever it may be there needs to be a built-in component there because i'm curious and that's where it goes back to again professional development the same way we'll have lessons for students professional development for our principles around what's contained in this srnr and not only what is it but what's the process what are things that we need to be mindful of assuming positive intent if i see mr chaudry in the hallway and i know i won't because he's a graduate but if i were to see him in the
186hallway and perhaps it was in the school where at a level where phones are not permitted um generally speaking i'm not going to attack him i'm going to come up mr chaudhary and i can do that in a discreet manner just as one example i think that most of our our staff you know you know you can never say all but assume that positive intent and that's the pd that we do with our principles and that pete and the principles in turn do with teachers and in situations where that's not the case then we have to provide support for those professionals and learning different ways of approaching and handling situations is that something we're committing is a take away from this because i don't want to end up we've got a long night so no
187i know i'll take another go back then i i don't think we have time for another go back but i think it's very clear where this is going to i want to commit something different because otherwise like we're just all each side doubling down on their position we can make this more constructive and that's why and like we can do that at the board table tonight unfortunately the motion's before us and we're voting on it but okay all right we've got two more um miss mclaughlin followed by messiah's more heiser and we've got to take this vote now i just wanted to make sure that it people understood some of the points being made tonight new york city public schools tried the total ban and then they got rid of it because of the very
188things that we worry about all the time which is disproportionality so when we talk about doing research and making decisions it is also realizing that fairfax county schools doesn't sit in a vacuum i totally agree that our educators are looking at the student population in their buildings but let's be clear when ms omich said something about a pilot it's technically been a pilot we have 26 middle schools and 19 of the 19 maybe i think it was five or six tried the away for the day the five to seven who said we don't want to do that the reason they're saying they don't want to wait for the day is because what they're doing they're building has been working for them for their teachers for their students and their families so my concern coming back
189to all of this is 12 of us are unanimous with the res with the research with all of the advocacy from our middle school principals we don't want it in the classrooms we don't want it disrupting instruction what we're battling about is the passing time in between classes that's like five you know seven minutes max these kids have they're in school for 35 hours a week we control so much of their lives and cell phone use is gonna happen after school all the things that i've heard and why we want to restrict restrict restrict what hasn't come through is if it was working with the schools who don't have a way for the day and that's why they wanted to continue with a high school model and again we're only talking about the hallways and
190at lunchtime i'm just really dismayed that there seems to be this idea that for those who like a way for the day let's make everyone have to have it in this absolute you know uniform and i'm just i'm disappearing point where we landed thank you miss mclaughlin miss seismore heiser yeah i wanna so um i've been talking about this for weeks as miss dr boyd knows i actually asked dr boyd set up a meeting with me to meet with all of the middle school principals who have been doing away for the day and i asked many of these questions then so a couple of facts um dr colin i very much respect you i like the principles but you know i'm hearing it's happened none of our kids have any problems with bullying but um
191the facts show differently that kids with disabilities are five to six times more likely bullied and are bullied five to six times their rate when i had this meeting i was told i can only think of two or three kids who might need this accommodation but meanwhile accepta and acsd were all very concerned about this and i could name ten kids off the top of my head who use this accommodation ieps and 504s do not have this documented because they don't document accommodations that have been available to everybody i will say that one of my concerns is i hear what dr anderson you're saying about or dr boyd you said about kids have different accommodations aids or ats devices but this is a coveted device it is different when a kid walks around the hallway
192with a device other kids are used to having had and now also they don't have it and they see a kid with it and i can see hey can i just borrow your phone and you have a kid who may have a desire to please or language issues handing their phone it's different to have a coveted device than any other device i also worry about a kid who has the right to have a phone because it's in their iep wandering down a school hallway with a teacher who doesn't know this child and doesn't know they have an iep or a 504 saying what are you doing why do you have a phone presuming positive intentions or not for some kids that is anxiety-inducing for something they're allowed to use and they will put away an
193accommodation they need this is five to seven minutes in a hallway for students who are transitioning to middle school with executive functioning needs and other students who just have these needs it does not make sense to me to have absolutes and other school systems have tried i have tried i try very hard to work with our principals i have tried talking to them i will talk to them weeks and weeks and weeks ago the ones who were doing this and i did not hear any answers to these concerns and that's what i wanted that's why i support this motion today okay um [Music] i do think we need to take this vote dr anderson did you turn on your light again i did okay very quickly dr boyd or um for the schools that implemented
194the away for the day did not allow it at passing can you give us some of your feedback in terms of what worked what didn't work i appreciate what's being shared by what new york city has done and how they've abandoned it but sorry we're from new york this is not new york this is a different space so we have actually some action research that i would love to glean some information from what did happen in the hallways with our students without special education students did they get the accommodation how did other students react to it kind of what you've been hearing here sure thank you dr anderson so the principals that have implemented a way for the day um share with me that it's really calmed the environment that a lot of the things
195with social media the conflict that those things have decreased that students who need it as an accommodation have it as an accommodation and some um actually allowed us that accommodation for students that they know needed even if it's not in the iep to address some of those other unique needs that staff may be aware of if there's something traumatic going on in a home and you know for a period of time and they just through the caring culture um but they shared that it's been very very effective that their students while they initially may not have wanted to do it that they got acclimated um to it and that their their parents and guardians um supported that now and provided feedback similar to what you've shared and again miss dr conley may be able to
196again provide first-hand information from having implemented it but generally that was the feedback that we received yeah i think one of the biggest reasons that we would support not having it in the in the hallways is because once those cell phones came out in the hallways that's when um for lack of a better description the drama kind of started back up and so um if you're in the lunchrooms and in the hallways you've got five minutes to then text friends and he said she said and all the back and forth can happen and then your students are going into classrooms and they're distracted they're not focusing then on what's happening in the classroom they're focusing on the five minutes of texting that's happened or social media snapchatting or whatever and so then it takes longer
197for us to get the classrooms back into that line of focus of what we're here to do which is teaching and learning and again when we when we talked about it as an association bringing in those lessons about how to use those things responsibly so then you know in the high school they would have the tools and readiness to then use it in that in that a more appropriate way thank you so you have the added concern of now trying to curtail all these little five minutes and now you're spending more class time just trying to get them to put it away from the hallways thank you for that thank you uh miss tolin i'm going to ask you because you shared it with me i think you sent me an email but i'm not
198sure if you shared it with everyone because you are a you represent a school that did this what did you hear from your parents what concerns did they have i think we need to mr morgan i think we should keep maybe our comments to each other instead of i think this toilet has had the opportunity repeatedly to speak to what her schools have done if we can keep them to staff i mean i'm just trying to get a sense of what has been happening in the communities have instituted this i don't see why i can't ask the board member who has that information to share it it's out of order mr morgan yes madam chair questions should be directed to the chair and the chair has the discretion whether to uh allow another individual to
199um respond to those questions or not okay so um so to phrase this okay so let me ask staff um dr ivey staff members mr tyson have you had any parent concerns from the schools that have instituted this away for the day repeat your question again dr anderson as the lead uh as the regional assistant superintendent did you have any feedback from parents who were concerned regarding the schools that were instituting away from the day for the day in their um this year i wouldn't use the word concern i would use the term that we've had parents that have been um pleased with the way for the day that they felt that um in some of the region one parents that have responded or addressed this matter have indicated that they find the phones to
200be a distraction for their kids and the use of their phones to be a distraction for their children and that it leads to conflict between children thank you no thank you so much um i don't think she's gonna recognize it that's it thank you thank you i will just very quickly um to our middle school principal representative do you have any data that shows after this was enacted what the disciplinary infractions look like that you could share with us i don't have the numbers here with me but i can tell you i was an assistant principal pre this decision and i can tell you i spent most of my time handling discipline cases that involve the cell phone either directly or in some way and once we enacted the away for the day that discipline
201time spent on the cell phones and the social media significantly declined i don't have numbers directly but i can tell you anecdotally my life improved significantly once a way for the day was implemented would that be total discipline or discipline relate did you see it go up in other no i i would say it not only did it impact just cell phone usage but um there were less altercations there were less um back and forth distractions you know disruptions to our learning environment as a whole students didn't have that access to the tool that they used the most to go back and forth and kind of start things um or plan things you yeah i think that's wonderful and that's why i overall support not using these in the classroom i do think we know
202where this vote's gonna go i don't know why we need to prolong this so i'm gonna go ahead and take the vote um all those in favor of this amendment please raise your hands it's mclaughlin mr kofax miss sizemore heiser um and myself all those against okay and that motion fails uh let's see can we go down we're having a lot of tech issues tonight so we apologize now okay i think we go back to the main motion that was the only amendment all right are there any school board members that would wish to speak to the main motion of the sr if we can put that on the screen so well i guess i guess everyone has it okay miss mclaughlin yes thank you um i first want to say dr brabrand as always
203um i have truly appreciated your leadership and your your tenure over the last five years to continue to improve the sr and uh really focus on a restorative justice approach and dr boyd i've truly appreciated your tenure and and the work you've continued to do on this so i do want to really emphasize that in my remarks to my colleagues that i do believe the spirit of what we're trying to do here with the srnr is rights and responsibilities not punishment i know that we had speakers here tonight who expressed concerns about whether or not this was a focus on control removing freedom of speech um the focus of of our and goal of um when we when we talk about how students treat one another the word malicious that is also used in the
204srnr is because it's just that students who accidentally [Music] are engaging with one another there's no mal intent that's why our srnr focuses on that is what what's malicious behavior toward one another and we need to address that because we're trying to reduce um bullying and and what would feel like hate speech against other students so i i really want our entire community to know that we are hearing where the concerns are when i spoke with dr boyd about this the concerns especially the younger students are and you know if they're still trying to learn along the way as they engage with one another this school division continues to focus on how do we nurture support and help guide and educate kids and so for that i want everybody to know my deep appreciation for
205where we are tonight however it's not because my amendment failed that i don't want to vote for this now and i have sour grapes um despite the looks on certain board members faces and eyebrows um but i will say that uh you know it does concern me again on how do we engage with our community and i really would like going forward that we look at ways of ensuring our families really do participate in the survey i'm i'm not comfortable with 2000 um responses um i do think that you know beyond um this the cell phone use uh we're heading in the right direction but i do think this is going to have a very big impact i i do want to model for our community that when i say i'm elected to represent the
206braddock district i'm i'm supposed to represent our families as well as our staff and our employees i just don't feel that we got there with this one i don't understand the rush on why we had to put in a cell phone mandate for this version of the srnr to my knowledge the schools i've been doing it the way it works best for them and i have heard zero complaints that how school a does it is a problem and that's why we need to control school a and so for that reason i'm just tonight i can't support the srnr miss cohen followed by mr frisch i i really appreciate following that and i know miss mclaughlin i mean all of us i think we've talked this thing probably to death with each other and and i
207appreciate that we've continued it's been a living breathing document right up until the last minute so i appreciate dr boyd and your team and everything you have been working to do and i i struggle with this one i i'll honestly say as you all know i am the liaison to the acsd and they lodged a lot of concerns the vast majority of which dr boyd and her team work to address there are still some things that i really struggle with and really have concerns about what we do and you know i i agree very much with miss mclaughlin that we have tried to change the system from being one that is punitive to one that is helping educate our kids about how to make the right choices that said i understand that kids still do
208foolish things and that there are consequences for those actions and that is part of our job to help teach that too so i do struggle with this one i appreciate dr boyd you changing the level of severity for consequences for having the cell phones i agree with miss mclaughlin that if we were going to have a cell phone policy it's tough to me that it lives in the srnr because i don't like that if we're if engagement is what we want then then punishments that also disengage kids don't seem to make a lot of sense to me so i really appreciate that you removed suspension and um and that you know i think it's very reasonable for teachers to be able to say you know what i'm gonna need your cell phone or this just
209keeps happening i'm gonna need to call your parents all of that seems very reasonable to me um and i still do worry in practice it all sounds great until um the rubber meets the road and and i i will definitely be watching um i do want to just say though it's such a it's been an oddity to me that people have gotten super worked up about the malicious misgendering um because that was in the srnr last year that was a change last year so that's been in place all school year so it's just a it's a weird thing to me that that is that people have targeted on that as something to provide commentary on for this year because that was already in it this year and i imagine if your kids have not been
210suspended for malicious misgendering then you probably don't have a lot to worry about so i i really have gone back and forth with the srnr poor dr boyd knows that i have i don't know how many phone calls we've had so um i i don't know what i will decide right at the last second but um i i i do appreciate the collaborative effort that we've gone and i don't know what i'm doing i will decide at the last second but i do really appreciate all the work that's gone in it's not for lack of that mr frisch thank you uh so we're going to consider a host of follow-on motions this evening um so buckle up it's going to be a long night um i don't plan on speaking on any of them um
211because i'm just going to tell you how i'm going to vote now nod nod wink wink join me on this journey you all have the option cell phone policy it is not perfect but few policies are however i will support the srnr because of the subsequent follow-on motions that include data collection targeted communications to our special ed families and other things that would have made the srnr stronger as an original document but we didn't get that so these follow-on motions will will do that principle discretion i am worried about the changes in principle discretion over discipline matters forced on us by the general assembly and our current legislative program does include language opposing those changes and i'm confident that when we have conversations next year about our program uh you know many of us will
212want to elevate those concerns uh to a prime spot in the in the front page document because i do worry about the school-to-prison pipeline um being worsened even more um and you will note that i've not addressed the other changes to the sr any other changes to the srnr because as laura jane cohen just mentioned um the protections we have in place for our transgender and gender expansive students related to malicious misgendering dead naming or outing have been in place for a year actually we're a little late on the sr r this year so they've been in place for more than a year without issue so i will leave it at that and i will support this motion and the subsequent follow-on motions mr mesh thank you um i do want to thank staff for
213their hard work uh like ms cohen i think uh was very annoying and i'm glad that we're in a better place than where we started um i think this is also an exercise of just a consensus building and trying to bring everyone's best thinking together in a piece that inevitably with 12 will never be perfect but i did want to point out i think there's a welcome addition of the definition for ableism taking that more seriously um there's a faith-based discrimination that's documented in there of course you know i had a longer wish list like things like xenophobia and whatnot but we'll get there eventually but i am really grateful that we were able to include these as well as expansions and discriminatory harassment piece really taking those things seriously and delineating specifics as to
214what that might look like and then just expanding our equal opportunity commitments and student rights in general so i do want to make sure we celebrate those wins um and uh recognizing of course that the cell phone policy will probably be controversial for god knows you know until the end of time but um you know that there were some pieces here that i know dr rayburn's leadership and advocacy dr boyd and her team uh really made sure came together with this one uh and i i will say i do agree kind of with just the mentality around maybe the cell phone piece is more of a health and habits type of component rather than a disciplinary component right so how we think about that is impacted by where it lives and ultimately we might want
215to give that more thought in the years ahead um finally i did um well actually two more things with two more things one you all know it gives me great pain that i wasn't able to bring my follow on today which i've been talking about for a really long time but it's okay we're going to want to work together to bring something that everybody can get behind and that is fully understood um and fleshed out by everybody uh so i do want to thank staff at the top of them was dr ivey working really really hard um on this but uh of course you know the idea being um that down the line we hope to begin to take bias-related incidents more seriously right so we do take them seriously today we have procedures in
216place but that perhaps we might model after best practices in the long term and we're going to continue doing the hard work to make sure that um we're able to identify models that are most appropriate for our division and the way it operates and i think that'll actually capture a number of even some of the concerns that were mentioned today around bullying whether that be dead naming and misgendering whether that be students with disabilities etc for them to have an uh a location a place to go with those concerns and then for us as a system to monitor and respond um to the concerns that are raised so i my colleagues i've sent you guys plenty of information on that i hope you'll have fun reading by the time we work again with staff on
217on how we might bring that forward it is posted to new business since it's been pulled from the follow-on so that we can explore it at a further date finally this time oh my time okay i'm going to take a go back dr henderson um thank you um i will be supporting the srnr today um but first of all i do want to say thank you to dr boyd and her team and i don't know how you were on the phone with miss cohen because you were on the phone with me all the time so thank you for being so diligent to working with this board to working with our advisory committees to working with our community i i think we are seeing some really some real positive strides in the direction of engagement um
218however i think there's a lot more work to be done there well i do believe wholeheartedly that we do have populations of our students that do need more than just reading writing arithmetic and we do need to do more to protect them to allow them to access what our schools have to provide i do struggle with what i heard tonight from some of our parents who feel as if we are attempting to replace them as parents i'm a parent i don't want for anybody to replace me in that role so i want to be sure that we are increasing our engagement much more so that our parents are not coming into this room feeling as if one we are not listening to them because i sat and spoke about that in terms of listening to
219our community just last month and two that we are trying to use their authorities as parents so i'm looking for a much more robust community engagement process with the next iteration because i think there's a space for us to improve there for the sake of our entire community so again i just want to say thank you to the entire staff for their work i won't go into all of these details because i spent quite a bit of time during the work session on tuesday iterating what my support areas were so thank you miss corbett sanders yes thank you madam chair and i too want to once again thank staff for all of your hard work on this i also want to thank the advisory committees for their hard work on this because this really is
220a collective uh process in which we work with not only the staff and the advisory committees but also expect and take into account a lot of feedback from our community members and having those intentful conversations about what this is and what it is not i do want to clarify and perhaps dr boyd you could do this it's my understanding that some of the concerns was on an earlier version was the dec the separation of k3 verses 4 through 6 in levels of punishment and the concerns which was discussed earlier tonight about you know elementary school students really needing to have that nurturing environment and an area where it's more of teaching about how actions impact others yes thank you for that question miss corbett sanders in the initial draft there the in our current sr
221that's in effect today there was a proposal to change those items listed as k-6 to k-3 we listened to our stakeholders we listened to the community feedback that we received and then the updated post following that initial posting we reverted that back so that those things that are delineated by grade continue to be k-6 as opposed to the initially proposed k-3 um so again that was based on really a lot of feedback from our stakeholders um we appreciated that we made that update excellent thank you so much i do think that that is uh progress because there were significant concerns about that additionally i see that you've also addressed the concerns of some in the community about what is malicious intent and you've provided a definition there is that correct and it's really focused on
222what is the intent of the behavior correct we've added malice to the glossary so that it's clear that it's that intent to harm as opposed to accidental things like that as it is relates to a number of the items that are fleshed out in the srnr excellent thank you so much and additionally you've added to the srnr some explicit language on internet safety which is greatly appreciated as well as addressing very explicitly something that is impacting our communities across the country which are opioids and the use of opioids and fentanyl that is correct great thank you so much i do think that there you know that this can obviously be improved over time i look at the significant improvements that we've made over the uh the course of my tenure on this board to move
223away from a punitive system to one which really values and talks about the rights of students to have a safe place to go to school and then what are the responsibilities that students have in creating that safe space so um i will be supporting this thank you okay miss tollen yes i'm very happy to follow a colleague um in thanking staff and our advisory committees and our our parents and speakers at the school board meetings for the input on the srnr i did also want to point out that um you know we did make the change on the k3 um back to k6 based on a number of the parents that spoke at our meetings and we appreciate that input i will be supporting the srnr this evening it's a very important document when you
224are trying to put together a document covering this many topics and this many issues of course it's difficult to get everything perfect and this is a living document we look at it very closely every year and so um you know with the recognition that you know i'll vote for something tonight that is not perfect but it's a document that our schools need and our administrators need to you know guide them as they're working with our students um throughout the year and as many people have pointed out it's a document that um it's not meant to be punitive but to really work with our students to help them have the best experience possible and to make sure our schools are safe for the greatest number of students um we have some funnel on motions that i'll
225be happy to support um that help us with some of our special education student needs and um it's not my motion but a little sneak preview that um you know i'd be happy to support um our motion coming forward and working on some things around the dress code for the next year so um with that um thank you again to staff for all the hours that they have spent on putting this together thank you miss tulan colleagues anybody else who'd like to speak mr not cofax thank you um i do want to thank staff for their hard work in this there are lots of people who put a lot of time into this and i do not take that for granted i have never voted against a budget because i don't believe in pieces of
226it i have not voted against some other big agenda items that we have on the table i am here you're watching me struggle right now as to what i will do about this i feel very strongly and i about this part i do feel like when you talk about what are responsibilities right that's accountability how you answer for something how you do something and it's within your own power or control and i feel as though we took away lessons for accountability by the cell phone policy is that enough to make me say i think you know you can't we can't pass this because there is good work here there is progress being made i don't think i'm there yet but i strongly do not believe that the cell phone policy belonged in the srnr period
227and i believe it was a mistake and i said that you know i i really respect two of the principal middle school principals the middle school principal as well as the high school associations or principals in my area that i respect incredibly and i talk too often asking for advice you're allowed to disagree with each other and still move forward and and work together so i think we will do this but i do believe we've made a grave mistake tonight and there is there are some follow-on motions where there will be accountability measures i get that it's a living document but if it's a living document we could have kept things the way they were and we didn't need to mandate one section of choice of a certain group of our leaders over the choice
228of another and that was problematic for me so i appreciate you indulging me and listening to me and um thank you um miss seismohauser would you like adrenaline yeah you'll hear some of the same struggle that you heard from ms darren at kofax and i i first want to thank dr boyd and her team you have worked incredibly hard and you've been very responsive to conversations and to and to working so i want you to know that i very much appreciate that and i actually do want to thank the middle school principals who met with me um i i don't feel like my concerns were fully addressed in terms of what's been happening but i appreciate the time and the effort and the willingness to hear my thoughts and concerns and and promise for you
229know ways to address things and continue improvement moving forward so i do appreciate that um i am very torn because i do strongly believe we need to have a way for the day in our class away in our classrooms that is something i've believed in a long time our teachers need it our students need it and that is in this but it is difficult to make policy through the srnr this is policy that we're making here and had we brought this as a policy i think we could have had many of these but we're making policy through a document that is around that is punitive and that's a difficult thing to do there's many many good things in this srnr and it is that's why it is struggled because it is a whole document we're
230voting on the whole document but making policy through this without some of these other guard rails and pieces doctor i just asked you are you committed to and dr conlon from the middle school principal side what's the commitment to training around some of the concerns i've brought up this is a primary piece apologize this is a primary piece of the professional development that we will be doing around the srnr we know that this is a level of trust right a level of trust between us as staff members working with working with you as our governance body working with our families and working with our students and so i think that as a matter of trust this is going to be a key piece in the professional development and ongoing conversations that we have similar to
231some of the things around other items that we're working on very intently so i want to give my firm personal level of commitment to this work i guess it in when you're making policy through a document where policy is not made as is common and when we're doing it in such an extreme absolute way there is a level for pause and i wish we'd had some middle schools who were doing away in the classrooms to have a comparison a point of comparison right in terms of i very much believe that the discipline's gone down i just wish we had that point of comparison to see what it is and i wish we had more intentionality for example all the ieps and 504s are already done and i do have follow-on motion to address that but
232there are no ieps and five or fours that document cell phone usage in there and because iep teams don't document that which is available to every student and so some may have but in general those aren't that's that's the rule of ieps and 504 so the timing of it doing at the end of the year when those are all done doing policy through a document like this it's not how you do policy um i think it needs to be a way in the classroom i think this i'm glad we did that and there's good pieces in here but i don't know i don't think this is the right way to do this honestly we have one go back by miso mesh oh um i was just gonna i mean building off of mystery and echo
233effects and the sasmor heiser's comments and actually something dr brabrand said earlier i don't know if this is a governance thing but i think you know revisiting this process in terms of how long it is and what steps needs to be taken before people feel everything's been done it's probably worth looking at you know we've struggled here i think every time we've done this as us um so that's just something to flag you know laura jane i know your chair so you guys can see if you want to talk about that um but finally yeah i really would be remiss not to kind of address some of the conversation that's occurred today i uh it's it's miss corbett sanders was trying to help in us and get in instilling understanding around what malicious means and
234what that's even about and and i think um we've seen school board meeting after school board meeting with the same literally people sitting on both sides of this auditorium doubling down on their different perspectives world views whatever you might call it uh coming out here getting gaining applause for saying something that ticks off the other side this is just not a constructive path forward and and i i name that because at the end of the day when we hear the need to [Music] point out the the harms of malicious dead naming malicious misgendering malicious anything that is about instilling compassion in our school communities that is about making sure everybody feels safe safe and valued and is able to be ready to learn uh and and it's extremely important for us to to put things
235in their place and to understand that this is the conversation we're having not uh you know uh anything beyond that but sure there are people who perhaps feel that they also are not seen and heard whether that's faith community whether that's otherwise uh and and that we have to have compassion and understanding where we're coming from and where one another are coming from because that's what's going to allow us to have the conversation that is necessary to be had uh and otherwise we end up with this and i don't think what we saw today nor what we've been seeing for weeks and months uh in our country and here right here in this auditorium is is conducive to anything productive so i hope that we can tap into that compassion in our hearts and understand
236the purpose here behind all of this miss seismoheiser so sorry i i did forget one key piece um when i'm checking my notes here i wanted to make sure that i articulated this um i don't have a follow-on on this i just want to be sure that it's on everybody's radar there are significant changes here that are pertinent to many parents and i'm speaking particularly about the pages 46 and 47 where hb 36 made some changes to what needs to be um reported to the police we have to make sure that our students and our families are super clear on those changes and so i cannot stress this enough and i was just reminded of that by what miss seismo heiser was sharing in terms of are we making sure that our principals are committed
237to knowing what this document has so when i'm looking at the stakeholder orientation which is um part four here where there's work or plans for school-based administrators school-based staff students transportation staff and coaches families i really want to stress please dr boyd and company and dr brabrand let us ensure that our parents are clear on what will be reported to the police because this is a huge departure from what has happened for the past year and they should not be caught flat-footed on this thank you goodness either heiser the hardest part of this document is there's so much good in this document with something that i've been asking for weeks not to be in here um so i guess dr boyd i'm going to ask you a question in terms of the pd for administrators
238and understand in the pd for teachers and understanding how to talk to students who have cell phones as they're walking around how to talk to what to say what to do what is your plan on that it's professional development and coaching i believe in scenario based professional development you're probably all familiar with that because in every situation i refer to little slung we have to make it real we have to make it live because that's how we talk about real things that happen and talk about hey how would you deal with this and slow knows everyone knows so we can really give that critical feedback and say how this is how an artist or dr king would deal with that let's unpack that what could she have done differently how might that other person feel
239and so again it's not a one and done certainly we're going to have professional development with our administrators before school starts with our teachers before school start with our students but it's always revisiting as we're looking at our data hey we're doing these three things well but we're still missing the mark here let's provide additional feedback and coaching and pd for our staff and for our leaders how long will you how often will you look at the data we will be looking at the data regularly but i know we'll be reporting it to you at least quarterly and also reporting it to our principals so that we are not having ahas at the end of the moment if we need to pivot if we need to do things differently if dr conley for example sees
240that there's certain challenges with her seventh graders that might trigger or that should trigger her as a leader to say i need to have some additional time to talk with my seventh graders to partner with my seventh grade parents and guardians around how we do this how we work with our ptsa all of those things because she see that that's a data need at her school it might be okay at dr king school to just have it at that quarterly period but she may need to have some additional engagement and really partner collaboratively with stakeholders to to meet the need in her building so in short at least quarterly but we'll be monitoring it ongoing and also supporting our principles and monitoring that data and we do have a pull out for cell phones for
241those cell phone infractions but also if we talk about defiance what are those or or disruption to the class from disruption to the school environment how many of those things are connected to cell phones what can be some of the proactive things that we do to minimize those things and so it's a lot of unpacking and i want to be respectful of our time this evening but and we can certainly talk more and i do agree with what dr anderson said i think it's really important to have a lot of information for our families and staff around some of the changes from senate bill 36 and or house bill 4 or however you want to call it in the impact that has and i would also say as you know that i had a fallen
242motion that i pulled i think it's also very very important to make sure because of the new mandatory reporting requirements that students have somebody to help them understand the questions being asked because the goal of all of our principles should be to get accurate information from our students to be able to address issues so we need to make sure that our students understand and we don't have minors being questioned um without that level of support yes ma'am thank you all right that's it thanks i'll take my turn before the break doctor uh before the vote dr burban could you answer for me please right now do our middle school and high school principals have the ability to enact in a way for the day or away from the classroom or whatever approach to cell phones
243yes um thank you uh i asked this at the first work session i did not receive a satisfactory answer and i would like if you would please try again why does it have to live in the srnr well i mean obviously i think some of the feedback tonight each year we'll we'll look at that there's some feedback tonight does it have to be there i think the best way i can say it to you is this there's three teachers i started with 30 years ago i still go out with them and did during my five-year tenure the last time i went out was the goodbye they said you know what we don't know anymore it's getting harder and harder i said what what is so different from when i was teaching they said phones phones
244and phones some teachers it doesn't matter what they're going to take care of it they can handle it they've got the classroom management chops we have a lot of teachers and in some cases sometimes our school leaders who want to have the division lay down what that marker is whether that's good or bad i'm just telling you that in all my lifetime of schools here and in lynchburg to have have that take some of the edge off for them having to be that role of maybe the enforcer that's why it's there right now because really they're asking for that does it have to be there forever i don't think so to be honest and um i think that's a conversation dr reed and this leadership team has with you i believe everything i i hired
245dr boyd and i believe in her work and her collaboration with this board this sr and r and karen spoke ms corbett sanders spoke to it earlier five ten years ago check out the srnr and check it out now it is radically different and we've continued to use feedback to continue to change it and i my prediction is this will be this way for a year or two and perhaps we'll find another way to express the same thing we want to do in a different way not during the sr and r and i think down the line as we keep evolving sr what really needs to be in there and what can be done through a different manner and the cell phones one that we're reverbing rating on right now but there may be a
246whole lot of other stuff we can get out of there and put in a different way and continue to change what that document's even all about so i guess just so for my understanding right now they do have the ability to enact whatever is best for their schools in consultation with their community and they have the disciplinary mechanism to enact consequences when children don't follow the rules that have been enacted in that school they may not fall under a cell phone policy or cell phone section but they do have the ability because we still at the end of the day expect our students to listen to what yes their you were referencing earlier we actually did i mean it feels like ancient history now but you did bring someone um were you on the board
247then yeah okay no not on this no you weren't no you weren't on the board yeah yeah and we did with the pta right before it was like just weeks before school the sr had been done they said please please please i think it was septa the pta put out something and we did do some draft guidelines just as school began and i actually think that was the beginning of this process then we had the pandemic and now it's coming out of this pandemic seeing that as as ms darinath kofax said what is now i think maybe more characterized an addiction grew a lot stronger it was a lifeline everybody needed to use their phone during the pandemic coming out of it we've doubled down on trying to re-establish the personal connection and so i
248think that's why we are in this spot right now and people it has this different feel for different folks but i think we'll ultimately well we'll see where we get tonight and ultimately we'll get uh we'll continue to improve each year yeah thanks thank you i appreciate that um you know obviously we have different ways of looking at this on the board for different reasons reasons there isn't clear best practice as to what to do um that's why this is a struggle for school systems across the country across the world but cell phones technology that's here to stay with our students so unless we teach them to self-regulate to use it in a responsible way trying to fix their behavioral problems which i believe stem from other issues through this um i don't know that
249we will ultimately be successful in that i i'm not gonna be labor obviously i have deep reservations deep reservations with this living in the srnr i i don't think it's going to be successful i think we will be back here cleaning this up at some point i do think we need to do better stakeholder engagement with our parents and also with our teachers i haven't heard a single thing from our associations on this that's a critically mis you know missing piece to it um but this is one piece of a very large document so i i thank you i know it's been a ton of work on this so we will go ahead and take that vote okay if we can get that motion up all those in favor of the motion before you no
250it's not before us there we go all those in favor of the motion before you please raise your hands one two three four five six seven miss holland are you voting can you voice vote yes or no please i voted yes okay please note that ms tolen is a yes all those um voting against tonight okay that motion passes we have a new sr and r so thank you for all your work dr boyd i know you've tried very hard to be collaborative okay but our night is not done folks um i call on miss marin for a follow-on i move to direct the superintendent to report to the board with data about implementation of the cell phone responsibilities portion of the student rights and responsibilities with quantitative and qualitative data that analyzes the strengths
251and potential changes needed for the board's use in the next annual reauthorization in 2023 is there a second a second seconded by dr anderson miss marin yeah the point of this i mean we've seen such extensive conversation we want to know that the the policy we've just enacted is doing the thing that we want it to do um for me the big portion of this follow on was to make sure that the um the teacher flexibility was indeed an asset and not becoming a hassle and a burden to teachers so um i would expect this kind of monitoring and an evaluation to happen but just wanted to be sure that we put it in there to make it clear that we will be tracking it and as was mentioned continue to improve the srnr in
252future years dr anderson just briefly this is just a way to codify what we have just been talking about for the past hour so it's just getting that data thank you i love that thank you okay oh miss mclaughlin followed by me skis gamara thank you um i'm going to take a page from our colleague carl frisch so dr brabrand the way i'm going to approach these oh darn it okay shoot okay um dr ivy and company um the way i'm going to approach these follow-on motions is i really appreciate and i've read them as a board member i want to support my colleagues desire for us to do the next you know step of work going forward so i my vote just so you all know is going to basically be unless staff says
253that's going to be a problem here's why you've got my support tonight and i hope you'll do the same with my dress code one so uh dr ivey do you or anyone on your team know if there's a concern with this motion the follow-on motion and it might be dr boyd who can speak to it because it's kind of in her purview but no objection ma'am thank you miss marin you have my support um miss kisgamar yes i'd like to expand on that just a little bit because you know i forget who was said we don't want this to become you know documenting to such an extent that we create yet another burden for staff right so are we looking for perhaps i should ask the makers of the most motion which i think is
254appropriate um are we looking to see whether are we looking miss marin are we miss marin are we i have a question for the maker the moment go ahead let's keep coming thank you um are we looking to track whether discipline is increasing do you have some specific things because one thing i do know that can happen with this board is there may be some things the maker the motion may have in mind but perhaps staff has has a different view and i don't want it to become burdensome or unclear um thank you miss madam chair for recognizing me yes go ahead with her thank you um to miss keisgamar's point i hadn't envisioned this as a very um as focused on the disciplinary actions it was more to understand are teachers being overly burdened
255with having to be dealing with the cell phones but i think this could also be further discussed you know we could further flesh it out but this was just giving it the entree to know that it's important that we track the information okay so you would be satisfied with anecdotal reports from principals saying or you're looking for something more than that that's what i'm trying to clarify i'm looking for something more structured that says you know in a month how many times did a teacher say i've got to refer this student or i took away a phone or class was interrupted or to that effect and what i would hope to see is at the start of the year there's more and as it goes down but i think something consistent whether it's a sample
256but something where there is a reporting system in place for principals to capture that data and report it back to the superintendent okay so my last question would be to dr boyd um i'm i'm assuming you heard that yes and um we will have information in our student we will have data from our student information system because we added a code so we would be able to see if a referral was made for for a phone infraction but but dr conley just shared and what happened most often is i just say you know scott put your phone away remember we're not supposed to have phones out right now or let's focus on this and so it and we move back to teaching two-step equations so in those instances there won't be any data on that
257and what we will have data on is if scott refuses to put the phone away i redirect redirect and he still just won't do it i'm reaching out to parent guardians and he's still not compliant then we would see that listed in the student information system with that cell phone and then likely his refusal to follow uh staff directives with that as a as two infraction codes so i just want to be clear about what we can pool centrally because we will know that data but the pieces that don't rise to the level of a uh referral which we would hope that we would want the former as opposed to the latter that that data would not be um something that we would have access to and i believe the maker of the motion wanted
258to address something well yeah to address mrs keisgamar's question my intention is to get that level of when ms boyce says we don't have access to information well we can make access i mean what i want to know is is the seventh grade um math teacher having every period to tell one student put your phone away this way by the end of that day that teacher has spent however many times interrupting their flow to deal with cell phones or you know yes we can collect about the disciplinary data but like was said that will be captured anyway what i'm talking about is this it's like the soft policing i don't see police but you know the softer minding how often is that that's what i would like to know and that was my intent so
259i appreciate ms keith kumar trying to help me elucidate that so thank you miss marin the purpose of me asking this question is exactly what you just thank you for giving me exhibit a um you know i think that there may need to i'm willing to support this but i don't want us to get down the road having had a misunderstanding even of what the expectations were mr frisch just suggested to me that dr boyd perhaps even teacher surveys may work i don't know i do think i will suggest this as a follow-up to your motion that uh after this that there will be some um sort of a memo of understanding of what this can actually entail because it does sound like when you say quantitative and qualitative data you know i'm picturing somebody
260with a research code and that is not really what i think we can have here but i don't want the makers or the motion or in any member of this board to have one expectation and then we get down the road and it's just not the outcome we were looking for so if if that works uh dr boyd i think you know i just wanted that clarification because i do know where things sometimes can go off the road okay thank you miss corbett sanders it sounds like dr dr brother just briefly yeah the the code we can do the the what you're thinking about i think is what miss keys gemara just said it's probably going to be some type of quick survey that we figure out the cadence of what to do and and
261check in and if that can be and again i think the i don't want to make it as formal as a memorandum of understanding i think staff can come back and share with you over the summer hey here's our approach and there can be some conversation so we can support the spirit of this but there isn't going to be a code that a teacher would put in each day that says in fact that would start filling up our discipline system and i don't want to have unintended consequences from that so we'll figure out a way to do it that keeps the discipline appropriate and i really i really believe we're not going to see a lot of those codes we'll have to see we'll have to track and we have a new as you know
262a universal referral system now that we've never had before so we're really going to be able to do it a lot better but we'll come up with survey or some sort of instrument to capture uh the essence of this thank you dr bray brown miss corbett sanders yes thank you madam chair um i too have some questions about this and it really is because it looks like in looking at all of the follow-on motions that there are two follow-on motions dealing with providing data and kind of giving a status report to the board on the impact of the changes or the inclusion of the cell phone policy one is what ms marin has put forward which is really important because it is that anecdotal data and that qualitative data from the first responders in our
263classrooms being our teachers is this improving the classroom experience for all the students or is this creating a challenge we've heard anecdotally that it actually has improved the classroom experience but we need to have a little bit more structure around how we collect that data there's a second reporting obligation that is included in miss cohen's follow-on motion and that one is really trying to unpack a lot of the uh questions that i believe ms seismor heiser put forth so eloquently about concerns about the impact of this on our students with ieps and 504s and how often they are referred for discipline it also along those lines not only the iaps and 504 students but also other underrepresented groups that may be highlighted in discipline reports more than others and so what i'm wondering and and
264this is you know we can address each one separately or do we want to have really looking at the two of these together as being a future reporting obligation on uh the superintendent to bring us together uh and to better understand the impact of these changes so we can address it in two follow-on motions i will say that the one looks more qualitative and one looks more quantitative and i want i think what this board is asking for is both thank you miss khan i think i so appreciate that it's a good segue here um that after talking with dr anderson um i think miss picarsky and i and we'll get to it in a minute but are going to try to broaden ours because i think the further refinement that ms keis gamara and
265miss maron have done have really centralized in it being quantitative and qualitative what the only thing i was just going to quickly suggest is this is the perfect opportunity for our our middle school high school elementary school principal associations and our teacher associations to come together to give us more of that qualitative of you know overall has this improved the environment and and if it hasn't then what things can we be doing better so i i will absolutely support this miss marin and i think the combination of the two different kinds of data would be very informative to us going forward great thank you seeing no other members who wish to speak i'll call for the vote dr anderson sorry i couldn't reach it quickly enough um thank you so much ms corbin sanders for
266what you've shared in terms of combining some of these data collections because that's pretty much what we're asking in a couple of these motions so i i would like to offer to somebody else who has a follow-on motion for data collection can we just combine some of these together because we're asking for data in terms of what's happening with our students around the cell phone no i'm not hold up this is the first point i belong to the body so it's more of a question to those who have others is there any interest in the combination dr understand point of vote mr frisch it's late dr brabrand if motions are passed independently from each other that doesn't mean the work to complete those motions has to be conducted independently right that's right in my in
267my head to be honest tonight as i saw these five or six we're gonna come take them all back and then the team can come back to you and we will with how we would operationalize it and combine where there's overlap so i don't you could but i don't want this board to feel you're compelled to have to do that tonight you brought six you want to go and up and down on those and then we'll take what's left or all of them whatever it is and then merge them together with our operational plan great well given that i i think we'll go ahead and call for the vote it's up to you so i'll call for the vote the motion before us is on the screen all those in favor miss tolin no that
268is unanimous i will call him miss mclaughlin for a follow-on motion i call him miss mclaughlin for fallen motion thank you i will read my follow-on motion i move to direct the superintendent to review and recommend changes to the dress code section prior to voting on the fiscal year 24 sr this review shall include an examination of all wabi school district dress code regulations as well as timely stakeholder engagement with students families and school-based staff proposed changes shall also include the provision of key definitions related to assessing student attire to help reduce ambiguity and improve standardization of implementation i'll be seconding this miss mclaughlin yes thank you briefly uh as i shared during the work session with my colleagues we have received feedback from our principals that the existing language and the dress code has
269a lot of terminology that is not defined it then does leave it subject to interpretation by individual school-based staff i know as we talked about earlier that this is an effort to always continuously improve the language that um i had talked about during the work session was language that came from my high school principals so i hope you'll support this again i'm missing dr brabrand so uh i'm gonna go again with dr boyd any um reservations at all with my dress code um request for review and recommendations no ma'am no objections thank you lovely thank you so much colleagues please i hope you will support it and you won't even have to really talk about it everything she said um and i'd also like to see our students and stakeholders really having a voice in
270this i think it's very important that we include them um and seeing as there are no people who would like to speak to oh wow mr not kovacs was so close yeah so last minute last minute edition um my former colleague ryan mcilveen and i um put the uh the work into the other that as it currently stands and that was a big change in favor of young women and what was happening to them and so in the striving for continuous improvement i will absolutely support this but i want to know that there was a great deal of improvement even though that language may not be the best that there is right now but it is far cry from where we were and um so i will be supporting this and with that i'll take
271the vote all those in favor of this follow-on please raise your hands i saw that dr raybran okay uh that is uni that is unanimous it was stolen away from the table um i'll call miss seismore heiser for the next follow-on i move to direct the superintendent excuse me i'm here oh sorry miss tolan we can't see you on the screen are you voting you vote ms tolan please if we can note that voted yes apologies our screens are not cooperating go ahead i move to direct the superintendent to provide targeted communications to parents or guardians of students with disabilities to inform them of the sr changes regarding cell phone usage and provide guidance on how they can request an individual education program iep or 504 meeting to consider the need for the use of
272a personally owned device i.e cell phone as an accommodation and or consider the need for accommodations that do not necessitate the use of a cell phone if they believe their child may require such support is there a second second is cohen seismohazer would you like to speak just briefly i mentioned this earlier um with the timing of these srnr changes and because iep teams and 504 teams don't tend to write accommodations for things that are regularly available to all students and all 504s and ieps are done potentially or most of them are done for next year there is a time gap between what those will list as the accommodations needed for special education students and what will be and without taking into account this change in cell phone policy so this is just to make
273sure that parents and guardians are aware of this change that if their child does need a cell phone for an accommodation they're able to mark it down the second part of this is sometimes in iep meetings teens may say hey if your child has a cell phone there's an app on that you don't need to put in the iep because there's an app on that and so for a parent who may not want their child to have the cell phone the iep team can talk about well you know you may have had this on a cell phone but now since cell phones are banned um you can use it on a computer or we can do this instead and just to have those targeted intentional conversations that didn't happen because this policy wasn't in place
274when those meetings took place that's what this is for miss cohen and what she said okay um dr braver i know you all can't believe this but i'm going to do this megan's got me thinking something i just want to say i've conferred with staff earlier this afternoon just for you motions this is motion three motions three four five and six there's nothing that staff has of concern it's up for the board to decide where the board is but we have no concerns with those motions that have been posted just fyi oh carl mr fresh that was alive go ahead mr oh okay all those in favor of this motion please raise your hands that is you that's okay that's unanimous uh miss tolen that is unanimous with dr anderson and who else ms mclaughlin
275away from the table next follow-on i need to call on ms seismor heiser again all right so this is the second part of that previous follow-on i moved to direct the superintendent to have school-based staff review students individual education programs and 504 plans and request an individual education program iep or 504 meeting to consider the need to for use of personally owned device i.e cell phone as an accommodation and or consider the need for accommodations that do not necessitate the use of a cell phone for students they deem may require such such support is our second second just briefly this does not require these meetings to be held it requires staff to review to ensure to see whether these meetings need to be held to to to document these devices or other accommodations so one
276is for parents to be aware and the others for staff to review that's it that's cohen yeah just to add to that i think because this is new for our staff that the high school team just in particular since a lot of our middle schools have already been doing this and so iep teams are engaged and ready to do this but for high school to not be able to use it in in classes has been up to individual teacher discretion and so it's been much easier for kids with ieps to have those needs you know addressed one-on-one but now when it's all seven of their classes we just want to make sure that the iep teams and 504s that those folks know hey this may be something that you need to address because it's something
277that our kids have been using i i will say as the parent of one who cannot find their way away on lake braddock without a phone um and at least the passing periods will be okay for that kid um but i i totally think that would just make sure again close the feedback loop of of making sure everybody knows this is possible miscues namara forgive me i do have to ask a few questions because um it's dr boyd may i can we just clarify how we normally review ieps typically we can establish an iep with the parents request or the staff can recommend it but this parent has to approve that then on review which is what this is required how which is what this is rick sort of recommending how do those reviews typically
278occur so as you shared anyone can request an iep meeting parents or guardians can request iep meetings staff can request iep meetings so what this is saying is that this is asking staff for lack of a better phrase to look at your caseload if i'm a special ed teacher i'm looking at the 14 kids on my case little 12 kids on my caseload and now i'm thinking about this new cell phone expectation and i say you know what francis i know she uses her her cell phone for executive functioning for organization she uses a call map those type of things so i'm not relying solely upon francis's parent or guardian to reach out to me i know francis i'm going to reach out to mom dad grandma whomever to say i think we need to
279pull the iep team together to consider this accommodation for francis but that the key part there is that the parent needs to agree correct absolutely but the parent needs to before any accommodations would be implemented the parent parent or guardian would need to provide uh parental consent for such accommodations to be implemented so i guess my concern is that um i'm not sure that this and i could be it could be because i'm tired okay let me just offer that qualification but i'm not sure i just need to look at this line i need to look at this language and make sure that it is consistent with the procedure you just described right because when i first read over this it was i thought staff was saying we need to review this and then we
280just review it but there's a procedure we need to follow so i need to make sure that this language honors that procedure i did confirm this language with dr boyd before bringing yes i i understand but i also understand sometimes when we're putting things together quickly we sometimes miss things and that's not that's miss keys kamar if i made the key words here for the staff one is that the staff request an iep meeting or 504 meeting after they've reviewed the student's iep or 504 for students who they deem may need that so again this is triggering staff to review the iep or 504 and then if you think a kid might need that accommodation based on your knowledge you request a meeting and then that team makes a determination in terms of if they're
281going to propose it or not and then the parent or guardian if it's proposed would have to consent to it prior to that being enacted so number five is only saying i'm reviewing my caseload if i think the student needs it i'm going to request an iep meeting that's the end of the follow-on motion what happens after that is strictly in accordance with virginia special education regulations so you're saying request an iep meeting from the team okay and then the team would be required to notify the parent the parent is a part of the team so the parent is a part of that discussion okay but it can't go forward without the parent that's parents consent i i just want to make sure that that parent piece which i believe we could have parents get
282upset about the fact that it's not recognized in here so that that is that is part of my concern okay i do not see anybody else wishing to speak so with that we'll go ahead and take a vote on this motion all those in favor please raise your hands that includes miss tolen all those against all those abstaining ms keith kamara with dr anderson and miss mclaughlin away from the table okay we've got another one by miss cohen calling on you for the next one all right this is i know is exhausted so i pray that you will indulge me after the conversation with dr anderson and um miss kismura and miss marin so without objection mr morgan if i screw this up you tell me without objection miss picarski and i would like to
283amend our follow-on motion to include to mend our follow-on motion to strike to include students with ieps and 504s and instead insert by all student subgroups sorry miss monday is typing as fast as she possibly can and then to strike the words acceptable use policy for cell phones and instead insert srnr for infractions of the srnr we ask for data on srnr infractions so this is i'll read it but then try to explain it is that okay oh wait are you supposed to say second first sorry i blew it cheryl second that miss cohen you go ahead it's so late um so i moved to direct the superintendent to provide a detailed discipline report disaggregated by all student subgroups for infractions of the srnr this report must be provided prior to adoption of the srnr
284for the sy2324 school year the goal of this is that while i think multiple times this board has asked for data about how are these infractions being used and are they impacting different subgroups of of students differently disproportionately we have not gotten that and so i i think year after year we've asked for that information the last time we got it was from dr duran three years ago maybe two and a half right when we started so this is just to codify hopefully going forward um that before we we work on the next year's srnr that we would be able to take a look at what infractions have have happened in the srnr and maybe be able to further refine it that way so if cell phones are not a big thing that people are
285getting dinged awesome if it is if there's another piece that's new where kids are um then let's have a conversation maybe that is you you're working on penalties or it's an area for professional development um or an area where we have advisory target for the next year but it may merit some sort of change in the srnr so we would just like to see the data the disciplined data from the srnr before we work on the next one um i have nothing to add to this so with that we will go with miss sanders miss corbin sanders and then ms keis gamara thank you very much i appreciate the maker of the motions um spirit of this i have one concern which is that this should really be looked at not only by subgroup but
286by school and that's the level of detail that we used to get on discipline data and i also am concerned that this is focused on an annual report whereas i think data to be truly useful it needs to be more periodic than annually and so it is the the focus should be on providing the data in a timely manner and in a format that ensures that it is useful for not only the srnr discussion but frankly the broader discussion about what's happening in schools and how it is uh positively or negatively impacting the learning environment so are you making an amendment to this that we could ask so my amendment would be to at a minimum see it as a semi-annual report and disaggregated by subgroup and schools okay without objection i would like to
287go ahead and adopt that new language into this motion all right seeing no objections can we put that on the screen it hasn't been added the um semi-annual yeah semi and yeah no further down this port the risk report must be provided semi and annually prior to the adoption of the srnr and 23 and 24. um i see some interest in no okay okay all right we are okay we're good um ms tolin followed by dr anderson so i just had a question on this um for staff you know a couple of you have already said you know we've been seeing data like this in the past so is this something that's already being collected can you tell us a little bit about the process by which this data is already being collected and where
288it's housed and how these reports would be put together thank you for that question miss tolin so right so currently we do provide um and i know we've been a little bit behind but we do provide semester reports across the division that's disaggregated by student subgroup and also that is broken out by bdoe espar discipline code reporting category so the first piece of the data we have now we're actually in the next week or two you'll be receiving your second report for this year on that data the piece that we have not um refined thus far is the added element that ms corbett sanders is talking about where it's the disaggregated data by school to have a common template and that's the piece that we we're going to have to have some additional discussions around
289how we create a system that produces that data so that we would have that consistently across all of our 200 plus schools and centers um so the division black data we have that desegregated back uh student subgroup and by discipline category we have that now um and again you'll be receiving that port report in the next couple of days it's the the school level piece systematically in the same format for ease of reference and comprehension for the board that we would have to uh think of how we would do that all right thank you so it sounds like it's something that um is can be done i mean dr braver and even said earlier that these emotions um would be something that staff would be able to accomplish i think that's a yes all right
290yes i'm just trying to avoid adding a lot of work to the principles thank you miss keisgamara yes just briefly i was sitting here trying to figure out i'm thinking but we get disciplined data and i know we had a lot of conversation about getting this we used to get it automatically i don't know how that how or when that stopped um but i'll be supporting that because we should be getting it automatically i apologize dr henderson i checked you off too early no no problem first of all thank you miss cohen for hearing my feedback i'm so appreciative that you were willing to broaden this because i think we do need this data for um so many more of our students and not just on cell phones but all of the rest of the
291stuff you know miss omeg one of the things you wanted to capture will be included here with this extension of this um of this motion so i'm excited to see that i also want to say thank you to ms corbett sanders for adding i don't see it now but for adding the piece about um providing this data by school because very often we get feedback that this is what's happening and these are the problems but we don't know where the problems are going on and where to have our advocacy so i think that's really going to be helpful i'm glad to that you have said it's not going to be an issue for this to be provided twice a year that was the only thing that kind of gave me some pause because i know
292that could be a little bit of a heavy lift but i'm very excited to support this motion because we need to have this information for all of our students because otherwise we do not know how to better support the division through our policy making so thank you okay and with that i think we're going to go ahead and take the vote all those in favor of the motion on the screen ms tolen are you voting yes for this okay and that is unanimous with miss marin away from the table all right we are so very close folks um agenda item 5.05 new policy gun free schools and school buildings and property policy and i'll call on mr frisch thank you i move that the board approved the new policy gun safety procedures gun-free schools and
293school board buildings and property is there a second second seconded by miss cohen mr frisch would you like to speak to this yes only for 30 minutes a few weeks ago i indicated that every level of government has a role to play when it comes to gun violence prevention this proposed policy is an extension of that commitment in 2020 our counterparts on the fairfax county board of supervisors took advantage of a new state law and passed an ordinance banning guns from fairfax county government buildings parks and special events to be clear guns have been illegal on actual school grounds for decades but virginia school boards have not had the authority to prohibit guns at their non-instructional facilities for fcps that includes places like the gatehouse administration center thankfully last year the virginia general assembly gave
294school boards the ability to act and that is exactly what we will do here tonight by passing this new policy tonight's vote is a continuation of our work to prevent gun violence from requesting an audit of security practices and procedures to reviewing curriculum and professional development related to gun violence and suicide prevention from encouraging the completion of our security vestibule construction program to notifying parents and guardians annually about their legal obligations to securely store all their guns so that children cannot access them the school board takes gun violence prevention seriously and i am proud to work of the work we have done and continue to do to build on the accomplishments of the boards who have served before us thank you ms cohen i could not say it better than that so well said um
295seeing as there are no folks who would like to speak to this all those in favor of the motion please raise your hands okay um ms tolen are you voting yes i voted yes okay noted and that is unanimous all right wow okie dokie um okay oh boy all right oh consent agenda item number six our adopted rules of parliamentary procedure robert's rules provide for a consent agenda listing several items for approval of the board by a single motion 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 in the meeting these agenda items are on the screen is there any objection to approving the consent
296agenda um seeing none the consent agenda is approved what let's have it yet we're good agenda item uh six new business the following are new business items there will not be a vote on these tonight but action is scheduled at a future meeting these new business items are on the screen great um agenda item number eight board matters and without objection it is very late our staff has worked quite hard um i would like to and the board has worked very hard too ms mccarthy i'm sorry you just got it as well thank you miss mclaughlin i'd like to skip board matters seeing no objections with that we are adjourned and it's still the warriors have won the nba finals warriors won at game six yes 106.90 boo celtics no mr fresh basketball the round
297one you