FCPS School Board Work Session - 5/24/22

001we are about to call this meeting to order because we do have quorum ms cohen has submitted a written request to virtually attend today's work session due to a medical conflict all those in favor of approving this request and that is unanimous with uh those seven or eight that are present do i need to call off the names okay thank you well good afternoon everybody it's our pleasure to be here today and have this opportunity to present the annual uh recommendations of the fleacat committee to you and the bulk of the presentation is going to be led by carrie reynolds our coordinator for health pe and our chair of the flea cat committee and that's probably one of the more challenging jobs in the school system but she's been doing a fantastic job facilitating that

002work and she's going to lead our presentation we've got about a dozen slides or so on this year's recommendations and just by way of preview if you haven't had a chance to look at the materials that are on board docs yet the committee really does have a set of recommendations that i would say are probably the most significant recommendations for program changes that i've seen in my 10 years in the school system so we want to walk you through the process of how they got to that point and then we'll have lots of opportunity for board discussion around next steps but without any further ado we'll go ahead and turn it over to carrie and get started good afternoon happy to be here this afternoon to share with you the recommendations from the family life

003education curriculum advisory committee only i have to point out here so today what i would like to share with you is briefly an overview of how the fle curriculum is developed and implemented in our schools a brief overview of the curriculum advisory committee and then we will go through the recommendations that the committee has made this year as well as possible next steps so as a review here in fairfax county public schools we do have a locally developed program of instruction which means that we use the standards of learning for fle as a foundation for our curriculum however we do not have to implement the sols exactly as they're written and exactly at the grade levels where they appear so we have some flexibility in what we feel are the most important topics and how

004they best would support the students and our community there are some topics which are written into legislation that we might that we must include and those include things like dating violence human sexuality sexual abstinence um human trafficking sexually transmitted infections and there's a few others so those are definitely included in the curriculum as they're written in the legislation outside of those there is some flexibility as i said to develop a program which we feel is in the best needs of our students in our community so each year our advisory committee meets and brings forward recommendations to the board there is a 30-day community review process where we gather input from community members on those recommendations and following that process all of the comments are collated and presented to the board before the action is taken

005on the recommendations and just as a reminder parents and guardians do have the right to opt their child out of any fle instruction or all of the fle lessons and i didn't want to mention that bdoe is currently undergoing a revision to the sol so there may be some changes to those in the future although at this point i don't know what exactly those might look like so the role of the curriculum advisory committee is to advise the k-12 court coordinator myself at this time on the program of studies development so they provide input on the objectives and descriptive statements on any media that may be used in instruction and any additional special instructional materials that may be part of the lesson the committee is made up of members who have a two-year term they're

006listed there for you they're school board appointees we have a representative from the fairfax county council of ptas from fairfax county health department i'm a representative from local clergy and practicing physicians and then we also have administrators and teachers and we have students from the high school level the students serve only a one-year term as opposed to the other members who serve a two-year term we are required to meet as a committee at least three times a year and our meetings are open to the public during this current school year the committee did meet seven times we received the topics for consideration from school board members fcps teachers and some of the committee members themselves as you look at the report the recommendations really fall into four different categories there's recommended changes to how the

007program is administered there's recommended changes to objectives and descriptive statements there is a piece of media that has been brought forward for recommendation as well as where the committee would like to go next year so as we go through the recommendations they're presented in these four categories they are not necessarily in the order in which they're presented in the report however on each slide for each recommendation it does reference the recommendation in the report for your convenience so our first recommendation would be a significant change to how our program is administered at this time and that is to adopt gender combined instruction and human growth and development for students in grades four through eight currently students in those grade levels are receiving instruction and grouped as boys or as girls the main points that the

008committee discussed one is that having all students receive the instruction together really normalizes discussion of the reproductive systems the reproductive process and other topics related to human sexuality it gives students a chance to interact with all of their peers and learn how to have conversations with each other about what can be some difficult conversations and of course it is inclusive of all of our students by not requiring them to select either the boys or the girls instruction as a committee we did look at what several other school divisions are doing both in this area around virginia and also a sampling of divisions around the country on the screen there are the divisions that are near us in virginia in your report there are some additional school divisions listed as well as you look through those

009you'll see that there are several different ways that divisions approach this instruction some are gender separate some are gender combined some have gender combined at certain grade levels or maybe a certain lesson they separate for so there is a wide variety of what's happening around in other school divisions the next recommendation is for students who are receiving instruction from the modified curriculum the modified curriculum is used by students with low incidence disabilities or students that might be in our cat b program they are not receiving instruction from the general education curriculum so generally what happens is student the modified curriculum is based on the same standards that are used for the general curriculum but obviously modify to meet the needs of those students i'm sorry i lost my train of thought so one of so

010when students are gender separated in grades four through eight and the general education instruction they're also gender separated in grades four through eight for students in the modified instruction and then they're together in grades nine and ten just as they would be in the regular classroom so the feedback we received was that when we're talking about menstruation and specifically how to use menstrual products it would not be appropriate for those students who are assigned mail and receiving instruction from the modified curriculum to view a video we have called janet scatter period that very explicitly instructs on menstruation how to use pads how to remove them dispose of them and so forth as well as just explicit instruction that goes along with that piece of media so the recommendation would be that for that one part

011of the instruction the students would remain in the remain and gender separate groups and only those students who are assigned female would view that video and receive that explicit instruction our next recommendation was for grade 10. in 10th grade while students do receive instruction in the single classroom with all students together there is one section of the grade 10 lesson that talks about breast and testicular exam where students do separate into a boys group and a girls group and in those groups they're receiving more instruction on testicular self-exam for the boys and breast self-awareness for the girls currently we do provide instruction on breast and testicular cancer for all of our students including signs and symptoms the idea that you should be aware of those signs and symptoms what's normal for your body and that

012self-exams should be performed what would change with this recommendation is that there would no longer be separation just for the instruction around testicular self-exam girls do hear right now that males should perform testicular self exams they don't learn the how to process so that would be a change the males are already learning about breast self awareness as we know that breast cancer can affect males as well the next recommendation would affect grades 4 through 8 as well as grade 10 with some objective changes if the board was to support the first recommendation for gender combined instruction there would need to be several changes to the current lesson objectives and descriptive statements and those really can be separated into three main ideas the first one is that in all lessons grades four through eight we would

013just simply need to remove the terminology that says the lesson is gender separate because that would now be inaccurate the second change would be removing language that indicates instruction in the puberty lessons that may only have been for boys or may have only been for girls and you can see in the example provided there it says girls only are taught about the intended use of proper disposal of personal hygiene products so that would be removed and all students would be hearing that information and then finally would be a change to update the language to be more inclusive and in the example we're using terminology such as individuals assigned male at birth or individuals assigned female at birth as opposed to girls or boys or men and women there are more details that show specifically what

014the changes would be in appendix c of the report so you can see that in greater detail additional change to the grade 10 human growth and development lesson 5 objective is a recommendation to add into the objective and gender when we're talking about development of sexuality in the descriptive statement the last sentence it does currently say sexual orientation and gender identity terms will be discussed so the addition of gender in the objective itself is just to be more clear and transparent that gender is already included in that lesson there would not be a required change to the lesson simply to the language being used in the objective um the new media there was a recommendation to use a new piece of media called hormones body odor and acne oh my puberty 101 a much more

015current video than what we currently have and it provides basic information to students about the changes of puberty really looking at the physiological changes and the role that hormones play it is being recommended for use in both grades 6 and grade seven it would replace a current video in grade six and there is not currently a video in grade seven so this would be in addition to that instruction however at grade six i do want to note that the current regulation 3204 does not allow the instruction of masturbation in elementary school this video does include reference to masturbation which would be new content at sixth grade it does not describe what masturbation is it just simply makes a reference to masturbation in the video and the final recommendation is for looking forward to next year

016the committee would like to explore changes regarding inclusion of the gender spectrum in elementary fle and a more overall inclusive curriculum for family life education which would include all grade levels and gender as one area but also students with disabilities students who english may not be their first language so that the curriculum can really support the needs of all of our students currently at the elementary level we do not include discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation that's also in the regulation 3204 that i just mentioned so moving forward with this would at some point require a change to that regulation all right well thank you very much carrie and before we open it up for board discussion kind of the the last slide that we have here is really what i think the board's

017options are for moving forward typically what we would do when we bring these annual recommendations is just walk the board through kind of that 30-day community review process in the timeline that would be scheduled for a vote so you can see that under option two that would be the traditional way that um i think every year except for one that i've been here in 10 years the board has kind of proceeded in terms of taking the flea cac recommendations and really and pretty much approving them each year since we're talking about a really substantive change this year though and because we only have about two weeks left in the school year and again we had to move this work session um you know back a little bit later than it normally would have been scheduled

018for so with a little bit um of a time rush i would say before the end of the school year i'm not so sure that option two would be the most prudent option to consider so we work to develop another option for the board to consider which would be to essentially put these recommendations on hold until the fall when we could do a more extensive community review period families of course would you know at the beginning of the year i think be more connected probably to things that are happening in the school system than they might be at the end of the year and it would give us a little bit more time to collect information from surrounding jurisdictions and jurisdictions across the country that have implemented similar changes to the ones that the fleetcat

019committee is recommending and it would give us an opportunity to get some student voice and hear from students about the changes because you know student voice in this area i think is student voice is always important but student voice in this topic i think is incredibly important so that would be a different option it would be different than how the boards maybe proceeded in the past but because of the short timing before the end of the school year in the 30-day community review period and because of the substantive changes that the committee is recommending we wanted to give the board an additional option behind beyond how you've proceeded under normal circumstances so with that we will conclude um the presentation and we've got a good hour and a half not that we need to use

020it all but we've got a good hour and a half for discussion on this particular work session topic thank you dr presidio and uh this has been a short but uh full co short and to the point presentation um so i know that we've got a number of people who have their um placards up and we have about an hour and 35 minutes to um have this part of this conversation it would be great if we could take a five minute break before we um go into budget so if we can keep it to an hour and a half that'd be great um i have dr anderson followed by ms marin right thank you thank you again for all of this work i fully agree with how significant these changes are and i will try

021to get all my questions in on this round one of the things that you talked about at the top of your presentation is that the flexibility that we have to have a local program is this available to all school divisions or is there an application process it is available to all school divisions they have an option to either use the sols as implemented or have a committee like we do that makes recommendations and with board approval thank you um you also talked at the beginning and dr presidio you also brought this up the community review process um that's always part of this process how are those recommendations or suggestions or feedback from the community typically incorporated does the does the committee go back and have some sort of committee response or is it just left

022up to the board for consideration left up to the board all of the committee all the recommendations come in through email which are then all collated and presented to the board okay um i'm going to jump to kind of the last piece and then i still have a bunch of questions i do want to ask given what you've presented before us which is significant i definitely would be one who would be interested in that option that provides a hold so that we have a chance to have some community feedback but i also would like for the community for the committee to respond to that community feedback as well because you guys have been in the thick of it much more than we have and so that's something i'd like to put out there as a

023consideration i i would like to say that we will have significant change to the committee in this coming school year most of the members are at their the end of their two-year appointment um so while they certainly can go back and comment it may or may not be the same members depending on who's appointed i see in the coming year um thank you for that so that is definitely another point for us to consider okay i'm going to jump into some of my questions regarding the content here the first recommendation which is the gender combined and if you look at the list that you have here i was so glad to see pg county because i taught in fiji county i taught fifth and sixth grade so i had to teach family life and it

024was always combined but one of the things that i also noticed and the powerpoint that you have on page i don't know i don't see this page here but it talks about the boys and girls circle that stood out to me because that's something that i always had to do as a teacher because i had students primarily female students who would not ask any questions even though they had those questions so they always wanted to have a separate time and it would be you know some informal lunch bunch but just something to respond to their questions that they were not comfortable in asking so while i am fine with the combination because again i was in a system where that was done i would like for some consideration for the the circle or however that

025ends up so that students who would not be vocal in the full group can have an opportunity to expand their knowledge because this is for them and if they're not comfortable to take advantage of the time i think we need to attend to that um another question that i have recommendation number two um this is i'm sorry i'm losing my place here i wanted some more detail about this this is the recommendation that speaks to the media correct it's with the modified curriculum and the view yes that's right the modified curriculum you mentioned that the um it would not be appropriate for our students who are in um in special and self-contained classes can you give a little bit more detail as to why um some of the discussion was that for students with the

026low incidence disabilities who can't access the general curriculum that providing information that wasn't pertinent to them may cause some confusion or may just not be really necessary for them to understand and their personal development at this age i see and i think that's my time so if i can have a go back please marin great thank you i just wanted to first start with a few process questions what was when was this report from fleek act transmitted to the board does the clerk or anyone know last week okay so my my process question is what no okay can you pause the time we actually had it on for the prior work session and we posted the materials i think a week in advance so it's been several weeks yeah thank you so what makes the

027fleetcat committee's report different than any of our other advisory committees in terms of you are responding to the recommendations whereas we have other committees who also give recommendations why is this one a priority over msaoc title 1 hrac yeah so that's that's a really good question so um this is not a school board advisory committee this is a staff advisory committee um and the committee advises kerry is the coordinator of health pe and family life education we have this committee because it's required by law as kerry said since we have our own internal local fle program and we're using something that's different than the state program if we just used the state program and followed those state standards we wouldn't need to have this additional committee we probably would want to have it would be

028my guess but we wouldn't be required to have it so this committee is different in that it's a requirement from the state to have this committee the recommendations come to kerry and her role as coordinator they don't come to the board but the board is required to vote on the recommendations that we bring forward thank you is that the same for the advisory committee for students with disabilities since that's also required by law is it does you know if that follows the same process i realize it's a different office but that one i'd have to think about that a little bit more i think it's similar but i don't think it's exactly the same another one that we have is our early childhood education program which is similar in that it's not really a board

029advisory committee it's really a a staff advisory committee but the board is required to receive the report on an annual basis okay thank you that's helpful um yeah cause i'm just wondering you know what what's the process for the board hearing the recommendations from committees and i know that acsd had sent us recommendations and i don't believe that we've gotten a presentation on those so i'm just trying to understand the process one other thing not only that may help to take everything sloan said acsd every school district has to have it because of code it's the virginia law this flea cac is only if you're a school district that goes above and beyond what the state standards are for family life 25 30 years ago many board members around the table may have remembered fairfax

030county public schools made a decision frankly over a generation ago to go well beyond state standards for family life so we've had flea cac as part of our culture for a long long time lots of districts in virginia simply continue to use the state standards which to be honest are very old have rarely been updated and are minimal compared to the robust family life program that we have here in fairfax thank you and i'm i'm certainly very pleased that we have flea cac and their recommendations this to me just there's a few things that are coming to a nexus for me one is that we are at the point of year where we hear from our advisory committees and once again here we are on the eve of the end of the school year hearing

031these very significant recommendations so i am a proponent of option one in no way am i prepared to go to my community and start talking about this right now and i'm glad that our executive director of communications and community relations is here because that's a major part of it but i also see dovetails with things like the cell phone policy and the student rights responsibility how did we how do we set policy when the policy the the success of it relies in in the families and the parents and so really for the first time that i think i'm sitting here really trying to understand knowing that we have lots of different you know values in the community although i think most people have a you know a similar one which is why we're trending towards

032this but you know i personally have a sixth grader so i have very much just experienced what's happening and i could see how some families might think something is appropriate and something is not but i think whether we're talking about proper use of cell phones or even safety yesterday i was at elementary school watching cars speeding and you know we're trying to figure out what can we do to put in speed bumps in this but it comes back to behavior so again all this stuff i know it seems like i'm a tangent but it's really not to me because it's really about how we communicate and partner with families and say to them we're trying to have the best interest for your kids it's important that we tell you you know teach your kid about

033how to protect themselves from cancer about how women's reproductive systems work um and how we respect one another's bodies so i think it's going to be a very significant messaging and listening that's going to have to happen when we do the community outreach part um so the other one other thing i do just want to mention is i've heard from students that they would like to see topics of when it comes to sexual assault not be based on just males assaulting females but how those different iterations of assault can happen so that was an addition thing that i wanted to put out there thank you do you want to respond to any of miss marin's comments especially the last one which would be in addition to our curriculum i'm sorry dr brabrand did you want

034to go i'll let kerry go first so maybe add after you make some comments um we have made some changes in recent years about the assault so that it's not as victim blaming as it may have been perceived previously and trying also to make sure that we're addressing the fact that males are also victims the data around males as victims is not as comprehensive as data for females because we know males are less likely to report but we are trying to make that shift but to go further we certainly could adjust address that as a committee and look at what changes additional changes just one other thing miss mayor because i think you accurately you've gone up strategically on something just to remind the board this board passed the first family engagement policy for fairfax

035county public schools we are starting to change how we do community engagement we restructure our occr we've invested more now in moving away from calling them apparently liaisons to family liaisons we're changing how we do business the srnr yeah it came at the end of the year the board took a vote now we're realizing all the stakeholdering we need to do these committee meetings at the end of the year we have begun talking with i've talked with miss bakarski ms seismar heiser and even with prior board chairs all of this at the end of the year is this the best way to do that back and forth with the community to make sure all voices are heard i do think this is one we have a flagship fle program that very few kids and families

036opt out of they believe in what we're doing these are a lot of of of worthy changes to review um but i would say to you as i've listened to and heard the feedback that i want to be sure the board ultimately gets to decide we've got to be sure we're bringing our community along that they understand the rationale the best practice so they can feel fully engaged and fully supportive of whatever changes what we want is for kids and families to continue to access this curriculum and not make a decision to opt out of information that i think is critical for young people thanks thank you dr bravern miss marin do you want to go back not right now thank you okay thank you then i have mr frisch followed by miss darren at

037cofax thank you um we do have a flagship program but i think that's because we adapt to best practices and i think the the top line message here that's been missed is that this change would align our program with best practices is that right i believe that's correct in fact the national association of school psychologists have taken a stand that gender separation in family life education is not a best practice i've been doing some research and found a journal article from the american journal of sexual uh sex education from 2020 that found a review of 13 academic journal articles around sex ed found that a best practice is inclusion for genders for many of the reasons that you mentioned so when we do communicate to the public i think that is the top line this

038is not willy nilly this is not the result of a flea cat committee that just decided one day that it wanted to do this you all consulted experts right yes we referenced the research that we've done in the in the report and i'm sure there's more research out there that we the report has a lot of great information i highly suggest everybody read it in addition to the school divisions from the presentation other school divisions are listed in there as well it's not just a northern virginia phenomenon places like norfolk virginia beach hanover hampton other places across the state and every geographic region conduct family life education in this manner in fact there are entire states where this is the law places like california and before you think it's some liberal conspiracy places like missouri

039do it as well because it's a best practice my my understanding is that alexandria has been doing it this way for so long that nobody remembers when it started um so i guess my question would be when we adopted last year's changes to fle it was on a similar timeline that we're hearing it now maybe one or two week difference right generally been the timeline the end of the school year so this is not unusual the only thing that would be unusual here is that we're taking an additional step as one of the recommendations would insist to gather more information beyond what we've learned our best practices and practices that are adopted in states across the country and school divisions across the commonwealth yes if you go with option one that would be all right

040i'd like to i'll yield and i'll take go back later once the conversation adopts saranac followed by ms mclaughlin thank you for this and i thank our family life education group for these recommendations um that said uh dr presidio do you have a preference or with option one and option two um i'm leaning toward option one because i would like to further engage with the community with the substantive changes what are your thoughts well i mean as dr brent said i mean it's obviously it's you know this body's decision which option we go with we wanted to prevent or provide you with some you know additional thinking um i do think um this is the most substantive change that we've recommended as a school system to the fle program in the 10 years that i've

041been here so you know i think oftentimes this body really wants to make sure that the community has an opportunity to weigh in on matters of importance and significance and this one would be a significant change so with that in mind we developed option one to to give you an opportunity to consider a different approach than what we've used in in years past i appreciate that i i am going to put my vote in for that right now and i guess i do have so i i'm looking at the the current practices about gender separate and and and gender combined is there a hybrid model out there where we could say there's an opt-in either way so if you want to go with the boy group the girl group or if you want to go

042with the combined group that's what we do currently in our school division you have the combined group option already i have well let me tell you we don't have a combined group what we do allow is for students to decide based on how they identify to go with the boys group or the girls group but we do not have a group that we have the boys and the girls okay together i do think that would present a logistical challenge in schools in terms of finding the teachers to teach the different groups that would go from two teachers to three yes um [Music] i would just like if if option one is the one that wins further study i would like that question presented to the community if that is something that we could if this

043body would agree to that i mean i don't know how where we're going to end up and where the where the which option is going to prevail but i would like that option presented as as a possibility if we are able to find the instructional people to cover those classes because that seems to me that would be a win-win for um people who are who are who are tentative and i for me it's it's just what dr anderson said it's the ability of a ten-year-old to be comfortable in front of the opposite genders talking about something or gender they don't you know being able to talk and ask questions and that's what this is for right there are some some children that are going to know know have been talked to their by their parents

044with these things for many years prior but there are some this is the first time and we all remember that for those kids it was the first time that's going to be really i i think having the combined groups would be difficult so that's why i would love that option to be considered as part of how we expand this and make it more comfortable or at least have that question asked when we move forward so i i think it's an important point that you're raising at this point we were not recommending that we change the community review process we were just recommending that we conduct the community review process at the beginning of the school year with more communication to solicit more community input into the process because usually we get pretty limited input so

045really working with our communications team to publicize how an individual could have voice we would just present the recommendations and i think as mr frisch has already pointed out it's really going to be important that we present the research around why we're making these recommendations as a committee but we weren't you know thinking of doing surveys or focus groups or providing any other options the committee's work is really the committee's work if we go with option one what we're doing is providing a window of community review when we think we would get more input from the community and also reaching out to the students and it's that student voice piece that i think we haven't gotten much student voice in the past this is a big one i mean i have a sixth grader um

046like miss marin you know i did my own survey at home with my own you know child to see what the response would be i think some families would probably want to do the same thing with their children well i think it's really important and i think it's going to be hard to get that youngest voice we're going to hear a lot from high schoolers who will probably be very comfortable with this option but again i go back to that 10 year old who this is the first time they're hearing it and so so i if if my colleagues care to speak to that to have that you know um that question presented or or whatever but i understand what you're doing if you're presenting this and maybe just bringing it as a point for

047discussion is something to to discuss and think about as we move forward if we end up not moving forward today but in the fall thank you miss mclaughlin followed by miss cohen who's on the screen so first i i want to thank um carrie and the f the fleek hack group um dr presidio um your remarks as well and your efforts on this dr bray brand i i couldn't agree more with you that part of our role as a school division and a board is to help educate and lead our community and uh dr presidio you said it best this is significant departure from something that we've done certainly in your tenure here at the system in mind as well and so um mr frisch i'm very much with you uh that when we look

048at the national landscape and we take the exhaustive research that um the fleet cac brought to their report i mean that's part of our job is going to really engage our community and point to that you know it's it's easy on something like this uh that can be very um psychological and emotional and we as parents we as um former adolescents ourselves i mean i'm i'm almost 55 years old i still remember being the 10 year old miss dearnett cofax i remember exactly what it felt like and my my experience in california at the time was gender separated and uh frankly 10 year olds are pretty immature and i can't help but remember how boys when they get information and it can go the same way for girls there are things that happen with the

049bodies that the maturity aspect of a 10 year old having that is you know playground ammo to tease kids i just want to understand that better i want our families to be able to have that conversation because i think part of it might be that while we know this is a best practice we need to bring the student voice in it and we need the family voices to be able to say maybe this is more family engagement on what this means to prepare your child that that you know what does it mean to respect one another to be talking about these things they're important i love the idea of of making this um something that as dr bray brown you said families value and and welcome remaining engaged in our in our flagship fle program

050um but i will say that as the parent of now three graduates of fcps i never once looked at the fle curriculum i just trusted that this is a premier school system is me done well and i i think that we have a community that's looking at this more carefully now and i love option one only in the sense that we really do want to lead and engage our community and if this looks like we rushed it during the summer time on something like this we may have a backlash that i think could be more harmful in the long run so that's kind of where i'm at right now [Music] thank you miss mclaughlin miss cohen thank you so much and thanks to the work of fleacac you know i will um i will say

051the elephant in the room for me is that i think a lot of our committees are really feeling dismissed and ignored because we say things like we want student voice we want parent voice um but that's who we put on our committees fleacack unlike most of our other committees actually has four student representatives who show up um month after month to be there um we appoint folks to fleek as representatives because they bring something to it so for example my representative is a very recent fcps parent and also a community health worker um and i know that that's the case for many folks on the committee several of whom have children currently in fcps so i just sometimes get frustrated honestly with the narrative that like we need parent engagement student engagement that's why we

052have these committees and it's why we don't sit here ourselves and get a presentation and just decide what the curriculum is going to look like in fleek so i will honestly say i'm i'm frustrated because the committee has been working for years around gathering enough information to come and present to us the idea of a gender inclusive fle you know from fourth grade on conversation i think we absolutely know it reduces stigma we have 10 year olds at schools who are having their periods it's important for the kids to know what that is and and how it works and um to not be ashamed or embarrassed um we've already had these conversations about putting pads and tampons in our schools and we had school board members who were very concerned about that and what it

053showed so my frustration is i always want us our job is to always do best practices and do the right thing for our kids and not let the loudest voices in our community be what determine um our path forward so i guess what i would ask is number one um did these options come back to the fleacac board did they know that we're going to be presented an option that we've not been presented before to ignore their recommendation for next year i have shared with the committee that it was possible that that option one would move forward um i will also say i hope that folks have will take this time then because it sounds like um i'm in the minority but to reach back out to the folks that they appointed to fleek and

054ask them about the conversations that they've had in these last three months and even for some of them the last couple of years um about how we got there i think um you know one thing to ms mclaughlin's point i i am one of those parents who went to go look at the fleek actor of the fle curriculum and i appreciate the letter that comes home from our principals every year beforehand to say this is what's going to happen these are good times to have family conversations and talk about what your kids are learning and i've always really appreciated that family engagement and parent engagement that we have done as a school i know him over time so um i will i'd love to go back discord with sanders thank you and i'm sorry for

055interrupting you i just wanted to make sure you know i don't know if you can see the clock okay great thank you and you have a go back i'll put you on so miss omeg thank you um happy to follow miss cohen actually i think uh with many of these conversations you know whether we do more engagement less engagement whether engagement is ever representative and i'm always you know of the camp that argues it isn't because we simply have voices that will not know how to engage and uh have the wherewithal to um so that ultimately leads me down to the same path of where we are where we're not naming the elephant in the room things are subjective around this how do we reconcile different world views around what sexuality is how it should

056be handled etc i i am also happy to follow ms cohn because i do agree that destigmatizing these conversations is essential for us to to grow up with one another and understand how our bodies work uh it certainly was it's not okay to feel like you have to hide your pad and and that it's weird to talk about certain things and whatever because that is just that is real and that's what we all experience um so along those lines i don't think that you know in in looking forward to where it seems we're going to have to move on this recognizing the subjectivity in that um and that you know we do things with more engagement or less engagement as we go based on how people are feeling clearly sexuality is an uncomfortable subject and

057people have all kinds of views around it uh it seems that the adults don't know how to talk about it much more than the children do but i say that to say that we're not going to reconcile these different world views nor should we hope to or try to uh and and that means that i think our role is not so much to say what is right what is wrong what science proves because quite frankly i think we all have sophistication here to know that all sides claim that science is on their side um and so what i would prefer is for us to think about how we might cultivate a school system that creates a path for all of those kids and and i was very happy to hear you know tammy your suggestion

058which i was going to raise as well where okay let's just create options we're not going to agree so let's have those three spaces where kids can choose and we don't want to stigmatize kids so even the combined option can be for folks who don't feel that that separation is necessary and honestly i think a lot of kids will opt into that but obviously that's something we have to gauge uh similarly uh i mean i i don't know how far this will end up going but even some of la you know language around um sex assigned at birth and whatnot people have different world views around that so even choosing a term like birth sex that can be you know stands as it is that it just names something rather than because because really again

059the elephant in the room folks there is a subset of our community that feels marginalized and has felt marginalized for so long and has rightfully done so and that we need to tackle the challenges of that across our school system right lgbtq youth feel like they're not seen they feel like they're not included that is a a reality that we have to recognize what that means though is because we had an exclusive curriculum before in the hopes of making it more inclusive we're perhaps leaning too far into now becoming a little bit exclusive on the other end and that's where i'm i'm calling upon us perhaps in this conversation of exploring further options to be more expansive about how we think of you know who whose voices matter here i think you know i saw

060the so-called research is really citing two lgbtq advocacy organizations and the national association association of psychologist document which largely cites lgbtq advocates right that's important but we have to also keep in mind that many people come to the table in this conversation and sexuality is really like no other topic where people have very deep personal values around it that we're not again we're not ever going to reconcile so let's look 10 years down the line not just today and what's going to be easy to move forward with but how we can sustainably do something that is reflective of of you know a variety of perspectives and i know that's my time but this is a conversation guys this is not going to end today this is going to continue years into the future of how

061our society is going to figure things out and i would hope that we can put our caps of how can we make this sustainable for everybody do you want to go back as opposed to pushing down our own ideology but yes please thank you miss omeg miss kisgamara yes thank you um excuse me i've got something going on in my throat but i you know i don't think it's a surprise to my colleagues in how i have advocated for trying to make sure the communities are heard and i'm grateful for some of the information we've heard today from our staff that we've had very few students our families opting out i think part of that has been the way information has been presented or the way we have tried to involve the community i'm also

062grateful for our committee members they are advisors to us they bring us information from their various uh backgrounds and that's very valuable but we're the decision makers and in various situations you know we've had conversations and most recently you know we've had some pretty hard conversations as to how we make sure we listen to the community i'd like to err on the side of uh making sure that we can be as inclusive as possible because i think it's going to keep those numbers up right if we're we're not um having communities that feel that they did not have an opportunity to hear what the rationale is or have an opportunity to give input then it can harm our reputation with respect to how we're proceeding so i really want to respect staff's recommendation here because

063i think it's i think it's the right way not just for this but for anything that we do um and and that's what i have tried to advocate uh for along the way so i think i'm being consistent um [Music] i as one who uh advocated for menstrual equity it was uh much the same way right um we had the opportunity we put it out there the community had an opportunity to try to give us their input students came alongside and worked with us to try to figure out how to make that happen and that is part of a formula that i think is very successful for us so i do support option number one um because i think that it helps us to um bring people along as we move even with the best

064the recommendations of best practices thank you miss keys gemara miss tollen thank you um it's just a few comments and also you know someone that has taught seventh grade life science um and dealt with a lot of these topics um and it has had uh you know conversation with my flu fluke representative and and had the as meeting manager the opportunity to really talk to um you know kerry and sloan about this um i'm ex you know thinking about our curriculum as we've stated being kind of above and beyond what some other school districts are doing so um i know we've got a lot of research and we've got comparisons between school districts in virginia and across the country but i would like to let spend a little bit more time understanding the topics that

065we have compared to some of these other school districts that are doing um you know gender combined are we really looking apples to apples and given you know what we're doing as some of my colleagues have already brought up does it really need to be an all or nothing situation you know a number of the other school districts it seems have you know combined genders for some topics and not combined for other topics you know i'd like to see us kind of go through our curriculum and really think very thoroughly about you know maybe we don't have to have three options all the time maybe sometimes we have everyone combined and maybe there just are certain topics where we need to you know have you know boys girls and a combined group as a selection

066or maybe you know we just have situations where um we're not combining students like you know we already have and we're seeing other school districts doing so i don't think it has to be all or nothing um and i would really hope that if we made a concerted effort in the fall to use that survey as we've already talked i would like to see that survey filled out by a wide variety of age groups of kids you know some school districts are doing combined just sort of certain grade levels maybe that's what we want to do and maybe that depends upon you know the survey results that we get and also you know keep in mind that this is a significant change to the curriculum and if teachers are now being asked to instead of

067teaching separately now it's combined you know there's professional development and training and curriculum changes that are going to need to occur and honestly like we've talked it's the end of may you know could we even be ready for a fall roll out you know of this given the magnitude of what we're talking about so that's kind of my rationale thinking about research and information that we need and input from the our families and our students so i am in support of option one also thank you any response from staff well i think those are all good comments just a few clarifications just to make sure we're talking kind of about the same thing process wise we were talking about not changing the community review process but just moving the dates by which we would do

068the community review process i don't think it would be a good precedent to change the process that we've used year after year after year that's established in our policies and our regulations it's just the timing with a change of this significance happening at the very end of the school year and really half of that community review period happening during the first two weeks of the summer i'm not sure would give us the kind of community feedback that the board would really like to make this decision if you go with option one so we wouldn't be proposing changing the process we'd just be proposing changing the timeline and we could provide some additional information on other school divisions beyond what's already been collected by the committee and we could provide some additional research as well but

069i just wanted to clarify that point and then the other thing about how we ultimately would think about different options for delivery of instruction i would want to keep that probably as streamlined as possible in the best interest of the schools that have to implement this work i i'd be a little reluctant to over promise that we could do lots of different things i think we're going to have to go with a division approach and if we could do something beyond that great but i'd be reluctant to go too far too fast because our schools right now sometimes have challenges uh getting the teachers trained and available to deliver the instruction and to do it well um so the more you know iterations that that our options that we provide on how to do that

070is just going to diminish i think the quality of the experience gonna clarify for a second okay so i it's a survey correct no it's not a survey so we collect yeah no we we collect qualitative uh information from families so what we would do is we would continue that same process that we've used before but we would make sure that we're working with the communications office to really push out the information about the change about the best practice research why the committee is proposing what they're proposing and really encourage not just uh you know parents and guardians to submit comments but for their students to submit comments as well okay so i think that's what i'm talking about it's just really making a push to get those student comments on top of the family

071comments that's right and i think my comments get to your time to streamline it sorry about that that's okay that was my gentle nudge okay so i'll take my turn now i think there's a lot of confusion between family life education curriculum and health curriculum we even saw it at our last board meeting where speakers talked about family life education as being a health curriculum so as part of this process i think it's really important even for this the collective body to better understand what is in the health curriculum addressing human sexuality growth and development what is limited to just the family life education curriculum and how does that differ from the state standards for family life education because i'm of the age group that um i remember when family life was first introduced in

072fairfax county public schools it actually happened in the late 60s early 70s and there was because frankly there wasn't as much outreach there were people who totally opted out of our school system because they didn't know what was going to happen and they have obviously from what dr brabrand said change their mind to a great extent so we want to bring everybody along with us one of the so that's why i would support option one as a way of better clarifying getting people to better understand what we're doing and what we're not doing and when we make if i could have and i'd like to know from you whether it would be possible to have a grid that showed those different columns then um we can bring people along with us and it may be

073i like the idea of combined instruction but having breakout groups by people opting into which breakout group they want and that would be one maybe especially since we've added more school psychologists social workers support at each of our schools i'd like to better understand if those groups could be led by some of the professionals that we've put in those schools and so i'm i need more information to better understand what we're doing what how we differentiate from the state because the other piece of it is i don't want it to become an impetus for people to see more [Music] maybe stricter standards coming out of the state versus allowing us to lead i think we could put that information together for you in a chart um just briefly some of the confusion may lie in

074how the instructor who's delivering the instruction are in elementary school health education and family life education is delivered by our classroom teachers and when they get into middle school and high school through grade 10 it's health and physical education and a portion of that is family life education 11th and 12th grade are lessons that are taught in their social studies courses so that is likely part of the challenge i think the content itself can be easily differentiated although people who are not educated on it may not know what falls where but it does get a little bit more complicated particularly in 10th grade where some of the topics we do a little bit of for example relationships and dating in general health education but we save the abuse and violence for family life education so

075differentiating between those two areas could become challenging for people who are not well informed but we could put that information together i would appreciate that i think would be very helpful not only for this board but for the community to understand just one other thing to add to that that might help some community members we did do a comprehensive review of our fle curriculum you know topic by topic either three or four years ago i don't remember exactly which kerry probably remembers but that was a very comprehensive review of everything in the curriculum we presented that of course to the board and to the community so we've done a recent deep dive so we could certainly do as kerry said some of that comparison to the state as well in a chart thank you so

076we'll now go to go backs i have dr anderson followed by mr fresh we have previously purchased testicular and breast self-exam models to be used in the classroom and they should be being used i can't speak to how they're being implemented with fidelity across our schools not on themselves it's on a model yes it would be the video that demonstrates how to do the testicular self exam thank you i didn't even do that thank you for at least hearing me um a question regarding the video i think this is recommendation five where you no i'm sorry recommendation six um where you have the video from pbs is this the video that you referred to that speaks to masturbation which is not allowed which is not yet part of the sixth grade curriculum yes it is

077okay and this the intended audience for this video are parents but can you speak a little bit more in terms as to why the committee feels that this is appropriate for students sure um there was a reference in the video about speaking to your children which gave the perception that it was designed for parents um but the content of the video the committee felt students would understand there is always instruction that goes around the video so if you were to view it there are some terms that you might wonder people kids really understand these terms um but that isn't left in isolation so there would be instruction around that to help with student understanding they also felt that the way it was presented where it's not real formal and scientific it's a little more light-hearted

078um i don't want to say lighthearted but one of the one of the presenters is a comedian the other is a physician so they play off of each other and it seems like something that would be engaging to students at that age and i watched the video and i agreed with everything you've just said i felt that there were some terms that students would not understand so that would need to be unpacked and i definitely felt that the banter between the two it kept it from being heavy because this can be very difficult for kids however i would have i do have questions about introducing a concept and that video that is not yet been found to be appropriate for the grade six curriculum so that's the one hesitation that i have regarding that that

079is um just if i can add it is in the state sols masturbation is in both grades six and seven it's but it is not something that we have introduced here in fairfax right um you talked a little bit um i can't remember which um chart where you were saying that the instruction would be more inclusive of students with disabilities and ell students are they not allowed to have that um instruction at this point they certainly received the instruction what i was trying to refer to is when we're looking at media and some of our media needs to be updated and when we're looking at scenarios and language that's used in our curriculum we probably don't have very much representation now with students with disabilities and we know that from our teachers that our english

080language learners in particular sometimes have trouble understanding because we don't have some of the supports built into the curriculum so when i'm talking about being more inclusive it's to make sure that we have those things in place so all students are getting an equitable experience okay thank you dr brandt you talked a little bit regarding the opt-out numbers you said they're very low can i get some specific information about that i'll see carrie whether we have that do we have that right off off the presses yeah our opt-out numbers this year our elementary is at three percent middle school is 1.7 and high school is 0.36 percent so overall um is two percent across all grade levels thank you um one of the things and again i'm speaking from my experience as a school administrator

081i find that a lot of parents don't opt out or haven't in my experience because they didn't even know that they could even though the document is sent home as you can see i'm one of those parents when the athlete curriculum comes out i am on it in september i watch every single video i have every conversation with my child in advance and so and i and i know there are other parents who are that diligent about it so i want to be sure that we provide them with that opportunity which is why when we're talking about your new approach now your new approach the the change in the timetable of the community review i would encourage us to have a new approach to it because as mr misha said we have parts of our

082community that don't access our regular communication you've already said that the feedback is usually very low how can we take this time to include those folks who are typically not included you know sending a letter you only get so many people but if we're really intentional then we should encourage our parent liaisons and all of those folks who do care very deeply about their students so that they have an opportunity to give feedback because i agree with what miss um mclaughlin has said we have an opportunity here to really educate we're not going to change minds but we need to make sure that the information is in front of people that should have it did you want to respond to that uh yeah so so again just for clarification purposes i am saying that we

083would want to do more outreach to be more inclusive to collect more feedback what i'm suggesting is not changing the feedback collection mechanism that's in our policies and regulations for this one change to fle i don't think that would be a good precedent to to start and to set but definitely we would want to be more inclusive in reaching out to our communities to make sure we were collecting as much feedback as we could i appreciate that clarification i think i misheard and that is my time if there's time i'd like a small go back for one more thing i will put you on a small go back list okay mr fresh please thanks um so would this recommendation for delaying the engagement uh delay all of the recommendations from fleacac and is there a

084potential third option where the only option the only recommendation that is delayed for the engagement is um the uh include gender inclusion so we could always create a third option or even more if we wanted to i think one of the things that would be challenging with that is then you would have two community input review periods the board would have to vote twice and i think it might create well i know it would create additional workload for the board and for staff and it might create confusion for community members would be some of the challenges i think with the potential option like that and if the community engagement is delayed when would this go into effect assuming the board approved it so that's a great question um and kerry i don't know if if

085you're prepared to answer that on the spot or not typically when there's new curriculum that has to be written there is a period of time obviously to develop those new materials i think the biggest issue here would be training for staff that would be delivering instruction in a different way because they would need to be prepared to be able to again deliver that instruction in a way that's developmentally appropriate and there might be some additional training that we would need to do for staff but i don't know if you have more thoughts on timeline for implementation might excuse me my thought would be that it would be delayed until the 23-24 school year because of the reason sloan has cited but also knowing that our schools once you get into middle and high school are

086delivering this instruction at different times so if we were to try a mid-year implementation we would have some students that receive one type of instruction and students who receive something different and that could even be within the same school depending on when they rotate through their health education and fle instruction and would you classify the changes beyond the gender inclusive changes as run-of-the-mill fleet act changes that would be implemented under normal circumstances any other year so those would be delayed for an entire school year when they're intended to make our our programming our curriculum more inclusive for those students we have a third option we probably need to ponder that one a little bit and see if maybe there could be some differentiation of implementation maybe some of the more run-of-the-mill could be implemented sooner

087but i think carrie and the team probably need a little bit more time to think about that and my last point before i finish up speaking to i think mrs corbett sanders indicated that there would be fears that the state might do something around family life education if if we do this too quickly or whatever i can't operate as a school board member afraid of what the governor might do or what his department of education might do that is in conflict with science and i will assume that that they will do those types of things regardless of what we do and it won't be because we did this that they pursue that agenda that would ignore all of the school systems across the commonwealth that are already doing this and have been doing this for

088in some cases longer than anybody can remember so i hope we never find ourselves in a position where that is the um the judgment call that we make that we'd rather not tangle with the governor over what is right and what is the best practice mr fresh i'll respond to that when it's my turn because that's not what my intended communication was and so we can talk about that a bit later we have two board members who have not spoken yet and so if you don't mind i'm going to take a meeting manager's privilege and have miss seismer heiser and miss picarski speak and then we'll go back to the go back list thank you um miss corbett sanders uh just a few questions first um i think it was ms darren at kofack who

089brought up the um the sort of the three different options right um in in schools you would have a mixed gender and a same gender for like a better word option and students could could choose which one to go to or families could choose and in some of my research i've seen some schools actually do implement that i don't know how much so my question is did the committee look at that as an option as a recommendation did they do research around those options as well i'm just i'm curious where the conversation on that was that option did not come up in our discussion or with the divisions that we had had talked to so no we have not investigated that okay um question about the special ed recommendation can you explain to me a

090little bit more why it was specifically recommended that students who are in the capit classes remain gender separated for that lesson recommendation was only for the instruction where they're viewing the video or receiving explicit instruction on how to use menstrual products they learn how to use pads in that in that class and my understanding with the feedback we received is that that instruction while appropriate for students assigned female may not be appropriate or necessary for students assigned male in the classroom just like to dig into that a little bit more as to why it would not be appropriate for a male in a cat b class to understand how pads work as they may have a spouse someday that may be a female and i would have to get more information i didn't explore it

091further i just just put out that perhaps we shouldn't make presumptions about few people's features and what is appropriate if it's appropriate for other people because sexuality is sexuality um so i'd love to have more information about that thank you um i also want to talk a little bit in the last recommendation it talks about an inclusive curriculum and as you know i actually spoke to the um my fleet the committee about looking specifically at disability related inclusion right because people with disabilities i think seven times more likely to be victims of sexual assault um and also people with disabilities may need differentiated instruction certain right to really have more explicit instruction so and also understanding consent with social cues is there talk about and also understanding not just consent but appropriate replacement behavior right

092um instead of presuming which i think sometimes happens that there's a different level of sexuality or different need to access understanding one sexuality is is that included in recommendation seven when you talk about inclusive curriculum yes that would be included so that's part of the to develop that to yes and work with our special education departments all right well um there are some great materials on the you know research materials on that as well so that was my um question and then um i think this is a difficult conversation and i appreciate my colleagues conversation and really thinking through the nuances and the most important thing to me i think is to make sure that our students feel seen and heard um and reflected and i make sure that our implementation is also successful in

093this so thank you okay great um thank you i just wanted to kind of sit back and see where this conversation uh was gonna go um i actually and i had to go back and really confirm this uh with some high school friends i actually was in combined fle classes um in my public schools um so i just thought that was just kind of you know interesting had to dig deep in that memory um and i did some unscientific just personal discussions with my own kids to kind of see where they were and i was surprised by um by their opinions on the matter um and you know i would like to see i think it's important for us to see the research i think it's important for the community to see um i'm hoping

094that there's just a little more than what was presented to us um in the report i would assume that the committee did look at a lot more so i would like to see that you know whether or not we like it this is for many people an uncomfortable conversation an uncomfortable topic and just out of sheer respect for that i understand the need to have further conversation and engage our families and and speak to them as to the why this recommendation was made and the reasoning behind it and really bring them in um [Music] really i just think it's a respect issue because it is a change and for some people it will be uncomfortable and for me the number one goal is to have as many children in accessing this curriculum as possible because

095it's important for their health and for their for their future and for understanding them their bodies and you know bodies of others and i don't want a backlash because we did not present this correctly we didn't get you know buy-in that people were going to be opting out i think that would be a a bad place for us to be so you know i don't know where the right place to land is but i think if we could see some more of that breast practice that has been referenced i think it would be helpful i do have a question though around and i guess a concern around the omission of the testicular cancel cancer self examinations i guess i don't really understand why that would be taken out it seems like a an important piece

096for uh health especially if we are doing the breast awareness sure um so we would still provide instruction on testicular self-exam the recommendation is to remove the piece of media and then that would allow the genders or the students to remain combined for the all of the instruction there's two things i think really around the media one is that it does it does include a naked man in the shower showing how to perform a testicular self-exam the other piece is that this video is no longer available for purchase and it's only on dvd so not all of our schools are even able to access the video at this time we did a quick little poll in about half of our schools either no longer have the video or don't have a dvd player to show

097the video so it would just be reading and hearing about it not any we would have the models available in the schools but it wouldn't be using the video okay okay thank you thank you mr carski we now have miss mclaughlin followed by ms marin thank you um i wanted to go back a couple reasons one uh i i want to be sensitive to staff time and community engagement but i really appreciate what mr frisch said uh for some of this that's sort of run of the mill it's really not going to be that big a deal i don't know why we wouldn't just uh bifurcate it and go ahead and advertise out stuff that we know is kind of standard run-of-the-mill updates and then the one that we all have been spending this work

098session on talking about i i would still be comfortable saying we'll help our families understand it's gonna be a different time for for the engagement period um i also think going forward i would love for us to consider what i see happen oftentimes even with our signs of suicide instruction and it's called an exit survey and it i mean i'm not talking a big you know expensive expansive survey but even just a form at the end of the instruction the kids would fill it out and check the box or however it is to just collect their feedback that says this was helpful this wasn't helpful why it wasn't helpful because so often we talk about wanting to empower student voice and we know that trying to get people after the fact to engage in a

099survey is a whole lot harder than if they're all sitting in the classroom they got the curriculum and now they just give their feedback in that exit setting so that's something i think would be helpful and i would want our teachers and instructors to do the same i'm always cautious about anecdotal information but i think it's worth sharing that uh i've i've talked with just a handful of teachers at the middle school level when they're teaching rfle and you know i think it's partly generational um again thinking of my age but this we did not grow up talking about these topics i mean our parents often didn't even talk to us about it and i swear my best memory miss miss karski is i got it in like 10th grade maybe a tiny bit more

100in sixth i mean sorry fifth grade and sixth grade that was it i mean i rolled into middle school and i don't think anybody talked about it really again so i mean who's who's parenting this this group of kids right now i mean unfortunately you got a lot of still gen x and older millennial parents who we didn't have much more than what we've been describing so i i will say i think that um i'm supportive of what mr frisch said bifurcated out and take the big piece that we're all talking about and i and i do think we want to do this really well i really want to hear from our teachers too because they are going to be the ones having to do something that is going to be different and then i

101i also really like at a minimum the idea as i run out of time that if as we consider teaching combined based on the research and best practice that potentially the breakout sessions i don't think it has to be led by then more but yep thank you thank you ms marin yeah so i just want to be clear that my reservations are really more operational so i when i think about rolling out something new at the end of the school year this also ties in with the budget conversation we're having about professional development we're already struggling to find the time for the pd that was already expected now we're talking about more pd also i i it comes back to me about how the board and the school division want to operate with collecting community

102engagement you know there's this 30-day process for feedback that is needed has that clock already started since the recommendations went out is it today so you know that that's a piece and like what is the plan and who's defining this as something significant enough to warrant community input um what was so the srnr just submit just warranted community input like how are we defining what rises to the level of needing community input and then what's that process going to be like dr percy you said time after time so we're not making up new processes as we go along i think that's really critical and i think our again um the office of communications and community relations has done a good job of trying to set up engagement plans that align with our family engagement policy

103so i i don't want to do this one as a one-off um i did talk with my fleet hack representative amber beekler and i do also read the fle materials and i try to talk about them with my daughter don't tell her so i find them helpful but we also know that parents are busy and they don't read other things that we send or sometimes they need to get that video or they need to dial into a web so again what is this our overall vision for how we want to engage families about what rises to the top as things that they they really really want to get their input on again whether it's cell phones or fle or safe routes to school or even the budget or facilities so um i also wonder too

104we had approved a trauma informed specialist last budget and i'm not aware that person has been hired but i wonder what that person's expertise might do to be added to this when we just you know look at that research about combined gender education you know what is that person's feel on the expertise for for children to be comfortable and just finally i feel you know it comes back to our comfort level and how we model it you know are we okay talking about menstruation are we okay talk you know and also acknowledging that yes girls do get their periods earlier and so we have to have that growth mindset that even you know 10 years ago it's different now and so again whether we're talking cell phone policy this others we've got to be open

105to the fact that life has changed for our students and we have to move with the times in a way that's going to make them prepared for their future and with their families and their families you know being the first teacher thanks thank you miss marin um dr brabrand i think there was an update on the trauma informed specialist recently wasn't there i want to say that we didn't we put that out yesterday that we hired was it was that the neurodiversity specialist only took several months to do it i'm sorry on trauma-informed care um i don't know you can answer that go for it we do have somebody who was hired um earlier in the year and and is from within fcps so yes so is that person on fleek or been involved and

106perhaps that's something that could be considered i i don't know if they've been on fleek they haven't but we can look at doing that moving forward thank you miss maron miss cohen thank you um i just want to echo what um ms mclaughlin and mr frisch both said about being able to bifurcate um the the gender inclusion versus the other flea cac recommendations some of them like schools not having the dvd seems like a no-brainer to me i will say just to echo actually what miss picarsky said in middle school 35 years ago in marietta georgia we had gender combined classrooms so maybe this is a virginia thing every once in a while there's things that surprise me when i'm here that to learn that um we did it very differently in the rural south

107but hey um so i i do just want to be careful that i think we [Music] we don't get caught up in governing by the ick factor and i think it is something that is um easy to do i know there's a lot of folks who would rather us not talk about it as i said just like when this board or the previous board went through conversations about menstrual equity um so i do think we're all trying to change our mindset certainly about how we do things but i do think this is one of those weird leftover remnants where an awful lot of places they have done this differently for a real long time um um i do i love the exit ticket idea miss mclaughlin i think we do that in a lot of

108different places and it is the best way that we learn what kids would like to have learned about you know what are the things that we don't cover that are impacting your daily life because let's be honest um our kids can learn in five minutes worth of time on tick tock an awful lot of what is covered and not covered in fle so what are the kinds of things that they would like us as educators to be able to have conversations with them about where they can learn hopefully a lot more and a lot more honestly than what they're seeing on social media the other thing i just wanted to clarify for fle we do have a comment period that's very similar to the state is that accurate the only comment period i'm aware of

109at the state is when the sols are up for revision they do have a period of time when input is collected from the from state i've just seen and i know ms mirren you have been a big advocate of each time we see curriculum changes that are up for review any time when there's public comment period on the state level that we've all tried to participate in that and so i do think to the point of trying to figure out what the timeline for engagement is and and what that looks like i agree with so many of my colleagues who mentioned that you know perhaps there's a way of us thinking about it and we've all had this conversation about our advisory committees that we're getting the reports as soon as we're done essentially with

110the budget from our committee so i would like just again to echo that i hope we can have an opportunity um to revise this timeline a little bit so thanks very much thank you miss cohen miss omesh thank you um yeah i appreciate the comment made about the ick factor i mean i we had combined fle in fcps2 it's just about at what point that starts right so do we have kids communicating about that and all before they're even understanding what it is or for the first time they're being exposed to it so i just want to make sure that's clarified i i wouldn't be able to necessarily support moving forward with certain pieces and not others i think they're related so when we look at what is being taught or what's being modified it

111relates to whether they're separate or not and whether that's an option you know specifically i mean in some of the language uh in pages um in some of those appendix appendix uh you know the specificity of some of the developmental and anatomical changes is is altered uh the connection between puberty and the ability to bear children for example is being removed um you know those are those are pieces and then the media removing the exam video which i think we really should reconsider somehow i mean i can't imagine it's impossible to burn a dvd and have it be digitally accessible right i mean is that not something that's possible i'm sorry i missed the end of your comment okay don't take my time for this but yeah burning the dvd and being able to provide

112it across to other schools that don't have it we don't have the rights to burn the dvd nor do we have the rights to provide it in a streaming format and there's no alternative i am not aware of another video that is similar for testicular self exam we ran into the same issue a few years ago when they moved from breast self-exam to breast self-awareness they stop making the video on self-exam and we no longer use that in our curriculum because it's not available and they also changed the terminology so in some ways it wasn't fully accurate either okay i mean i guess the broader point in the other examples too was the idea that these are related ultimately to what model we're choosing to adopt right the what we are teaching how the language

113is changing and whether the classes are separated or not um and and for me right here i want to better understand why we're choosing language like sex assigned at birth as opposed to something like birth sex and the challenge is precisely what you were saying earlier that other options were not considered alternatives were not brought up in the conversation with this committee which is where i have some concern because in the good intent well intended effort to be inclusive i'd like to argue we perhaps have gone a little bit too far there are ways we can capture more of our community that are not alienating to any perspective uh that achieve the same objective that are not what's being presented here so can you help me understand that yes um sloan referenced earlier when we

114did the overview of the entire curriculum a few years ago and at that time there was extensive discussion of what language to use and sex assigned at birth was the language that was settled on and presented to the board at that time and that's what we've continued to use in the career in our curriculum right it was supported with the that's being presented as a new change here no that the change is that instead of using boys or girls it's the assigned the sex of i'd male at birth or the sex assigned male at birth which is the same language that we do currently use in other grade levels where we talk about gender identity okay that's helpful but then i guess the subsequent language of the specificity of what that looks like is being

115altered yes yes there was some discussion on the committee that puberty is not experienced the same way by all individuals so some of our language that was very all boys all males have this all females experience this may not be completely accurate so they were trying to be more accurate and um they're in the wording okay and the piece about uh how puberty is related to having children i believe that's actually in the state sols and was taken from from the language there so that students would understand that once you develop sexually you are capable of reproduction right so that's being removed which grade level are you looking at um let me find the exact place i think you're looking at fifth grade and that would there would be a statement that students will understand

116that puberty prepares human bodies to be able to reproduce right so we're removing the relationship understanding the relationship between changes that occur during puberty and the ability to conceive and bear children yes to the statement that they'd understand puberty prepares human bodies to be able to reproduce i mean um yeah i mean i guess there's there's that piece that to me um if we're gonna actually go and do some more thorough analysis and speaking to the community and understanding kind of what science presents again i am concerned that we're going to come back actually with the same the same proposals but saying that and here's all the evidence that we are saying you know supports that meanwhile not considering perhaps you know other ways of doing this but and then the other piece is in

117terms of the next steps recommendation i'd much rather focus on things like sexual assault consent communication around that that's clearly been an issue in the community around title ix things like that and being responsive in terms of the charge for the committee next year because that's another area of concern but anyway go ahead thanks miss darren at kovacs thank you so i i feel like i want some clarity um i i first want to say i think it would be counterintuitive for me to split this up i think if we're going to engage the public we need to gauge the in public in the totality of the recommendations so and you're shaking your head dr presidium okay so you would agree with that i mean that would that was my recommendation when when the issue

118came up earlier in the meeting i just think it would be very difficult um [Music] for the community to follow what we're actually trying to engage them around when we have two different processes and i do think as ms omesh has pointed out a lot of the content is intertwined so i think it would be pretty difficult to pull a lot of that apart i think so too so thank you so i i will go with your recommendation one is my vote right now i'm not sure where we'll be as a board um i think to i just feel like some i i want to be clear about my thoughts on this and i will tell you i had two different ways where i grew up in pennsylvania early education was separated early sex education

119and then it was it was together as as in in high school and i went to high school it was grades 9 through 12. so it was separated in elementary and middle school and then so nine through 12. so that's not different and i think too i mean some of the things of course girls get their periods in fifth and sixth grade all of that thing all of those things happened for a long time so i don't necessarily think it's generational the way this is being thought of it's more for me that particular age group is something that i go back and and dr anderson was best to articulate my thoughts the fear of being made fun of in front of other classmates who either don't who obviously knew more than you did when you

120walked into there or and and i want this to be a learning experience where people feel empowered and feel free and feel good about getting the knowledge they have if their family's not providing for that and that's why i feel that's why that's my reservation i understand there's best practices out there but i do hear miss omesh saying you know i think there's just going to be different opinions on this as as to and i want the kids who need to ask the questions to get their answers without feeling embarrassed and and because this may be their first time learning experience so that's my thought right now i will see where we go as a board and as a community and i will listen to the community if the community's views are different than mine

121and i just want to clarify about the menstrual equality thing that was mentioned quickly this board and previous board were not against female menstrual products in the bathrooms they were taken out because there was damage done in the class in in the bathrooms and that wasn't a sound decision we put them back in as soon as we could we didn't even know that they were taken out because of the damage that was being done so it wasn't a previous board's lack of understanding or knowledge and i really want to make that clear because i was very frustrated when i heard they were taken out and they were put back in and it became a movement that was brought about by administrative decision and um i just want to make sure that previous boards were not

122um i just just not entangled in in something that was not done thank you miss darren at kofax and we now have miss keys gemara followed by miss seismer heiser so i i want to appreciate the fact that we have been working toward continuous improvement and so i want to thank everybody for that and for the committee in helping us to do that so these are on i see these as ongoing uh conversations to try to just always improve because we're always learning we're always trying to figure out how to communicate better how to support each student um to the best of our ability so i the the last little thing i'd like to just kind of put in in our leaders ears is just to be mindful of we don't necessarily know what a

123child's experience has been and so i don't know what the nexus is between those folks who can handle students who may have had some trauma in this area or been exposed in an inappropriate way because we don't know what these conversations may produce that's certainly not for everyone but i would just like to put in a plug that as we're looking at professional development that we're prepared for that thank you miss keys gemara ms seismer heiser just a quick question when we talk about our regular process for community engagement you know what's the purpose of that community engagement from your perspective well i mean i think it's similar to community engagement that we conduct on other matters right i mean we want it to be as inclusive and as representative as possible um and that

124really is to inform the board before you vote and you know make policy decisions so you know that's why we always bring the entirety of the community feedback we do synthesize it in terms of you know topic areas um so that it's a little bit sometimes easier to follow but that's really to inform board members to to inform your votes i asked that question because sometimes we do community engagement right to inform of something we've already done right to sort of get community buy-in information the community here is a new policy here's a change sometimes you do community engagement to help inform us of what we should do so i want to kind of get your feedback on what you think the primary purpose of this community engagement is well i think the way that

125the process and the timeline is set up is to inform what you should do i do think it's very important to have community buy-in but that's really important when we're making changes to to look at best practices and research and i think there's you know space to you know i would love to i would love to see further research around um school systems that have the three options like mr and at cofax recommended and how that fits into the best practices and research i always think it's it's a difficult balance between making sure we're reflective what our community needs but also making sure that we are following best practice research and being inclusive of um students who may not be the majority in the community and i think that's um and so i think when

126i look at from my constitutional law perspective right there's always that that quote you hear in constitutional and politics that tyranny the majority so we need to be really careful that that's why we inform best practices but we get community binds we have successful implementation and that to me is what i look at is the purpose of this and my i don't want students to feel uncomfortable but i also want students to feel like who they are is part of the norm and who they are is part of our lessons in the way that everybody else gets them i don't know how to even explain that but my main question was what the purpose of the community input was and how it would balance with the recommendations based on best practices and research yeah so

127just one more point i think ms lloyd wants to weigh in on that as well so i mean the question really is more nuanced maybe than the answer i gave i mean there's multiple reasons to do community engagement but i want to be clear the way that the timeline and the process is set up is that we allow the community an opportunity to provide input to the board before the board chooses whether or not to adopt the recommendations right so it really is informing how you would choose to vote on this particular policy matter that being said i mean there's also the point that you know we need to inform the community about you know the what and the why of what we're proposing and recommending right so it is more nuanced than that but

128to your question it really is to help inform the decision that board members would make ms lloyd uh thank you dr presidio yes you're right there are really three purposes for this community engagement and that is firstly to inform and educate our community around what we're proposing to do that is number one step so no one is surprised and everyone is prepared for any changes that might then come then it's also to ghana um feedback to make sure that we have heard about any concerns and that we again if we if we look at our data have triangulated any data to make sure that we're doing this and we have the backing of the community around it and that we're not just doing it in a void without that data piece to support it as

129well and then the third component in your right would be once we have taken decision would be to um to inform our community about what that decision means for them and then how we'll be implementing that decision that's been made as well so threefold great thank you i appreciate it thank you ms seismer heiser um i have my go back and then we have three people who have listed uh have indicated they want to go back for up we're down to two um okay so now we're down to two so with the um i wanted to take my go back because there was i think a misunderstanding of what i was saying i want to make it very clear i see this as option one as fully engaging and ensuring that we are able to

130demonstrate to our community that we have we value their input and we value not just some input but all input and we're able to make informed decisions we have been characterized in the past not necessarily fairly but characterized as not fully engaging the community and not including the um the voices of everybody in the community so that is what i was saying as a way of you know we want to make sure that we are doing that so that we don't provide an impetus for people saying that fairfax isn't listening to parents or listening to the voice and so we have to take action ourselves that was what i was trying to say earlier and if i was not clear i apologize for not being clear i do think that it is important for us

131to also clarify what what we're doing by state law and what we're doing beyond state law and that's important because that is what makes us the world-class system that we are is that we in every area we tend to go beyond the minimum standards set by the state be it in uh how we support our students with disabilities how we support uh different groups in our community how we ensure that everybody can be their authentic self and included in our schools and so this is one component for us to make sure that everybody can be their authentic self which is why we went through the fle curriculum several years ago line by line with fleacac but i do have one question the charge for fleacac every year never comes to this board am i correct

132in remembering that yes we don't have a charge for the curriculum advisory committee as there are for other school board advisory committees yeah so that's actually where this is kind of one of those unusual situations because many of us did not realize that fleacac was working on this issue i think it was a good issue for them to work on but i do think that we need some sort of mechanism to bring back to the board like the other advisory committees in the essence of transparency making sure the board knows what their charge is so i think that's an important point that you're raising and and we definitely could work on a procedure to do that and i certainly understand why it's important just the one clarification though is a reminder fleek is a curriculum

133advisory committee to the curriculum coordinator not to the board that being said the board votes on the recommendations from fleek and you should have a good understanding of what the committee is working on each year so we can work on a process and a procedure for that thank you so i now only have since up now i'm back to one two three four short uh go backs and we have two minutes uh before the end of the meeting so if i can give 90 seconds uh and we're only going to keep with the four that have put their placards up so and i'm going to keep you in second q mr fresh since you were second originally so i have dr anderson mr fresh ms omega and then ms mclaughlin thank you turning my mic

134on this time um just very quickly i thought i heard mr mesh talk about this and that was my small question converting that video that is no longer available did i hear that it was that was not possible that's right we don't have the rights to duplicate the video or to stream it it's not on youtube or anywhere else that could everything else is on youtube so okay that was my small question but i wanted to just quickly respond to what i heard around the room i noted that there were seven recommendations and by my you know special math um many of them are dependent on the first one many of the recommendations depend on this big decision that we spent a lot of time talking about i only see one that kind of stands

135alone which would be number four the grade 10 and frankly number seven to some extent but i also hear what dr presidio is sharing which is we would still have to have the community respond to those and then to have to do it again that might get messy and so i would like this for this to not be messy because i don't want us to be accused of trying to what's that email we just got recently the bait and switch so um i would be a proponent of let's just keep it together just so it could have we could have full clarity with our community and then we can move this along i'm hoping and at the high school it may be a little harder but i know at the elementary the four through eight

136piece rather the middle school and the elementary schools maybe we could adjust that schedule a little bit because most of the times and i'm just speaking about from my children my personal experience i find that my kids fle experience in the elementary school does not happen until the second semester so there might be some space there for us to still get it in the next year once all of the community engagement has taken place thank you i do think we would need to look at how that would look very carefully because we are only talking about the changes right now to the human growth and development unit there is another unit of instruction that happens throughout the year and our communication goes out to parents generally early in the year so if we then change

137the instruction how we communicate to parents what they saw in september may not be what's being instructed in december or january whenever the individual school chooses to do that instruction thank you mr frisch thanks we just heard a little bit about what flequet doesn't do in terms of charges if we talk a little bit about what they do do the first few meetings of fleek hack each year tend to center on conversations about the committee's priorities right in our first meeting we do have a list of our topics we hope to get through that year and prioritizing what those may be for the year um you know this year we didn't get through everything that we had hoped to there were just too many and the gender combined conversation just as it is has here

138it took a long time in multiple meetings and these meetings are public right they are public although we do not have a public comment period right um so i'll just speak for myself i was aware of what flea cac was working on this year because i've had conversations with my fleet act representative throughout the year um and generally speaking um had a conversation before the year began with my representative about what their priorities might be going into it i knew that the beginning of fleek x calendar included conversations where they bring ideas to the table um and that's how flake has operated for years as far as i can understand right all right so um you know i i say that only to help inform future conversations um and i treat fleek act differently than

139my other committees because the structure is different i don't necessarily have to have the same kind of conversations with my other advisory appointees because um we're giving the charge but that's why my my approach to fleacac work was different because it's a different setup so i appreciate that i know we all have fleek representatives so um you know we could all benefit from having conversations with our members thank you mr frisch miss mclaughlin and then miss omaesh uh yeah just quickly to something that uh ms tollin had said that i don't think we had time to really uh go a little deeper on and that has to do with the apples to apples comparison so uh when we can say okay that the other jurisdictions in virginia that we can point to that are doing

140gender combined instruction are they covering the same topics or not i mean maybe they are they aren't but i think that will go to additional information that will help our community um secondly i i do really want to emphasize what ms corbett sanders said we are a representative body we specifically it's in our title school board representative we represent our community and so earlier we all talked about there's a two-part responsibility here one is to go solicit engagement and feedback from our community so we can represent them but the equal piece in dr brabrun really drove it home which is we also can help educate and lead our community and so um you know i i really appreciate the passion that a number of our colleagues have made that they would like for us to

141be more aggressive in the timeline but i also do think that when we build that trust and confidence in our community to show that we're going to honor our elected status i think it will be a better win-win i don't know why it still shows 18 seconds but i'll go ahead and finish because she started with 13 minutes for you and adjusted it not 13 minutes 5 seconds i know okay miss omega how's the next year's charge chosen we don't have a charge for the committee so we gather input from often from teachers committee members sometimes community members contact me with things they would like discussed in some situations board members have topics they would like to discuss and we bring those forward to the committee and try to prioritize what topics we will talk

142about can you speak more specifically to this one how it was developed what we discussed this year or flooring inclusion of a gender spectrum in elementary curriculum for next year one of the recommendations brought forward was to have a more inclusive curriculum and knowing that that probably would take quite a bit of instruction or not instruction discussion we did not want to spend a year discussing something that we did not have the support of the board to move forward with so we were hoping to see if the board would support looking at that before the committee spent the time to really look into what that might look might look like at the elementary level and the inclusive piece across all grade levels do you mean that by four through six like it would be part

143of a philly gender identity would be part of fle we haven't identified what grade levels they've simply said looking exploring what it might look like at the elementary level it could be they decide sixth grade it could be four through six i i don't know we haven't had any discussion around it at this time were there other topics considered for next steps there are several topics that we do have left on our list from this year consent being one which we began discussion about and did not finish that we'd like to go back to there has been some legislation for female genital mutilation which requires a evidence-based curriculum which does not exist at this time although i been i've heard that that might be coming and if that does come out it may require us

144to look at inclusion of fgm in our curriculum um and there are some other topics around inclusion that were already on our list that would be subsumed into the recommendation for next year yeah i reiterate you know the importance of the consent conversation i think for me um as an as a next step for the committee to look into obviously my colleagues can weigh in on where they are with that but uh overall this leaves me in a place where i don't if this if the public engagement process is coming back with the same thing and just saying that we talk to people i don't know that i'm in a place where i feel i can truly as a representative of all all types of people in this county uh can move forward with this

145but and i'm concerned about kind of going with where the wind blows i mean the reality around this issue is there's sensitivity you know that leads i i have no doubt between now and the vote that emotional blackmail reputational campaigns you know personal threats that have already been happening are going to continue uh to basically terrorize us to vote a certain way and i um i just wanted to name that because i think we have difficulty in in discussing this with any level of sophistication that will set us up for unity healing moving in a direction that that is truly inclusive of a variety of perspectives and that creates the space for that uh and this constant tension that continues to exist between kind of faith community lgbtq the intersection i i think we can

146move beyond that but that's going to require honest and and real conversations that are inclusive of uncomfortable perspectives too uh and i'm just hopeful that we can get there i mean staff you're leading the process but uh i i i'm skeptical but still hopeful uh and we'll see thank thanks with that we have concluded our go back process and i do want to put up the two options before this board and get a show of hands of where we're at on that so that we can have a process going forward and move to the next agenda which is the budget so we have two options before us well one requires us to put it on the next new business item for this thursday night the other requires us so we have to have some general

147option for next steps and i would actually say there's a third one which is the bifurcated where i believe you would have them am i we need to have consensus on a way forward what staff needs one requires us depending on the way forward would have it as a new business item for thursday night so we need to have a general idea today to be able to determine what we're doing miss picarski you look yeah no i was just gonna say i mean we just discussed this i think it's sitting with some people i don't know that we have to do that right now if somebody wants to bring a motion you know that can be put on our agenda for either one of these um [Music] anyway i don't know i i guess this

148would be an informal show of hands is where you're trying to go with it that's what i was trying okay i mean the other option is we can all contemplate and before we adjourn this evening we could come back to it we may not need to so just maybe ignore me i guess we'll see where people are miss mclaughlin you put your hand up yeah just the the process wise is i i absolutely agree we've just had a three hour or two hour work session we need to give staff in the superintendent direction on what we're gonna do with our business meeting i i was shaking my head in that even though i spoke for some of the merits of option three i didn't hear a majority of board members so i would say let's

149streamline this go with options one and two and see where we are because i only heard three of us actually saying dr anderson you put your placard up and put it back down again is there no i didn't have my placard up i'm so sorry i was just moving pencils but i'm ready to just rock and roll and vote on so if i can get a show of hands of who can support option one and we do need miss cohen's face on the screen if she's still around so option one would okay so we have for option one we have dr anderson ms pikarski miss o'mesh miss tolan miz daranakovax miss keys gemara miss seismer heiser ms mclaughlin ms marin and miss corbett sanders those for option two we have ms cohen and mr fresh

150so we will go with option one may i offer that during your chairs meeting you discuss what option one as far as a timeline and a plan for how to engage the public will come back we do need to have more discussion but i think okay thank you thank you we'll do that can i suggest we take a five minute break before we go on to budget or do you want to keep on going folks please okay thank you okay i didn't hear the beginning i heard the end i did where are these people board members we have board members take their seats please we have seven all right we have seven in the room so we're going to go ahead and start our discussion of the approved budget and this is an additional work

151session that we added after our may 10th work session what we are trying to do in the work session today is follow up on the procedures that we've been following with our budget processes if you recall in the beginning of the year before dr brabrand even came to us with his initial budget we had a school board resolution on what we wanted to see included in that budget dr brabrand came forward with that then as we approved that budget we did an omnibus motion including different areas that we wanted dr brabrun and staff to look into and then they came to us last week with that additional information included in the budget based on the may 10th work session we had a set of additional questions and some ideas that came forward to be included

152in this approved budget that we will be voting on at our meeting on thursday um i have to say staff and dr bravern have done a good job of trying to answer the questions that came up um last on the may 10th a work session around transportation the salary scale extension professional development we've had a number of questions come up around the call me mr program that have been we've had additional information sent out around that as well so today we want to make sure that questions are answered and everyone is comfortable with the potential of doing an omnibus motion on thursday evening around the approved budgets and then a follow-on motion for potential expenditures from the end year-end money some of the things staff have come up with today have moved some of the

153things we talked about on may 10th to our year-end budget so with that let me turn it over to um miss corbett sanders do you want to add anything about that yes for everybody to know on an update of funding from the state we still don't have a state budget as you know but over the weekend the appropriators met extensively and they have asked all of our colleagues at the state level to reconvene on june 1st optimistic that they will be able to adopt a budget in time for the july one start of the new fiscal year and what we are hearing um ms darinath kofax ms seismar heiser and myself had been at the hayfield celebration this morning as well as miss keys gemara and i had the opportunity to speak with one of

154the appropriators who said that the state level funding is looking extremely well based on a surge in state revenues this year attributable to increased income and increased funding from the federal government so we are optimistic and we will provide you an update soon after but that allows us to have confidence that the year-end will also create opportunities for us all right with that um thank you to staff for putting this presentation together we will turn it over to you and school board members if you can think about taking this information and then tailoring your comments for any additional questions or clarifications that you need to prepare for the vote on thursday night thank you and this is really coming to the end of a long journey right the budget journey has been a whole year

155and i'm so excited i think this is a very very good news budget and i think it's been an excellent budget process that only gets better and better like a fine wine with age and this was a particularly great year we've worked hard to take your feedback from the last session and address many of those either in the budget or in follow-on motions there are a few areas where we maybe didn't agree completely but overall i have tried with the staff who's done an amazing job they've worked weekends nights weekend nights to try to bring you the information you need to make the very best decisions and i think i will be here to help and i know the last session perhaps i stepped out of bounds a little bit and i want to acknowledge

156that i apologize about that and don't have any intention of doing that today i want you all to feel good about this budget and your vote on thursday and i think we have a very very very good news budget to share that meets the priorities of this division and will set up dr reed for a very successful school year with the funds and resources not just her but all of our school and central office and school principals and teachers they're very excited about the budget to pass on thursday and some of the things that maybe haven't been talked about is as much that we've been talking about just over the last month or two i think our staff is going to be excited to see so thank you and with that i'll turn it over

157to mr smith and i know his wonderful team to make comments and go through a presentation and then we'll take any questions so good afternoon everyone i just want to thank you all again for your questions at our last work session and thank our fantastic team across the system for pulling together the answers so quickly and so thoroughly so we really do appreciate their efforts i also want to share that we'll have another opportunity to reflect on the fy 22 budget in a month's time as we look at year end and so as we're thinking about many aspects of the fy 23 budget that might be one-time expenditures or are are things that perhaps we haven't covered or addressed we also want to remind you that there is that additional bite of the apple for

158fy22 as we think about carryover and how we might be able to use those funds and so i just put that out there as an overlay to today's conversation because we do want to stay focused on the fy 23 and we'll be able to engage with you and at that time with dr reed about our carryover in fy for fr 22 carryover and ms byrd good afternoon as ms tolen indicated this work session is to continue the discussion from the may 10th work session and reconcile the budget to the funding levels provided by the board of supervisors as well as distribute funds that were originally included in the budget as placeholders and provide funding recommendations to the school board initiatives that were identified in the follow-on motion approved at the advertised adoption as well as

159the new items that were brought up on may 10th so you'd ask for more information about some of the superintendent's recommendations regarding the transportation scale changes the salary scale extension and professional development new initiatives that were mentioned include the young scholars extracurricular enrichment holding counselors harmless from the staffing reductions middle school start time study the jet proposal translator and interpreter funding and additional maintenance support and finally we'll discuss the omnibus motion this summary reflects the changes to the advertise that will be included in the fiscal 23 approved budget to be adopted this thursday may 26th obviously we decreased funding by 10 million and the advertised budget as the advertised budget included an increase in the county transfer of 112.6 million and the funding increase appropriated by the board of supervisors was 102.6 million we are

160reducing one day of professional development to address the funding reduction and distributing the placeholders set aside for any state expenditure changes and the placeholder for family liaisons and the bus driver market studies as well we wanted to address some initiatives that school board members mentioned on the 10th so we have revised the superintendent's recommendation to reduce 1 million from the electric bus cost share allocation originally proposed to free up funding for 10 positions for translators and interpreters funding to support electric buses will be addressed at year end also school council reductions that were a result of the enrollment decreases will be held harmless and addressed through the staffing reserve we have a number of items that school board members expressed interest in funding and those items are largely non-recurring and are therefore suitable for funding

161at year end again the local share of electric bus grants will be funded with year-end you know air plans are that we would be fully electric by 2035 so these are just start-up funds in fiscal 23 we will need to include funds in future budgets to address the local match that is generally required for electric buses with grants young scholars materials and supplies like lego robotics algebra manipulatives those kinds of things we also have included at year end at 500 000 for elementary and middle a funding for a study for middle school start times and an action plan recall that we did the high school in 2016 with plans to look at the middle school start times but that analysis hasn't been updated in a couple of years and so we plan to do a

162study of that or an updated study the ace supplement which is routinely funded from year end this is just an estimate of about 200 000 certainly their participation has gone down dramatically during these coveted years and so we need to give them a little bit of help but that's that's pretty routine we do that every year we also plan on replenishing the staffing reserve from the counselor hold harmless and then provide additional funding for maintenance support we included we're we're planning on about 3 million in maintenance support um recall that every year at year end we allocate 3.3 million for maintenance support but last year's year in fiscal 21 we we increased that to 6.3 million because they do have quite a few needs uh in in the maintenance uh office ms burton if i

163could just make a comment on the school counselors hold harmless if we could go back that means not a single school will lose a counselor neither half time nor full-time anyone that already traded for that counselor will get that money back to be able to invest in other instructional priorities in the school so we heard that feedback from the work session and it's addressed here in this year in motion or this year in action by the finance team thank you okay moving on to the fiscal 22 bus driver market study we thought it would be helpful to review the key points from that market study it was presented to you all at the first budget work session in january after the beginning salary increase an additional 2.5 percent msa that was added last fall out

164of cycle school bus driver salary skills midpoint is at 101 percent of the market recall that the fcps goal is 95 to 105 percent of the market but bus driver shortages remain a national issue and we still experience vacancies at the time of the market study we had 166 vacancies although we do have 52 floater positions and their whole job is to shore up where we have vacancies so 114 vacancies would be actually what we experienced which is well below pre-covered levels the pre-covered estimate of vacancies in bus driver ranks is about 137. there are also the same staffing challenges in surrounding dristics we were able to get vacancy data from them that you see displayed here we're right in the middle out of five school divisions who provided bus driver vacancy information continuing with

165the fiscal 22 market study this chart shows the minimum the midpoint and the maximum of the wavy market comparison comparators bus driver skills compared to fcps we have the highest starting salary among washington area boards of education school divisions at 112 percent of the market at market midpoint we are at 101 percent and again the goal 95 to 105 again this is the current year so it doesn't include any of the compensation increases planned in fiscal 23 but we do have a later slide that shows information about fiscal 23. so stay tuned this is also from the market study our records show that nearly 60 percent of drivers live in fairfax county with 16 percent in prince william and 13 in alexandria with 12 percent in other surrounding counties combined [Music] i'm not sure about

166the alexandria number uh alexandria has a number of its residents um that live in fairfax county um and we're checking and you know i wish i had thought of this like yesterday or the day before but it could very well be that some of those in alexandria actually live in fairfax county it's just you have to actually look at the address in order to tell whether it's a fairfax county resident or an alexandria city resident so we'll get an update on that the 12 percent that are surrounding counties stafford's 1.5 percent prince george's in maryland is about 1.5 percent louden county 2.5 percent fredericksburg 1.5 and then the other 4 is just 0.1 0.2 those kinds of really really tiny amounts um i know that you received information that showed nearly 40 percent of the

167drivers were from prince william and 32 from alexandria but i don't know how that data was derived nor do i know the source regarding the step data 70 of drivers are on steps 5 through nine of the 22 salary scale about 19 on steps 10 through 15 and 11 are on steps 16 through 19. after the study was completed and conveyed to the school board a work group was formed to look at bus driver salaries in more detail work group members included reps from transportation human resources finance the bus driver and attendance advisory committee support employees association fairfax support professionals association fairfax education association and the fairfax county federation of teachers the work group agreed to the scale reflected here which provides another two percent on average to bus drivers over and above the four

168percent msa proposed in the fiscal 23 budget this new scale sets the midpoint at 105 of the market up from the 101 midpoint identified after the last round of bus driver increases in the fall of 21 which increased starting pay to 22.92 per hour and a 2.5 increase of bus drivers that weren't subject to that starting pay increase we also have a closed pay plan for bus drivers closed meaning that driver drivers may not no longer opt for that scale the closed plan provides an increased number of debt paid not working days and the trade-off was a lower hourly rate those on the close schedules will be allowed the option of moving to the um the new scale but they won't have to it's just purely at their option we also updated the projected market

169comparison to reflect surrounding school divisions compensation plans for fiscal 23. most have not yet adopted their budgets but this is this reflects what is proposed it could change as ours is but this is the best info that we have right now so along with the two percent added based on the work group recommendation we also included the fcps proposed msa of four percent that will be provided to all scales that results in 106 percent of the market at the midpoint which is slightly above the stated goal of 95 to 105 percent we compare favorably at the minimum at 112 percent of the market 106 percent again at the midpoint and 103 percent at the maximum the issue before you is employee placement on the scale historically a new scale results in employees being placed on

170the closest hourly rate that is not below their current hourly rate when the new scale provides greater earning potential this often results in employees being placed at a lower step which means their salary has more room to grow excluding teachers and cis skills steps and years of experience are not related on the skills for other staff members so here are some examples of the impact of various bus drivers placement on the superintendent recommended salary scale which is the box on the left employee a is currently currently on step one will be placed on step two as well as employee b resulting in a seven percent increase these employees are on different steps now due to the initiative in the current year that increase the starting salary for steps 1 2 3 and 4 to 22.92

171employee c is on 10 and will drop back to 9 but will receive a 9 increase and so forth the work group requested placement is different than historical placement and moves drivers forward on the scale resulting in pay increases ranging from 7 percent to 18 percent as seen here the cost of the superintendent recommended replacement is 1.3 million the cost of the work group requested placement is 5.2 million this next page shows bus driver retirements and separations in this current year and historically but it's just july through april in this current year for obvious reasons so retirements have increased since fiscal 18 and separations were highest in fiscal nineteen fiscal 21 looks like a bit of an outlier and that's because separations are much lower no no doubt due to the pandemic in the virtual

172year during that year we had drivers that were assisting us with delivering food technology delivery book delivery doing professional development maintaining the fleet and then providing supports at schools in the custodial area and those sorts of things in fy 22 we have about 90 separations and 39 retirements which is not that different from pre-covid so to be clear we are not seeing a mass exodus of bus drivers to other divisions some certainly but not a mass exodus and that is all evidenced by this chart the transportation scale redesign the superintendent recommends implementation by moving employees to the closest hourly rate that is not below their current hourly rate which is the historical placement practice that fcps utilizes this recommendation combined with the step in market scale adjustment included in the 23 advertised budget will provide

173bus drivers with an average compensation increase of 8.68 and if you look at it over two years it's 14.38 percent implementation of the workgroup placement recommendation would result in an increase on average of 20.38 percent over the past two years we continue to utilize new bus driver hiring and referral bonuses you may recall that those hiring bonuses are three thousand dollars um you know we ask employees that we hire that are eligible for the bonus because they have their cdl license and they've completed their training that they commit to one year the first payment is half of it that comes out within 90 days and then the other half is paid at a later date we are also working on a policy revision to allow us to rehire drivers after a 30-day separation retirement um

174so that would assist as well in in filling air bus driver ranks and most importantly future transportation compensation will be addressed by collective bargaining so this is um this is just the first bite at the apple there will be another opportunity to look at bus drivers i think a couple of you wanted more information about the recommended salary scale extension recognizing retention challenges across the division funding of 4.3 million will add one additional step to every scale and provides another year of step increase eligibility for employees we want to hold on to our employees that are close to retirement they have institutional knowledge and value to the organization and we do have precedent for this initiative some of you may recall that a revision was made to modify the ba lane of the teacher skill

175to add steps 19 through 23 in fiscal 20. we are all aware that market conditions have changed since the initial market study in 2015. you all are aware that step increases in the advertised budget are available only to those eligible meaning those at the top of their respective skills would only receive the msa of 4 percent the average step increase is 2.68 nearly 10 percent of our workforce is at the top and about half of that group are teachers employees at the top of their respective skills may have enough years to retire but they are still relatively young productive and provide value to fcps and its students we want to keep those staff members and extending the salary skills one additional step is a way to do that so that all staff members will receive

176a step increase and an msa the cost of this recommendation is 4.2 million and affects about 10 percent of the employees and all active skills will be enhanced by adding a new final step i think at least one of you wanted information about career earnings a chart showing nine divisions and up to 34 steps prince william is a little bit unwieldy to display so we group the career earnings in steps one through five steps 10 6 through 10 etc and the total for career earnings across 30 years is in the far right column looking at the career earnings range shows alexandria pays the most at 2.7 million across 30 years prince george's in maryland pays the least at 2.4 million with fcps ranking six out of nine divisions at 2.6 million this reflects data from

177the current year fiscal 22 because again most divisions do not publish salary schedules until adoption and you know this is some you know i kind of keep an eye on what's going on um in the other divisions to the extent that i can and it's it's not just just teachers who have shorter salary schedules i kind of keep an eye on what's going on with the directors and so i took we took a quick look this morning to see what non-school-based directors how they compare to their counterparts in in loudon and prince william we have 15 steps and our minimum is 110 000 and the maximum is 173 000. loudon has 20 steps and their minimum is 123 000 with a maximum of 197 000 so about 25 000 more at the top prince william

178has 23 steps and although they start lower at about 100 000 they max out at 233 000 for a director so we we have you know concerns about our salary schedules um and the few steps that we have compared to others uh in a lot of different areas um and i think that that you know doing cyclical market studies not just doing them in 2015 and then five years later i think that hr had a plan to continue to do market studies uh the salary schedules every year for for different groups but covet intervened and um hr has been a little busy with their regular operational work um and so that um decision to to do a cyclical market comparisons um has not borne out but i do think it's on the to-do list you

179know once we settle down yeah we also checked with fcps employee benefits erfc and fcers to get an estimate of how many people are eligible to retire about 2 000 vrs erfc participants are eligible to retire and about 1100 fcers participants are eligible to retire this year and just to refresh your memory fcers is food services transportation trades maintenance custodial and then any part-time teachers or operational staff that are part-time they also are in the fcers retirement plan not vrs and erfc also it should be emphasized that these are estimates there may be more eligible to retire we only know the number of fcps years with vrs not service that individuals might have with other vrs entities and i don't mind telling you just to give you an example so you understand what i'm saying

180i'm probably not in this estimate because my record at fcps shows that i have four years with fcps however i have 32 years with vrs and i'm certainly eligible to retire but i'm not on this list because fairfax doesn't have any record of my other 28 years and so that may be true of others who have shifted from one division to another so these are estimates but it doesn't include everybody who may be eligible to retire professional development the two professional development development days the superintendent is recommending will support training in the following areas literacy the trust policy srnr esser and school improvement plans and a whole bunch of others we had 17 teacher work days originally planned in the proposed budget we have eliminated one day due to the funding reconciliation leaving 16 days

181eight of those days are teachers directed including april 21st and september 26th for our school planning days and for our staff development days that are directed by the division including the new day on august the 12th we also included one additional pd day specifically for 12-month transportation employees to provide training on communication and customer service anaphylaxis awareness i always stumble over that word so i usually just jump right over it but this time i thought i'd try fcps reporting child abuse kindergarten and fc fecep policy and guidelines two-way radio usage those kinds of things the new professional development training includes again the equitable access to literacy essar plans trust policy srnr the additional pd day planned for august 12th has been designated for completion of required virtual pd trainings and existing training to comply with

182local state federal regulations like reporting child abuse title ix those sorts of things and then one day of course was allocated for additional elementary planning and pd time which will close the gap between elementary and middle and high schools planning time allocations and we're going to provide elementary monitors to help with that guidance is being developed to ensure fidelity of implementation it'll provide recess and transitional support and release time for planning and engagement of job embedded pd an omnibus motion is several items being approved simultaneously it's a type of legal motion in which multiple items are bundled it provides efficiency so that one doesn't have to make motion for each item individually so the fcps fiscal 23 budget omnibus motion would include adoption of the advertised budget with the changes identified in the chart shown

183here assuming there is consensus among a majority of the school board since we have proposed funding a number items out of fiscal 22 year in but that won't come to you until mid-july with approval scheduled for after your hiatus late august it was believed that we should codify that intention and acquiescence in a follow-on motion so that the intention to do so is understood by all the remaining budget calendar with adoption uh this thursday at the regular school board meeting both the omnibus and the follow-on will be included as motions to the fiscal 23 approved budget board item and the board item will be posted tomorrow or thursday depending on the number of changes if any decided here today and that's all i've got so before we go to school board member feedback on your

184presentation i do want to thank you miss burden miss wiggington and your whole team mr smith for the incredible responsive and collaborative approach you have taken to this budget process all year long we started with a bit of a new approach that i think was very helpful which was that this board collaborated on our budget priorities in advance of the superintendent doing his uh proposed budget this is something that is a best practice that some of our neighboring jurisdictions have done for years and so i'm glad that we brought it here but recognizing that a budget is a snapshot in time we did provide opportunities and flexibility for board members to continue to provide their input i think we're at the point though that we have to to use a term that you like to

185use dr brabrand we need to land this plane on thursday night and we need to make sure that we agree today on what the budget is going to look like on the budget motion and follow-on will look like on thursday night so with that i know we have a number of board members who would like to provide comments um we have tried to be very responsive and i see before we have comments that miss burden would like to make a comment well our crack hr team has been able to update the residence data for bus drivers and we we were correct alexandria was overstated um so the new numbers are fairfax 68 of our drivers uh live in fairfax with 16 percent in prince william percent in alexandria and then 12 percent in other surrounding

186counties so i just wanted to correct that and we'll get it corrected on the powerpoint too thank you miss burden that's a good example of your your team's constant responsiveness to the questions of this board we do have dr anderson uh followed by miss mclaughlin mr frisch and then mizumi thank you i may ask some questions that may have been raised before because i missed the last work session so my apologies i want to start off with page five the school counselors holding harmless dr umbreon you mentioned something very quickly i feel like i'm a little bit lost in the sauce here in terms of um i hear you that there will be no loss to schools but why is it at a cost of two-point whatever it is here i don't want to lose

187time so at the last work session board members were saying they were hearing from principals that due to enrollment laws counselors were cut and now was not the time to be cutting counselors from our schools and could something be done around that issue and so we heard that feedback um and what we decided as an administrative team is we would use our staffing reserve for the list of i don't know it was 20 to 25 schools that lost either a 0.5 counselor no miss burton oh well we had 43 schools 43 lost counselors but the total positions was 29 positions 14 at the elementary so those are probably 0.5 that they lost and then 15 positions at middle school and high school and this loss was due to decrease enrollment that's correct what is the

188plan moving forward is this going to be captured in the future is this a one-year hold harmless my assumption is it's a one-year hold harmless and then we'll wait and see um you know our enrollment right now is is running higher with about 3 000 kids more than we had at the beginning of the year and you know we're you know i'm i'm an eternal optimist you know we may get 11 000 kids back over the next year and if we do so then that will fix this if we we will definitely take a look at this before we take any action when developing the fiscal 24 budget thank you my next question is on page six of the presentation um the bus driver staffing data that's provided is from december of 2021. do we

189not have any more recent data in terms of the vacancies i think it's about the same but somebody may have more recent information that is sitting here with me this is i guess where i call a friend miss miss bird knight can answer that so we currently have 170 bus driver vacancies and that data point is from may the 16th okay thank you um i'm a little out of sort here one of the things you talked about was year end consideration um first of all i want to go back a little bit and say i'm very pleased with this budget because i think it reflects much of the concerns that i have heard and i've brought to you from mason district primarily regarding the parent liaisons the study and the subsequent changes here but one

190of the things that i'd like for some consideration for year end is our family liaisons are very resourceful when it comes to communicating with our parents with the parents with whom they need to connect and they do this using whatsapp and various other apps using their personal cell phone devices you can't do whatsapp on a school phone i would like for some consideration for them to be issued a school an fcps cell phone so that they can continue that kind of communication because we know many of our parent groups a cell phone is pretty much all they have yeah my understanding was that we provided fcps phones for family liaisons uh either in this year or last year that is hello uh miss burton this is kathleen waltz yes we did provide uh fcps issued

191cell phones for family liaisons this year oh okay so that's done so never mind that um one of the pieces that i wanted to talk about i can't find the page right now where it says what was agreed upon i think it's page 10. why is there such a huge discrepancy between what is what was agreed upon in the work group versus what we're hearing from the bus drivers right now via david swan well there was agreement on the salary schedule it's the placement on the schedule that is where the contention is and the placement is what you identified on pages 12 and there's one more that i can't find right now 14. 14. thank you so looking at page let's say looking at page 14. this includes the msa what would be the average

192change in compensation if the msa was not part of the calculation um you mean for fiscal 23 yes then it would be 4.68 right you're just subtracting the 4 msa from the 8.68 over the last two years let me ask a more specific question if we go back to 12 to page 12 where you have the different employee groups and you've given those examples if we subtract the msa the total increase that is being proposed for let's say employee a goes from seven percent to like three percent okay so that's not a huge change for those employees because the msa everybody's going to receive that in the division i would hate that for that to be the the biggest chunk of some of the employees change on the of the scale could we have done

193that before applying the msa okay i may be confusing what i'm asking i'll try dr anderson so the average increase to the scale change if you're looking on slide 14. so just the scale change before msa is 2 so that's on the very first box where it says average scale changes right so there could be employees that get more than that right but so it's an average across the board then when you add the four percent as you were mentioning across all employees at six percent and then those who are eligible for step get the 2.68 so that's the combined 8.68 so we did do the scale change pre-msa because we're going to we're going to move you and then apply the msa okay i i will need to go back to dig into that

194question sure i'm going to come back to it my other quick question is you talked about the closed salary scale how many employees do we have on that closed salary scale and how many do we anticipate we'll be moving to the new scale i think mr mcdonald may know that i'm hoping mr mcdonald will know that mr mcdonald you're okay you're muted yeah um i do have that data point in my binder i don't have my fingers on it right this moment but i can circle back to it in just a few minutes i think i've run out of time dr anderson can i put you on a go back and i will put mr mcdonald in the queue so that as soon as he shows a raised hand he can answer that question okay

195miss mclaughlin please thank you first of all dr brabrand i appreciate you and your team bringing more of the data charts and information that some of us had asked for at the last meeting i do still remain very concerned about how we're arriving as a division with um data in context that captures what we're doing here with this 4.2 percent in adding a scale the the chart which is very good um that shows across the wavy schools um and let me see if i can find which slide that was on uh 17 thank you if we can pull that that's good except for as a board member who was involved in this uh and the salary scale um analysis that was done back in in fiscal year 2015 one of the most important things that

196we pointed out as a division to help our employees understand is we have erfc and the other school divisions don't arlington in particular who we were always chasing and who we modeled our teacher scale after when we layered on our salary scale plus erc which there's the employer contribution then we were at or above so this chart for everybody to understand who didn't participate at that time this is just salary scale alone so what i had really hoped dr bray brown is that your team would help our board making important fiscal decisions that you know four million dollars a year we all could sit around the table and say where we need to do 4 million unfortunately this doesn't reflect that so now the message on this chart alone is see the the the narrative

197that fcps doesn't competitively pay is borne out on this chart and ms burden you even said that and yet there's no mention of the what happens when you layer on erfc we're not as bad it's um this is this is just salary which is what we were looking at but erfc recently did a calculation as to the average value of erfc and i believe that that equates to about four thousand dollars a year so you would need to add times 30 years 120 000 to this number to get a number that included erfc so miss mclaughlin what we can do we can do that we can add that other piece in i i do remember and remember miss burn wasn't here nor was i but i i know that um that was one of the

198points and in the later years you can see we're actually getting a little bit below the market why are we not having an issue with retirements because people are going to hold on until they get to their erfc mark so we can just add one more that four thousand dollar calculation if that's what it is miss burn and show what that looks like across it probably a slide like this that's just compensation only and then one that shows the erfc plus and and to be honest one of the things that we've been doing with erfc and eli martinez since he's came is we have doubled down on selling the value of our local retirement and we need to keep doing it and we need to do it even as we enter collective bargaining that it's

199not just about bargaining wages and wages when you look at benefits erfc is a huge benefit and it is the game changer here in northern virginia between us and these other districts thank you yes if i'm doing the math correctly and you add the 120 000 you said so then that puts us at almost 700. so we actually then come to outpace arlington loudon and prince william so this is why you know again we can't we we have to be making decisions that have the total context there you your team is recommending to this board that we spend another four million dollars because we're saying we're not being competitive and in fact we are competitive right now and there are a lot of things we need to spend four million dollars on and so i

200feel like we're undoing all of the efforts and all of the hard work the system did and the board did with the prior superintendents and i've run out of time because there's also some history on the ba lanes that weren't was not captured correctly mclaughlin do you want to go back but i i would like to just understand from dr brabrand and mike to my question again why are we being presented this is how we stay competitive when we are already at the top when you add the efc in well a couple of things remember we did say even back when garza's recommendation was on salary to be in the 95 105 which is what we've kept doing and that's what we presented to you erfc puts us even farther ahead it does but remember

201this folks on erfc can make a decision they could be retirement eligible they may want to stick around and get the additional benefit of their vrs and erfc retirement which calculates the last three years or the last five years i guess depending on what system now most people are on five so it is a retention strategy to keep people right who could say i'll just go over to another system that has a higher rate of pay like a prince william look at the max back on the other page but i still care about my retirement benefit and my retirement benefit can be maximized by an additional step on our scale and maybe we can continue to explain that or tease that out better on that list but as those folks get higher up on the

202steps there would still be a reason for you to stay versus hey i won't get any more here now but i can still get more on my vrs by just going over to another system and they would pay a higher pay miss burn would you want to add anything different to what i said there mr smith i mean i'm always really reluctant to just pick one benefit and add it in even though we are the only ones because they're you know we we enjoy some economies of skill with their health care which pushes that number down compared to others so if you you can't really just add one bent the value of one benefit in and say oh well that's that counts as part of salary you've got to look at all of the benefits

203um you know another division may have a better health care plan than we do or lower co-pays or wealthier benefits so it's not quite as simple i don't believe as to just add in erfc and say we're good you're not wrong and you should have brought all of that to us so we could make that decision in full context i'm certainly we can work on that and get it to you at a later date thank you miss mclaughlin uh mr frisch followed by miss o'mage thank you and i see miss marin you brought your um your speaker closer so do you should i put you on the list i just want us to keep the tone collegial please thank you thank you so mr frisch please thanks um i appreciate all the work that's gone

204into this and i appreciate ms mclaughlin's comments to bring some additional context to the numbers um it's sometimes interesting when we talk about being competitive regionally that we're we're talking about whether at the top of a pile of school divisions who are all in crisis trying to find people right are we at the top or in the middle of a bunch of people struggling to find employees in a state where we are further behind the national average than we've ever been before in what we pay teachers um and what we we pay i'm sure other classifications as well so i'm never gonna advocate that we pay anybody less we certainly need to pay people more we need to find ways to do that part of that is going to be continuing to press the state

205for additional funding so that we can get closer to the actual national average because we're not just competing in a pool the size of northern virginia or the size of the commonwealth we're competing with the region we're competing with the entire country um and that makes this all the more difficult especially when we have these conversations so this is a crisis it's a crisis for everybody and us being more competitive regionally is great but it's not uh it's not a solution um so on the uh the question of erfc and whether we have certain data about uh employees who may have come from another division um are we prohibited from inquiring about their status from other divisions when they come into our system you could ask them vrs won't tell us they won't say they

206won't that's none of our business what other service with grs an employee has but we could ask we could ask the employees is it true ms burnham we would know it if they chose to buy in service to our local erfc but not that many do only some do and it's all it's very limited um on what you can how much you can buy i mean you couldn't buy the full amount right um switching to the the bus driver question um is there not a third option available to us out there about where if if the discussion is just where we're slotting people i suppose there's two competing interests there but last fall when we kind of clumped everybody together in the beginning of the steps at um would stretching that out a bit help

207solve this problem because i don't know that we've ever been presented with a plan for how we're distinguishing between somebody who has a year worth of service in fcps versus somebody who has five years or five the equivalent of five steps i mean we've we've got that compression problem in a couple of places like air we we did the same thing with the living wage and the food services folks who were on steps one through four steps one through five i don't recall exactly all got collapsed into one step and as a result since we did that which was a couple of years ago people with one year um are on the same step as people with two years three years four years i mean that's just when you when you do that that is

208what is going to happen teacher scale same thing if you look on the salary schedules online it shows you the placement and all the way up to step 13 which is where our cap is as far as how we hire people in none of the steps equate to the none of the experience level equates exactly to the step yeah carl if i could help where i think you're going because i i i know how oh or i'm listening to what you're saying so let me just say it this way we have a lot of places on the scale where we're compressed right and then so you d you uncompress here well wait a second like this was my thing from a couple weeks ago in the 90s we compressed teachers on three or four well

209i want my compression back i want to be decompressed but one thing um and i'm not advocating it but i'm sharing it in the spirit of you bringing the question our recommendation is to move over to the scale and up to the next step some are advocating to go with their years you could move over to the next step and do another step on the scale in a sense a double step move up two steps instead of one it would cost less but it would still move people up along the scale so i'm just shifting less than the the four million dollars because and it would fall somewhere in between in between that because here you're just going to go over up to the next step the advocacy from some is to go all the

210way to your year in between that you could go up another step from that base step when you come over on the scale i don't have a lot of rhythm but i'd like to know more about this two step that was an adequate dip sticking of what i was going for uh they can better explain it than i could but that's just i'd be interested in learning more about that yeah the um can we pause for that joke though that was good it was awful i i thought this is not coming from my time it shouldn't have come from my time in the first place so miss burden would you like to respond and then i also have mr mcdonald at who after mr fresh is done i want to insert him into the conversation

211to respond to miss to dr anderson so the superintendent's recommendation follows the historical practice of higher not below the current hourly step i believe that the work group recommendation is advocating for a placement that results in two additional steps for bus drivers and if we split the difference and said one additional step it would cost us two million in addition to the 1.3 so 3.3 million instead of the 5.2 i guess the big problem i have is that i don't think we've ever compressed five years before have we we did with food services with the living wage okay um in the 30 seconds i've got left um i'm you know hopeful about the investments we're making in in our jet and srt and um or safe routes to school and get to green i would

212note that our county counterparts are investing significant amounts of money in their jet goal accomplishments and for folks that aren't aware they're seeing a reduction in the current proposal on the bus issue that will be picked up in year-end funds from what i understand and that money is required for us to get these buses as part of the grant system so i want to make sure people are aware of that we are not walking away from our electric bus commitment it's just a different way of funding it thank you mr frisch mr mcdonald thank you miss quoted sanders so dr anderson you had asked about the number of drivers in the old pay plan or the closed pay plan and we had shared with the work group the number 158 when we were working through

213our discussions last month and we had drivers in the current pay plan dr anderson i'm going to give you 15 seconds to ask it how many of those drivers are you anticipating will be moving to the new plan because they have the option it's hard to predict uh ultimately it's going to be a personal decision for each and every one of those individuals we will do our best to try and provide a robust set of communications around the benefits for individuals moving to the current pay plan um but i really don't have a way to predict how many we'll elect to make that move thank you mr mcdonald i hope you're sticking with us for the remainder of this session because i'm sure we'll have other questions for you miss omeg thank you and thank

214you to staff for the you know all the hard work on this and for trying to bring everyone's interests here together um obviously i'm especially grateful for the translation edition um and i did want to clarify uh you know whether that would be a placeholder for future budgets the intention behind that and what that might look like because i know it originally came in conversation as something that might look like the esau placeholder in the in future uh budgets i i i i in complete candor you i think was that budget question that was asked and and the number was just huge right and so then you kind of came back and part of the feedback is god all right that number was huge but it isn't really an issue it is an issue we

215were funding it with esser and there was some discussion of are we going to just wait for the esser clift or can we start building and we are behind in the ability to do translation interpreters so i don't want to speak for dr reed i think she needs to come in and assess we have done multi-year plans i'm not prepared to i'm not going to place that burden on her today or on the staff but i do feel what i heard from the last session is we've got to really start to manage the escher cliff and it is coming and here was something that we all agree that translators interpreters are important staff knows it is so we wanted to go ahead and start to have some additional funds to hire some more so regardless

216of the final decision that we are we're certainly not going backwards and that we're continuing to move forward how many years how much more after that i just can't say yet yeah and and since it is you mentioned about the esser piece will it be shuffled in the sense that if we do get it from esser will that then still be towards translation nothing in this budget that we're doing now or we're not yanking anything in esser as a result of what you're doing here so this is not a shell game to put money in one place and to take it out of it no no no but i'm just saying it for the the esser budget as already constructed will remain the same and then we'll have to look at the esser budget for

217next year based on expenditures revenues and anything else that might happen from congress to change the way it's being done great no thank you for that um and thank you i i appreciate the clarification on the environmental piece mr frisch i was also kind of disappointed to see that but then happy to hear it's coming in the long term you guys are fully expecting that i'm going to come back to this bus driver's piece um just just because i think i would like to see that at least reflected in our follow on if it's not something we're able to make happen um i understand that you know the steps don't necessarily correspond to years but i think we found ourselves here in a place where we're nearly at a year of conversation and promise of

218something getting better for folks whose numbers have frozen um and now with the salary scale even with the option to move to it still kind of with some bitter taste around what is happening so i do want to uh i guess clarify here how many of our so if somebody's a first year bus driver they're essentially going to still be put on step one right and then the second year is also step one right and then a third year is also step one what percentage of our bus drivers are in their first three years so mr mitch [Music] one of um slides there's a breakdown of the it's grouped um well that gives you just a breakdown on that slide of the years of service so we do have about 70 of our bus drivers

219that are on steps five through nine which essentially indicates they're they have fewer than 10 years of experience and that's reflective of the fact that we did condense those beginning steps okay so i know that some of the examples you guys gave in terms of where they'll end up um put them down just a year in terms of uh i was looking at slide 12 so then here for the numbers on slide eight where did these five through nine end up because my understanding is it was two but then the example showed one so it depends so if we're looking at the superintendent's recommendation uh the the current step that the individual is on uh is not a factor in terms of placement it's all about what they're currently making and moving them to the

220next closest amount on the new schedule so if someone's currently a first on step one and making 22.92 with that movement or placement onto the new schedule they would be placed at step two making 24.61 individuals that are currently on step one may have anywhere between one and four years of service so that's the group that would be clustered together in terms of the movement uh from that point on or up on the scale uh individuals would again move to the next closed system now uh so you know the example that's provided there's the next one's brought as step um but anyone that's on step 6 7 8 9 would move over to the closest corresponding dollar amount and the scale itself is in terms of um pay in the scale then the scale number

221is off by two right so where they end up landing based on what they're paid is two numbers off of what of their current step right uh not uniformly but the examples provided here would would illustrate that there would be a one-step difference [Music] and that's miss burden is that what you were saying will cost to the two million for current employees how much would it cost basically to put people on on their current number step go ahead no no the 5.3 is the amount to move them over and keep them lateral on the same step and then to step them in the budget obviously that cost is part of something else but 5.3 is to move them laterally over 1.3 is to move them based on their dollar amount the in between would add

222a two million dollar cost in the budget and would basically put them between those two options and that was mr frisch's two-step yeah that's it that's the summary that is the that's the most explicit summary that's it that's the two step that carl just talked about a minute ago right yeah i know that's helpful i'd like for that to be reflected in the follow-on if possible at least i mean this has clearly been of interest to several of us i'd like for it not to be lost um and then the final thing in terms of the follow-on just to be uh closing this the ribbon here the translation services piece since that's not you know we can't make that commitment today as to it being you know pieces into the future um i'd like for

223that to be a component in the continued conversations in the future but that's all otherwise i'm happy to support this and grateful for everyone's work thank you so much may i clarify on the um follow-on regarding the translation so the ten that are built into the budget with these changes those ten will continuously be part of our operating budget so are you looking for as your follow-on additional beyond that 10. when you're referring to 10 are you referring to slide 22 or 23 or sorry 21. slide 22 has the follow-on motion um so you're if you go back to slide go i'm sorry the previous slide i believe has hold on a second let me pull it up trying to capture yeah so the omnibus motion for thursday night includes the translators interpreters and that's

22410 translator interpreters that are now going to be built an additional 10 translator interpreters built into the operating budget every year that's so your follow-on motion you're suggesting what are you looking for in that follow-on so am i wrong that it was upwards of like a billion last time how much was right the full trans the costing 98 million dollars i thought or something or 9 900 something right 98 million okay 98 million we put a million in yeah yeah okay so i just remember it being an egregious number that is far larger than this so what i was trying to say the conversation there was can we begin putting placeholders every year right so you're saying that this is going to be recurring every year that million is a recurring cost now it's built

225into our operating budget so you get your okay okay okay uh so is your follow-on motion that you would like we're still just inching there but we're getting so fine hundred years so miss omega is your follow-on motion that you would like as instruction to the new superintendent to come back with a plan for enhancing translation services for the school system beyond what's in this budget sure why not okay and i think miss i think somebody raised their hand saying they would support you in that it was dr anderson so if the two of you could work on that i think that's the appropriate approach well can we include it in this or just fold it in because what you're asking for is an actual plan okay that's fine thank you miss omega miss cohen

226thank you um two issues that i have um spoken to dr brabrand about dr boyd about um are two different things one we've been talking about and kind of skirting around for a few um months maybe even a few years at this point but i spent last week at kecomer and burke centers and we are seeing more and more referrals that are coming to them more than ever um kilmer was mentioning that they had 36 referrals um and 35 of those were behavior so for a board that committed to ending restraint and seclusion which is wonderful i just think that we've been short-sighted in what it cost them to be successful at changing our strategies and what we know we need is more staffing at those schools so instead of just i know there's conversations

227about staff being held harmless but we are at those schools losing various people um through other cuts that are being made and so i really really want us to take a close look at crisis staffing support for key kilmer and burke schools if that needs to be part of the year end i would be supportive of that but i cannot we are putting our staff and our students in an incredibly dangerous position in those schools and the number of teachers who have been injured this year for students by students who are in crisis we we cannot keep ignoring it um the other piece is bus drivers you know i just i can't i can't give up on this because for three years we keep seeing a net loss of drivers and what we keep saying

228is like we're trying to stay on par with systems that also are experiencing a loss of drivers so what my concern is i don't see we have got to figure out some out-of-the-box way to not only recruit but retain and i just don't see this as that even though i know it is a compromise trying to come up with a budget so i guess if we're calling it the first two step i i certainly would um be supportive of that as an interim measure but i do think we are we are hemorrhaging people we're hemorrhaging bus drivers we're hemorrhaging special ed teachers were hemorrhaging special ed ias and what i would love to see is a commitment that we dr ricardi always talks about braces on everybody like how do we figure out in the

229specific categories we have got to do something above and beyond because even cola next year for social security administration looks like it's going to be 8.9 percent so as we increase salaries we're not even touching what it costs people so their their paychecks are not feeling like any more realized um dollars so i i still really feel strongly about that and i i would like us to focus on both those areas and thanks for all the great work sorry thank you miss cohen so regarding the staffing for crisi you're calling it crises staffing support uh can i ask a clarification question and i don't mean to go back and forth but are you suggesting that we should take something out of the staffing reserve to provide additional staffing supports for those three buildings and how

230what would your formula be well my fear is that we've promised the staffing reserve in it in any number of ways to all kinds of different people right now so right now at several schools they're going to be losing their crisis resource folks um and some of their aba therapists and so my concern is how do we get to that and make sure that that that our schools those schools key kilmer and burke are not losing any staffing because when we say hold harmless we're not looking at the trades that those principles make to be able to bring more behavior folks in and crisis management folks in so there is a net loss in those schools even though we are saying that it's hold harmless mr smith so so if i may uh add a

231few things here i know that we did have a conversation with dr boyd yesterday and uh the these three schools came up in our conversation and uh we have already begun working with burke center to ensure that their staffing is at a level to support students in their buildings and dr boyd and her team weren't aware of the other centers and their particular needs but we will certainly be reaching out and following up with those schools to ensure that they are staffed at a level to to support the students coming through so and the reserve that we normally use for that would be the staffing reserve so we have been working with and her team has been working very closely with those principals uh at least with our principal at burke center and uh based

232on our conversation yesterday we'll be reaching out to have that conversation with our other centers and mr smith oh i'm sorry dr ivey and if i could also add at least for burke center the region has been heavily involved in those conversations as well and will continue to be thank you very much dr ivey i just want to bring attention to the board that the staffing reserve actually was increased from uh from 280 staff to 310 and the work here allows for that staffing which is an increase by like 12 to 13 percent year over over last year in previous years so i want to clarify we are not reducing that staffing reserve and that the intent is that we may add back into the staffing reserve those 28 positions as part of we are

233its plan for the follow-on motion for year-end funding so the staffing reserve is designed to address exactly what you're suggesting miss cohen and um so i want to assure you that's what we're trying to make sure that we preserve that flexibility no but and i would love i know i'm over my three minutes so i'd love to go back to respond because i think there's it's something is not clicking um with how we're calculating that at these three schools so i appreciate that thank you very much miss omesh i mean i apologize miss cohen um at this point i don't have any other board members placard up for first conversation but i do have three board members for uh go backs i have dr anderson miss mclaughlin and miss o'meash oh miss i'm sorry miss

234marin sorry i didn't realize we were ready to go back time i just want to say well first of all again how hold on before you go miss marin gets three minutes because it's her first opportunity thanks yeah i just want to reiterate what you had said i think miss corbett sanders how ridiculous it is that the governor and our general assembly have not passed a budget in no less than a session and three addition two additional meetings we can't do our job effectively so that's really disappointing um i'm still not clear about the professional development okay so this is what i understand it as originally dr brabrand you came to us and said you want three professional development days because that's what's needed especially to implement that equity and literacy plan which is for

235me my number one thing and for this board supported it okay so three days for all this pd then we had to adjust for a 10 million dollar reduction in what would be available okay we had the reserve planning that our staff very diligently put aside but that reduction in pd remained reduced why not take that reserve money from those different lines that you had it and put it back in to sustain those three days okay so that's that's one piece the other piece is i do not agree with having pd on religious holidays and not only once but twice so i just don't understand why we're not keeping those three pd days and why that reduction of 10 million has resulted in other things being funded it's like a double hitter to me we

236lost the pd and then that money got funded in other places i want to take my best crack at it and then you guys if anybody else wants to add you can add three days one one's a cut right we got we got cut 10 million from the board of supervisors one day we're folding into having professional development and elementary planning time throughout the year with the monitors it's like which is fully supported 10 12 million it's still that day but instead of one day early which people were saying oh i got to come back early spread it out through the years i got you and then we're keeping right and then we're keeping one day early we did debate really trying to keep two days with the eid in april but we went ahead

237and made that i believe sloane check me or marty we made that a teacher work day because there was concern what you just said about getting correct me if i'm wrong i'm right that e will be a teacher work day we thought about trying to capture that third one back with professional development but there was there was discussion here we talked about as a staff we we we didn't go with putting that as a professional development day so we lost one of those three days so let's just put aside the issue of eid and the other holiday on the jewish holiday okay let's just put that aside i don't understand if if your best budget to us was three professional development days understanding one is dispersed okay but for autism purposes the money the time

238it's three days why now does do you think the staff does not need that additional professional development day what's changed since your proposal in january and the reduction that we got that as you're thinking our staff don't need that extra day well i wouldn't say that i don't think it needs it i mean we had to take a cut somewhere so we cut a day we we distributed one day through the year and we have one day we're going to come back early on the contract to do the required professional development training i get it but that that 10 million was accounted for i don't know if you can pull up the slide but right like when we look at where that 10 million went to it went to other things why did it go

239to those other things and that reserve not go back to sustaining that third day you originally proposed i mean what i guess i'd say is there a budget is an exercise in balancing multiple priorities and we have and this board continues to have multiple priorities somebody new will get to come in and maybe have a better way to do it i've i've tried to balance multiple priorities all the way through and and i have to be honest almost every year with the board things come near the end we need to fund this we need to get this i can't support this budget otherwise i try to bring people together that's been my style some people think sometimes i should have a harder line i said three days that's it uh or nothing but you know

240i i mean we preserved a lot of it and we transferred the one day into the elementary day which is a huge hit that's a huge huge a change a game changer and yeah no i mean i take it as a fair point we could have had all three days if i did another pd day on the e day in april and i didn't well i'm glad you didn't put it on i think having a work day on a religious holiday is israel part of the reality too i guess being candid as well is even after i prescribed it one mistake i would say i made i brought you the calendar in january but there was a whole reason why we did the calendar in january i mean right earlier we were doing the calendar

241in the fall two years in advance but we didn't have those three pd days on the the the staff out in the world saw the calendar as the calendar and started saying to me and some to you all oh my god i gotta come in three days early right and then then the argument among board members is this a priority is it not i do believe it's a priority but everything's in context it's a priority but not if i don't know about it until late into the process that i got to come in early so i mean i could that's all yeah no i thank you and you know there's there's merit to some of what you say and i can accept that you know things change i mean look we didn't even know the

242literacy plan was going to get passed and that changed but i guess this just further underscores my advocacy around us having a very um clear board calendar clear budget prior and we did have clear budget priorities so yeah we did i think it's just um if we say we're going to like go all in for early liters for the literacy plan then we've got to protect that and sometimes it'll be at the cost of other priorities and and i would say one of the biggest shifts from the budget i did to now is the elementary day taking a day off and distributing it but that's that's also literally because of that literacy plan sloan and the elementary principal said scott one day at the beginning of the year just to go over all this literacy

243science versus throughout the year we get planning time to work with teachers as they're doing the the the the additional phonics pieces as they're learning about the new way to do teaching uh of reading is a better way to go so that's what we did yeah and um no i think that that's that's right to have that planning time so um i do agree with that um i think that's all i have for right now okay thank you thank you miss marin do you want to go back okay thank you dr anderson followed by ms mclaughlin thank you just going back to the question that i had earlier and i'm glad that some of my colleagues have been able to tease that out but before i get there um i'd like for you to look

244into your crystal ball a little bit miss burden i know that the state is doing its work regarding budget what is our anticipated um allocation or what our expected allocation now dr anderson you know that i absolutely refuse to crystal ball what a bunch of elected officials might do with money given what we take you through you should be expert at that that's a three step they will so because if i guess no doubt they would do something differently right but would it be what would it be less than can you give me that we'll pick it up at your end whatever they do so you all will get another crack at it if we if we get additional funds from the state which the the thing i guess that's that's out there that's still

245being debated is the support staff thing right and if we get additional funds for that that we were not expecting um then we'll that'll come back to you all at your end what did we get last year from the state stop my time while she's doing that i'll keep on going i think the other just point of clarification that i wanted just to remind everyone that in this budget we've already assumed an 87 million dollar increase based on the governor's budget so whatever the state does we're going to be comparing back to that number you know plus or minus that number so just just to provide that clarification that's helpful the reason why i was asking because i was trying to find some space for us to consider having some sort of middle ground um

246you know going at page 12 and what i'm hearing some of our folks outside of the msa would literally be making pennies with this shift and we are trying to retain them we are trying to attract them and we are trying to do that in a situation that is not good for the for the rest of the region so i i want to be very mindful of that so i really want to lean into the conversation that we started with carl about how do we get into that middle space of maybe it's not the um the superintendent recommendation and maybe we can't get to the work group request but i'd like to put a stake in the ground for um step one for us to consider the step plus the two steps and step two

247the work group request based on what our allocation from the state end up being and i will love to be able to wrap that up in a motion in a follow-on motion i'm not i'm seeing a lot of blanks there well that's the board's decision not staffs here's the nugget here's the nugget because this is i think how you're trying to go do we think we're going to get cut the 86 million no right how much more we're going to make lee's not going to go there because we really do not have a clue and then we're going to be held accountable well you said we could so if you all feel that something needs to be done beyond what's in this budget you can do a separate follow on to say look at this

248and this and bring it back at year in time to see where year in falls out and to see where the state budget remember even though the state meets next week the governor gets two to three weeks to admin change veto so we're talking a whole another month so it really is going to be july when the final numbers will be available and that gives frankly not only um the finance team it may give dr reed a little bit of time in this board to look at some things that come out of your advisory meetings right where you're always frustrated about there's no money left we did leave a little bit of money for school board initiatives but there may be more room for that if the state ends up being more generous we just

249don't know what we do know is we think a deal has been made only three people frankly the whole general assembly are in these meetings right now even though the committee is 12 it's three people but two of the three are fairfax people janet howell and george barker i gotta believe they're gonna make sure we come out of this in a good place i i have to believe in that and so i think it's a follow-on if you feel there's an area that's still not addressed here ask us to address it at year in with updated state funding and we can take a look and then you can decide which uh which option you want for example on the transportation superintendent wreck the two-step or the work group i'd like to work with ms omash

250on the two-step right now immediate and perhaps add a follow-on for based on whatever the state gets for the full work group recommendation i i need to i need to tell you a piece of information that you don't know i don't want the bad news well you know that's my job um additionally we got a message from uh michael malloy this morning that there is still consideration about moving the three positions per thousand for nurse psychologists and social workers to four per thousand which would require an additional 12 million dollars expenditure on our side of the house which we would then hopefully if we get those that support dollars we would use it for that but i i don't know i mean it's just still under consideration there seems to be a lot of things

251that are up in the air but what i would put a stake in the ground on is that motion for us to get to that two-step for right now and then that year end perhaps another motion to get to the recommendation by the work group and dr anderson where would you if you're making a suggestion of adding two million dollars to this budget where would you suggest we take it out of i think that's where we're at at this point i i realized that i just cannot answer it right now but i'd like to have a little bit more conversation with um staff to see what can i'd like to have a little bit more conversation perhaps year-end because i know there's lots of stuff on that year-end piece well salary salaries are recurring costs

252and you're in one time cost so then you had you basically then have you know added an additional you know 3 million to your fiscal 24 budget from the start i i would just suggest if we are making large changes to this budget that we would like to hear from the board members where they're thinking of taking it from because we have been trying all year long to be very responsive to the needs of this board and their priorities but changing things at this point we need to identify where you're what you want to cut no absolutely and i'm very mindful of that and i will certainly get that i just don't have that right this moment to share but i do want to articulate one more thing i'd like to follow up on and

253this does not miss dr anderson would you like to go back sure okay if i could miss corbin sanders just one thing i i just want to say right now staff can work on the follow one for year-end and where the state budget is we can that's easy to do right and we'll know where things fall out what ms corbett sanders just said if you want it now it's finding it's finding that two million now out of something else thanks and if if i also might add that it's important to do that now as we look at building all that we have to do for uh for fy23 for salary requirements for staff the day after this budget is approved our hr team will start all the work that has to happen to ensure that

254all of our employees get paid on day one and if if we wait until uh year-end which then isn't approved until august we would lose that window and so ms corbett sanders thank you that as we're looking at making adjustments to the budget if there are reductions in other areas it's it's imperative that we know uh when the budget is approved thank you mr smith so i have miss mclaughlin followed by miss omega and mr fresh oh no longer okay okay i'm gonna race through my two minutes um first of all as you all have heard me from the very beginning when we saw the superintendent's proposed budget in january i questioned the professional development and adding three more days at a cost of almost 33 million dollars i fully support what we need to

255do for elementary school i fully support we need to do for literacy and some of our other things however i will beg you to consider again with adding in this extra money even this additional 10.7 million dollars that dr brabrand still wants us to do we will now be at 17 professional days when you look at our comparators arlington is at 13 prince william at 11 loudon at 14. at almost 11 million dollars a day it is 33 million dollars we're sitting around the table talking about the things we want to do for employee compensation um i can tell you the long list of our office of facilities and management maintenance backlog and respectfully when dr brabrand says his desires to bring people together and that things come at the end what came at the

256end for me as a board member was our last april our last budget work session we did a few weeks ago in april where suddenly we had a long list of things that the superintendent was saying that you know they think are priorities and importance that we were just talking about for the first time so you know dr brabrand i love your your desire to always bring us together but respectfully i hope you at least acknowledge that you and your team also brought us some things that we're just trying to sort through from the last meeting to this one the adding on the 4.2 million in this extra salary step the call me mr programs i mean you name it it's here i'm looking at a follow-on motion proposal from your team that captures some

257things but for example i hope my colleagues were not going to walk out of here today and say there you go because i need miss corbett sanders to tell you the great news that the board of supervisors just passed in the chairman mckays but i don't have any time because i'm i'm at zero so if i if there's time for go back i'll have one more thank you miss mclaughlin mr frisch my only comment i think that will help moving forward i leave one thing for legacy i think we've got a pretty good budget process here's a nugget when you all do that follow on motion after at the advertise after i propose and you all did that follow one of the list of priorities and and i'm i was part of the admin team

258too working with the budget chair and vice chair we had an april meeting we're like well we're not going to be able to know yet and we don't know what the borah supervisor so we did end up canceling that meeting maybe honestly we end up keeping that meeting we're not going to make final decisions there but we go and take that motion and we talk about the priorities more so that when the numbers do come in we're closer to landing the plane because that's kind of what i ended up hearing two weeks ago some of you all felt well you've already put all the priorities down we did based on that motion but maybe we should have spent more time talking about it before we got this close to the end because it makes people

259feel rushed i take responsibility for working with the board uh budget chair and vice chair about that i think we ultimately keep it but we agree if we're going to keep it that we make no final decisions in that meeting until we hear what the board of supervisors is going to say thanks thanks for the feedback thank you dr brabrand miss burton did you oh your sidebar okay mr fresh thanks um i wanted to close the loop on this i've only got i only need like 45 seconds um so i i do have a follow-on motion that i've been working on and that i've spoken to about half the board about um i'll be sending an email after today's work session with all the details it is budget neutral but if you look at the

260current um uh proposal before us there is a line item for school board initiatives placeholder i think that's for future conversations and several of us have talked about different things whether it's communications whether it's scheduling all these different ideas that are kind of floating out there in addition to how we best use our office upstairs at gatehouse so my follow on motion concerns the use of the office space upstairs and how to make sure that there's equitable access to not only staff aides but school board members as well ms corbett sanders is second in the follow-on and i have a lot more detail about how the proposal breaks down and look forward to talking to the five of you that i haven't yet spoken to so and mr frisch and it doesn't come from the

261budget it comes from the flexibility reserve because it's a one-time expense that will not be recurring it's a reconfiguration right and modernization thank you so i have miss cohen thank you um i just wanted to reiterate um and just make sure that it was understood i i mentioned this crisis support staffing the need to staff for um restraint and seclusion um the removal of it since for the last two years so i don't i don't want to anyone to feel like i'm trying to jump on a follow-on train here at the last second i've tried to use every channel that i know how to to work the chain of command to let people know about my concerns with our staffing at key kilmarn burke [Music] and you know i do feel like if the staffing

262reserve is the way to go and then and that's you know what we do i'm i i'm fine with that but i do want to make sure that we are really understanding the implications um i do think to to the earlier point made um by many people about the bus driver if it's a conversation about um you know uncompacting the first five steps that's something i think would be interested in hearing uh miss burden is that the piece what would it cost us to just fix those first five steps to uncompress them i i don't know that's um my understanding is that is very difficult to do because if you change the first five steps then that ripples throughout the salary schedule um that's something that hr would have to look at i don't know

263if it's possible because you're right that's kind of where the problem is miss wiggington did you want to add to that no i i was just saying that we would have to look at the scale because what it would do is change that midpoint and so one of the objectives of that new scale that was agreed upon was to get that midpoint to 105 percent so that's going to ripple from behind and then forward and just as a reminder so the the two-step option would not just to make it clear for all the board members here it would not uncompress you know everybody as well so that issue would still be there let me just say this just to be sure everybody knows like in the end we've been asked to do a lot of

264different things nimble flexible we have not on drager you're here i've known you 30 years since we walked the halls together as student and teacher teacher and student we've not uncompressed a single salary scale in fairfax county if we do it here we are going to be asked to uncompress the teacher scale from the 90s and i was there we're going to be asked to uncompress the food service one of more recent i i'm not you all get to decide but i need to just be 100 percent honest i heard two-step i heard the ultimate recommendation of match with year to be just quite candid i'd rather you if you're going to look at something look at those two options if you don't like the superintendent recommendation but uncompressing is going to lead you down

265a path that i i think the board just has to think thoughtfully about as you approach the future which will be a collective bargaining future if you want to do that and just the operational difficulty of being able to pull it off thanks so go ahead i also feel obliged to mention that moving folks to the higher scale the the work groups request is a bit of a slippery slope in the sense that we use that practice of move when we move somebody when we you know enhance a scale and we move people to the the not lower than what they're currently making to the next place that will have ramifications for when we reclassify people because we use that practice when we promote people when we recline you know we some i think recently

266we reclassified an entire classification it was like tech people at the schools a couple of years ago and we keep the cost down absolutely by doing those um in the in the way that we've always done it so it's a little bit of a slippery slope to do something different now we'll certainly have repercussions in future changes to scales and reclassifications i see miss cohen has raised her hand again i will put you back on no no i think i still have 41 seconds right yeah go ahead sorry um so i would just i i hear everything that you're saying and all i will continue to try to beat the same drum that i started to beat two and a half years ago which is if we cannot get our kids to school then all

267of the beautiful plans that we have laid for them is not going to amount to hillary beans so i am just continue to be concerned that what we are doing we're throwing money at something that is still not going to fix the problem so that's just that's where i'm where i'm living thanks thank you miss cohen um i have miss tolen who has not spoken at all yet so what i'd like to be able to do is have miss tollen have three minutes thank you okay um first of all i think what i would like to do spend some time on the professional development line item you know it's no secret that i worked at isd for almost 10 years and i have trained thousands and thousands of teachers um and done a lot of

268professional development and i am a certified teacher trying to maintain my certification so i am also one of those people up at midnight and on sunday afternoon doing my online training that i need to do in order to keep up that certification so you know someone said our teachers are asking for time that one professional development day and allowing them some additional time for doing all those online trainings that they need to do i think is huge and is a nod to their professionalism um i work best with examples so you know i worked on the science team for years so i think maybe most of you know in our honor science you mean one person one specialist that takes care of elementary school science we have one person that takes her middle school and

269one person for high school and they are in charge of training all of our science lead teachers at our elementary schools for example we have two science lead teachers at each school for you know early grades and later grades and so it's super important that our specialists have time with our teachers spread throughout the year fidelity of implementation does not happen by accident and dissemination of information that our teachers need to know does not happen by accident so my understanding is with the 17 days that we have one day is now the elementary school day so we're down to 16. another day we took off because now we're saying eat is a teacher work day so we're at 15 days according to the plan that we got from dr presidio and mr naco so we've

270got three maybe four days for people in the central office to work with our teachers out at the schools and the science team for example they need to work with those lead teachers get input from them use their expertise to figure out how we need to work with teachers to teach science they need to work on new curriculum implementation anything that comes out of edoe steam collaboration science fair they need to know how to scaffold and team with their esol teachers their sped teachers other teachers on their team they need to do the literacy work blended learning pog they need to teach all of those things and work with those teachers to do all those things i don't think that three days is even enough for that so it's my little speech to stick with

271our professional development funding we already lost 10 million dollars of it i think we really need it and i also i don't have a problem if we have a day or two more than our neighboring school districts it's part of the whole conversation we are trying to be the premier school district professional development is a huge piece of that thank you miss tolin um miss keys gamara i don't believe you've spoken either so we will give you three minutes so i've been sitting here listening trying to figure out how to reconcile the concerns that all of our board members have not all of them but i'll take a crack at it i know there's been some concern about professional development if we talk about that you know i'm wondering if it would be helpful uh

272to those who are concerned uh dr brabrand if there was a plan put forward so that the board understood what that was for thank you miss tolin for expanding on that because you know we're not operations we perhaps don't understand the level of detail that is necessary to truly support our staff members in in this particular atmosphere and so i'm wondering perhaps dr brabrand if that would be helpful to follow your recommendation but also allow your staff to bring this board or you know a plan as to how we move forward with that recommendation giving assurances to those that have concern but at the same time giving you the freedom or our the next leader freedom to um appropriately put in those types of structures that would allow us to achieve what you had in

273mind that's my first um so we did do some updates that we just shared but it just came probably over the last couple of days i don't know that all board members have seen them and dr presidio uh if we haven't gotten it to you we we we will but i'm pretty that gone sir and we did some updates no no no let me dr presidio let me just double check on that yeah so we shared more detailed plans with the board last monday in your monday letter the high level summary is on slide 20 of this slide show and based on the board's feedback from the work session two weeks ago we are working on a more detailed plan that we could share i think kind of similar to what ms keith gamaras is

274asking about how we would deploy the classroom monitors to provide the additional planning time for elementary teachers so i think we've got a lot of that already and we're building those other pieces out well i just offer that because i think i feel like we're kind of perhaps at a stalemate maybe not but i don't know if that's helpful with respect to some of the staffing concerns i would offer something similar i think mr smith and others have said that they are looking at this issue and i fully agree with miss cohen miss laura jane cohen if you know if if we're having these types of uh significant concerns in these schools we can hardly afford that where we have such vulnerable students and so similarly perhaps if we could have that kind of follow-on

275information it might help us to understand rather than have it hold up these conversations and try to figure out how to you know as my mother would say rob peter to pay and we still have positions in the staffing reserve dr boyd's going to go back and review we'll review all three of those schools and uh with dr boyd with wrath with dr ivy and make recommendations and that can happen with the existing reserve as we've done the the counselor one was across all schools and that's why we um took it there but we still have enough positions to be able to go back review those three schools and make any reserve changes that we need to and i'll commit to that we'll do that i think my staff members have made some suggestions on

276how we look at um the bus drivers i will say this is a shameless plug just based on where i have been in the last week or so and i'm not suggesting that we need to rob peter to pay paul but in the future at some point i really would like to look at the avid program i do think that we are doing some amazing things how we can make sure that that is available to the majority of our schools i would love to figure out but dr brabrand i am not telling you to figure this out today i am just utilizing my 17 seconds to say stay tuned no miss keys gamora actually this is a great way if you're the last speaker to wrap up i it maybe not no but if i

277can just make this comment the avid expansion may have been my first or second budget we were frozen on avid for years it works it's wonderful we began and we added in that first or second budget year the first elementary avid it's picked up steam to do more we've added avid at more middle schools and it's certainly something i'll talk to dr reed about and of course dr presidio can too avid works it's real and it gets the kid in the middle sometimes we in fairfax in everything sometimes the one extreme or the other and avid is that place in the middle and we have to really make sure we're meeting kids across by name and by need across the full spectrum and abbott has a place so glad to follow up i'll use my

278last 12 seconds to say this we've had a lot of conversations about how we have equitable outcomes and i see avid as that machinery to get kids where they need to be so i'm i'm looking forward to those discussions thank you thank you miss keys gemara before i take my turn and i think maybe some others would like to um i just want to bring everybody's attention to a tragedy that has occurred this afternoon in texas and it's a tragedy that each and every one of us worries about every day as school board members as parents as aunts and uncles which is a mass shooting that has resulted in at this point 15 children losing their lives it's something that is we must take very seriously i know that we've made some enhancements to our

279buildings in the past this board has been very proactive in trying to address gun safety issues in our curriculum but it's also something that at the state and federal level we need to take action we need to have people take our children's lives seriously and not put them at risk so just hate to share that news but i did want to share it with the board and it seems kind of silly to go oh miss daryn at cofax i'll let you take your three minutes first i'll take a turn um so i i do want to thank everybody involved in this budget process i know it is a difficult one because it is always not everybody's satisfied but i know how hard you and your team work and i'm not completely satisfied with i still

280feel i feel like i personally even though i've done this budgeting for a long time i was a little thrown off by the last work session and dr brabrand i think we absolutely must have that other work session set in here because i had a personal commitment that i had to take a week off last week and i feel a little behind right now and i'm hearing a lot of discontent from employee groups still i'm hearing um and i'm not sure i'm a little concerned that i have to address this on um on thursday so you know i i think what i will say for this i i'm continuing to listen we have a few days yet and and but i would not i will not be proposing any big changes at this point in

281time i think that's counterproductive i encourage those who are going to do follow-ons or do any big changes please be mindful where we are in the process i think that is that can upend something and not be productive on another note just because what you what we just learned about the situation in texas i i don't even know where we are dr bray brown on securing all the front offices it feels like that was a project that was started and stopped avid i know the first time i saw avid i was like this needs to be everywhere i feel miss burden and i'm not sure who this is like who's the holder of all of these things that don't ever get fully funded like the security in the offices i know they're not all secure

282and that was that was a big push forward and where do those monies and i know some of that cip money but at the same time it's it it hasn't been prioritized and avid i feel like we lose things and you're leaving now with your historical knowledge um you know um so i i just say that to my board i'm you know being a little philosophical hearing those news and just feeling where where we are and how we change this process a little bit so i hope we all continue to talk to each other over the next few days but i also am mindful that you know we have some really good things in here we have some things um and and i know you ladies worked really hard as well as your team so

283thank you for that and it's always continuous improvement um but um you know there there has to be a way and i think we have to be thoughtful and mr smith maybe you are a person who can help us with that from some of these things with your tenure here and making certain that we know and and where you oversee ms burden like some of these things which we talk about but they're not stored they're not warehoused where and sometimes they feel like we're starting at scratch even though even the follow on sometimes there's there's not not every step not every eye is dotted and not every tee is crossed so that's kind of where i am personally but i i do want to thank those i feel like i'll be reaching out to some

284of you with questions and but i thank your team and you ladies for doing this this year so ms darren at cofax i do want to assure you that what we did at the beginning of this process is we went back for the past four years and pulled up every single um follow-on motion that was made on budgets to make sure that they were incorporated but i do think that you have a very good point of we've got to find a way of collecting them in a more i mean miss holland and i actually worked with miss burden to make sure that occurred um but it's good the other piece that you should know is that part of the state funding is funding for secure for infrastructure supports at each of our buildings to include

285security and um we're waiting to find out where that comes at the end of the day and yes mr frisch just the point of clarification i see that uh future superintendent plattenberg is online on the zoom um i believe he indicated earlier this year that there was funding being made available for the completion of the vestibule project um which i know miss darren kofax just referenced so maybe he can speak to that that's what i was referencing when in my remarks but absolutely mr plattenberg if you would like to address it so that's great thank you very much in fact it's indeed a really really just terrible tragedy um no we do not have funding that are identified for it it is on the list of priorities for in the event that there is additional

286funding from the state in that 30 million it has been my top priority and and that's where we have it so [Music] ask jeff so you're saying it's not completely funded it's just on the list correct the 15 million dollars that we still have to fund um would be predicated on the uh on the state's funding and i i and mrs burton's comments about um you know speculation on on that is i concur with her comments about that this burden yes um again i talked to michael malloy about that this morning and under the governor's introduced budget they did allocate 30 million to fcps for construction grants the senate's budget retained the governor's proposal but the house turned it into a grant and subsidy program based on various measures of need so if the house

287prevails it would be unlikely that we would qualify there you know they may split the difference and do half grant half subsidy and so we would get some funds but as the you know that's still under consideration we don't we don't know where they'll go with it yes yeah i i i we do need to lobby hard and and maybe i'm too much of an optimist but this is all i want to just go back to there are three people in the room right now when you read the news reports three george barker a longtime senator here from [Music] fairfax janet hal long time veteran and who are both of in the democratic party of virginia and then a republican from virginia beach i i just honestly have got to believe they've come up with

288an agreement people are saying it's people are not walking around going oh my god the sky's about to fall i think we're going to be okay i think we're going to see some additional funding so i don't think our worst fears will be realized will the best be everything there be there maybe not but not the worst so i think we will have some additional dollars i hope that we will have some con school construction dollars and frankly there's still time the governor has time based on today school construction for security needs to be increased after after sandy hook grants were given out remember these grants still piddly money of a couple hundred thousand dollars for a district like us when we need millions to be able to do all of the security vestible upgrades

289which i think jeff's already figured out is what 12 million dollars something like that so i'm hopeful and we'll know in a few weeks exactly where the numbers have come out thank you dr brabrand i see that uh chair picarsky has put her placard up she has not spoken yet so okay um did i manage this okay um if you would like uh vice chair seismar heiser you have not spoken yet so we will give you three minutes great thank you and i um spent a lot of time listening to the conversation and and i'll back up my my chair that i was first so but it's horrible placards going up and down um and either way is fine um i wanted to mention piggyback on what ms cohen said about the crisis staffing at

290the three schools i've also heard a need for that at css sites and i've talked to several principals about the crisis resource teacher at css sites and many of them are trading for that position so as you're looking into it you may want to just have a conversation or i'm sure you have but follow up with them as well i know those three schools are definitely needing um that staffing but um it's the behaviors are challenging another thing when you we mentioned that one pd day for transportation staff one thing i've heard over many many years as need and i brought it up throughout the budget conversations for ia training and i haven't seen i didn't know if that pd day for bus wouldn't is incorporating that or is it just specifically for that staff

291for transportation staff the day that's mentioned in here i i'll put the slides do you mean a bus attendance uh in addition to the bus drivers no i mean so we have um one additional day for less than 12 month transportation employees specifically i'm curious what's only transportation employees we added that as we looked at the calendar process and we added five days into the calendar that would be days off for our bus drivers and so as part of that smoothing process wanting to add at least another day in to help balance out pay which would be a paid work day and so bus drivers would come in on one of those days that other staff are receiving professional development and uh would take care of some necessary trainings that for their work i guess

292that was my question cause i recall that conversation in terms of hourly employees not just bus drivers so maybe i'm recalling the conversation incorrectly or maybe those other hourly employees are already receiving pd on that day i'm just trying to clarify that piece of it no that was uh we were to ask to look at that as part of the the overall bus driver work group and we did have conversations about those additional days in the calendar and so we looked at that specifically for uh for bus drivers and haven't done any calculations as to what it would look like for our food nutrition service workers i think miss seismer heiser is uh asking about instructional assistance sir not just the bus attendants but i've heard from many teachers and principals about the need for

293ia training and having dedicated time for ia training and i've yeah so so for additional training as less than 12-month employees they would uh get that additional professional development as well thank you i just wanted to clarify that i wasn't clear from this yes there was a question and we did provide the the explanation of who would get and and we have to go back to it so much has gone back and forth but yes they are included in that group okay great thank you um and i would put a plug in also for avid having been that lewis today it was a wonderful program and i know it's been long supported by the board this than previous boards i do want to mention um mr nikola fox you mentioned sort of the knowledge management

294piece right and i think there's i've actually talked to our auditor general about the need to audit knowledge management you know and some of that institutional knowledge and how do we what processes do we have in place for knowledge management so i'm glad you brought that up because i think it's something for this board to take a look at especially as we have retirements and people moving on the last piece i wanted to mention i've i've been trying to get more information about this and i don't feel like i have it yet is the call me mister program um i asked elaine tolle and i have talked about it and one of the questions i've talked to sean mcdonald about is you know we have in our strategic goal three you know to have a

295workforce that reflects our community and that's very important and the studies that show why it is for our students but i have milled to get an answer as to when you look at hiring and retaining diverse workforce is the issue in recruitment is the issue in hiring is the issue in retention and if so which is the where's the data to show which the problem is that's the first question the second is this is almost two and a half million dollars over four years does it go on in perpetuity or is it a four-year program um my dad is about 120 teachers about two and a half million dollars um but i'm not going to get any data really to show that how the teachers recruited reflect the diversity the multicultural diversity of our community

296so i'd just be helpful to have some of those questions answered is mr mcdonald still on the line yes i'm here still um so yes the intent is to continue this program on uh certainly with any program we would want to evaluate the impact or the effectiveness as we progress through time and certainly if the program is not producing or yielding the results that we would hope we would certainly uh review that and perhaps make recommendations to change or withdraw the program altogether at that point in time but my understanding is that this would be incorporated as a recurring funding item within the budget to support this work in terms of the question related to where we perhaps have the greatest need at which stage in the process ultimately we want to i think we

297have needs at all all steps in the process the recruiting and uh the retaining stages of the employment life cycle we do have an individual in place who is working with schools around building cultures and environments that ensures folks feel like they're included and and represented and supported in terms of the the recruitment aspect of the work though we do know that we have a need to build our applicant pool our traditional pipelines are drying up uh and so this is another pipeline opportunity to feed members of our community into the potential teaching pool and support the division's goal outlined in the strategic plan the question regarding the data about this program's efficacy in other areas in recruiting multicultural staff that reflect the diversity of our community so we have reached out after our conversation

298to clemson they have not supplied any data around the overall composition of individuals that have completed the program however we do know that 98 of individuals who enroll have made it through the entire program and have gone on to be effective teachers within school districts across the country the program currently is in place in nine states and is producing outstanding teachers for a number of school divisions across the country we do know that some other large school systems that are currently employing this program include chicago public schools houston independent schools and they're sorry my screen closed uh pinellas county schools in florida and dallas independent schools in texas but we do know that there are other districts that have continued to utilize this program and have had a positive impact on uh being able to

299bring men uh and very specifically men of color into the teaching profession thank you miss seismer heiser uh chair picarsky and she gets three minutes please all right thank you i don't think i'll need it sorry for stepping on your toes but people are very sensitive on this board about their place uh on the speaking list so i certainly don't want to cut um thank you i really just kind of wanted to sit back and listen and and see where um the discussions take us today um i do think there's a lot of good things in this budget and i know there has been work unending um work on it so i do appreciate um all the collaboration and from both our our board leadership and our staff to try to get us to the

300finish line i still have some questions i mean i do question even you know the salary scale extension if this will really be you know an effective recruitment tool when you get to that point um of the scale uh i don't know i just it's a lot of money and i i i'm just not sure that this is what it's going to take um to keep people once they reach that point in time and with the bus driver um you know i think it's unfortunate to be in this place right now where we do have um our associations that are um you know not feeling content and and and and happy with where we've landed and at the same time we really don't have much time to have conversations beyond where we are today because

301we are voting on thursday so um you know i know it's been a busy year but i think uh you know when we did end up getting this information we just have not had the opportunity to kind of work on some of these so i guess i will sit back and see where my colleagues are with their follow-ons if they decide to do anything but i do worry at this point in time if we have any significant changes i just don't think we have we have the time to to implement and to talk and discuss you know the last thing i know miss miss seismor heiser brought it up i brought it up last work session i do have the questions um around the recruiting program it is a massive amount of money uh for

302the number of people that i believe we're gonna get but i don't know i mean i don't you know if we're going from zero to 40 in a given year that's one thing if we're going from you know 20 to 40 potential employees that's a different you know consideration and i certainly have not seen that i don't know what happens if people decide to not stay with us after we have invested in them a considerable amount of money and we still have our grow our own program why aren't we utilizing that as a a place to invest and we've got a new hr director and a new superintendent coming in so this locks us in for many years so i just there are questions and i took more than my three minutes so i will

303oh okay very good um thank you and i don't need any replies back that's just i wanted everybody to just kind of hear where i am and i know we're going to continue in the next few days talking offline actually i would like mr mcdonald to provide some response to both of those you also know what the cost is and whether or not you could have people from our um our student base who do future teachers move into the young to the um call me mister also might be interesting mr mcdonald sure so the way that um the budget is is uh proposed here is uh that we would have uh thirty misters joining the program each year so it's a four-year program so as we scale up over the four-year period we would eventually

304have 120 individuals enrolled at any given time this is a longer term vision type of program so it will take four years for the first group to move through the pipeline certainly as ms corbett sanders just indicated this would be another opportunity or option for anyone that would be interested in getting into the teaching field but most definitely we would want to be able to link to some of our existing pipeline programs so we've invested time and resources in working with our teachers for tomorrow program and we would want students in that program to know about the colony mr program and that that potential pathway to getting into the teaching field thank you mr mcdonald we do have three additional you can be on the list i've got three so far you're the third okay

305uh so we have three board members who have go back go backs um one our first one is miss mclaughlin followed by ms marin and then miss keys gamora and we will do one minute um so i will just quickly say for the school counselors being put on a follow-on motion i would like to have more information on why we can't be using our esser dollars we know postcovid we need to have that mental health supports and i'm concerned about all the year-end carryover fun needs so with my 30 seconds or so ms corbin sanders i'm going to implore you to join me in sharing as well because quickly i just wanted to make sure everybody where um karen and i will be sending you details but just this morning the board of supervisors unanimously

306passed chairman mckay's board matters motion to direct the county executive to develop a plan in consultation with fairfax county public schools and so therefore we're going to be coming to you as part of a follow-on motion as well but it relates to year-end funds to funding stadium bathrooms for the 15 remaining stadiums that do not have them and she can tell you all the reasons why i hope our board will add this at minimum to this chart staff created and sent provided to us today about follow-on motion considerations for your end thank you miss mclaughlin and uh mr plattenberg has been working on this diligently with the county staff so if he wants to add anything he can no just that it's been really good grabbing a process mr smith has been working as well

307diligently because we've recognized over the years that our legacy approach to having temporary bathrooms at stadiums is just untenable [Music] thank you i now have miss marin yeah i think i think there's a lot of things that are untenable and i think that we stood this morning at the board of supervisors jointly to wear orange and stand up for gun violence prevention and now children are slaughtered so i'm going to once again um plead that we invest the money for the vestibules the 6.4 million dollars for the security vestibules to have secure addresses to all of our schools this is something i asked for when i first got on the board in 2020 it got delayed due to covid i asked i just looked for the budget question i don't know if it was budget

308or cip um i was told it was going to take five years to roll it out i just sitting here contacted chairman jeff mckay and supervisor walter alcorn and pleaded with them to figure out how to get 6.4 million dollars because i'm not certainly going to have my kid be slaughtered and i don't want anyone else's kid to be slaughtered and i think that we really need to focus on what our priorities are if it's stadium bathrooms that's great i've been working on that too there's an issue with staffing where's the county on that you know we need to develop real robust partnerships if we're going to talk about safe healthy places to live so i'm happy to draft the amendment for this thursday i'll do it by myself i'll make the motion myself i'd

309love to have your support but this is just we cannot let our kids go on living like this and parents living like this it's something we can do jeff i see your hand up would you like to respond yeah i just would like to clarify that the 6.4 million is the information we provided um after the window of the five-year cip we've been using a total of 15 million but the 6.4 is because we went ahead and said that after those that are included as part of the renovation the next five year program it'll only be six four point four remaining um so the the total number is 15 million i just want to provide that clarification uh to make sure everybody's talking uh apples to apples so i apologize to interrupt thank you and

310can i ask mr plattenberg to send an email so we have 114 schools without secure vestibules we have 200 facilities how is it that in this day and age we don't have these facilities upgraded i i just this goes to mystery and echo that's question where what's the plan we as a board need to give that direction and we've got to get clear on what our priorities are and work with our county supervisors to do this thank you miss marin ms keisgamar yes um i i certainly support the effort that miss maron just mentioned and you know i know that we are in a bit of a transition as a system um with the new political leadership i would think that um if mr yonkin was interested in protecting um education this might be an

311opportune time for the state to step forward as well so perhaps we can put together an advocacy package where we can all participate because this is an emergency i also did want to speak to concerns regarding call me mr um i i really i want to push back on concerns and i want to give our staff an opportunity to show us you know let us know some of the differences i can tell you we've had concerns i came on this board in 2017 we've had concerns about achieving um improving our diversity in our staffing since that time without change and the fact of the matter is the data supports this the data supports that we need these changes the data supports that it makes a difference in academic performance and student success and we're talking

312about what i'm looking at here in the omnibus motion is 500 000 um so i you know i do have some concerns if we start trying to take this apart because we've got long-standing concerns that have not been addressed thank you miss keys kamara miss picarski okay thank you so i do want to clarify i feel like i have to because i think it's difficult to ask sometimes questions about how we are using our money to ensure that we get the biggest bang for our buck quite frankly for what we are investing um yes we were given the 500 000 that was one year this is in perpetuity so we're talking about millions of dollars i agree we all agree that that is a priority but my question which actually wasn't answered is why this

313over saying invest and grow our own send our own kids give them the tuition to go to schools to go to college so it's not that we don't share the same goal my question is is this the best way to do it and i'll be all for it if i could have just gotten a little more clarification to that we also have two new leaders coming in so i you know taking that into account those are my questions i just felt like i needed to clarify that i do believe we are all looking at the same goal so thank you thank you miss picarski uh missed actually dr brabrand do you want to go before mr mcdonald i do okay y'all are pretty close on this budget you're not that far apart you pretty dad

314gone close to get to thursday the biggest thing i see is actually bus driver pay you can do it in a follow-on motion it's two-step it's superintendent recommendation or actually it's not either you can decide it's two-step or the association recommendation and give us until the end of the year and what the state budget falls out and see we can bring you options then are dr reed and marty and the team can bring you options then for what can be done into the next school year around that so that doesn't have to be the end of the story i think you all are pretty close i think your priorities are reflecting this budget let me just say this about call me mister and i know tammy i always like how you can encapsulate some things

315it's good you've got to keep institutional history and this is one word is in 2019 i asked everybody to come together across departments and talk to me about it had been cut after cut after cut they didn't even know to ask for budget stuff because they said scott all we asked for before and i'm not blaming it was just where we were the prior superintendent said give us your cut list not ask for what you want to invest in i asked dr nixon sean mcdonald and the entire hr team i want to know what it takes to get to go through your premier workforce that was on the original list and it got cut as the pandemic hit you all also in your follow on motion had it so you all actually had in the

316following motion we had it as a priority even from two years ago that's why i brought it forward it's not in itself the one and and this is the nugget maybe there's no one silver bullet to this it's culture it's recruiting it's retaining it's growing your own our growing our own is flourishing almost a hundred kids this year are getting a contract a hundred kids we had nothing four years ago so that's starting you do call me mister you're sending a signal you're sending a signal across this state and across the country that you're serious about getting persons of color and particularly men virginia is one of the lowest states in the country for the number of men in the workforce when i was in lynchburg i pulled those numbers looking because we were desperate

317for men we were in the at the time i don't have today's data we were in the bottom five of states for men k through 12 in the workforce number one state in the country believe it or not kansas how about that we were at the bottom we've got to get more and more folks looking at fairfax as the place to go not only teach diverse kids but be a diverse employee and want to be here companies are coming here because of the diversity in the talent pipeline we got to keep growing it and i think this is one more tool and i do say i i believe in dr reed and dr wilson coming and they're not going to see everything the same way scott brabrand saw it and this team will come up

318with new recommendations and that's okay but i i'm confident in talking to dr reed already if she sees something she doesn't like she'll let you know and say let's pause i don't see this as being one of those i think this one will continue to signal and continue to show that we want to really get goal three and we have good news to show you on goal three in june we went from 24 25 schools three years ago when i talked to the naacp and it made the headlines 25 schools without any teachers of color that goal three report three schools that's still three too many that means no one's still of color in those schools but that's real progress and we've still got more to do and i think call me mister will be

319that next step to go even further in institutionalizing the work around goal three thanks thank you we have nine minutes left i know that um shawn has been working on the call me mister quite extensively if i if you have anything additional you want to contribute to this john we would welcome it and then i'm going to have um one last go back for miss seismer heiser and then we're going to wrap this session up with a couple of comments thank you miss corbett sanders so miss picarski i apologize that i didn't fully answer your question earlier ultimately one of the the key reasons to utilize the call me mr program as our vehicle for working towards achieving our goal is it is a decades-long program that has a history of success and and high

320levels of retention the program is research based and is designed to provide wrap-around support to the candidates that are part of the program so it's more than just going and learning about teaching but it's about learning about the culture of teaching and being able to be successful within the field so this is a ready program that will provide those wraparound supports i think that is a a premium support perhaps then might be available via other pipelines uh and to miss keith gomorrah's point earlier we continue to work on in growing the diversity of our teacher workforce the most current data shows that we have fewer than 20 of our current teaching force our men uh here in fairfax county public schools and so again this uh this particular initiative helps to uh help uh make

321a difference there just about 26 percent of our overall teaching workforce are people of color and we want to continue to see that number increase so it is more reflective of the diversity of okay thank you mr mcdonald um we have two minutes for miss uh seismer heiser thank you and i will try not to take those two minutes um listen we all as mr carson said we have the same goal it is in the goal reports what i have not seen and i've asked for is data around hiring multicultural staff for the call me mister program i've not seen that data that's what i've asked sean mcdonald there's there's a difference in way i think that's understood and are we have a multicultural society and a multicultural community and i'd like to see data

322on hiring multicultural male teachers of color and i have not seen that um in addition i i've asked about disadvantage regarding our teachers of color in our school system my hair is 26 percent but i like to have that disaggregated if we're if our goal is to reflect our community our students i like to see where we are disaggregated in that goal that's what i haven't seen and that's why i'm i'm asking these questions um i i love your passion dr brayban i'd like to just ask respectfully we are bleeding special education teachers bleeding there are special education teachers on provisional licenses there every principal i talk to cannot find special education teachers we need to do something about that and we should not be doing it either or but we need some passion around

323that as well and i'll pause for a second and if you want to respond to that let me just say the passion for special ed just a reminder and i know and i don't want to set dr reed up for this either because it was a lot of money we were probably the only school district in this country that i know of right now we spent 25 million dollars and we extended special education teacher contracts by 30 minutes this year and next year because we knew we were him injuring and we had to stop 26 million that a lot of money a lot of money people are like are you crazy scott are you seriously going to do that but i knew we needed to do it and i think that's something we're gonna still

324have to look at especially for special education um but sometimes recruitment since there's a recruitment program right there's there's no pipeline either for in that in the special education teacher and i'm not again this is a long-standing goal that i fully stand behind i just have been asking for that disaggregated data and some data around this program regarding recruiting multicultural teachers and where we are as a system and then the last data is what give me some data around what is the biggest area of need in terms again recruitment retention or hiring and when we're triaging right we don't have unlimited funds how is this the one we want to spend you know you know you mentioned that you had 100 kids this year and grow your own contracts and that's phenomenal right but this

325is four years and we'll it actually will take eight years to see 120 teachers right so i'm just curious like how's the analysis on if we use that funding to grow our own diverse teachers i just would like to see more analysis maybe this is the delay i don't know but i just want to see a little more analysis on those pieces well we'll try to give you as much data as we can by thursday i do believe in it and um you know ultimately it's your budget so we'll we'll work with you but i i do believe in it and um and we'll see what we can get you on the data that that we have certainly on our own we we have reached out to clemson about their national data and we can

326try to give you the best data that we have for our own and again i just want to reiterate i very much support having a teaching workforce and the data does that reflects our multicultural community i just want to make sure this is the right way to go okay thanks seismer heiser i wasn't aware of your specific questions or i would have made sure that we had because every specific question that we had come out we've been trying to make sure they were presented tonight so we'll see what we can do going forward okay yeah miss keys camaro since it's your second go back you have one minute okay well um part of it is um miss picarsky isn't here and i think she may have taken my comments um wrong or maybe there was

327a misunderstanding um i was asking for additional information as well because i want our our staff members and our our um not our staff members our board members to feel comfortable with this investment but i also am advocating because i know teach our teach for tomorrow when i look at our program i have not seen the level of diversity that i would have expected so when dr brabrand proposes something like this you know i you know i hear the phrase multicultural i'm looking for effectiveness right i'm looking for changing that needle moving that needle which we have not done since i've been on this board in 2017. no i'm saying that i heard the phrase multi just a second i heard the phrase multicultural my phrase would be effectiveness right how what what has what

328can we say about this this particular program and the effectiveness that they have been able to achieve um more so than um any other that would be my standard so i just wanted to say i was looking for um that additional information i heard miss picarski's question i wanted to back that up um in in addition to looking at what those contract requirements are but we have to move the needle period thank you um i'm going to try to wrap up and combine the three questions together which would be that mr mcdonald if you can provide more data in the next few uh by tomorrow ideally um that would address the multicultural aspects of the um of the call me mister program so beyond you know the various demographics also i think it would be

329helpful to have coming out of that data if it's available the percentage of the teachers that go through this program that become t general ed teachers specialist teachers or teachers of students with disabilities yeah and multicultural is part of that but multicultural it's it's layers multicultural as well as the demographics of what area of specialization is a general-led is it special education is it some other area of need and the please miss seismer heiser go ahead yes and then the demographic of our teachers of color not only by racial composition but also women and men so it's kind of a peeling back the onion multiple layers and obviously if we can direct some of our students who are going through the teach for america to take advantage of this program it would be great with

330that before we um close because it is six o'clock we're supposed to start another session right now but i know the board members are yes ma'am i was about to thank you um we have a uh break for dinner for i'm going to ask no more than 15 minutes or 20 minutes i'll get the view of the board and before that i did want to give a heads up and follow on with miss mclaughlin's conversation about the board matter that was presented at the board of supervisors earlier today this was a board matter that was supported because it does two things one it addresses the equity of facilities across the county but facilities across the county that are utilized by both county community programs and fairfax county public schools and has the potential to contributing

331economically because of the sports tourism work that is being done across the county and today with the inequity of how these bathrooms are at some schools and not at others those schools have an economic advantage of being able to get people to come use their fields those that have appropriate bathrooms and the bathrooms would be modulars that have bathrooms plus a concession stand and it would be put in place at all of the 15 schools that are not it would be a standard almost for wanting of a better term a plug-and-play system and it would ensure that we addressed an immediate need and then as schools get renovated they could always be replaced with bricks and mortar it is something that we know that women don't attend our sports event as much because they don't

332like going into a um yeah i guess that's what you call it a portage on yes so and elderly don't and it doesn't have ada accessibility so it's all those things that really make um it a much more um positive experience for everybody and so i know that we'll be presenting that and i did speak with miss burden and there should be money available to do that um and we've spoken with mr plattenberg and he's given us a period of time which he thinks it can get done so we'll send all of that to you with that this work session is over we're going to take a till six i was going to say still 6 20 but if you all want 25 625 um and we'll come back so 25 minutes oh i said

3336 25 okay can we get it done in 20 minutes so that people because we do have the um pre-k early head start folks coming so if that would be possible i just don't want them waiting that much longer and thank you so much staff for your incredible responsiveness appreciate it bye-bye early head start and pre-k programs offered programs that touched every aspect of the life of the students and their families cumulatively 1925 preschoolers infants and toddlers were served with high quality virtual and in-person instruction teachers and family service staff completed a virtual home visit for every child at the beginning and end of the school year through the parent education programs all families were provided with virtual opportunities for health nutrition and parenting education students also received strong in-person classroom instruction and additional academic

334and behavioral support social emotional learning was embedded into the pre-k and early headstart curriculum and taught through second step lessons and games additionally 158 children including my daughter were also supported through the child fine referral process my child's teacher shared her observations about my daughter's trends and challenges we worked together to find solutions and identified family and mental health specialists evaluate her and develop solutions that would support her social emotional and academic development i welcomed the opportunity to address her challenges at this early stage so that she would be better set up for success once she enters kindergarten i believe all the families who benefited from this program would share similar sentiments in the area of food health and nutrition parents were supported in finding a medical and dental home for their children to ensure

335they were up to date on school health insurance requirements and age-appropriate preventative health care families also received monthly messages on healthy choices to help them make decisions supported of your child's physical health and wellness students including those with food allergies religious dietary practices and other special needs receive nutritious breakfast lunch and snacks in the classroom each day again i am sure that like me other parents greatly appreciated the peace of mind that came from knowing that our children were receiving healthy and nutritious meals daily ongoing professional learning and coaching were provided for 106 teachers and 118 instructional assistants which ensure all students are receiving high quality and best practice instruction professional development and ongoing classroom support for trauma-informed practices within the classroom and in support of families were also provided parents took part in volunteer

336in virtual volunteer opportunities and provided 156 virtual volunteer hours mainly through attending the ppc meetings over 4100 applications received for the program which had 1849 available spaces however due to factors of age income and space limitations in some schools only 1548 children gained acceptance for the 2021 school year a declining enrollment of 17 percent this year 1819 students enrolled in the program with a more modest decline of two percent at the end of april 2022 there were 285 students on fcps pre-key and early head start waitlist for the school year 2021-2022 despite honor enrollment this school year certain schools and areas did carry weightless while other areas had no wait-listed students to fill open slots this may be attributed to several factors including misalignment between where there are spaces and where children live the areas

337of greatest needs don't have enough slots and unavailability of transportation to schools outside of their school areas makes access to the program impossible for some families this map shows a percentage of children in kindergarten this year who did not have a pre-k experience the darker colors show where there are more children who did not attend any preschool the lighter color means more children in that area add a preschool experience i want to draw your attention in particular to the percentage of each of the dark blue areas such as lewis justice annandale mount vernon and erndon where the numbers were 40 percent and above unfortunately the pandemic and other factors created another year of difficulties for families in response the program intensified the support offered to children and families through social and emotional learning in the

338curriculum additionally mental health specialists created various resources such as grief packages support bags and welcome backs for refugees second step lessons and videos taught specific skills to children and social and emotional learning it also provided various videos videos on various teams and mental health specialists modeled the behavior being taught they also offered social and emotional support groups for all adults in the light in the children's lives including parents teachers and student staff other support such as virtual and in-person enrollment and screening options that manifested from the pandemic improves program operations and expanded choice flexibility and access for families additionally 250 parents who express concern about their children were screened which enabled the program to better meet their needs further the virtual parent policy committee enabled more parents to attend those meetings ready rosie has also

339been a wonderful resource of information that helps parents understand how to model and teach age appropriate behaviors to their children this year the ppc had 91 volunteer representatives including five members of the executive board 22 regional representatives three commun community representatives and five policy council representatives the ppc regional and community representatives attended quarterly virtual meetings and virtual school-based meetings and communicated with family service partners this year the ppc executive board included roselda fernandez chairperson myself tanya brooks vice chairperson zaib zubair secretary senior kashif treasurer and joanne shay parliamentarian i am pleased to share that the ppc meetings were well organized and managed the fcps officials provided excellent support to the executive we were prepared beforehand through prep meetings and provided guidance on the subjects and issues that would arise in the meetings this year we

340had the pleasure of partnering with three community representatives anna martinez from partnership for healthier communities kirsten buckner from fairfax county health department and patricia aldus from united healthcare they shared a range of services and updates from agencies they were representing through ppc meetings we were also briefed at every stage on the budget and developments in the pre-k and early head start sites program-wide additionally we were briefed on a t on attendance and reimbursement for meals we spoke about volunteer hours discussed the report submitted to the school board and brainstormed recommendations for improving the program which i will share shortly parents were consistently provided with opportunities to ask questions and provide input the meetings were inclusive transparent and democratic in closing i note that while fcps pre-k and hurley headstart program has many commendable strengths there

341are also areas in which it can improve to better serve the needs of the students and their parents in my case i was delighted when i learned that my daughter was accepted into the program however it was on the condition that we provide daily transportation for her to and from school which is outside of our area given our busy work schedule this was challenging for us thankfully my daughter has since joined an afternoon special education program and has been provided with the opportunity to take the bus home it has made a significant difference to our family and our ability to work and parent unfortunately my situation is not unique such support is invaluable to our ability to take advantage of the program we therefore recommend that the school bus program be expanded to better service

342students and parents of the scps school district including those not attending their base school secondly it is well recognized that play is an important part of learning for children in this age group we know that outdoor activity supports your mental and physical health and social and emotional development playgrounds that are ill-equipped for their needs limit their ability to explore and learn they also create extra work for teachers who must dedicate more time to supervising and redirecting children therefore we recommend that fcps provides more age-appropriate outdoor play spaces where children can enjoy those learning opportunities in a safe environment finally as our society is evolving and becoming more technologically advanced we should be focused on preparing our children to participate effectively exposure to science technology engineering art and math stream skills and concepts through play and

343discussion supports the development of a strong foundation for future learning under the current pre-k system these subjects are being delivered by the classroom teacher while they have performed commendably we believe our children would benefit from having other opportunities to engage in learning with teachers specially trained in those areas it would also allow the classroom teachers to focus more time on their work area as such we recommend that pre-k classrooms be included in the staffing projections for schools eliminating the need for weekly planning time subs ladies and gentlemen in conclusion i once again thank you for the opportunity to serve my community it has been a pleasure and an honor the program has made an immense difference to my daughter and i hope that it continues to be supported and expanded so that other children can

344benefit it is not a cliche to say that our children are our future and we must do all we can to give them the best possible start thank you thank you so much mrs brooks we are really appreciative that you're here um with us today um and i know we will have some good conversation um around some of these recommendations so we would like oh mr mesh right next to me yeah thank you thank you ms brooks it's a pleasure to hear from you and then of course to the entire parent committee for coming and showing your support for this incredibly important initiative that i know i think it's fair to say all of my colleagues support um and that we continue to hope for an expansion of uh you know sooner rather than later

345um i did just want to uh kind of ask i noticed that many i mean actually all of your recommendations were the same as ones made last year or whenever 2020. when we heard you last um with the exception of the mental health recommendation which i am assuming was absorbed or or responded to by staff but specifically uh the busing the the support the playgrounds etc where are we with that can somebody from staff give us an update uh because i remember that we were supportive i believe as a board through that general conversation but i'm wondering where we left off do you want me to start is that he said well it looked like miss burke you were going to respond if not we can get some other folks involved but we can start

346with you and then see uh mr smith and check with mr plattenberg we'll do our best we'll let you start though so in terms of transportation we've done some really great uh collaboration with the transportation office and they really have tried to meet our needs but unfortunately because of the limited number of programs we have in only 63 elementary schools we're always going to find children that fall out of the current boundaries of what transportation can provide we've also tried to co-collate our classrooms with special ed classrooms because we know their buses go farther out and we've tried to catch a ride on their buses but that still does not always work so we still struggle we this year we had 119 families that were accepted like tanya who had to provide their own transportation

347because where they lived wasn't within uh transportation boundaries um oh you want the other ones too that's right so for the playgrounds um you know that that is a budget uh that's that's a budget ask um this year we uh there wasn't money available to do that we are hoping because of um some carryover that our program has that we might be able to absorb some of the cost of the the playgrounds but it wouldn't be able to get playgrounds at all 12 schools that currently do not so we always try to absorb within our program whenever possible but there are also times where we have to ask for additional funds which having just watched your budget meeting you know how difficult that is to earmark money for specific things like this so we've worked

348hard to do that but it's still it's still a challenge and particularly for those kids who are in those schools and the limited play space they can play in but we are hopeful for next year again we work very closely with facilities to try to tag on to any playgrounds they are building and see if we can be absorbed in that but again that is a that is a challenge the planning time sub um la their last recommendation recommendation about the staffing is much bigger than me because that is that's a large financial ask and that would be uh that would have an incredible ripple effect so that that's really something i would pass back to you to be thinking more about i mean so then in terms of you know dr barry brown leadership

349team do we have a plan in place for thinking through this have were steps taken and attempted but then perhaps halted etc since the last time in 2020 that this was brought or so i would say that with regard to the the facilities piece we've been working with our county partners and mara works very closely with those county partners as we've been trying to identify spaces where we could certainly provide more space for early childhood we're currently working with a member of the board on some possible solutions for adding more seeds to early childhood or for early childhood in the system and are hopeful that that might be a proof of concept that we could look at to expand early childhood across the system and we'll be bringing something forward once we wrap our minds

350around that a bit more so so certainly we've been working with our our county partners in identifying space but of course uh revenue and resources are an issue and space continues to be an issue for us in the county and then with the transportation piece too mr smith i don't know so i'm not aware of any outstanding transportation issues other than the fact that we do work very closely with our early childhood partners and ensuring that we can provide the transportation necessary i know that we also work very closely with our region staff working with schools and working with the early childhood office as we think about program placement to ensure that students aren't on buses for a long period of time and really thinking about where those programs are uh to lessen that time

351for transportation wait i think there's a bit of a disconnect my understanding from the report is not all children have transportation i think mr smith was multitasking over there when that part of the republic was not right i missed that part i was i was you know doing some other board work actually yeah so i mean i guess what i would say is these recommendations have been forwarded as part of the budget development process for the last couple years and and you know again as the budget is a competing set of priorities they haven't really made their way to the final proposed you know superintendent's budget and you know we discussed early childhood back in february at a work session that you might remember on this uh skipped uh community schools presentation we talked about

352the different focus areas for skipped and you know we talked about the focus on early childhood education is really the genesis of the skipped work and at that time we discussed really probably what the recommendation for the board would be is to think about some strategic goals to address some of these long-standing issues that we've talked about and build those into the budget process from the beginning of the budget cycle so for example um you know we might choose so the board might choose as a body to set a goal of increasing the number of students three and four-year-olds that could be served by you know x number or x percent for the following school year reducing the number of families that need transportation services by expanding those bus routes but those are going to

353cost significant amounts of money that we haven't been able to to bring to bear in previous budget cycles so that's really our best thinking and recommendation right now and we're going to continue that work with the county at those skipped meetings but it's going to take some additional investments to be able to address and meet some of these recommendations that we've had for a number of years yeah one other thing i'd say is i heard the governor last week at the press conference talk about additional access for early education and this is this is the time where we need to have our um and i know and i know we can we we need to stay what's the right word uh we need to stay positive that it's time to take the words and match

354it with actual action we can find common ground here this is something we agree needs to happen where are the state funds to do the massive expansion of early childhood that we're talking about i think this is a place we can find common ground against across political boundaries across regions of virginia pre-k is an issue every school district so we need to find the money it has been too long but what mr smith said is we are thinking out of the box on a way to provide additional pre-k slots um and we'll have something soon to share with the whole board we're just trying to get the proof of concept a little more developed and we'll share that with you all soon okay yeah and then i mean in terms of the transportation piece um

355even just the costing like have we even done costing to see what that would look like i mean i know we're assuming the resources are not there but what oh yeah jeff okay yeah i mean i guess this this conversation is actually lending itself to my point i think that i this is extremely important work we all know that we all believe in it we also have a million things on our plates i get it but the fact that we're seeing the same recommendations since now right right and then so i'm left being like okay well what's the point of this where are we going now what's going to happen are we going to find ourselves two years from now talking about this again seeing the slide so hopefully you know maybe the proof of

356concept piece is a starting point i know this conversation is beyond but um this is me saying that i fully support these recommendations and i hope that staff take them seriously and that you know next time we have this conversation we have more uh pride worthy or more you know you know positive things to share um perhaps is that um i don't know ms brooks did you have anything to say about any of that or no no comment okay no comments um yeah no and it kind of goes back i remember last time i pointed out specifically the map on your slideshow that speaks really to so much more than even just pre-k uh in our county um i'm i'm almost inclined to like blow this map up and just have it sitting in our

357school board office for us to stare at until this changes because um i i mean i don't i just don't know where else we're gonna move if we're not able to take steps here so i'd love to see in our next cip uh jeff slash any facility staff who are listening um that we consider this may be a sub component uh whoever what oh that's my time whoops i don't even realize okay it's okay thanks thank you i can do a go back if you want miss um dare not go effects thank you miss brooks and thank you miss burke for your work on this i really do appreciate it and miss omesh thank you for your passion um i i've had similar passion and then i've heard to learn patience um but uh so

358um that's no but but but that's okay you you have to learn both i i tell you that um as as my friend and colleague and um but um that aside um i am the board member that staff is working with so people don't know it is something i've asked mr smith to gather data miss burke um to do that i've talked about half of you about it and if i haven't if you haven't spoken to me yet i plan to call you have the list and talk about that because yes this map is is is stunning it hasn't changed in my tenure on the board some of the areas have gotten darker and worse um there have has not been um the the the need has not been addressed although i i don't want

359to put you in the spot more but i know i i ask you often like how many pre-k classrooms have we had in the past five years how many of fcps added and i know you've had that number and it's a lot it's impressive we haven't in the last five years yeah we haven't added any classrooms what we did is we added students to the classroom that's what i meant okay so we were able to do that um we have a hundred classrooms and we started um about eight years ago at 16 we went to 17 about four four years ago and then the year that the pandemic came in we went to 18. so i haven't done the math but um it's it was you know yes yes over 300 students but but to

360that point we've we've done a great job in serving more children but we've also recognized that the needs of children have increased and now we have teachers who have two additional students in their classroom which doesn't seem like a huge number but when a child is struggling it can be extremely impactful to that classroom and we often have children who are struggling yes and and and i appreciate that um and um i know your county uh partner um miss tui i i know we've been working with her i sat on the child care advisory council for many years where this problem was first presented to me and there was a lot done and maybe dr brabrand as we talk about losing your institutional knowledge you can take that and forward and round up your supervisors

361because if we're talking about equity and we're talking about the need to prepare our youngest learners particularly those which typically come with deficits to our system pre-k is the premier way to do this um i you and i always talk about optimism versus reality and um but i am hopeful that this is something that you can take to your other superintendents across the the the state of virginia because i will say i i hope this governor puts into action um his words but i unfortunately have seen four governors and uh there the the last one that put monies into it was actually um now senator warner there's a lot of talk little action little funding and i continue to be um concerned about that as well as frustrated quite honestly so hopefully we can with

362the direction of mr smith his team we can bring forward as fairfax is an innovator often to have something that we can use as a prototype not just in our district but others may follow so um but i'll be talking to you about that and thank you for your work and thank you for sharing with us how impactful it was to your child i really appreciate that and i appreciate you taking your time to be here miss brooks thank you ms mclaughlin thank you uh again i want to express my appreciation for all of the volunteers who served and uh for your presentation to us this evening um i'm gonna probably direct my questions a little bit more to staff because they're the ones who do this work day in and day out um let

363me first bring up the slide 12 i believe it is the the heat map that we show on percent of students entering kindergarten without pre-school experience i would i would just ask my colleagues that i think that our new superintendent and her team really need to drill down a little bit more on this because there's some there are some lots of layers to this and and i want to start kind of in a reverse area you look at langley mclean oakton that have some of the lowest poverty rates in the entire county and like i think langley's poverty rate is below one percent but 14 of those students didn't have any pre-k that we're aware of mclean 13 like i said oakton's 17. then you take annandale um pyramid which i have about 30 of

364my families in annandale they're at 37 appear to not have had pre-k but then you go all the way out west to westfield and it's 30 percent so there certainly when you look at the darker areas the darkest areas you can absolutely pinpoint where are our communities with the highest economic need and they're going to be the darkest one on on there however i think it's also interesting to just ask what's what's really going on here and and maybe you know ms burke and you can speak to that first because i i just find this is fascinating all across the economic spectrum what's going on yeah so i think this is a particularly interesting map because of last year we know that many preschools close families withdrew their kids they were working at home so

365lots of children might not have gotten your typical pre-k experience regardless of your income level i think it might be interesting to look back at a more quote unquote normal year and compare to see what it might typically look like i think you are correct in terms of the if you just look at the shading that has not changed much the percentages definitely have changed um even in the darker colors they've gone up uh quite a few percentage points as in the lighter colors so i think that's the first thing i think one of the other pieces that we're doing very well and we recognize that that we need to offer lots of different types of opportunities for families that don't get captured on the pre-k experience form because the form is is is spelled

366out um we have a different we have we've layered the categories in there but basically you go you didn't you you've gone to a pre-k and that pre-k can be um a publicly funded one a military one a uh you know you pay one or you can go to a child care which we count as a pre-k experience based on what the state says or you've had no pre-k experience but we also know those kids that have had no pre-k experience might be participating in something like hippie or early lit that is not on that form considered a pre-k experience because it's very limited it's not a year long it's a it's nine weeks long it's more limited but we recognize that there are families out there that are choosing not to send their child

367to pre-k so how do we also not only provide good quality pre-k classroom experiences but also provide experiences like early lit that aren't based on income hippie that's not based on income we've started the we play which thank you to skip get were able to fund us to be able to have some play groups again we put those in more high needs areas but even our families regardless of their income some families are choosing not to put their child in pre-k so how do we create good quality opportunities for them to have good experiences with their children um just like a family who chooses to put their child in a more traditional program like our pre-k experience and thank you so much for pointing out that this is for the 2021-2022 enrollment numbers um i

368will say that this was supposed to be when we came back from covet but i also recognize that um regrettably we're still globally trying to figure out covid vaccines for children under five so that could have played a role here as well but um i would say that i would like a five-year look back i think to really see what changes have been there and i only say that because i mean my my number one focus and i've been a major champion as you know on skipped for early expanding early pre-k um but i do want to make sure that our that the data we're bringing to the table when we capture and understand the families and in my final few seconds i'll just say um could you explain why it's 32 000 a year

369for the early head start and then the other pre-k it's roughly 16 dollars a year because i think thirty two thousand dollars is almost two years of tuition to our our virginia universities babies are expensive um the ratio is much smaller in those classrooms we have one teacher and two instructional assistants because the age range is from six weeks to uh three years old so kids that are start at two but then turn three so we know that their needs are very different and we wanna make sure we're meeting those needs they also require a formula when as part of the early the federal standards we have to provide that we provide diapers we provide formula so all those pieces play into the cost of an early head start program and our early head start

370we only have 48 infants and toddlers so um and their year is a little longer those kids are in school um our teachers contracts are 218 days so that again and that's part of the um and there also is a summer program so that's part of the heads the early head start requirements so their year is longer and young children on average even a family out any family out in the community on average it costs about 25 thousand dollars for to put your child in child care yeah infants and toddlers yeah i think that i know my time's up but i would just say i think for the report for the the board it might be helpful um and the public to see that you know when we place some averages in context thank you

371we can give you some background on that all right and we're going to miss you yeah thank you [Music] thank you ms mclaughlin ms tolin followed by miss corbett sanders thank you thank you and and thank you for all the information here um i did want to i just have a couple questions one um mrs burkos and asked you maybe to talk a little bit about the report that you just prepared for um skipped around um you know the early childhood and the idea of you know what we can do to serve more children i mean just talk about that a little bit briefly and then this and this may be a question for mr plattenberg as well i'm just thinking um as the drain dollar representative herndon of course is in my district and

372we are about to embark on renovations of herndon elementary school in duriansville elementary school and i am embarrassed to say that i don't know if we are you know expanding our early childhood classrooms there you know given the color of herndon on this map it seems like maybe that's something we would be looking at so we currently do not have any uh plans to expand we have two classrooms currently at herndon elementary um we don't have plans to expand that again as you the only funds that we can currently access are the funding from the state and that requires a match from us from the school board and as you've probably read in a report you you give us quite a lot of money you give us almost half of our current budget you're very

373generous but in order to be able to expand we would need additional dollars from you and the county to be able to do that right and i understand it's not just the facility you've got the right teachers teacher yeah and the material goes with it right you have to pay for the food because free lunch really isn't free no exactly but i'm just thinking you know from a facility standpoint this is a an opportunity if we're we're just starting the planning on these renovations we have really developed a wonderful relationship um with jeff's team we we've done some really good work with them over the last several months so i can bring that back to them and talk to them about herndon and what they're they're looking at right now around the building of that

374that you know the adding to that school um so i i'm happy to do that and i'm sure miss clemenco and dr presidio can uh will endorse that as well yes and so do i thank you for your work so appreciate it corbett sanders thank you and thank you for your dedication to our children maura you will definitely be missed i'm actually going to kind of take this a bit different way a number of years ago the school system started training local providers to infuse their work with children to take on more and more of you know to fill some of this need then we also have the original mount vernon high school which is going to have i think 120 preschool slots coming to the route 1 corridor and a partnership with northern virginia

375to train teachers for early childhood and we have a number of other places we also know that the governor has talked about grant funding for partnerships with faith-based community and other organizations to expand the footprint for early childhood education based on all of that how do you put together a plan for early childhood education that braids the various funding streams and provision of services streams to identify where the the true hot spots are that others can't take care of and then focus our efforts on that area great question so we work very closely with our colleagues at the county we we do we recently are collaborating on facilities so the um the work that you that is being done in the county around expansion and we are sharing what we are thinking about so that

376we're not you know um inundating a community and leaving other communities out so we're being much more strategic around that i think um the work that we're doing around the um the the school readiness plan which was developed with the county the public schools community stakeholders really sets starts to set out a little bit of a road map for us to be doing that work are we where we want to be and actually having this incredible plan out because the other piece that we always have to consider is the evolution of fairfax county and how the demographics are changing right so as because the programs that we we offer to families are subsidized we families that are reach a certain income threshold are the only ones eligible and what we have found is we we

377start to move and we're there by the time we get there the community is starting to change and then we have to we try to move again so it is this a little bit of we're always a little bit behind trying to be strategic but also knowing that fairfax county continues to and change and evolve in terms of the communities and and where families live where there what we have discovered is when we can sort of be in communities that are um have older apartments and are are that's often you know like our bailey's crossroads the culmar area uh that's a well estab those apartments are well established i don't think they're going anywhere in the near future um the other piece we've done better at is really working with the county and our facilities

378team i can't say enough about jeff's team particularly this year and working with us about looking at where development is happening what is happening five years from now what's happening 10 years from now that they are aware of in collaboration with the county so that we can get better at this planning because even though there again that there might be space like at the original mount vernon but is that going to serve the is that community going to stay the same that those spaces will be filled or will we have to look at a different type of model where we're we're we're doing a sliding scale so that families who who might have more income can access our programs as well that's the precisely the type of planning that i'd like to see in this

379area because you know frankly the the county is changing a lot we know that we have the development of embark richmond highway which will have significant impact on the affordability for people to continue to live in that area and so what we want to see and we also know where the affordable housing investments are being made by the county so i think what we need to do is find a way of bringing together the various peace parts so that we have a more coherent and holistic approach which isn't just based on the snapshot and time of a heat map but rather where do we see based on investments in the county where do we see things going so that we can actually overlay our strategic planning process because the most difficult challenge we have today

380as we look at this investment is we are continue to be a k-12 organization the state has not done what i think it needs to do which is say we are a pre-k through 12 education system and that we make the investments in them we know that the great equalizer is if every child is fully literate by the time they're seven years old then um they will have a much greater chance of success than if they don't and so your programming and the availability of multiple other strains or um providers is what we need to have to have a coherent plan you know i we i appreciate you um sharing your insights on that because that is where we're going i think the other piece that we've just been able to get is that now

381we have different kind of access to data that we didn't have in the past that will inform our planning as we move forward so right now we are in a we have a meeting quarterly with the county around facilities housing authority sits on that in that meeting with us fcps fcps facilities team members we all come together and it's a facilities meeting only about early childhood so we are on the right path we're not quite where you want us to be but i do think that our ability to access the data around where families live and the the children at different ages that live in those communities and as well as the development of the county and the projected development of the county has really is going to be very helpful to us to be

382able to create a plan like you're suggesting okay i'm seeing that there are no other folks looking to talk i'll just say um you know i think this this map is just really illuminating um i find it very helpful i know you said the numbers could be a little bit off but the the colors are not and what is particularly interesting for me is that when you're looking um you know you have some areas that you would expect to see large need but then you have other areas that we do not always think uh would would have children who are not having these experiences and you know especially out my way you're talking about a third of a school that's thousands and thousands of children that do not have access great inequities in places we

383would never you know think about my question is what you also see i think is that the providers are far and in between um so my question to that is when you're talking about the transportation recommendation have you noticed any trends or any areas where there is um greater need for transportation where parents don't have access anything that you can provide that would kind of help us or is it just throughout the county um so we usually and i we will get you the exact data but the trend we usually see is sort of out here in the west field um not so much centerfield but this the middle areas and that chantilly um area around there um where we and you you're brookfield right you go to brookfield but your base school um bonnie

384bray that's that's right bonnie brae but your base school is laurel so yeah so in those that community that sort of fairfax chantilly kind of area um but we can get you the exact information i do the one thing i do want you to know is um that that we we presenting tonight on fairfax county public schools there's much bigger opportunities within the county uh programs as well which are not reflected up here i would appreciate seeing that i think that's important as we're looking at this recommendation so thank you uh one two three no we do not but we we are i think finished with this portion um and i just really want to thank both of you for being here for presenting um and for all you've been doing and we'll miss you

385and then we will take a brief pause while we round up some more folks [Music] thank you let's try to all stay in the room so we don't find ourselves losing quorum again we are going to hear from our foundation for applied technical education um committee so i want to thank all of you for being here with us tonight we're eager to hear your report and i will just turn it over to to you to go ahead and introduce yourselves hi good evening thank you for having us tonight we're so happy to be here it's my pleasure to introduce our chair for the foundation for applied technical education kayvon we're so grateful for his service he'll be giving the majority of the report this evening before i turn it over i'd like to introduce whitney

386ketlidge who's the coordinator for career and technical education and is our liaison from instructional services for this committee so we're excited to bring to you a really feel-good report that is full of a lot of opportunities for our students and some successes that we want to continue to celebrate and grow so without further ado i'll turn it over to k-pon good evening madam chair distinguished members of the board of school board my name is kevin jabori and i am president of foundation for applied technical education incorporated fate i'm a professional engineer and owner of kj and associates a civil engineering and land development consulting firm in fairfax since 1996. i was introduced to fate in 2017 by yeri dudley who is a life member of faith's board of directors i became impressed by faith's mission

387and joined faith's board of directors in 2018. next slide please can you please go to the next one or yeah that's it yeah thank you uh fate is a non-nonprofit organization it specializes in sponsoring several career and technical education courses to develop technical skills among students in fairfax county our board of directors is comprised of 18 members the individuals list that you see in this slide or the executive board's members the programs we support include residential construction student auto sales and entrepreneurship i am happy to report to you tonight that we had a very exciting and fruitful year students returned to in-person learning at our construction site and we excelled in all our programs next slide please our residential construction program has been very successful to date we have sold 10 student build homes in

388spring village state residential construction program for a collective total of almost 8.8 million dollars our first house lot one sold in april 2010 for 750 000 dollars in july our 10th lot sold for 1 million 150 000 and lot 11 is anticipated to go on the market next month next slide please lot 12 construction is currently in progress the students participate in a variety of construction phases including electrical construction framing drywall and finishes next slide please in student auto sales vehicles are donated to the program we have 13 locations where vehicles can be donated to the program vehicles worth selling are repaired by students and are sold at our dealership at marshall academy either by walk-in buyers or sold on public auction site the sas program took a huge leap forward this past year 170

389vehicles were donated to the program as of april 2022 and 142 were sold surpassing 256 thousand dollars nearly 162 000 of the proceeds were returned to schools for program improvements tools and other needs to make the public aware of our student auto sales program we had one of the vehicles wrapped with sas advertisement as shown in this slide upper right hand corner periodically this vehicle travels to a different location to ensure exposure next slide please we had success in other areas too to allow students to develop a market day concept to create their own small business fade advances funds to school entrepreneurship programs state provided eight schools with seed money loans totaling fifteen thousand nine hundred dollars in school year twenty one twenty two next slide fade also contributes to career and training education program

390known as cte by providing grants cte teachers submit applications to fade for tools equipment and machinery that would benefit cte programs in the school year 2122 grants were awarded to chantilly high school marketing program to start a school-based business with their coffee kiosk and south lakes high school was awarded grant for their cyber security stem program i'm excited to report to you that the south lakes high school seahawks cyber program placed first in this state next slide please another way fate provides assistance to students is by awarding scholarships faith has awarded more than 313 000 in scholarships in the past 14 years to students to promote career and technical education for graduating seniors in the school year 2122 nine scholarships were awarded in the amount of one sixteen thousand five hundred dollars in three categories

391four one thousand tools scholarships one twenty five hundred dollar academic apprenticeship scholarship and four twenty five hundred dollar academic scholarships next slide please as with any endeavor there are challenges that we need to overcome to have a seamless transition from our phase two construction to phase three the biggest challenge fate faces is identifying the phase three residential construction sites in in six short years spring village states is scheduled to build out as viable sites for development are becoming increasingly scarce in fairfax county fate must work closely with the fairfax county board of supervisors the fairfax county school board and the leadership in fairfax county school schools to identify a property in fairfax county suitable for program to continue a that the faith board's board of directors is open to all ideas being universal design single

392family construction town homes or multi-family development ideally exploring parcels of 10 acres or more in size the site might must house the construction office and classroom support years of student learning and residential construction that provides for valuable learning opportunity for students and meets the needs of the greater fairfax county community next slide please in closing the faith board and fcps would like to recognize founding member and fake treasurer bucky white and congratulate him on his retirement but he has been a part of faith for more than 39 years lucky thank you very much for your dedication and support of students and fcps community madam chair thank you for your time tonight i will be happy to answer any questions that you or any other member may have thank you and i apologize we were just

393like oogling over the uh houses over here just talking about how amazing they were to me to interrupt you at the beginning but they are amazing the kids do a great job absolutely um we're going to go ahead and start by with miss corbett sanders thank you um you know this county first off i want to thank you for all you've done for fate it is such an amazing program and i beam every time i walk through one of those houses and i love telling the fate story to our community members and encouraging people to participate in the courses is just something we should be doing every day in each of our high schools actually in seventh grade we should start telling kids about it my big concern is one that you've raised for several

394years which is where do we go next with the challenges of space available but the flip side is this county has jointly supported the importance of investing in affordable housing so it seems to me that one of the things that we should be looking at is having a strong collaboration between fate and the affordable housing developers to say okay we're investing as a county as county taxpayers in townhouses in multi-family dwellings in single family dwellings in support of affordable housing why aren't we having some sort of structured approach that says you get the contract to build affordable housing but you need to have a piece of it where we're going to have our kids it may take a little longer but our kids are going to build one of the townhouses are killed have you

395looked at that the board has not explored specifically the affordable housing development it is indeed something that we can explore but in my opinion the bigger issue is the land regardless of what kind of a development we're going to have which as i mentioned we're open to any which way we we need to move forward as you know with with phase two that is under construction we switched after three or four lots to uh to universal design so we're we are sort of pliable we we can go many different directions but the the issue is finding the parcel of land that we can develop unless we want to get into redevelopment purchase something tear it down and then put something new now whether it's adus or condos or whatever that could be we we can

396explore all of that what i'm suggesting is the county has actually got land throughout the county where they're saying for example we're going to build a hundred townhouses here for affordable housing or you know all sorts of different configurations seems to me that if we could find a way of saying okay the affordable housing contractor is going to partner with fate and say this portion of this land that's being being developed for affordable housing we're going to give them that spot and they're going to build two houses or three houses of the hundred somehow kind of partnering because then there then the county taxpayer is getting a double investment they're getting investment in affordable housing which we desperately need across the county but they're also getting an investment in skills development for the next generation

397of workers in fairfax county so it is a double double benefit i agree with you that's just would love to see you guys go and talk to them about that and i'd be happy to introduce you to him if you want we will reach out to you mr frisch thank you and thank you for all that you've done uh this is one of my favorite presentations each year and you know it's a bit like hgtv fcps edition to that end i started going down that rabbit hole mentally and i thought of all these other opportunities that we have around this kind of work to engage students who may not have been interested in construction but might be interested in marketing or real estate for example do we do anything to consider you know bringing the

398marketing the kids who are in marketing classes in for the purposes of marketing not only the houses but the cars or um to work with the real estate agents that sell the houses or et cetera yes we've we've started having conversations about that there was a previous and it's been quite a number of years now but there used to be a real estate marketing course and it it kind of evolved over time into some other things but um it now is is coming back as an interest that students have and with the construction side and student auto sales it makes sense to look at how can we build that into some of our current marketing classes not as a standalone but as a built-in part of that class along with student auto sales along with

399interior design and some of the other pieces sustainability and energy and some of the other pieces that we can build in so looking at all of the other areas of cte that we can wrap into these projects absolutely even being more literal literal you know kids who are interested in broadcasting we could be filming you know make our own make their own hd tv shows there you know um and they could broadcast snippets on the different uh school systems around the the district um so short of being able to just hand over parcels of property which i think is a difficult uh you know path um in addition i wrote down affordable housing as well but perhaps there are commercial real estate opportunities as well that we might engage in um i don't know if

400do we have to own the property in order to gauge the work uh to the best of my understanding yes unless we want to change paths and get into partnership with other entities or i don't i don't mean to be negative but you realize it says residential construction so so if we want to go commercial which is fine being being a civil engineer in and consulting in this commercial is more fun than residential well it could even be something that's mixed use right i mean correct um we have lots of buildings going in that have many many units around fairfax county and if we're able to work with others maybe that's one way to consider you know either expanding laterally but still keeping the work going the construction committee [Music] within fate we have explored

401not explored disgust partnering with other entities perhaps the possibilities of but it's something that we we need to discuss with this border we can't just go on our own and do it okay i appreciate it thank you let's do an echo facts followed by miso mesh thank you all mr jabrie thank you for your presentation and thank you for your work with and partnership with our schools we greatly appreciate that um i uh too have always touted the major benefits of the fate house is always saying that this is the best hands-on experiential learning we have in our system um i have the first question because my favorite thing is to show off my colleagues i don't even know if this is in my district anymore with redistricting but it used to be and um

402it has to be my district still um so it's my district i'm just going to say that and i'm very proud of this accomplishment that you allow me to brag about and but are we going to have an open house this year with a new property i was actually waiting for you to finish lot 11 is we usually have the open house after we get our rope and that is coming up fairly shortly okay there are some final touches that we need to put to the house to pass the final inspection and all we are going to have an open house and i would like to invite everybody absolutely to show up we only had one individual with the last house yes i know [Laughter] and the year before only dr brabrand showed up so

403please feel free to show up we are not bad people we do not think you are bad we think you are extraordinary and amazing and um i think probably covet had much to do with that because i know i hadn't missed any up until then so if you'll make sure that we get this and my colleagues really this is something to behold and something to see and even then i know in the past i'm sure staff will help arrange this we we've had our culinary academies there mr frisch we've had photographers student photographers we've had a lot of those things so it is one of those things that particular day where many many um wonderful programming here at fcps is on display so ms corbett sanders and mr frisch thank you for sharing those thoughts

404about you know other opportunities we have been looking for lots i know for quite a while and anything this board can do to help you as miss corbett sanders stated you know there's lots of projects um that are out there and i'm not sure how that would mesh with the um you know working with a builder that the county is contracting with but you know we could find a way and um so i i look forward to continuing this because it is um you know i i will say i've met students um at now um lewis high school where this programming literally set them on a new path for their life and this is something that the parents told me i think the kids were even unaware of how much this has changed their trajectory

405but we have we have heard this from parents about how this was life changing for their student and tears of joy and happiness when these parents saw what their child was able to create and then had a career path as a result of this so i thank you again for your partnership we we welcome the phone calls to in any way we can help because one we want to continue this programming because it is an outstanding um thing which we provide for our students with your partnership thank you very much um your your help is always appreciated thank you so much mr jabori for joining us and for everyone who's been a part of this work uh obviously you know happy to follow my colleagues and and how uh exciting it is and inspiring really

406of how it can what it can do for children um i did want to ask what happens with the revenue of these projects where that goes and how that piece works um the revenues are split basically 50 50 50 of the proceeds that are sheer profit go to the school system and the other half stays with fate for expenses salaries or whatever they can then the next project interesting okay um yeah i know i i guess i in terms of you know potentially new projects etc is there have there been roadblocks to potentially working on even just school renovation projects or when it comes to the vehicle piece of the project we have plenty of fcps vehicles that need all kind of maintenance et cetera i assume this isn't the first time this is being

407raised so i'm curious as to we're certainly open to exploring all possibilities i think that that has definitely been a consideration in the past to look at our contracts and of course with mr plattenberg and and whoever is coming next to fill that seat we'll be happy to look at any opportunities there i think as mr jabori stated the the first choice is to continue with the program like what we have had because we truly can establish a classroom and a year's long residency if we own the land and can build out multiple sites and that allows the students who are in the program to see different phases of development on the different properties it doesn't have to be single family it doesn't have to be million dollar homes however but it is beneficial if

408we are able to stay in a location due to all that goes into establishing a site and getting the permits and then building the house and turning over the house for sale etc so certainly that's our first choice it's not our only path that we're pursuing across all of our career and technical education programs we are welcoming new partners who are interested in supporting internships and work experiences for our students so we'll be looking and we have a couple partners who are exploring opportunities now about how they could welcome students as early as the summer and next year so we have lots of different paths that that first choice for residential construction is to try to secure land that we can match in the same way that we have over the past two sites the

409first one in mclean and this one in springfield thank you for that were you trying to add something no i felt like you were itching over there no well i think there's other board members who want to speak so i'll save my remarks off to the end okay okay i wasn't putting you on the spot i thought you wanted to um yeah no i think that that would be an interesting place to explore where you know we can have students serving right the our school system as well um and finding relevance and learning through that uh i i also am wondering if you can help outline some of the roadblocks you've faced already perhaps in partnering with let's say the planning commission in the county who can incentivize you know various uh builders etc uh

410to to partner with you yeah if you could outline some of that would help us in in figuring out where we might be able to be useful sure so we started this program in mclean and i don't know the year i've lost my um my time frame there however we stayed there for years so we've done this new acquisition process exactly once after that and what we learned from that experience is it's about a 10-year process to try to make it all happen and now we're at six years so some of the roadblocks that we faced well the biggest one was kovid we we had to pause really partnering and seeking out because of other priorities and the challenges that we were facing throughout the pandemic so now we are on a more condensed time

411frame uh however before the pandemic what we were hearing is there is no land available there used to be land that might still be an option within the school division um and now there's not so we need to explore those other avenues as mrs corbett sanders raised um and if any of you have additional contacts or or ideas we're happy to explore offline with you as well yeah no i mean two that immediately came to mind in listening to the presentation one is you know the finance park situation that's supposed to be close to frost woodson there is a load of land that just sits there i don't know if you know that's a possibility i'm just pointing it out for you guys to scope um and it's a very uh ugly underdeveloped area so

412it could be you know you could do something there and the other was wilson i know one of my dr anderson actually always advocates for how this could be a school or something but it is a i don't want to say dilapidated but really getting there built community center um that maybe could be redone i don't know that's another possibility because it does serve as a cultural hub for a lot of subsets of our community but certainly from an infrastructure standpoint is nowhere near where it should be so i'm just naming those as possibilities and i was wondering just in terms of micro credentialing too what we've thought through and maybe what's possible uh i don't know if pmp etc is like too too much for what you're able to do but can you speak

413to that sure and whitney can jump in at any point here through our cte courses as you know we have a variety of industry credentials that are available to students and there are many available in fate supported programs so one of the biggest ones that's most transferable is osha the the safety certification which is available to our students in any of the trade and industrial courses we also have been working through partnerships with our adult and community education about some intro level uh property management courses or to that regard so it's a student can get exposure to a variety of different fields or then also get property management certification perhaps continuing through ace as far as the pmp we have considered that but we haven't brought that into the high school stage at this point

414and we're certainly open to other credentials that we can explore we do work very closely with vdoe and offer hundreds of credentials across our division they're not exactly micro credentials but they're industry certifications that can be transferable to work ready resume ready skills and experiences i'll just add connected to construction our electrical students have several levels of credentialing that they earn along with potentially a full year of an apprenticeship towards their electrical certification and our hvac students also earn certifications as well and then for student auto sales we actually just heard today of a student many of our students earn ase certifications but one particular student was able to earn six ase certifications which is the most that we've had a student earn in one year most of our instructors have eight so for a

415student to get six in one school year was pretty incredible and the student is trying to get all of the eight that the instructors get before he graduates so they definitely try and stack as many credentials as they can that are applicable to their classes yeah i know that's helpful and perhaps thinking through even beyond kind of the industry uh certifications you were sharing but you know employable um yeah things like the pmp but i just leave that to you and hopefully this conversation is useful in thinking through what's next but thank you all for everything you're doing miss marin followed by ms mclaughlin yeah hi thanks good evening i'm very pleased to be here and to hear the presentation having spent the year with with you all as the liaison to the career tech

416advisory committee of the school board so i'm no stranger to all the amazing work of fate and the other careertech programs um you've heard this before but i mean my only you know concern is that there's just not enough of it happening and um i know you would certainly like to see more of that happening and so um you know for k-pop i'm just wondering you know you said of course this is a residential program but you know when i see things like renovations happening at our schools and knowing that you know the faith program is in one part of the county that i drove to clear across the county for my constituent students you know in in the vein of the growth mindset that we try and teach our students could there be a

417role in supporting students in commercial construction and and i ask either because you know we have a lot of vacant office space and could that be the place where we outfit some of these programs and um when we have renovations could we as part of the rfp process and procurement put in there some provisions to have you know a portion of that renovation be all ocean compliant with our fcps educators and partners because otherwise how how are we going to get our students to more places with limited residential availability the time the traffic and the county so is it possible what do you think um again i emphasize that we at fate we are open to having a change in direction but what i would like to bring to everybody's attention is that this concept

418which started in the early 80s fade with the construction residential construction and all of that by we starting from scratch we expose the children to school students to different facets of construction this renovation for commercial and all it's it's a good way to keep things moving however we limit kids learning cur learning avenue to certain aspects they never see the foundation being poured they never see the framing of the house that it is fine to go that route but we we should in the back of our minds have in my opinion some means to get back or at least as alongside this renovation possibly work get into full aspects of construction ground up yeah i see what you're saying i think you know thinking about what is limiting i mean you know i could say

419well it's limiting because i don't know if i have any students from my part of the county that make it down to edison for the program so like how can we reframe what's limiting you know is it is it better that some that more students have exposure to electrical work than only a few and residential like i just wonder what your all good thinking could be in like what is the goal here is it to do the start to finish if that's the goal and that's that's the goal but is there another aspect of it where it's like okay well maybe if we want to increase the number of students who can get these certifications is that pathway going from foundation to you know paint or is it that more students you know do hvac

420do electrical you know do those things whether it's commercial or residential um in the early 80s when this program started my understanding from doing a bit of a research um you know phase one was a 16-lot single-family residential development phase two that we're in is an 18 lot thing the concept my understanding is that to expose the students to the whole nine yards of this thing uh we can't switch i'm not uh we don't we don't have any issues switching gears yeah no and i appreciate the struggle context i think i put this back to you all to you know what's the interest of you know your you know your partners and your partnership and the staff but also like you know 100 mill in vienna we have houses getting torn down all over the

421place and so how do we partner maybe with builders who there are occasions where maybe one house will go down and like seven will go up in their place so what can we do to set up some classrooms you know in places of the county where actually there there are you know expansions of residential so just you know again like i just i see these opportunities and i want to help broker the partnerships whether it's with the builders who are very invested in the community to just get more access to these really important opportunities uh we will definitely discuss this at the boards meeting okay and we'll report back to you okay so great thank you so much i just i love this program and i just want more students to take advantage of it

422so thank you and if you all put in a plug if anyone has any build builder connections who are seeking partnerships with student interns there are ways to build those out in different areas it is also time consuming and it's a different approach yet it's welcome we'd be happy to partner and get students those experiences and connections we also i wanted to mention i i do realize we have a very big county and we'll talk more about this in the ctec report and then later in august and the career pathways study report we want to think more about where our programs are located and how students are accessing them specifically with construction we do have a carpentry program in chantilly which has some availability of of certifications it's not the start to finish residential construction

423yet it does have elements that we can connect so it's also about marketing those different opportunities even if they're not the same in every location to connect students with similar interests to the ones that they can access geographically thanks miss mclaughlin yeah i just too wanted to express my appreciation uh nothing could be more important than really providing for fcps students this life-changing opportunity to develop career skills and the ability to pursue their own passions and even to introduce them to realizing passions they didn't even know they had so i know that this is a unique program and it takes a village to make it happen so i do want to express my appreciation again to fate all the people who make this partnership work so well and along with ms kofax we've been seeing

424and appreciating this for a long time on the board i just stand ready to continue to help support this and hope you know again that it's something we value deeply thank you for your compliment we can use your help all right well i also want to thank you um appreciate you being here tonight and for what you do for our students it is incredible and i i know many of us are now looking forward to coming out to the open house and um hearing where maybe some of these ideas of different avenues can take us so that we can continue to offer these opportunities for our students so thank you staff as well and we will hopefully see you very soon thank you very much thanks for your time i just wanted to wrap and

425say because this is my last time here when you present this is one of the best single things about fairfax county public schools i've ever seen in my life it is a national model an international model um and i just can't thank you enough and all the people who've served people walking off 30 years of service to this and and what what tammy said game changers for kid after kid it is it's willy wonka and the chocolate factory for for construction and we've got to figure out how we create more of those willy wonka experiences for these kids across the county and i'm confident we can do it but i've been in those houses i don't know how many of you as board members got to do it some of you i know have been

426on for a while it would blow your mind what those kids were able to do um you know by the way since we talked about hr and retention strategies maybe or school board supports right if we had these houses as part of teacher principal right i mean but it is unbelievable what you all have done and i just want to thank you again for your service and jen i've known you for a long time too your leadership um with all of this has just been phenomenal and i really do appreciate it and this is one of fcps's finest things so we will figure out a way we will i i stepped out and gave jeff planenberg a call and gave him 45 day instructions to see what we can do we've got to pull out

427the stops and come up with what the next plan is we've got to find 10 acres of land and we're going to find it there is karen yeah i didn't say where i just said talk to jeff so we're gonna figure it out thank you for your comment and uh sincerely thank you for your service thank you we appreciate you [Applause] another fave um and ask you to introduce yourselves to the board and everyone um and we look forward to the report thank you very much my name is dan amenov i'm the chair of fmac up here with me is um katie herman i'm from the mason district we have katie herman from the city of fairfax our secretary and chuck fanshaw a member from the braddock district and in the audience we have angela

428smalls uh who's at large um and okay yeah and the uh and the vice chair and then kathy hosek from the mount vernon district um is back there as well so we'll do a brief um presentation and then we'll we'll open it up for for questions for everybody so uh we did have quite a busy year um we'll briefly go over the um membership i don't know if this thing says you have to do it for us okay the membership the report organization the annual charge our recommendations and a couple conclusions first on the next slide is is a list of our current members um we did have uh five new members this year and we can see them up here ah there we go perfect um one from each district we have three at-large

429members and a member from the city of fairfax the report is organized as it has been in years past with an executive summary which goes over the most significant recommendations groupings of all 15 recommendations with references to location in the report and then that's followed by a detailed report that includes the significant findings more detail on the recommendations and then the detailed annual report and it goes through our activities for the year our charge for this year was to continue to work with staff and build and work in the following areas that you can see here on the screen and in connection with long range vision a couple of the significant findings that we had were assess underutilized real estate assets in fairfax county to determine which may provide an opportunity for adaptive reuse or

430redevelopment which goes along with with the topic you just discussed about perhaps there are some opportunities with the county and using some land for such projects as fate we view the classic academic divisions by current and future facility inventory and technology to help create an alignment between student outcomes and school capacity um we're you know we're school board is currently looking at the makeup of mason district and its sixth seventh and eighth configuration um and whether that continues to make sense or not or maybe there are some alternatives um what we say in the report is you know maybe we do need to look at some additional configurations such as kings glen king's park and some other you know upper bailey's upper lower baileys and some other things that may not be traditional having a

431full k through six in a school but maybe some other configurations that make sense given the assets that we have available this is one that maybe chuck can talk to a little bit and that is revising the internal budgeting rules to allow for more funds received from community use to go directly towards facility maintenance and this is a problem we've talked about for several years where we have our school buildings are probably used more for community use than they are for actual education and the county and whoever is using the schools you know doesn't necessarily pay their fair share of the wear and tear on the buildings um we we talk about in the report where we think we can you know there's a way not only to use some of the community use fees

432but there's some some energy savings activities that we can do within a building that will lead to certain savings that we would like to be able to roll over into the next project and do this on a rolling basis throughout the county and then also review organizational structures that can better integrate the design and construction and planning teams with operating operations and maintenance you know this is really more of a an organizational chart type thing within jess group just assuring that everyone's talking to each other and that planning is taking place amongst all the various divisions in in his group moving on to major maintenance and asset management we recommend that cps continue its engagement with fpac uh as the false church high school renovation moves forward we had an opportunity this year to go

433to falls church high school and take a tour and really get behind the scenes before they really start coming in and doing a lot of the renovation work what we'd like to do is track that through the renovation process and just see how that goes and how things evolve over time so um we're hoping with uh justin moss's and the people that are doing the actual you know renovation work that we'll have some opportunities while the renovation is going on to get in and and see what's being updated we recommend that scps perform an updated comprehensive facility assessment using industry standard criterion benchmarks this is something we've advocated for a couple years and that fcps include the full breadth of operations maintenance and construction costs and all funding sources in in future cips [Music] the

434cip tends to focus strictly on on the use of the bond funds but a huge component of the maintenance of the facilities is included in the operating budget so when you if you only have half the story it doesn't necessarily make total sense to the to the user um moving on to um facility resiliency um this is this is a topic that we kind of picked up uh kind of at the onset of the pandemic and it was um to be sure our facilities are are the most efficient and that provide you know a safe and secure environment for for our students not only from a health and safety standpoint but just everything so we recommend that fcps provide additional funding to environmental programs to achieve future benefits specifically for get to green and jet

435initiatives um you know the the jet in initiatives um are uh fairly substantial and you know with the existing staff that's on hand um it's going to be challenging to to fulfill those unless we actually really have an office that's in charge of some of these sustainability things so i know you guys have talked about advocating for an office of something but you know we we highly recommend that uh to the school board and that the fcps ensure their red specs are updated with the latest innovations for furniture solutions outdoor learning spaces emotional health space and gender neutral bathroom facilities um the specs tend to to change as the next project comes up and we just want to be sure that each project is always using the latest and greatest things that have evolved and

436jeff's group does does a great job keeping up with that moving on to some boundary policies and processes we recommend that fcps stand up a task force of staff stakeholder holders councils and committees to perform a holistic wide look at the current boundaries in the report we include a timeline over the next 10 years that we feel the county should really undertake in connection with this culminating with the opening of western high school that's been in the cip for a few years and you know if it all goes according to plan we'll come online but the time to really think about how that school might affect boundaries all over the county we recommend really coming up with the timeline now to do different things along the way so when it comes time to decide who's

437going to go into that school um it's it's pretty straightforward dr bray ran as always recommended if you're going to do a boundary change set a marker you know 10 years out and say this is what we're going to do so the sooner people have to plan for that the better it is for for the whole community um the other thing that's that's kind of been a big thing this year is to talk about uh completing work on a comprehensive communication plan as proposed by cpdc and supported by occr um cpdc has spent a lot of time this year developing a communication plan in connection with various projects you know they have engaged with occr there's a timeline and a template in connection with that and we just you know want to be sure that

438that gets completed according to the timeline so that um whatever uh the school board has to go out to the county in connection with the development whether it be just a 2232 type thing or whether it's a rezoning or something more substantial there's a communication plan in place with all of that and then of course there's still the outstanding issue of updating the boundary policy and the criteria associated with doing a boundary change and um one of the items on the charge this year was to review fpac's charter and self-evaluation we were so busy with everything else we spent a little bit of time on this but we're gonna request that we continue this on until until next year and finally we do propose a charge for the next school year which is to continue

439to develop the long-range vision for school facilities additional major maintenance assist with the development of the updated boundary policies and assess how scps can incorporate and evaluate the joint economic task force goals to achieve greater energy efficiency and environmental sustain sustainability throughout the facility that's pretty much it um we would like to thank of course our our school board liaison this year uh ms tolen and we really appreciate her engaging with us at our meetings all year so thank you very much thank you um we already have a few people ready to speak miss mclaughlin followed by mr frisch great uh first one to thank every member of fpac for your incredible expertise and your tireless work on to help improve fcps it's greatly appreciated i do want to give a special shout out to

440my appointee chuck fanshawe because chuck as many of you might be aware stepped in for charles hickey who served for more than a decade and hooky sorry about that and it is just fantastic chuck the two bring your extensive experience in facilities work both for our country and our nation and your work that you did overseas as well as just throughout your career so it's uh wonderful to see the braddock district working alongside dan again at the at the helm um i do want to really impress upon um fpak that i i believe your role is more crucial than ever we have suffered as a school system ever since the recession in our annual maintenance and infrastructure needs and uh now we don't know what is on the horizon for uh the economy in our

441in our country so we may be facing some challenges along the way your recommendations absolutely capture i think at a high level and so if we could bring that slide back um i just want to use it as a reference point um there we go oh yep just that last one there uh next one uh it was the very last one that i saw where it said the jet and and yeah you're charged for next year uh-huh so well then i'll focus on your charge for next year because that's really where my comments are going um so there is no doubt um that as we look at the challenges we have for the cost to build new schools um the fact that we have some schools that are under capacity schools that are over capacity

442uh the fact that we want to have boundaries that are logical i feel very strongly and passionately about neighborhood schools i think that um it has shown to be a strong attraction um not just in fairfax county but elsewhere but we don't have logical boundaries and everybody knows that for some of them but most importantly i would say if if as you look at that bullet number two um looking at again major maintenance and asset management that you all could bring back to our board what really is the cue because uh i've been meeting with and talking with my schools and it's everywhere from baseball um facilities to softball facilities what's happened when some schools got renovated and they ran out of um you know funding and so the entire school campus didn't get the

443renovation that maybe another one did we know construction costs are an all-time high and i'm hearing that current schools particularly high schools that are doing the construction they are facing the problem of you know having to cut corners or maybe not to be able to do the full renovation and schools shouldn't be punished because of the year that they came in so i'll need to go back but um i i do as you can hear really want to lean on you guys even more than ever sounds good thanks thank you um so getting off of the slideshow for a second i want to dig in on the report a little bit and talk about community use on page 24 of the report you go into a good amount of detail about assessing the actual cost

444of community use to the school system looking at the water used by community use the electricity the wear and tear etc to help come up with an idea of whether or not and i would advocate that they probably should uh community use fees should increase to help pay for those things if memory serves me right and you all can correct me if i'm wrong our fees are a bit lower than most people in the region that's correct in fact cpdc was was doing some work in connection with that earlier this year and there is a chart um in one of the committee meetings uh that provides a comparison between the the jurisdictions in the area so one of the things that's asked for in here is a a plan for recording this information so that

445we can have an assessment of the actual cost and i am one thousand percent in favor of that um you know we have the backlog of maintenance requests in our system and this contributes to that problem you know i think it is wonderful that we bring the community into our schools in fact uh many of our renovations now are built in such a way to encourage community use in a way that's not uh you know letting them into the full school etc if we're going to continue to do that and i think we should then we need to make sure that we are not you know um doing it in a way that puts us at a disadvantage so i applaud the work that's been done on that and i will talk with colleagues in

446the weeks ahead about how we can further that that goal thank you very much ms tolin followed by miss corbett sander yes so good to see you guys tonight once again i'm so happy to be working with you this year um i i just felt very quickly on the community use things cpdc did do some work on that so staff prepared a report for them last year and um we also our audits our auditor general did a review of community use procedures at least so we have that document as well so we have some good work going on there that you know we can certainly provide to you and look at you know next steps maybe to look at where to go from here um i just wanted to ask a little bit more about

447um what you're thinking about doing as you're monitoring the renovation of falls church like what are you thinking about looking at you know what are you going to be analyzing what do you want to see what do you want to do with that information chuck do you want to address a couple of those items i can i can try but if you know something off the top of your head that'd be great okay um we're not sure to be honest with you um but it's it's an opportunity for us to see how how things are going i think we're um you know we had a chance to look at the systems and i think what we want to do is see um how how those systems are replaced what they're replaced with how efficient they

448are um you know there's you know control systems things of that nature we just want to see basic we really just want to observe and see how it's done and what you know what a brand new renovated high school looks like you know uh before and after yeah i mean i think having it you know i the level of expertise on fpac is incredible so it might be kind of nice to have another set of eyes taking a look at it so we'll continue that discussion as you're over the years of the renovation um also we do have staff are starting to work on a new renovation queue so you know that's come up a little bit um so it will be interesting to see i think you know initially we've talked about this as

449we're developing the criteria for the renovation queue you know we'll want to keep you guys you know up to speed on that and what's happening there and you know have any comments or anything that um you have along the way i think we would appreciate that yeah and i'm i'm hoping you know that there's an rfp in the works somewhere coming soon um and i just wanted to ask you i don't want to put you on the spot but we do have a new assistant superintendent of you know facilities coming on board and given where you guys sit and the myriad of topics that you've been discussing what's recommendations might you make to this new person what are the first couple of things you want them to take a look at uh thank you for

450that question um you know that that the portfolio of the assistant superintendent for facilities is is huge um they run the what one of the largest bus systems in the country um they probably have uh i don't know over 200 something facilities they're responsible for they have any number of construction projects underway at any given time so it's it's a you know it's jeff it's huge shoes to fill for sure but um i think if um if the new person comes in and and you know has the sustainability um piece top of mind as well as um you know working on on creating energy efficiency in this community use piece i mean i think those are our big things that you know jeff has done a great job getting us to the point and i

451think now we're ready to to actually do things with that so um you know if i had an opportunity to meet with with the new superintendent we'd probably have about five or six different things that we'd recommend you look at first awesome sounds good is that my time thank you and it's always good to see you every year um and i thank the ladies of mount vernon for all you do for fpac it's greatly appreciated so one of the areas that you have here there are two areas i want to talk about but one is on the long range long-range vision for fcps's school facilities and you've also indicated that the importance of monitoring the development of falls church high school both are tied to the sustainability goals of fairfax county and the wish to

452have green schools i note in your report that you talk about the importance of building on our work to develop a long-range vision for fcps school facilities i'd like to better understand how where solar fits into it and the commitment to carbon neutrality because it's my understanding that we are still stumbling in getting solar deployed even on annandale high school so i'd like to know where we're at on annandale where we're at in falls church and other buildings um to reach our net neutrality goals sure you know i can't give you the specifics about where we are necessarily on annandale um i do know that all the renovations now are um making the buildings solar ready whatever that means um but um and then in terms of the financing for the solar uh i haven't

453delved into it too deeply but it sounds like it's like a public-private partnership that maybe the county's involved with and there may be some uh you know issues in connection with that i don't know if that's the only way it can be done or not but certainly i think you know the group will tell you that you know over time you know it's probably revenue neutral in some way whatever the expense is versus you know whatever the benefit will get over time so we we highly encourage um solar and whatever other kind of alternative fuel sources can be used so i think it will be important when you look at that long-range vision to incorporate the jet goals and really put an emphasis in the ed specs to get us to that um i can

454tell you i put solar on my home and i'm paying just the maintenance fee of having a connection every month the solar is covering all of the cost so we really should follow through on the commitment of the previous board and this board on going solar at a quicker pace than we are today secondly we know that there are large developments and expected growth both in the western side of the county and on the eastern side of the county and we're kind of squeezing it into the middle i know that um just along the route one corridor there's over 12 11 500 students projected uh in a short term time frame you have some language here on boundaries i think it would be very helpful for this board to better understand what you would like

455to see what approach you would have would recommend to a new superintendent and assistant superintendent to address capacity issues and boundaries i too support community schools but when i talk about community schools i actually want to make sure that the communities surrounding a school or actually attending that school and not having in my case i have students who bypass multiple schools to get to the school that they go to based on our bus routes i think long-term sustainability actually ties into that absolutely we'll we'll definitely look at that in connection with you know these areas that are building out and growing you know it's not just tyson's it's it's you know the embark project it's um you know there's there's crazy things going on in westfield they're converting a lot of that commercial space now

456to um uh housing so uh you know place deal they're changing the airport contours and they're squeezing in whatever they can in terms of of development so absolutely we need to look at that we we would yes we will we will yes we will come back with a a projection and uh and what we think should be done in connection with that ms eisenheiser great um thank you for the support and for and for all your time that you put into this this is always um very informative i wanted just to bring up a couple things i really like your recommendation in terms of looking at space to reflect our needs and looking at unique spaces as well um one and you know i really appreciate you mentioning king's glad in king's park that was

457actually my kid's school so i'm very familiar with that model and i think it's important that we look at i know you mentioned mason district in the sixth grade in middle school and it's important to look at all of our unique structures our secondary schools for example like robinson and lake braddock which was seventh through 12th and um look at that in connection with when we're looking at new programs that we bring into place or policies like middle school recess for example how does middle school recess look in a facility made for middle schoolers and high schoolers right and um how does your middle school recess look for example in a facility that may be situated on a busy road and we so i think having that intention more intentional conversations between fpak and maybe

458cpdc is the the you know venue to do that with you know in discussing our policies would be very beneficial to me i think going forward i mean you know miss toll and i brought a forum topic for a program review for example to look at our programming and i've talked to my um fpac um appointee john keegan who is one of your new members this year about really using your expertise and looking at how does our programming impact capacity right and how should we look at our programming from a facilities perspective so i would just love that feedback or some thoughts on that um you know next year i won't put you on the spot but just something to think about is i think you know and then how do we look at our

459renovations given our unique spaces and unique needs i think ms mclaughlin really brought up a good point where some schools um were renovated but then ran out of funds i know at lake braddock they always call the theater the little theater and rumor has it that at some point they were supposed to have built a big theater all right and they never did so the theater is called the little theater i don't know if that's true that might be a you know a you know a tale whatever but you know i just wonder right is there space to go back and look at some of our renovations and say in comparison to what's done somewhere else and say this is still a need for this school versus that i think those are interesting things to

460think about as we move forward and i love that you brought up community use because sometimes i think it's starting to impact as we think about community use impacts how we plan for renovations right if communities using our buildings that much how do we plan to make sure but also plan to make sure that our number one priority is educating our students and our facilities are so i think these are all tensions that we can discuss through fpac and use your expertise and other than throwing a bunch of things for you to think about i don't really have much else to share but i just there's just thought that i've had that i think as we're looking at our cap and we're looking at our instructional programming and even having more conversation between fpac and

461our instructional folks right as they're rolling out new things i think would help inform our decision making so thank you for the work you do thank you for listening to me sort of spitball off the top of my head and i appreciate all your time thank you very much we'll capture all that mr mash yeah thank you and uh thank you dan chuck katie katie and angela right yeah for all your hard work um i know it can be frustrating at times when you probably see where we should be headed and and things move slowly in a system this big but um i i guess in in taking a look at your report and presentation one of the things that stood out to me and i just want to make sure i'm kind of my

462hunch is correct but there are so many recommendations because there are so many things you're asked to look into um you kind of have the whole kitchen sink of of issues to um you know oversee and then the question becomes okay well why is there not so much movement around each piece and and specifically to me it's the boundary policy that i keep coming back to where we've had the consultants come and they've presented and we've had these conversations since we've started as a board and nothing has been adopted yet um so that leads me to um i guess i just want to pose this to you all as i've been synthesizing some of this you know with cpdc i know that we've been having conversations around your charge and whether that should be narrowed

463how you know what should be the focus um and then the planning commission has all kinds of complaints that on their of their own about the public engagement side are we talking to them how innovate how far in advance etc and then there's you guys of course and uh and then staff jeff's team so i i was starting to think like do we need perhaps some kind of project manager or someone who is collaborating amongst these various groups there's you guys as fact there's cpdc there's a planning commission in the county and then there's staff who's just kind of that gives that longevity and then is is looking at that bigger picture i don't know if you guys have given that thought if it would be useful because there i mean there are conversations happening

464in silos at this point and yeah yeah i mean i certainly sent your frustration in connection with that i mean i i don't know that it's something that fc fpa could take on in terms of any sort of project management type position but um there are there's just a lot that goes on um you know any given year with regard to um you know all the various priorities um you know maybe you know a lot of these goals ultimately lead to to achieving these jet goals and some of these environmental and you know i haven't talked about this necessarily in this tollen but i mean i think having somebody that's kind of in that position that's kind of supervising those uh you know their charge is going to be to get to this point by

4652030 or whatever it is um and that person's going to have to be a project manager so i think maybe if you know if we can get to the point where we can get that person in place that person can maybe drive a lot of these things that all eventually roll into that whole concept yeah colleagues i mean i think i just want to make sure everybody heard that because long term and how we're dealing with facilities i think we all know it's just been untenable and you know we're not we're not um improving at the pace that we need to be to to actually end up where we would hope in in the next 10 or plus years so i think some kind of project manager to dance point might be useful to consider

466um and then i also wanted to ask just in terms of y'all's observations uh around two things one the public engagement piece my feel is that you guys might be limited as to what you're hoping to do or would like to do uh yeah go ahead on that first yeah i mean i certainly we feel that it's it's a critical component to have um given you know some of the issues that that have taken place with with the planning commission and uh some of the projects uh you know the justice edition uh the false church renovation um know i don't know that fpak can necessarily assist with that other than just say we really think you guys should have a plan about how this is going to happen and it needs it needs to involve

467you know all the stakeholders like you know ms corbett sanders said she's got people that live across the street from a school that have no kids in that school but yet they're affected by what happens at that particular school but they don't really have a voice right now because they don't have any connection to the school other than they live across the street so um so yeah exactly right dude yeah sure sure whether it's their real estate investment or you know or kids yeah so uh you know so we feel you know so there has to be a method to reach those people as well as the student community and the parent community and those type of people yeah no i mean dr ray brandt i know in cpdc we've talked about like helen being

468a part of some of the outreach just in terms of putting in place uh almost like a rinse and repeat kind of thing with facilities decisions what is the public engagement procedure you know and we have some of it in policy actually around like the monopoles and specific boundary changes but i think expanding that is going to be crucial uh and and lends to kind of what they're concerned about and have articulated here yeah go ahead martin i know that uh helen and her team have pulled together a communication plan uh specifically around our facilities projects and we're working very closely with the facilities team and we'll be bringing that forward to the board so we are we're on top of that and a lot of that has come through uh our public engagement committee

469great no thank you you're refreshing my memory actually cpdc has that coming up for a conversation so that's um that's great and then finally just in terms of any observations you guys have had over the course of the last two years in terms of how covet has maybe impacted things and things to continue to look out for um from your vantage point for facilities if at all i mean i think there's a few recommendations in our report that we speak to one in the long range vision is to not lose sight of the lessons learned and some of the positives that have come out of virtual learning and how how fcps was able to quickly migrate to a virtual learning environment may be beneficial for some specific programs across the k-12 maybe that's already being

470looked into here at fcps i'm we're not sure because we don't deal a lot with programs but that whole virtual learning component and how that could evolve and what that means for facilities to assist in that kind of programming is worth i believe we believe it's worth looking into and then in terms of ventilation we had a piece there that you know has evolved from our last report for the 2020 to 2021 year and um the outdoor learning i think environments i think though that's an area in which we would recommend continued eyes and funding for for many different facets for curriculum aspect for student mental health because i think most of us get have a relaxation aspect and a mind ease when out with nature learning about nature so how can we facilitate that

471in sure it's not just in the facility but it's on the school campus and then making sure that those that those opportunities are distributed more equitably and equally across the regions so we've got a few pandemic-esque type things sprinkled through the report um so i would recommend but those are my kind of three those are yeah i think those are kind of the major ones okay thank you thank you we have a number of go backs starting with miss mclaughlin so you know again i just i wanted to kind of get a sense from you guys on the bandwidth of of what you you all are doing and and in consideration for next year's um charge because there as i said there were four bullets there and those alone are very meaty topics so um

472how do you envision being able to tackle um such an ambitious focus for the next year well we'll do it you know as as we pretty much always have where we'll we'll kind of you know break up into subgroups and subcommittees and and each kind of focus on a particular topic um we'll um you know a couple of them are carryovers so that we're not starting from scratch um you know the jet one and some of the sustainability thing is newer so i think we'll have to get up to speed to some extent on that but um you know our group is highly active and very engaged so they you know enjoy putting in the time and you know meeting the people asking the questions so i think i think we'll get it done i

473think you know to your question it's very broad and i think we've tried to start to narrow things down this year and i think we've teed some things up that to kind of give you the clue that we're going to look multi-year at some of these things uh so i think we're at a starting point on on quite a few issues um and with the folks that we work as we work together um i see us kind of extending that and and trying i mean maybe drilling into things a little deeper um so i mean that's our intention i i want to emphasize something that um ms tollin cited i mean uh mr plattenberg's been here at the helm almost throughout my tenure on the school board so you know he's he carries incredible institutional

474knowledge and fortunately he's only going essentially across the street to the city of fairfax so you know he can't go too far but i i do think that fpac is going to also play a very vital role as we onboard a new assistant superintendent in that realm and i'm going to put my other plug in here that i've said the office of facilities management and our office of transportation are two massive enterprises and mr plattenberg knows i've advocated for considering that those become two departments with two heads and i plant that seed in your minds as well thank you we we had kind of a recommendation to that effect that that we do feel that you know because they're so large there could be they tend to be siloed so you know one may not

475know what the other is doing so um you know maybe that's the solution to making that work better thank you again miss tollin followed by ms corbett sanders i just wanted to let everyone know um you know this corporate center has asked a couple questions about the solar at annandale and so mr frisch and i met yesterday was that just yesterday that was another multi-hour meeting with our jet staff and the county and went through um you know each of our you know work areas and conservative updates so we will be bringing you know an abbreviated update to the board on thursday night but um staff was actually meeting today with one of our vendors for the annandale project and we do have the next step on that project is a communication and communication to

476the public about what's happening what's coming and in addition um you know we're looking at maybe canopy solar at mount vernon and so we want communication around that so that communication plan has also just been drafted so we are making progress i'll bite slowly but um we'll have an update on that for everybody tomorrow actually um one of the exciting things and i think it goes well with your bullet that you had there regarding these sustainability goals is a look at metrics we had a serious conversation about that yesterday with county staff and of cps staff you know what the metrics will be so all right out of time on that um more to come thursday night thank you thank you mr owen so ms toland i appreciate the update on the solar um the

477approach using solar canopies versus solar on buildings is something that actually we probably should build into our ed spec and i don't think it has been yet so i would love to have you all's input on it and the other piece is that we actually have never gone out to the community and um and talked about a solar canopy at mount vernon high school um and so prior to installing a solar canopy which actually has a has in fact impact on the view shed and other aspects of a facility i do think that we have to have some sort of structure in place to ensure that we have public engagement on these initiatives because absolutely i i just worry that we end up having um people not being as supportive as we want them to

478be and so we whatever we can to do that and also as part of the facilities planning having a portion of our facilities in our academies that can provide the education associated with the jet um jet goals of career and technical education such as building solar panels or installing solar panels building solar panels all sorts of that those assembly of um opportunities i hope you have it let me have it i saw mr frisch just put his very quickly uh agreed uh with everything that missed olin said about the path moving forward including community engagement i will say that the last time i visited my family i drove past my high school and the parking lot was covered in canopies and it was pretty cool and it told me that they took it seriously and

479part of that is the communication to the community about why that's a uh one of the paths that we take when we are looking at uh cutting our energy usage and i would note that it's not just about looking great and doing great we save eight million dollars a year um through the energy savings that we already do and that's money that goes right back into the classroom so the more of this that we do the more money we save the more goes back into our schools all right thank you thank you mr frisch i love that that is definitely your uh signature line um i i will just say thank you for the detailed report and um concerning the community use fees that was a conversation that did actually come up in our school

480board cpdc committee and we had when i was on it last year and we had just started talking about this and looking into it and maybe diving a little bit deeper uh and i will follow up i'm no longer on that committee and um ms tolin are you on it this year okay um i don't know where that has gone karen but but i think that's something we should follow up to kind of see where that has landed um and i will be doing that because i do have some interest around this so i want to thank you uh very much and i don't know how but we finished on time yeah that is impressive and i will let you um offer some closing words thank you we'd uh you know this is probably our

481last meeting with with you know jeff involved and and really we um you know from from working with him when he first came back as the assistant superintendent through now moving on to be a superintendent we really want to thank him for all his uh his work with with the school district with fpac and and everyone on his staff so we really appreciate it and then we dr bray band just stepped out but we'd like to wish him a fun farewell as well so well we appreciate all your time and work this is always very informative have a good evening thank you you