FCPS School Board Meeting - 09/23/2021

001this september 23rd 2021 regular meeting of the fairfax county school board will now come to order please rise for the pledge of allegiance followed by a moment of silence in a performance of the national anthem by the herndon high school chamber orchestra under the direction of alison devereux to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Music] [Applause] thank you herndon that was wonderful agenda item 2.02 certification of closed meeting compliance in order to comply with section 2.2-3712-d of the code of virginia thank you it is necessary for the board to certify that since the fairfax county school board convened a closed meeting on september 23 2021 and to the best of each member's knowledge only

002public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board during the closed motion closed meeting is there a motion move my miss corbett sanders seconded my missile mesh all those in favor dr anderson miss marin miss tollen miss mclaughlin mr nat koufax massimo heiser miss cohen mr frisch miss keys gemara miss miss corbett sanders and myself that motion passes agenda item 2.03 announcement if you would like to review a copy of this agenda and any agenda item that is being discussed tonight that information may be found at the back of the auditorium or on the website at fcps.edu [Music] school board board docs tonight's meeting is being broadcast on channel 99 and

003live streamed on the website at fcps.edu tv slash ch99 a reminder masks must be worn by everyone in attendance this evening pranav shoutery our student representative is also absent this evening item 5.02 recommended changes to the strategic governance manual regarding the process for bringing additional recognitions and resolutions has been removed from tonight's agenda at the request of a board member and i would also like to remind everyone that when school board members go to the back of the room there is a tv available and they are able to follow what is happening during the school board meeting agenda item 2.04 recognition of whitman middle school's 60th anniversary i call him miss corbett sanders for the recognition thank you madam chair and i am so thrilled to be able to make this recognition because i attended

004walt whitman middle school when i was in eighth grade [Applause] not quite 60 years ago though walt whitman middle school proudly celebrates 60 years of educating and nurturing the children of mount vernon it opened on september 5th 1961 with an enrollment of 1066 students at the site of the old mount vernon road that is now mount vernon high school in 1973 it was decided that the original location would be better suited for mount vernon high school so whitman traded places with the high school moving to richmond highway location which is now known as the original mount vernon high school with the closing of fort hunt high and the merger of stephen foster and bryant intermediate schools in 1985 whitman was moved again to its present location on sherwood hall lane when it opened whitman was

005one of the first original 11 intermediate schools in fairfax county public schools intermediate schools were created to ease the transition from elementary school to high school by providing students with a specialized program of study geared to the specific needs of their age group in the 1990s intermediate schools were renamed as middle schools to better reflect a focus on nurturing student growth academically socially and personally whitman middle school's mission calls for collective responsibility and collab collaboration with peers parents and community members to create a positive respectful culture that sets high expectations achievable goals and a pathway to success for all students whitman middle school's dedicated teachers inspire students to discover and pursue opportunities as they become innovative and productive global citizens the staff and administration of whitman share the beliefs that all students can learn and

006that diversity is a strength in creating a resilient open-minded community of learners the school has implemented many innovative programs practices and strategies to address the school's changing demographics and students with special needs whitman is an international baccalaureate middle years program and supports a thriving avid program and in whitman became fcps's first community school the broke the program's goal is to leverage community resources combining them with an integrated focus on academics health and social services youth and community development and community engagement to lead to improved student learning stronger families and overall healthier community and i would like to just let everybody know that i share the responsibility or the responsibility for walt whitman school middle school with miss daranak kofax and i cannot imagine a better partner on the highway to ensure that walt whitman gets

007the supports that is necessary and appropriate for the world-class school that it is so i would like to welcome whitman middle school principal craig herring whitman middle school staff and anyone else who is here in support of the recognition to please join both ms daranak kofax and i at the dyess for a photo with the board [Applause] before we move on to the next agenda item i do see that we have a former school board member in attendance miss elizabeth schultz and i want to recognize her this evening thank you for joining us agenda item 2.05 resolution honoring charles charlie hooky columnist mclaughlin for the resolution thank you miss picarski um this evening i am extremely honored to read a resolution honoring charles hooky who is a long-time member of the f-pac the facilities and

008planning advisory committee that advises the fairfax county school board whereas mr charles hookey has served on the fairfax county school board facilities planning advisory council with dedication for 10 years and for the last eight years as its council secretary and whereas thoughtfulness and envisioning have been instrumental in fulfilling the facilities planning advisory council mission to provide accurate timely and relevant advice to the fairfax county school board for the development of strategic comprehensive and long-term plans for educational support facilities and whereas mr hooke's leadership on the long-range planning subcommittee has immeasurably helped fairfax county public schools plan for new and renovated facilities boundary adjustments and emergency preparedness and whereas mr hooke developed a facilities planning advisory council orientation for new members and graciously hosted the new member orientation with his signature chocolate chip cookies and whereas

009the success of the facilities planning advisory council can in part be tied to something that mr hookey had advocated for now therefore be it resolved that the fairfax county school board extends its highest commendation and deepest appreciation to mr charles hooky and thanks him for his outstanding service and dedication to the fairfax county school board its students families and community members iso move is there a second second by ms cohen ms mclaughlin would you like to speak to your resolution i would um as many of us who've lived in fairfax county for a very long time we know that one of the most amazing treasures we have in this county is our residents who bring a wealth of expertise and their willingness to serve and help strengthen and improve our community and i can't think

010of a better resident citizen and community member than to be able to honor mr hooky here tonight when i joined the board ten years ago uh you had been serving under my predecessor miss tessie wilson and i was so grateful that uh you came from the braddock district and it just continued to represent the very best that we have to offer here in this county i know it has been long long hours long days weeks months and years and with every passing year you continue to bring such passion and energy and devotion to making this the one of the most important advisory councils that we have really come to rely upon so on behalf of the fairfax county school board the braddock district community i just want to personally convey to you mr hooky how

011deeply grateful i am for everything that you've done and i hope that we will continue to stay connected with one another best wishes to you as you begin your new journeys and your new adventures thank you miss cohen would you like to speak to your second absolutely um i had the great fortune of getting to serve with charlie on fbak for two years his deal for making fcps the best that it can be for all of our students was evident in every single thing that he did um from pushing for us to look at capacity issues facility issues like hvac and ed green initiatives and design justice you have always made fpak a better place by being there and your absolutely infectious smile that starts with a twinkle in your eyes and your wit and

012your dedication will absolutely be missed so thank you for everything that you have done fairfax county is a better place because of you thank you i will now call for the vote all those in favor please raise your hands dr anderson miss maron miss toland miss mclaughlin ms theron kofax besides my heiser miss cohen mr frisch miss keys gamora miss omesh miss corbett sanders and myself that vote is unanimous at this time mr hookey i would like to invite you and family friends to come join the board for a photo and thank you again for your service [Applause] agenda item 2.06 voter registration resolution and i call on ms tolen for that recognition thank you whereas voting is the most important civic responsibility of united states citizens and is the cornerstone of our democracy and

013whereas a virginia law requires every public high school to provide opportunities for eligible students to register to vote during the school day and national voter registration day is september 28th and whereas the ethical and global citizen attribute of the saps portrait of a graduate is an expectation for all students that includes understanding and valuing the rights privileges and responsibilities associated with the united states and schools are committed to developing students who will exercise those rights and responsibilities as citizens and whereas civic education contributes to the development of engaged citizens and increases the likelihood of future participation in voting providing information to students about voter registration voting procedures when and where to vote and how to become informed about election issues prepares students to exercise their voting rights and whereas young people who are registered to

014vote participate in numbers close to the participation rate of older voters voting is habit-forming when young people exercise their voting rights they are likely to become lifelong voters exercising their duties and responsibilities as citizens and now therefore be it resolved that the fairfax county school board recognizes the efforts of the league of women voters of the fairfax area the fairfax county office of elections fairfax county council of ptas and the fcps social studies team and teachers who provide voter registration opportunities and nonpartisan information about voting to eligible students and therefore be it further resolved that the fairfax county school board will support and recognize schools that make significant contributions to student voter registration and voter education this recognition is sponsored by the league of women voters of the fairfax area and the fairfax county council

015of bta's iso move is there a second second seconded nightmare not kofax ms tolen would you like to speak to your resolution yes yes please the league of women voters of the fairfax area and the fairfax office of elections have provided voter registration assistance to fairfax county public schools for more than 10 years four years ago these efforts increased with the assistance of the fairfax county council of ptas during the 2018-2019 school year approximately 6 000 students registered to vote through their efforts due to the pandemic we were not able to track the number of students registered during the 2019-2020 and 2020-21 school years but the office of elections estimated that the registration numbers were similar to previous years during the last school year when volunteers did network inside our school buildings the league of

016women voters provided 92 virtual lessons to nearly 3 000 students these virtual presentations were often tailored to meet specific teacher needs and objectives teachers also had access to league of women voter created powerpoints and videos that are available on their website voter registration events have already started this school year with four high schools requesting voter registration assistance in advance of october 12th the file deadline for voter registration since most seniors will be age eligible to register after this general election in november most schools will provide their voter registration activities after winter break high school voter registration is an important step toward promoting active citizenship and increasing the percentage of citizens who are registered voters pat vege is in our office tonight and she's with the league of women voters in the fairfax area here in

017the front thank you pat and to your colleagues for the valuable service you provide to our community pat has graciously declined a photo opportunity but she did leave um for each board member little brochures and information about facts about voting so i'll make sure everybody gets that thank you is dare not cofax would you like to share some thoughts yes um i too want to thank the league of women voters the fairfax office of elections our county council of ptas and our amazing social studies teams for your partnership and hard work to help us educate and motivate our students to understand the important rights and privileges of voting in our democracy we appreciate all of your support and we appreciate the spirited competitions you provide to inspire our high school students to begin their involvement

018in our political process and in region 3 i am proud to represent the hayfield hawks who have won this competition this voter registration competition many times so i'm looking forward to more spirited competitions and colleagues voter game on to all of you thank you so much thank you seeing that there are no other board members wishing to speak i will not oh i'm so sorry it wasn't working miss corbett sanders yes um i just wanted to thank the league of women voters and also put in a plug for your other work that you're doing i know that you are conducting debates in support of the upcoming election and i would encourage all of our students to take advantage of the fact that all these debates are done via zoom and so it's a wonderful way

019of becoming civically engaged and i just so appreciate all that the league does in not only registering our students uh for to vote but also uh teaching them our civic values so thank you miss eisenheiser thank you and i just wanted to say i echo the sentiments of my colleagues but i wanted to share my personal perspective on how important your work is i was as a child of immigrants i was the first in my family to vote i was the first one in my family to be a citizen i had no idea how to do it i had no idea where to register i didn't know we needed to register i remember going to vote and walking in going what do you mean i'm not on the list i'm a citizen and so the

020work you do in bringing this to our high schools to teach our students how to register and how to vote which is essential to our democracy is is vital and and so welcomed and appreciated so thank you thank you i will now call for the vote all those in favor please raise your hands dr anderson miss marin miss tollen miss mclaughlin ms sterner koufax ms sizemore heiser miss cohen mr fresh miss keys camaro miss omash miss corbett sanders and myself that vote is unanimous thank you agenda item 3.01 community participation the next order of business speakers must limit their remarks to no more than two minutes in length at the conclusion of two minutes the microphone or video will be turned off school board members will be listening but not responding to individual speakers the

021school board will not hear statements of all the issues that have been scheduled for public hearings such as a capital improvement program budget and boundaries comments targeting criticizing or attacking individual students are not permitted during public meetings wherever complaints regarding school-based employees should be directed to the appropriate school principal or other school official speakers should refrain from using personally identifiable information in connection with an individual student or school-based employee additionally speakers should be respectful and observe proper decorum in their statements avoiding profanity inappropriate gestures shouting and comments that are on counter to the spirit and the letter of the school division's non-discrimination policy all statements should be directed to the school board and speakers should remain at the podium until concluding their remarks in-person speakers should wear a mask when addressing the board we are

022very grateful to all of you who have come to speak to us today and we do thank you for your cooperation our first speaker is liam ride liam ride our next speaker is gay atheri von galu gayathri vongalu our next speaker is tyrone santos hello i uh i hope it's helpful if i partly explain why millions of americans choose to be unvaccinated the vaccine only serves two purposes it protects the person from death and disease and two it stops the transmission of disease to others so for the first point i mean survival rate without treatment for unvaccinated people is 99.997 percent for people under 20. and 99.98 for people aged 20 to 50. the risk unvaccinated people take is their choice it has nothing to do with you or anyone else for that matter i

023would wager you guys believe in my body my choice so take that and uh so for the second point don't don't cause harm to others on august 5th cdc director dr rochelle walinski told cnn what the vaccines can't do anymore is prevent transmission in other words vaccinated people are getting infected and transmitting the virus to others so if the vaccine protects you go get yourself vaccinated if the vaccine doesn't protect you then why are you forcing a vaccine on someone if it doesn't even protect them you can't have it both ways so for kids under 12 who aren't eligible for a vaccine i'll just say more kids died from the flu in the 2018-2019 season then kids have died from the virus in the last 18 months and no one was advocating for mass two

024years ago so take those masks off too i mean i bet i uh i beg you to answer three questions you need to answer three questions and communicate your answers to the constituents to explain why you're forcing people to inject something into their body so what is the actual risk of serious injury or death from vaccinated people of different ages how effective are the vaccines at blocking infection and transmission others why aren't there exemptions for people with natural immunity so three questions you need to tell everybody that thanks for your time and god bless america our next speaker is dinesh kumar dinesh kumar our next speaker is abhay baghou thank you for the opportunity uh thank you for the opportunity um during last two school board meetings a number of parents have asked for remote

025learning options and i do not want to repeat the arguments the board knows all the arguments very well but i am baffled by the lack of compelling responses from the board as taxpayers of the county concerns and asks of parents should not be ignored the board continues to state that in-person schooling is the best option for kids and the remote option will cause hardship for teachers we all know that in person is the best option but there are very good reasons why so many parents are asking for the virtual option the staggering numbers of covered instructions cannot be ignored what about the hardships of parents who are forced to make decisions to continue to put their unvaccinated kids at risk every day or pull them out of school these are the only two choices offered

026by the board the board continues to use sp 1303 as the justification for in-person schooling but virginia department of education states and i quote schools may at their discretion offer virtual instructions to students throughout the year and let families determine which mode of instruction is best for their students given the uncertainties of probate 19. i understand the board is willing to provide one-way streaming option to quarantine students but not willing to consider a full virtual option to those who are asking for it can you help and help me understand what is the rationale behind that so i again urge fcps to take clue from our neighboring and other counties for example york county arlington county who are able to provide virtual options at no cost to the parents thank you our next speaker is amanda

027campbell good evening i am here as an individual to speak about the special education audit i am hurt i am exhausted and i am angry you know i don't say that lightly i've been speaking to the school board and fcps leadership for four years now bringing to light significant concerns primarily regarding the experience for students with complex support needs including those on the adapted curriculum and in self-contained classrooms throughout those four years i've heard the constant refrain that fcps serves every child by name and by need and i have consistently shown how fcps is not meeting the needs of these students or their teachers when this school board pushed for the comprehensive special education audit i was bullied knowing that an outside firm with expertise was coming in gave me hope but while i agree

028with the overall findings of air's report i am also angry that students on the adapted curriculum are entirely invisible in its work to date when air was asked about data for the virginia alternative assessment program the means by which students accessing adapted curriculum are assessed by the state they seemed confused and had no answer who is responsible for this omission aar fcps leadership or both the one mention of the vap in the 100 page report is where it is used as an example of the breadth and depth of fcps's professional development a strength i find this utterly absurd given i've heard repeatedly from cat b teachers that fcpspd does not apply to their classrooms or needs the breadth and depth of pd cannot be considered a strength if the offerings are not of high quality

029and don't address what teachers need to serve their students facts supported by the staff survey data i thank the school board for questioning aar and fcps on this omission that said this incident again demonstrates that the education of children on the adapted curriculum is not as valued as that of their peers which is inexcusable until this is rectified on a systemic level fcps must stop speaking to how it meets every child by name and by need it is hurtful and insulting our next speaker is manju noth hey greeting everyone i am here to request to provide a virtual schooling option along with the in-person option uh let parents choose the option they want i do not want to repeat what my fellow concerned parents shared already now on in the previous meeting however i have

030few questions to the board are the kids and the infection just numbers for you don't to violate their life for the future in september alone there are in just 23 days so 600 cases have been identified it is how the infection being controlled that dashboard update is also delayed i see every day i saw few pictures posted by schools on social media and it's very clear that no social distance is followed in schools we need to learn from others mistakes like india and other countries where infections skyrocketed is more ready to guarantee that my kid won't be infected at school will the board take any responsibility for any mishap and finally while you are able to provide livestreaming to kids in quarantine why can't you offer the same to all are you waiting for the

031so-called numbers to go out of control to make a decision i hope you'll make a wise decision soon and provide what your actions thank you so much our next speaker is mary beth style [Applause] good evening i prepared a statement as a parent and a social worker to talk about mental health issues and the damage that you're doing to our children with your family life education programs your critical race theory and your gender theory you've got my written statement and as i read it it was three and a half minutes long it used to be that you let us have three minutes you can't even get a resolution out on civic involvement in two minutes and you tell us you value that and you say sure come up here you got two minutes there's no

032point in me spending hours reducing that to two minutes so tonight i'm going to not going to waste my time i'm going to spend it talking to the one being that will listen to me and that can make a difference because you don't want to hear what i have to say anyway and there's nothing i can say in two minutes it'll make a difference to you so i ask the holy spirit to come down and give you the gifts so that you can better serve the children and the families of the family of fairfax county in line with god's will for the gift of wisdom come holy spirit for the gift of understanding come holy spirit for the gift of counsel come holy spirit for the gift of fortitude come holy spirit for the gift

033of knowledge come holy spirit for the gift of piety come holy spirit for the gift of of all of the lord come holy spirit saint michael the archangel defend us in battle be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil may god rebuke and we humbly pray and through thou will some heavenly hosts by the power of god cast into hell all satan and all of evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls amen thank you our next speaker is michelle katie's on behalf of the fairfax county septa thank you to the board and fcps for choosing to invest in air's special education audit and we hope that you will continue to make the necessary future investments to remedy the identified problems in this final year of the study

034we ask that it is ensured that the following happens additional ieps are reviewed to bring the study closer to statistical representation of our special education population focus groups are truly representative of the entire special education spectrum encompassing all placements diploma tracks curricular races social economic statuses english language learners and especially the students voices investigate adaptive curriculum and students on the vap track from the perspective of parents and staff as this was glaringly omitted staff has repeatedly expressed unique challenges and problems with a lack of available curriculum materials multi-age classrooms and no planning time more specific data disaggregation especially by placement and level of support students with the same eligibility level can be in vastly different placements with extremely different support needs inclusion of the role and impact of ats on our students and staff ats

035was also glaringly omitted and there was little to no representation of other related service providers zero social workers from fcps completed the initial staff survey in-depth investigation into the fidelity of implementation of instruction this is a major area of concern and one that air noted they did not yet address in year one we encourage the public to view air's well-written and presented interim report especially noteworthy is that every area of concern listed by air is a concern that septa and other special education advocates have been bringing to this board and leadership for years with little to no resulting changes fcps must use these findings to implement sweeping changes the status quo does not serve every child by name and by need thank you our next speaker is hemong nagar hello the people of fairfax county

036actually watched the fcbs working session on tuesday the september 21st the session actually looked as if it was a scene from the movie in your person we were absolutely appalled when you use word like burden it's a burden for you to educate the children of fairfax county for that burden you are paid 3.4 billion dollars billion what you basically call it as a burden is the very reason for your existence and to add to this i have never ever seen a person so proudly com proudly proclaim their incompetence as did the superintendent of fcps if it's a burden to take 300k for being this this incompetent maybe it's time for you to find something else which is less burdensome for you also absolutely appalling was the school members who were actually agreeing with him so

037i have a few questions for the school board members why is he allowed to complete the term when he is actively looking to sabotage education and mental health of kids second at what point is the search for the new superintendent or are you looking to run out the clock like you did the last time we also heard in in in a brief that was over there that the school board member and the superintendent wanted to mandate vaccinations for children well there is another use news for you both of you neither have the education or the authority to do that virginia court chapter 456 clearly states that our next speaker is malik arjun barugu [Applause] my dear brothers and sisters of this board everybody agree like a human being was born in africa that makes all

038of us cousins my son and daughter are nephews and nieces for you for everyone all of the school people your nephews and nieces are frightened to go to school as of now there might be some who who want to go we are not obstructing for in-person school but your nephews and nieces are frightened you are brothers my wife your sisters she is my sister your sister is frightened to send her kids to school please listen please listen i'm not telling logic there's no logic my friends already told the logic we are not against in person again i'm telling you in person can go on you can do anything but give us an option please we are all like an amicable uh living we call surveys that means we are like a family what happens something

039to happen your family your son your dad or something you will take care you'll listen to them please do that one please hear us what happened last year with thousand cases whole economy was shut down now 200k 200 000 cases nobody is worried and still 55 percent of people are not vaccinated can't you believe it it's data then why is different from last year we are not asking you to reinvent the wheel just take please take last year's moral please listen to your nieces your nephews your sisters brothers we are family our society can exist only as a family we cannot divide if somebody disagrees please listen to them our next speaker is adrian hensel good evening my name is adrienne hensel i am a fairfax county taxpayer and a former fairfax county public schools

040teacher i am here to protest the use of fairfax taxpayers money in a campaign to normalize homoerotic material with minors as part of this campaign the school libraries in fairfax public schools are promoting books that graphically depict homosexual acts to cite just two examples recently at fairfax high the school library promoted an array of lgbtq themed books by putting them on prominent display one of these was the graphic novel gender queer by maya kabade page 167 features two panels clearly depicting one of the high school age protagonists acting out oral sex on another high schooler i have a copy of the page here and requested to be entered into the school meeting another book promoted at the school's library lawn boy by jonathan everson is look is loaded with similar material for instance on page

04191 one adult male character graphically describes engaging in fellatio with male minors other taxpayers have found similar examples in the school libraries and in reading assigned as homework this indoctrination effort includes other branches of the county government for example on june 26th there was a drag story hour at the mclean branch of the public library where the mclean community center paid tax dollars to drag queens to perform for children aged four through eight fairfax county taxpayers don't want their tax dollar our next speaker is stacy langton stacy langton after seeing a september 9th school board meeting in texas on pornography in the schools i decided to check the titles at my child's school fairfax high school the books were available and we check them out both of these books include pedophilia sex between men and

042boys both books describe different acts one book describes a fourth grade boy performing oral sex on an adult male the other book has detailed illustrations of a man having sex with a boy the illustrations include fellatio sex toys masturbation and violent nudity pedophilia here from the author maya kobabe quote from the author jonathan everson this is not an oversight at fairfax high school yes there are children in the audience do not interrupt my time do not interrupt my time i would like to remind everybody stand here until my time is restored and my time is finished these books are in stock and available in the libraries of robinson for high school and annandale high school pornography is offensive to all people it is offensive to common decency it is the reason why the mpaa is

043our next speaker is alex levine our next speaker is alex levine miss padeja can you please call the next speaker our next speaker is alex levine we'd like to have our next speaker come to the podium please ma'am your time has ended the microphone has turned off if you cannot follow rules of decorum this school board without objection will take a five minute break to clear the room thank you all right madam madam clerk madam clerk madam clerk i believe they're a board called a five-minute recess yeah it's a five-minute reset excuse me the boy excuse me the board will now take a five minute recess thank you school board members take your seats please all right we're now going to reconvene our business meeting in order for the board to conduct the public business

044it is crucial that those in attendance not shout interrupt other speakers or otherwise engage in disruptive conduct if there is any such disruptive conduct you will be escorted out of this room our next speaker is alex levine each week fcps pauses more than 700 healthy students depriving these kids of school for an average of 10 days and these numbers keep growing fcps has done little to address this problem beyond tweaking some of its procedures and offering the band-aid of streaming some classes the best solution of test to stay has been largely not considered the failure here is twofold fcps hasn't implemented a policy that would better serve our children and second it hasn't even researched it the delay is harming students the superintendent's explanation for this failure has been to point to the finger at

045health agencies this ignores that testis to stay is being successfully used throughout the country and in virginia including in arlington and fauquier counties both of which have which permit students to return to school after five days with a negative test as the superintendent conceded in the tuesday meeting the ultimate call for this policy lies with gatehouse on tuesday he provided this slide uh purporting to show the risks if the quarantine period was reduced yet this slide actually doesn't show that first this slide assumes that the person quarantining is infected which is overwhelmingly not the case in schools la schools have been testing close contacts and have 30 000 people quarantined only 63 people have tested positive an attack rate of 0.2 percent another study from the uk found that less than 2 percent of close

046contacts later tested positive second the slide ignores the fact that uh the risks go way down if there's diagnostic testing so with a test after day 10 cdc has said that the risk is 0.3 percent and that's using the false assumption that every quarantined person is infected thank you our next speaker is naomi petco naomi petko our next speaker is osra nomani my name is astra nomani i'm a survivor of fairfax county public schools my son was a student here for 13 years i am now a taxpayer and i am a citizen and i don't even know where to begin i mean the display that you had tonight not even able to listen to the truth that a mother was sharing about a book available in our public school system is embarrassing the fact that

047on the eve of 9 11 you abrar omesh couldn't even vote to honor the 9 11 victims and those that were the first responders is embarrassing and today we now have a survey going out to all of our students and their parents and in it you are giving 1.8 million dollars to an organization panorama education in which mark zuckerberg has invested and in which now this company outside of our school district has now the authority as representatives as officials of the school board in the caveat in their contract language you're wasting taxpayer money you're ignoring parents there's a poor kid here who has been holding up a sign his arms are so so tired now because they're simply trying to get a virtual option when are you going to take time to actually listen to

048the citizens that want to participate in our school system i mean this is your duty and this is your responsibility listen to them they are crying for your ears and they are crying for you to hear them so that you can actually do something that is culturally responsible and listen to those that are in our culture here in fairfax county the citizens that want to be heard please listen to them they beg you and this taxpayers will respond accordingly if you cannot listen to them thank you our next speaker is christopher henzell [Applause] christopher hensel our next speaker is naga deepak yanduru good evening thank you for providing with me an opportunity to address the board until very recently i thought i am a proud fcps parent but the recent actions or lack of them

049from the fcps authorities and the utter apathy from the school board makes me really doubt if i am really such a proud parent in the past one year i lost six loved ones not one not two not three six loved ones due to kovid i am an immuno-compromised parent i represent many people who lost their loved ones to covet and i also represent many such parents who are immunocompromised who are not left with any option you have not given us any option we are chosen with only two alternatives either to send the kids to the school or product or family we request you to provide a virtual learning option we are not against in-person learning we request you we beg you and we appeal to provide an in a virtual learning option many counties have

050resorted to providing such an option fcps which is one of the highly funded education system in the country fairfax county one of the richest counties in u.s if you are not able to provide this option that's a mere excuse again so many speakers have today requested to consider our request just tonight we also have one video testimony smitha mandala bharti my name is smitha mandalaparthi i am here to raise my concerns about in-person learning i thank you all for trying all medication strategies to keep our kids safe you're doing your best but this isn't working cases are raising and kids are getting affected this bill sb1303 is obsolete now delta variant has changed the dynamics earlier kids were not at risk but now they are the vulnerable cdc guidelines have also proved it and also

051the overcrowded pediatric icus overwhelm doctors are shouting this from the top of their lungs fcps proudly accommodates every kid with every kind of ailment but why this kind of rigidity towards virtual learning why are you not ready to give it a try at least when it is possible to give virtual learning option to quarantined kids why not to the others this kind of adjustment will help in person kids to have more social distancing let the teacher teach in the class and just telecast that to the virtual kids and let the teacher hold a q a session and let the kids email or let the kids email their questions we are just asking to telecast or transmit these lessons or these classes you heard us all numerous times we have been blasting emails and making calls

052and showing up to these meetings believing in you it is time for you to act now our kids are not any guinea pigs in your labs where you experiment with them as a parent we have the right and responsibility to to choose the best for our kids we choose virtual or concurrent learning you helped us in different situations in the past with this why this indifference now what is or who is holding you back in making your right decision this is mental health month and this situation has put us through such a stress that we are losing our sleeps and sanity i ask you to act now and give us virtual or distant learning option thank you for your time agenda item 3.03 opening of schools report i call on dr ray brown for the

053presentation members of the school board chairman pokarsky ladies and gentlemen of the community good evening i am thrilled to bring you our annual opening of schools report our 2021 report if we could start with the very first slide up just the cover slide thank you really excited we bring this to you all every year in the community and i'm happy to present this annual report which is an overview of our demographics our hiring statistics our budget technology capital improvements among other key information that i'll be sharing with you tonight let's start with just some descriptive pieces about fairfax county public schools if we can go to the next slide please we continue if we can go to the next slide we continue to be the largest school system in virginia with 199 schools and centers

054some fast facts 24 000 employees 86 of our budget focus on instruction 173 energy star schools that helped saved annually seven million dollars in energy savings our demographics enrollment as of september 17th we're still waiting for the big september 30th uh membership report is 178 000. in july we had 171 000 students registered for this fall so we were really able on our returning strong got six seven thousand seven thousand uh students and families to return this year and that was our direct outreach through our community and really happy to get those back that does fall short of our fy 21 projected enrollment uh and this is a tentative enrollment number we think this number may change once we certify our enrollment and membership to the state on september 30th it's also important to know

055that while our enrollment fell short of projection we're 2 000 more students than our usual homeschool enrollment our homeschool enrollment over the last several years prior to the pandemic was about three thousand we have over five thousand now and we're being told by our principals that many of our homeschool families will be returning when the vaccination is available for elementary students so we'll continue to keep you abreast on our enrollment process as we move forward through this school year fairfax as you know is very diverse with over 200 countries and 200 languages and we continue to take pride in the diversity of our system we also take pride in our division success one of the things i wanted to share with you that has just come out is our four-year on-time graduation rate has gone

056from 91 percent in 2019 it went up last year and is now at 94.6 percent among the highest graduation rates ever in fairfax county public schools these rates continue to show advances in closing achievement gaps for the three groups where division historically had lower graduation rates than the average since 2019 hispanic and el lerner saw a gain of nine points to the graduation rate and economically disadvantaged seven points and for the second year in a row students with disabilities graduated at a higher rate than the division average graduation rates were boosted through some state flexibilities allowing locally awarded verified credits for courses completed during covit in lieu of the sols and the ongoing work that we have done to provide graduation coordinators through your budget support at our schools we'll continue to have more details

057about our on-time graduation rate when the state releases data at the end of the month just a couple of other highlights about 85 percent of our graduates report post-secondary work and programs following high school um we have 73 percent that take apib or dual enrollment that's that college-ready uh rigor uh and we had 212 national merit scholarship semi-finalists in 2021 our sats just came out and they continue to be above state and global averages and while the state had a dramatic drop in participation the college board saw a 31 percent drop in sats and a 33 drop in virginia ours dropped only four percent as we created equity of access to have sat day for our students in september of last year and we're going to continue to offer the sat at no charge to

058students this year in october we saw sat scores improved for asian black and hispanic students in 2021. if we can go to the next slide i want to say with all the positive things that we're going to present today it's important that we continue to be transparent with challenges to ensure equitable access across the division we know this is a challenge that we need to continue to face and and confront every year we opened the school year i did as superintendent in our leadership conference talking about returning to learning with joy and vigor but also talking about our aaa framework of affirming assessing and advancing so that we can have continuous improvement and really exceed expectations for all of our students regardless of who they are and where they live our focus for this year

059is to see our students returning strong by listening and responding to their needs by meeting them where they are academically and emotionally and by opening doors for them so that they find and rediscover the joy in learning after being for most of them many many months in virtual education and so we do this by keeping equity at the center and strengthening practices our k2 literacy we'll be talking about that on an upcoming work session all our multi-tiered systems of support our sel work with advisory teams and again all of our portrait of a graduate strategies that we're doing in schools and as i mentioned to you earlier we continue to do the aaa framework of a firm assess and advance as we work with each and every student in our school system it's important as

060we do that work if we go to the next slide to talk about our supports for families they're going to remain critical for the 21 22 school years we all work to transition out of this pandemic and back to full in-person instruction as we've done this year let me talk a little bit about the supports for families last year as part of the distance learning survey we asked families to share their experiences and perceptions on family engagement close to 90 percent of families who responded to the survey told us they and their child felt respected by schools and school staff our spring responses were more positive than what parents had reported when these same questions were asked on an earlier family engagement survey and in fact we saw meaningful improvement and my child felt respected

061by teachers and other staff back in december of last year when we did the survey it was 84 it went to 88 percent when we talked about supporting our kids when there's stressful situations in their life it went from 64 when we asked last year to 72 percent there is improvement but we know there is still much work to do and many of our populations that are underrepresented in the survey still need to continue to be reached out to and we need to look at their perceptions as we move forward it's critical that we continue to affirm all of our families and all of our students to create an environment that's conducive for belonging and engagement one of the things we've done is we've returned we've had open houses welcome walks family welcome back calls

062we did a lot of personal calls over the summer collect for kids which is done in partnership with our education foundation we did a first day of school communication countdown and we had our back to school nights available in many different ways both virtual and person and hybrid i really want to thank all of our team doing so much to help reconnect our community during this pandemic and really help create new connections for students and families and i know it was a lot of work to do that not only to open the year but to continue the year this school year additional supports that we're working on with our families is we've worked to create additional funding for our schools for the family liaison we used to call that the parent liaison but we have

063now uh broadened or redefined that as family liaisons and this year 31 new schools that have never had this support for families now have a family liaison we've had the getting to know fcps orientation for families that's been hosted through a hybrid model in multiple languages and we're excited about the expansion at our division school levels for our military connected youth and families we have the most military connected youth and families in the state of virginia and we continue to support them through the student ambassador programs bi-weekly coffees and family support groups through the parent resource center and military family life counselors we have 34 schools as this board knows that have been recognized as a purple star school by vdoe and we will continue to support and increase the number of schools that are

064creating this uh and winning this designation by the virginia department of education some other additional support for families include our parent resource center they have weekly webinars on a variety of topics we have parent resource packs which are pre-packaged tote bags with books and resources for adults and children and i really hope parents will go to our website to learn more about all of the opportunities that you see here and more available to our website for family engagement we also want to continue to expand communication supports to provide timely information i've done many town hall meetings over this last year as we've been in the pandemic and as we've returned to school and and we will continue to do them we video stream them into families and communities we've had a weekly newsletter that we've

065shared with families we have parent information phone lines available in eight languages united language interpretation services we've done multilingual podcasts in spanish arabic and korean i've participated in all three i spoke more of spanish and spanish and did my best with arabic and korean and those podcasts and we continue to have a talking points website app that really helps teachers provide translation communication between families and schools we also support families through transportation and transporting their kids i know the year was off to a challenging start with some long runs and our transportation folks jeff planetberg francine furby have done an amazing job to really address some of the issues that we had starting the year and i know this board will be considering additional action tonight around supporting our transportation family here in fcps that's

066doing so much for kids over 1600 school buses that run daily um 23 million bus rides each year it's an amazing amazing uh uh program that we have with transportation so i'm really excited uh for everything that they continue to do and we have our here comes the bus app that helps give some real-time information on bus arrival i also want to talk not just about our amazing transportation folks but food and nutrition we serve last year over 14 million meals and snacks in the middle of this pandemic more than 500 000 no cost meals are provided over the summer months we continue to expand healthy offerings and here for you to know this year we have no cost breakfast and lunch available to students our participation in food and nutrition has increased 25 percent

067compared to pre-covered levels we now have 28 000 meals uh per day um i'm sorry an increase of over 28 000 meals per day because now on average we're doing 138 000 meals including breakfast and lunch served per day and last week's participation has gone all the way up to 150 000 our largest combination of meals ever in fairfax county public schools for our safety and security that remains our top priority safety and tabletop training will continue and be completed in all schools this year all of our crisis management guides have been updated safety training's already begun this year and additional safety and security personnel were deployed as we returned to school during those first two weeks to ensure everyone returned safely and we continue to have a strong partnership with fairfax county's department of

068public safety and the fairfax county police department to ensure the safety of our schools and school communities i want to talk a little bit now about student success one of our key goals in the strategic plan and i want to begin by talking about school accreditation and recognition the pandemic has resulted in learning impacts that we're all aware of and accreditation continues to be way for all schools in 2122. sol tests given in person this year will be used to calculate future academic indicators towards school accreditation also new this year we've mentioned before but it's worth reminding the community that in grades three through eight spring sol results will be compared from results last spring to measure growth but we'll also have a new shorter virginia growth assessment that kids will be taking for the

069first time this fall we'll be able to measure growth from either last year to last spring to next spring or from this fall to this current spring and that will be a greater opportunity to really demonstrate progress for students and progress for schools and supporting students student success also resulted in expanded summer learning we talked about this with the board through multiple work sessions we had a 66 percent increase in the number of students we were able to serve over the previous four-year average we served the diverse needs of over thirty thousand students in the summer through face-to-face and virtual programs and we had new elementary and middle school programs with the focus on math and literacy we had a new bridge or an expanded bridge to kindergarten an expanded bridge to first grade and

070we had young scholar programs along with our esy our summer enrichment as you look at expanded summer learning 2 was a mixture of some very familiar programs enrichment camps we were able to cover the cost for students on free and reduced lunch and those enrollments for the first time enrichment camps that before were paid now allowed 30 percent of our students in those enrichment camps were free and reduced lunch students we had a crowded success program that gave weekly supports to students in our program and we had and gave out over 300 000 summer practice books mailed directly to students to help them continue to learn during the summer we also did some updated curriculum and digital resources to support our students in the return for five days of in-person learning to be able to

071help them continue to have access to high quality resources and to really help support learning so the curriculum updates ensure alignment with our standards of learning this year and prioritize essential standards that are relevant to students we have required phonological awareness and phonics lessons and k2 is part of our equitable access to literacy plan you'll be learning and hearing more about that at an upcoming work session we did work on our curriculum to address the social emotional and academic learning of our students and additional culturally responsive practices and we provided purposeful assessments for students to gauge student learning needs and their progress we also had some additional digital literacy uh resources that we use last year and continued into this year and a new learning management system called schoology that was already in use by

072students and families and educators across the country we did a pilot of it last year and expanded it to all of our schools this year we've also done significant work with technology to support student success we tripled bandwidth in our schools with growing demand for connectivity we had new uh technology like schoology as i mentioned but also new zoom which has replaced blackboard is our learning for synchronous learning we had multiple upgrades to our student information system and we've all seen the impact of cyber threats in our country on multiple public institutions we've not been immune to that and we've invested in new technologies including creating a new cyber security office and focusing on critical long-term technology enhancements across our division some additional technology support i want to mention to you we've really worked to

073provide much much more expanded device access and now devices are in the hands of all kids through your leadership and the board of supervisors there is no more technology fee for fcps on that fee has been removed permanently so thank you we provided mifi and low-cost internet subsidies for families without home internet and did a terrific job there we set up last year in the pandemica technology help desk for families that needed help with technology and we continue to have that up and running and uh we're really really very very pleased with that we know how important it is for technology to support classroom engagement and really technology now as we work to come out of this pandemic we'll be a constant companion for our students as we move forward and we continue to support

074our school tech teams who support our teachers in providing strong student digital learning experiences to be paired with in-person learning we have 38 000 student laptops newer laptops that we provided elementary school we have additional teacher laptops for our ias and other support staff and really really pleased with all of our technology support i want to thank our cio gotham sethi for his leadership he came to us just as the pandemic began and has done a tremendous amount of work in his team under the leadership of ceo marty smith to really take us to another level with our technology supports for students and staff i want to talk about caring culture which is another important part of our strategic plan first the foundation for fcps continues to be a vital partner with us and support

075students and teachers with teacher grants kids in need school supplies and the support of our fcps honors recognition program the foundation got over 1.4 million dollars this year and provided grants to teachers uh in the system over 73 teachers giving them each over thirteen hundred dollars on average um this year the foundation welcomed some new members to the board of directors mark uh testoni who's the ceo of sap sap ns2 uh rick lightwise uh who is at the keller center at anova and jose bazone who is with white 64. they're all new members of the foundation board and we welcome them and the foundation's continued support of fairfax county schools and community also with caring culture is fostering mental health and awareness wellness we know with the impacts of the pandemic student mental health and

076wellness is more important than ever before we focus on professional development to support students who may be displaying mental health challenges we've worked to do more youth mental health first aid and teen mental health first aid so students can learn strategies around mental health this year all of our 7th 9th and 11th grade students will participate in the signs of suicide or sos program families will be able to have access to wellness resources through the parent resource center we continue to partner with the fairfax and falls church community services board anova and kaiser with our annual mental health wellness conference that will be held the week of september 27th hope many of you will be able to go to that and students will be able to have the ability to participate in student sessions at

077this conference as well part of our caring culture too is to really focus as we said on social emotional learning universal practices in our school dedicated time at all grade levels both elementary grades and secondary grades for explicit social and emotional instruction whether it's in a morning meeting at elementary or advisory periods in secondary schools are focused on positive relationship building with students and building a strong positive school climates our counselors our psychologists and social workers are providing tiered supports and we know that supporting our students with their social emotional health is more important than ever if we go to the next slide we are uh rolling out division wide our scl screener which will allow kids in grades three through 12 to self-reflect on their skills and their needs three times a year kids

078in grades uh kindergarten through second teachers will be completing a screener with each of their kids and the results will be shared with schools and families and used as part of our existing multi-tiered systems of support so we can directly provide intervention for those kids we also want to in a caring culture ensure that students and staff have voice as you know this is key to having a strong school system we're continuing our student equity ambassador leads program they're the seal team and we have seal kids at our middle and high schools helping elevate equity in all of our schools we're continuing the work of understanding the gaps to access and learning opportunities that we assess through the school's equity audit processes and we've convened fireside and twitter chats to keep two-way dialogue going with

079our students uh and staff so we need to keep creating the space so that we can keep equity at the center of all that we do and it means elevating student and staff voice part of doing that is having a premier workforce which is another one of our key strategic plan goals our third goal in our strategic plan and i want to provide some updates for you here so as of september 1st we hired almost 1900 new teachers this school year we remain committed to building a diverse workforce teachers and staff of color service strong positive role models for all students we've talked about this now for several years and i'm pleased to report continued progress in two areas we've increased hiring of individuals who self-identify as hispanic and latino by 1.36 percent we've increased

080hiring of people who identify as people of color by 5.46 over last year 32 percent of our total teacher hires this year are people of color which is an improvement from 26 percent last year we are continuing to know and reflect on the power of a diverse workforce to support a diverse student body and we'll continue those partnerships through so many ways with our universities our faith base and community groups and even working with our own seniors who become part of future employment for teachers for tomorrow we also are proud of supporting our new administrators we have 21 new principals and 51 new assistant principals since last october and we know that part of strong leadership in schools begins with the school administrative team and that school principal is so key if we go to

081the next slide on premier workforce professional learning to support student success we really work to maximize teacher and leader time with asynchronous and limited synchronous offerings so that our staff can stay in schools even though we have a requirement an obligation to provide professional development some of it is required by state and federal law and some of it is aligned with our critical mission critical goals like pre-k to literacy social emotional working with students with disabilities and the el learners we've worked to do as much as we can to provide that in flexible ways for our staff we also had a great great beginning summer institute with 1100 new staff attending that i also want to talk a little bit about professional learning and support of our school leaders with the equity symposium that we've

082done with over 1500 uh participants you can see all of the equity work we've done around equity leads and cultural proficiency and we will continue to work to build our equity muscle so that we can better support our employees in the areas around equity cultural proficiency and anti-racism so that our employees can continue to serve our students and community well i want to also mention resource stewardship and i want to end the presentation with some updates on that our fy 22 budget remained focused on student achievement equity and social emotional supports we gave a two percent increase for all employees and we did the final year of investing in a three-year plan to enhance ia salaries we also provided with your leadership bonuses of a thousand dollars for full-time employees and 500 for non-contracted hourly

083workers that will be delivered in november of this year our budget also includes esser money from the federal government to provide enhanced summer programming special ed recovery services facility upgrades air quality upgrades academic and wellness intervention things like family liaisons we already mentioned additional esau staffing school-based monitors to support uh outdoor cafeteria use and also supporting principles as they deal with the work around uh pausing kids and dealing with providing contact tracing materials to the health department so really a ton of supports that we've used with those esser dollars and we've committed to giving you regular updates around that i also want you to see our capital improvement work construction is underway with 1 million square feet totaling 535 million dollars and we completed this past year about 200 000 square feet we're designing about

084another million square feet and we eliminated the need for more than 80 temporary classrooms over the past year those all have been prior board goals projects underway this year include these are projects underway this year include work at braddock elementary there's the beautiful mock up there that work still remains in progress fox mill elementary project for capital improvement underway this year we also have projects underway at um uh hibler valley uh really excited about that we know they've had a need for a long time with their uh capacity of students to have additional uh improvements in that school we also have oak hill elementary uh capital improvement project underway there washington mill also is getting a uh a wonderful upgrade to that uh capital uh infrastructure and you can see as we move from elementary

085to middle schools we have some upgrades that we've done we're working at cooper middle school and building additional capacity there you can see also projects are underway at frost middle school super excited about that at hughes middle school and at uh that was our middle schools and now if you look at our high schools we are finishing up the last phase of the work of renovating hernan high school which reminds me of what it looked like when i first walked in there in 1993 and it's great to see them like many schools get the renovation that they deserve we see enhancements going on at madison high school um an addition there that's well uh needed uh and well uh anticipated and excited by our community to have it and we are getting close to finishing

086our uh complete renovation of oakton high school anybody driving by 66 west can see that as a work in progress we also are beginning our project underway at west potomac high school for its addition to provide additional capacity relief there for students and i also want to share just some completed projects that were done we were able to complete this past year bellevue elementary which was a wonderful addition i got to see that at the very beginning and it's just a lovely final product clearview elementary and providing additional capacity there and we were able to add additional modular classrooms in at mclean high school we really have been through a lot this year uh our challenges have been great but this system is greater we are a strong community we have deeply committed educators and

087families and students and community partners and board members we have a passionate community and we will continue to listen to our community and know that we are in fairfax county public schools greater than the sum of our parts it's not one individual it's not one person who comes before you here not one superintendent not one teacher not one principal it is all of us and in the middle of this pandemic we have had to rise to the occasion to serve our students in ways we could have never imagined we have returned strong in fairfax county public schools and we are learning strong to wrap up i simply want to say if we can go to the final slide a profound thank you i can't thank all of you our students our staff our families are

088born in this community who partnered with us from the beginning from the first days of the pandemic i've asked for grace not grief and i still believe in the long run we have seen evidence in our community far more grace than grief we have to understand that grief comes in a pandemic because people have felt lost people have felt anger we have to understand it but we have to move beyond it to become a better fcps a better community we are all walking forward out of this pandemic we're excited to have our kids back in our schools and we will continue to partner shoulder to shoulder with the school board and with our community to have a great school year in fairfax county public schools this is the opening and i can't wait for the

089rest of the year thank you very much and i'll be glad to take a question or two or as many as the board chooses to ask well thank you dr brabrand and i'll now open it up to any school board members who'd like to go ahead and ask their questions and we'll start with miss corbett sanders thank you dr bravery and i always appreciate this presentation it's one of my favorite because it really does reflect where we are at a snapshot in time you had some very interesting statistics and i am glad to see that we are continuing to have additional enrollment i do know that some of our schools have seen significant enrollments just over the past couple weeks and uh so i have a couple of different questions you talk about 133 vacancies

090can you fill me in on where those vacancies are i know that we have significant challenges in special ed are they all in special ed are they in esau just kind of break out that a bit sure let me see what information i have there let me get back to that side uh let's see sean's not here just off the top of my head let me let me take a look and see what i have in here on vacancies um dr brabrand i am here i'm sorry oh sean there you are very good um so we do have uh a mixture of needs across the division in terms of the vacancies i'm trying to get to my list here on my computer but we do have our significant need it continues to be the area

091of special education but we do have needs in the content areas at the middle and high school level primarily in the areas of math and science and then we do have a number of elementary classrooms that are vacant as well so high school and math and science some in elementary school but where are we at on vacancies in the special ed area so that's what i'm trying to pull up on my computer i apologize our most recent count in special education the number of vacancies total is 57 and a half and that's at all three levels we recognize by the way that we definitely had a special education teacher shortage prior to the pandemic we have one now in the pandemic and we are going to have to come up with new strategies to address

092the special education teachers shortage i hope to be bringing this board some advocacy around how we can do some additional reform at the state to provide more qualified educators to serve as special education teachers and look forward to bringing you that very soon so in addition to um so about one-third of all of the almost half of all of the vacancies are in special ed and how are we on instructional vacancies for ias mr mcdonald will we have that information handy by chance i actually do yes so we currently have just over 40 instructional assistant vacancies at this point how many i'm sorry 440 okay and is that included in 133 it is not so that count is specifically teacher positions okay so it's 133 and we have um 50 133 plus 40 so that's

093177. is that about equal to the number of bus driver vacancies as well it's it's approximately in the in the ballpark i think we're a little bit uh fewer in terms of bus driver vacancies at this point but it's pretty significant um so we really have to have i believe a dialogue with our community on a couple of things one is the changing structure of our workforce and the importance of addressing that structure but secondly it's really important for us to change the tone and tenor of the dialogue around the teaching profession in the education profession because the greatest investment we have as a country is the investment in our children and the only way we can do that investment in our children is to attract the best and brightest into this field and i

094would urge as we continue to have the dialogue as we come out of this pandemic that we change the tone to be one which goes back to honoring this most treasured profession so i really do um appreciate your presentation here tonight thank you think that we need to keep coming back to having updates on how we are focusing on the needs of our children i appreciate the change in some of your focus of this but what i would like to see in future updates is a some more targeted updates on how we are going to address some of the more vulnerable students in our population absolutely and we'll be doing our esser update which really will have even better focus on that student academic and social emotional recovery and acceleration so absolutely thank you miss

095cohen thank you dr brabrand i appreciate your presentation as always it's exciting to be kind of coming into hopefully our own here in fcps and getting a little more settled with everything that we've been the turmoil that has been happening um a few questions for you specifically about this report um when when we talk about the sped vacancies and kind of you know what we can do to address this going forward i'm hopeful that your budget that we will see not terribly long from now is going to have some additions to our talent and acquisition management team we know that we have even bigger gaps that we have got to fill now and i think pre pandemic we all had these conversations that we needed to have some folks who were able to ver to

096help us with our diversity of our hiring and also maybe we need somebody who is particularly sped focused so i'm hopeful i'm gonna give a wink and a nod to mr mcdonald over there and say please please please we gotta beef up the tam office there's just no way that they can do herculean efforts but we got to be the best and the brightest here to attract these folks in a shortage um the other and i know you're tired of me talking about it but is the bus driver so to piggyback on what miss corbett sanders said i think one thing that's really important for us is we obviously were all gung-ho to work on the recruitment bonuses and but how is it working what are you seeing you know are we actually hiring people

097are we saying that's not enough and so what else do we need to change and then not only are we hiring people but are we keeping people you know we all get some emails left and right from different drivers who are leaving for primarily reasons of plain old salary in the middle of all this and so how do we make sure rich you know attract is one thing but retain is something altogether different and so i just remain so concerned and i know that our staff is beyond i know people who normally are helping manage routes and plan routes or driving buses i mean everybody is past maximum capacity and i know that drives to more people wanting to retire more people who just cannot sustain what's happening so yep what ideas you have to

098fix it we would love to hear it well a couple of things i'll share and then let mr plattenberg or mr smith share as they like we did rise we did raise with your support just a few weeks ago our initial bus driver salary really now to the highest starting salary really in the region which is going to be a great opportunity to get even more bus drivers in and i'll let jeff talk about any initial impacts he's seen from that and tonight as you know the board has for action doing a two and a half percent raise for all other members of the fcps transportation family which is really about a retention strategy of keeping the folks that we have we need to continue to do that and we need to continue in small

099ways too to show our appreciation for what bus drivers are being asked to do each and every day everybody in the system but everybody especially in transportation has gone above and beyond their normal job duties mr plattenberger mr smith anything you'd like to add especially around impacts of the latest training classes that we have coming in well thank you very much dr bray brown and i appreciate the conversation what i can tell you is you have heard time and time again across the division from and the same could be applied for teachers for leadership team members cabinet members the amount of pressure and stress and tension that has been the only constant through every adjustment every issue everything that has come before educators who have a passion about serving students and the community and the

100challenges of bringing people together to know that we are all working together on behalf of our children our drivers have done an incredible job our bus drivers our attendants the leadership team over there with francine furby sherry dyson michelle and the whole rest of the team over there paul d'andrea they have done an amazing job with when we started this year and our drivers were doing double backs our principles were under pressure beyond a normal year having to go ahead and find out ways to manage and administer and care for children and parents having to be patient with us and give us the grace that dr brenban speaks of while we had some bus rides that were over an hour long overcrowding on rides things we have every normal school year but this year because

101the pandemic was extra ordinary that compounded with the fact that we had this huge shortage of drivers i cannot tell you how appreciative i've been and the drivers have been that this body collectively is talking about them is focused on them as a group we know we have many challenges from instructional assistants from mechanical trades the shortage of over 260 that i have in the maintenance department and so forth the only thing i can say is we have totally been looking at revamping we have made marginal adjustments to your point dr brabrand about the training we have increased our recruiting efforts with the partnership with hr we've worked with the office of community relations to go ahead and ramp up the passage of that hourly wage and the signing bonus as and the premium for

102late runs has been huge so we are so appreciative and so thankful i just wanted to take a minute and forgive me dr berryman for going on but letting the board know how appreciative we are with all of the pressures that each and every one of us have been under absolutely lord jane you asked for specific numbers i have them five to seven applicants a week prior to the bonuses and the uh salary support 20 to 50 additional applicants each week since so yes this work around pay this work around bonuses has made a change to our pipeline and we'll continue to bring you updates around that as we move forward all right so let's make sure that we don't create this pretty amazing farm team then for every other system to pluck off when

103they get five years in no understood um you know and i think i i i really hope i don't know how we're going to keep teachers after this year i'm not going to go after you about live streaming when we're on a different topic today but you know i think what mr plattenberg said i i will just echo that whatever we can do and i know that is a big ask of you but as we head into budget season um we got to figure out how to keep people and we got to figure out how we don't grow this number by over taxing them to that kind of extent but thank you i appreciate it thank you miss kisgamara thank you for this report dr bray brand and i um i'll start with the easier

104topic and then address the elephant in the room but uh we talked a little bit about updated curriculum and digital resources i know we have uh schoolology this year can you tell us a little bit about how that rollout has gone and summarize what some of those curriculum changes have been sure thank you for that miss keys gamara and i'd like our chief academic officer dr presidio to talk a little bit about schoology it is replacing blackboard that we had for many many years over 20 years and now we have schoology and dr presidio we will share a few updates around on ms keith kamara's questions sure thank you for that question and i think overall the rollout has gone pretty well we did an extensive pilot with a number of schools last year to

105really prepare and make sure that we understood the the needs that schools and teachers would have with this full-scale implementation this year but you know honestly i mean this year is so challenging in so many different ways for teachers that we definitely understand that this is one more change that they're having to undertake so we're doing everything that we can to support them and make that transition as smooth as possible but most of our schools are reporting really positive progress with the implementation and again just providing that additional support where it's necessary the other question you asked was about updated curriculum resources and we really had a herculean effort by our central office folks over the summer to rewrite our curriculum what we call our planning and pacing guides for our core subjects the school

106year to make sure that they were aligned with the key information the essential learning the essential standards that students needed to have mastered last year that could be reinforced this year as well as the most important content from this school year so we provided a lot of additional ready ready-to-use resources in those curriculum guides lesson lesson plans lesson materials as well as assessment materials that teachers can use so i think we did a really good job with that but again we're continuing to refine that work based on school feedback so we're continuing to make adjustments for second quarter and we'll continue to do that for third and fourth quarter as well thank you i really like to try to clarify what we're talking about so that folks don't have to get too creative dr bray

107brown we have heard a lot of testimony i know this isn't in your presentation about a possible virtual option i know we as a board have talked about this but just to try to answer some of those folks i know that there's a teacher shortage i know that we have limited resources so can you just talk to us a little bit about what it would mean and what it would take and how difficult that or not difficult that might be right now sure first of all i'd like to say i have heard the community and i am working with our occr team to reach out to members of the community that have come forward to you today this evening and just a few weeks ago to be able to engage them and talk about their

108concerns in more detail and see if we can find a way forward at the same time i need to be honest as superintendent in the system and share the context of the request for virtual we simply don't have the staff we don't even have the staff right now to operate full in person we're strained to provide staffing for the limited virtual that we have per cdc guidelines for those with students with a diagnosed medical and health needs and the systems that are offering virtual that they mention have wait list of thousands of folks or have the positions filled with up to forty to fifty percent of substitute teachers substandard instruction we have to listen to our medical community to give us guidance on whether school is safe and resoundingly at the national state and local

109levels all the medical guidance continues to say that school can be done safe our own data that i have shared just this week is that only again point three three percent point three three percent that's 33 cases out of uh i want to make my math right is that of a thousand very very low percentages of covid cases in our schools so it's acknowledging that there are concerns but showing our data being transparent with that and also saying that we don't have the staffing capacity to add and and offer the high quality product that we have here in fcps but we'll continue to engage with them and if there are different ideas or new ways that come about as a result of this engagement that i can bring this board because we want to be

110solution oriented we are hopeful that the good news coming out about the elementary vaccination for kids 5 to 11 will be with us very soon that i can share with our community that so as early as next month in october uh our elementary kids will have access to the vaccine which i think can be a game changer for education here and across the country so more to come and i appreciate that question i just wanted to give us an opportunity to respond i know that people have stated repeatedly tonight please listen to us i know that it's not that we're not listening it's that we have to work with what we have to work with um one more thing well two more things i want to ask about but first on social and emotional learning

111is it too much to or can we get a synopsis of that i've heard people from our community take the creative approach to describe what that means and i thought that perhaps that we could actually define it today you know what i think i could do if we could go back would it be helpful maybe to go back on one of those slides we had a slide there that was it was page 27. yeah can we go back to slide 27 is that possible our folks here are going to see if we can get that up at elementary and and dr presidio i'm going to do my best and please overlay at elementary one of our core things that we're now doing universally in every slide 27 i believe at every elementary school is morning

112meeting that's where kids in elementary school they sit in a circle they introduce each other they talk about how they're feeling they unpack their feelings just like you would unpack facts about history or math they unpack feelings and learn strategies about how to communicate with one another and explain how they feel that's morning meeting at our secondary level we have got a required advisory period now in every middle or high school that's where kids have time in a smaller group with the same teacher to be able to get additional uh help support ask questions and we provided lesson materials for them to be able to go through again age-appropriate and we're still working on it we know some of our high school and middle school kids think some of the sel can still be elevated

113even more um and i among those were even my own two boys who went through the scl lessons last year but i will say even as kids sometimes go all this is touchy feely or whatever i'm too old for this learning the themes and telling kids simply like dr bracket told us last year from yale before the pandemic hit we need to be sure we're signaling in our system that kids have permission to feel morning meeting in elementary advisory and secondary lets kids know they have permission to feel in our schools and we're going to continue to grow and learn as we do more and more social emotional supports and provide the curriculum and get feedback from students dr president anything you'd add oh i think that was a great description i mean i think

114the big nugget as dr brabrand likes to talk about is we want our students to feel seen and heard and valued and connected to their school community so that's really what we're trying to do through the morning meeting activities through the advisory periods and then of course we know that a number of our students have been impacted uh by the school closures and coveted in different ways so we definitely are activating our counseling services and our social work services whenever necessary and when adults really know their students in the classroom they can help make those connections when students and families need those supports so that's really i mean i think those are the big ideas that we're really focused on i appreciate that i just wanted my parents to have an opportunity to hear i

115know that a lot of folks don't get a chance to come to our work sessions so here we go um the last set of questions i have it has to do with premier workforce on page with respect to those hirings and the work that we can do to make sure that we retain people especially special education as well as our diverse workforce hires we know that oftentimes people come into the community um and feel as though they're the only ones so is there you know if we if we can can we report on those particular retention efforts yeah sean do you want to talk a little bit or marty about some of the work we've done with diverse staff and we've not only increased more staff of color we've really gone directly to look at

116schools that had low or no staff of color and directly had dramatic impacts on that through leadership in mr mcdonald's office so shawn you want to talk about some of that thank you dr brabrand so from the recruitment perspective as dr brabrand shared this evening we did i have an increase in the number of teachers of color hired or the percentage of teachers of color higher this year which is something we absolutely should be celebrating but we're not going to stop there we're going to keep pushing to ensure that we continue to grow the number of folks that are joining our team and helping to support our students ultimately we have been working with a group of schools and continue to work with a group of schools that we previously reported that they had no

117teacher or no black teachers on their staff we've made great progress with those schools and continue to now look at widening the the the growth that we're expecting and and being able to support them to do so and that support really is working with the school leaders around building the culture of inclusion uh and really promoting an environment where folks are going to feel supported uh and celebrated in ensuring that they feel that connection and want to continue to be a contributing part of that school community that that is tied directly to that retention component as well that culture piece is critical in ensuring that uh individuals within the school community have those connections and supports that they can rely upon and and that does help in ensuring that we're able to retain those individuals

118we're also working through the great beginnings program to ensure that we're as we're bringing new teachers on board they have an opportunity to start to form some of those relationships with other teachers that belong to similar affinity groups as themselves and being able to identify with those folks make those connections build those collaborative partnerships and and solidify uh their their employment long term here with the school division so the work is ongoing and we are also working with community groups as well in that regard thank you i i understand it's ongoing and i and i wanted to highlight particularly two groups of our special education teachers that we know sometimes it's hard uh to fill those spots and to make sure we retain as as well as our diverse workforce and i hope that we're

119also reaching out to those groups that's that where they can join and and get information on how best to support these particular teachers who that are so and staff members that are so vital to our community thank you thank you ms mclaughlin um i was interested in talking about our students um just pulling up the slide who've been paused and quarantined i believe that is slide what's showing up for me is slide four on the impact um even though it says august 13th to september 15th we know that school started um at least a full week later so even looking at just over a three week period we were looking at 3 600 kids between paws or identified as a close contact and then there was 546 students who were actually covet positive my concern

120is that 3 600 students as we talked about on tuesday we know that our neighboring jurisdiction loudon is recognizing that with the delta variant which symptoms will typically show up sooner that when we have the students who are getting tested after day five that by day 10 you're going to have 98 out of 100 of those kids by day 10 accurately they're asymptomatic and they don't have coveted and they come back to school fairfax county is going to actually extend that by almost another full week another extra four days so this is something that's been a big concern particularly in my district i can't speak for the other board members in their districts so i would really like for your team to understand that when families are citing states all around the us including california

121and massachusetts that we really take seriously what are we doing to help minimize students being out when so much of this board and so much of your commitment as well has been how do we really reduce learning loss after everything that's happened over the last 18 months no absolutely we're committed we're going to continue to review in partnership with the health department this this quarantine number we talked a little bit about it on tuesday which i think is the slide number you're referring to just for the wider community i did present data our cova transmission super low and i did present a chart with the potential risk being higher if you shorten that quarantine length it didn't have the delta variant data on it we'd love to see it but that even said about seeing

122the data we're going to continue to work with the health department look at the experiences of the districts that are already lowering it and i commit to working with dr boyd and of course dr gloria and the health department to review that and make additional recommendations moving forward as we review the data coming in and i would say given tonight's testimony from one of the citizens who happens to reside in my district and is actually a fellow hoya graduate he was talking about that specific chart and having concerns about when and where that cdc data where you're talking about uh the risks of um and and it's a massive spread to be saying at 10 days it could be a one to a ten percent risk i mean yeah one percent is one percent ten

123percent totally different i'll certainly take those comments and follow up and look at that in more detail with dr boyd and see uh if we we have additional uh recommendations for the board uh at a later time the other thing is that as the daughter of a former teacher i absolutely understand um how much they have done throughout the pandemic and just how exhausting their jobs can be but what i don't understand is why or what did they share on the problem of live streaming versus recording because i think it's a very different experience for students particularly at the elementary school level you know i'll try to bring back additional feedback on that we're just getting ready to start our uh uh streaming check-in process um that will be uh going into effect next monday

124and i can bring back some of that focus to you as we go through that with our schools we are continuing to work to refine all those processes as we begin it next week and we've stayed in close collaboration dr presidio and i were meeting with principals today we were meeting with teachers today we're continuing to get additional feedback look at things that we can help refine to make this easier because we know it's a lift but we'll also try to drill down a little bit more on the live streaming versus pre-recording and bring you some additional information on that one of our future uh updates yeah i i i can't emphasize enough that our students are just so desperate um to continue their their learning absolutely thank you mr kofax thank you and thank

125you dr brabrand some of this you will have heard um from me at the uh work session but well first of all i do want to highlight there are lots of good things in this presentation and fairfax county needs to and continues to be one of the best school systems in the nation we are challenged like we have never been challenged before we must adhere to audiences that believe masks are unnecessary to those that want virtual learning and we are trying to do our best in all of these circumstances so i thank you i thank the staff i thank all of our principals and teachers who are navigating through these waters which we thought were almost done in the spring but here we are again so in our work session i mentioned to you that

126i continue to have a lot of cases in my area that where students of course were not contacted in the 24 to 48 hours on average i was hearing 8 to 14 days in my area i know you're aware of that i want the public to understand that we hear you we are and you had committed that you will be working and meeting with our county health partners you've already started doing that but you will be working with them you will be meeting with them and but dr brabrand i ask you to make our county health partners understand what this is what what these pauses that have not been followed up on in a fashion as promised have done to our students and how they have impacted our students as well as our teachers and

127administrators no thank you i know the urgency we have heard loud and clear the urgency of parents with kids paused and quarantined need and those that could have the opportunity to come back sooner we must address that and give them communication based on the medical advice so we've sped up the process at secondary for the vaccination card if they're asymptomatic we've sped up the information we're giving them so that they can do contact tracing quicker and we hope to have better results to share than what i had to share on tuesday where we saw that those cases were still beyond the 48 to 72 hours that the health department has worked to do a goal but they are working too to speed up their process and i hope to have better news to report when

128we next meet yes thank you um because i am working with our schools and getting this information i'm also my time's up okay just last thing yes please go ahead um i i did not hear that um i really think um because as i was saying because i've been talking to the administrators i am hopeful that i spoke to you about this earlier today i am really hopeful we can come up with something to um support the mental health needs of those that are in the buildings on the front lines this is extremely important they are you know the hashtag not sustainable is applies to them as well as everybody else in the building so absolutely and we're we are meeting and we spoke to principals just today that help is on the way for

129additional supports for them as school leaders they need that because they're trying to fill the tanks of others when their own tank is approaching empty and to be honest everyone in america needs to understand that our educators are all trying to serve kids in the most unbelievable set of circumstances i think anyone could have imagined you couldn't have written a more challenging chapter of the last 18 months and it's a testament that so many people who love kids so much are staying connected i'm hopeful that very very soon we are going to have the vaccine for every kid and really be able to to to extinguish the delta variant completely and we're going to do everything we can to support our leaders to support our teachers and front-line workers thank you dr anderson thank you

130i just want to quickly echo what miss denver kovacs shared which is there's a lot here to celebrate so i do want to be sure that we're not losing track of that but i do know that in the effort of continuous improvement we do want to just kind of hone in on the areas that we do need to have some different results very quickly i'm just going to start on page three i know on page three you shared information about the national merit semi-finalists and i know that the information for this year has just been made public and i know there's been a slight increase but i have to share my concern in terms of how none of the schools none of the students who are semi-finalists are from schools that are represented in mason

131district not not one of the high schools so that message is troubling to me and i would love to hear your thoughts in terms of um since equity is at the center of all of our work how we can have greater parity in this kind of honor for students all across the division yeah one thing i would say is i think we need to continue to look at how we can support kids we offer the national merit scholarship is determined by the psat score that is taken in 10th grade and we offer that universally the leadership of dr dominic almost 20 years ago put in that at 10th grade i believe uh dr presidio do we do some work at ninth grade even with psat or is it only at the 10th grade level before

132i say something it's universal at the 10th grade level it's universal at 10th we may need to do some more targeted work around that at the 9th grade level for those schools that we're not seeing the same success and i'll talk with dr presidio about maybe some opportunities that we can do that more i will say i've learned personally even through the journey as a parent that the psat can open gateways for kids to have opportunities for scholarships for colleges to see them to understand them and uh i'll i'll bring back some ideas at a future meeting thank you i do remember seeing your son's name on this list last year because i sent you a note and thank you the fact that your cognizant of the doors that it opens and again my just

133dismay that zero of the high schools in mason district are represented it just speaks to the continuing narrative that our kids are not performing as well as others in the division and i really think some targeted efforts to change that is key and overdue thank you you're welcome um secondarily i wanted to speak about um lunches you have lots here in terms of how many meals have been served that's great news because i do know our folks do use it in our community have there been some impacts to the quality of quality of the lunches based on supply chain issues and matters i'm going to let miss burton speak to that i think we have had a few supply chain challenges and we've had to double down on some uh of our oldies but goodies

134like pizza which maybe doesn't make students uh upset but we we want to continue to fully implement the food uh and nutrition health guidelines but uh miss burton do you want to share a little bit more there yes thank you dr graybird um we uh we are experiencing some supply chain shortages in food um due to the greater participation of students as dr brabrun said we're serving on average about 28 000 more students per day than we were pre-covered for a total of 138 000 compared to 110 pre-covered uh on average and so that that participation volume increase you know is being experienced all across the united states and as a result of that we have uh supply shortages for you know some food items uh delivery drivers are also in short supply that can

135impact food services but as far as the quality of food i do not believe that it is affecting the quality of food it is affecting the number of options that we are able to provide typically we do provide a number of choices for students every day and that has been limited somewhat at this during this school year because of supply shortages can you give a little bit more specificity are we talking about five options that have been now down to two options or three just roughly because i do have some community members that are just concerned with the offerings my understanding is we have um that we usually have four or five options at the secondary level and we usually have just two or three options at the elementary level at this time and usually

136it you know pre-code it was we had a much greater selection than that we can get you some additional information on where the menu has gone um and it has been shortened some because of supply chain and we can let you know which those um are pizza is still available in fairfax county public schools though i wanted to share that tonight first oh i know i had it at po not too long ago when i visited as somebody who ate lunch in the cafeterias every day it's hard to get out of that habit but thank you for that information i think knowing that we do have some supply issues will provide our parents to understand a little bit better in terms of the shortages lastly i just want to say very quickly schoology i know

137it's new and has been a little bit of a learning curve for our parents and our staff but as someone who engaged in seven different classrooms during my child's back-to-school night it was a nice one-stop shop where you had to go to schoology the everything was there syllabus the zoom button so thank you for that transition i i think it's been streamlined tremendously thank you mr fresh thank you very much um first question on technology i think it's great that we have uh devices in everybody's hands now is i can't see it's marty here he's here okay uh and i'm sure you can guess what i'm about to ask but i'm curious if um if we will be able to roll out uh the monitoring capabilities for parents to see screen time data for their

138students that we approved last year mr smith so and i will also let uh mr sethi uh have some comments on this i know that our teams are [Music] working in so many different areas to ensure that our students are returning to school strong and so that is clearly a priority for the board and is on our priority list and we will be providing some information to the board about what our options are but i can say that with what we have going on at this point we've been more focused on ensuring that we are again returning students strong but we will be bringing some information back to the board about our progress and where we are with implementing that work is the same hold true for the other follow-on motion that was passed last

139year to make sure that our devices are being used to supplement enrich classroom experience as opposed to just being the technological paperweight yes and that is a work that we would be doing in working with isd to do that work and again those same teams are involved in ensuring that we are supporting the work of returning students to school and so it is a bit of a domino effect there but those are still priorities for our departments and i don't want the public to get the wrong idea that i'm not conscious of the hard work that they're doing but i continue to raise the issue because at one point we were told that it was going to be implemented in the short term um and it was in it was during the pandemic that that

140that was said so um also on the question of uh technology are we noticing a savings on my fi devices in the coming year compared to the big expense that we put into it last year and are we pushing families toward cox still or is it more mifi-centric i know that we are providing a variety of options for families beyond just our cox offerings but i will ask mr seti to provide a little more information about what's happening with my flies in general thank you marine to the question of my fires we during the summer season planned to keep the same amount of my fires in rotation just not anticipating um trying to anticipate all the demand so currently we have the same load of modifiers for this school here but clearly the use is

141shifting as students come back into the building and we will be able to reduce that in the coming year depending on the the spike in demand or the reduction of it to the um question of um student use we have i think i was just going to go back to the quick question on the technology for using and monitoring student network we piloted a solution through the last year and the team is just about ready to roll it out on a larger scale we want to be prepared for the parent support questions that come along with it and allow for a roller to help parents sign on for that strategy we will come back with details on that thank you um shifting a little bit to social emotional learning we've made a lot of progress

142over the last year looking out for our lgbtqia students tremendous progress tremendous um i would say leading this the commonwealth and i'm curious and you can rope in others to answer as well how you see our sel universal practices benefiting our lgbtqia students in the year ahead well here's what's great we are doing this screener universally grades three through 12. we talked about whether to pilot it but we said in this pan post pandemic or emerging from the pandemic we need to dipstick every kid we're going to be able to really drill down and give that kind of data that you're looking at to see how are our kids doing by grade level and i don't know yet maybe dr boyd or dr presidio what our full data capabilities will be but i do think

143it's going to let us pinpoint much more specifically how students are doing how unique groups of students are doing and we can make the appropriate adjustments i do think we've led the way in virginia around our transgender work both regulations but also creating a culture of affirmation the aaa network starts with affirming and the more that we affirm our kids from all backgrounds about who they are uh the more successful they're going to be but as far as the data piece on the scls anything dr presidio that you would add to that um i don't think i would add anything at this time okay i think you answered that all right thank you no thank you miss tolin yes thank you for the presentation you're welcome lots to be proud of here in fairfax county

144public schools and i think sometimes we lose sight of that when we're hunkered down dealing with all of our issues with covet etc so thank you for the presentation um i did i'm happy to follow some of my colleagues and so i do want to bolster some of their remarks um you know we've had discussions too that um very interested in really tracking what's the appropriate amount of quarantine time and how do we you know take care of the pauses and and make sure we're working more closely with the health department you know my office has been tracking that information for school districts across the country we added some international information today so you all have the spreadsheet to take a look at well thank you it's you know a lot of data um i

145did want to just ask a couple of questions about um the sel work um i you know i know we're doing a lot this year and we have significant investments in that area and i just wondered i know that's a very difficult area to sort of have a lot of data around is it working what do we do next year i know you know we're looking at using esser funds for this and the you know the the numbers are big so how are we going to really track it and make sure that what we're doing is working yep and what is if we need to make adjustments dr boyd or dr presidio but i know we have a firm plan around how we're going to assess kids and then do uh follow-up based on that

146assessment uh should i go to dr boyd first dr presidio or well i see her hands up so let's go to dr boyd dr boyd good evening and thank you dr greenbrand and thank you um for the question we will be having the capability of dr brabrand share to have data from our seo screener and the key piece is that we are focusing on certain trends so as we talk about seo i just want to highlight that we're talking about self-management self-awareness responsible decision-making and relationship skills um and social awareness so with that data and with that information we'll be able to establish goals as one of the data points being the screener but the benefits of social emotional learning that should have a positive impact on our student attendance it should have a positive

147impact on our student discipline and most importantly a positive impact on our student achievement and so we will be able to establish goals have baseline data and to monitor the interventions that are implemented to ensure that we are making progress and as with all things the goals and the strategies that are implemented at one school may be different than those implemented at another school based on that school's unique needs but we'll be monitoring that closely and supporting our administrators and our staff in that way so i also know an important part of the um the screeners is follow up with students that are identified in the screeners to have any issues dr bray when you and i had a conversation about this i had with some of my administrators they really need to make sure

148we need to make sure they have time to do the follow-up that they need to do after these screeners so we need to really be careful about our testing times and our follow-up times yeah thank you as some of the principals are telling me scott as we work on this can we have a little bit more time between the assessment and the follow-up and it's a lot of kids right we're not just doing this for a few kids we're not just doing this in a few grades so we're certainly going to take that feedback and try to make the adjustments so that it's pace that the cadence of the assessment and then the follow-up is just right i think we all also just feel this overwhelming need to really make sure we've checked in with

149every kid in these areas and make sure that we're really going to meet their needs and the needs aren't going to be just through this school year we're really going to be having to develop plans for kids for the rest of this year but even beyond and that's why our esser approach has really been this is not just a one-year sel project this is about frankly i think this is going to be one of the more permanent things that comes out that we're going to have a more intentional approach to social emotional learning in schools and it's going to stay with us even beyond the pandemic but we'll certainly bring some more updates and i will have flexibility uh working with the principles on both the assessment and follow-up timelines okay thank you thanks for

150the presentation you're welcome thank you miss marin thank you dr brabrand um it's nice to hear about things that are not fully covered related all the time yes that's right however i'm going to talk about covert related things okay well that's that's okay too um i've had the good well i've been talking um for many weeks now as you know with different families and who have experienced the pausing and the quarantining and i know our team has done a ton of work to try and make those um be more seamless and i think uh one thing that i've learned is that we are being tasked the school division is being tasked with really stepping up in ways never seen before in terms of public health and i know you and your staff have been involved

151with meetings to plan for things that on a massive scale that we haven't seen for instance the upcoming vaccine that will be rolling out can you just speak about the different community members stakeholders partners that you've been engaged with to plan for that um and just to sure share the expansiveness that we have six hundred 87 thirty nine fcps students who will be age eligible eligible for the new vaccine out of the ninety six thousand children in fairfax county so so please yeah do share about sure your conversations i'll be honest let's be let's be clear we have a tremendous lift in front of us to get ready to vaccinate these thousands of kids i have convened already working with the health department already our partners with dr boyd our assistant superintendent who has responsibility

152for school related health services and also with anova and also with our virginia academy of pediatricians we know our pediatricians are are feeling concerned about being overwhelmed as this vaccine becomes available they're already overwhelmed in their offices we know a nova is is sharing strains but the truth is we're going to have to partner together with community partners with our health department with anova with our pediatricians and come out with a way that we can all successfully get our community of elementary school kids vaccinated dr boyd is about to launch a survey that we will be doing and dr boyd you want to talk a little bit about that and then our plans to use that survey to help bring and convene we're meeting with these groups already started to meet with this group we'll

153expand the group as needed and we're meeting every two weeks but we're going to use that survey dr boyd going out very soon to parents to help guide us through this next and what i hope is our final vaccination phase for kids dr boyd thank you dr brabrand as dr brabrand shared we will be partnering with our health department to support the vaccination efforts for students ages 5 to 11. we know that there's going to be a significant community outlet to support the vaccination of our youngest learners in this way and we know that a number of our families will take um access and advantage of those community outlets but we also know that we will have some families that may need supports and accessing the backs and we want to survey those families to

154see how we can best support them um as with all things we don't want to assume we know how to meet our families needs we want to ask our families what their needs are so that we can collaborate with our county partners and determine how we can be responsive to those specific needs so we'll be submitting a survey to determine how how many of our families will be interested in having their students vaccinated during the school day in their absence how many of our families would prefer to have participate in community vaccination efforts where they can be present with their children and how many of their families would want to and would prefer to have their young ones be vaccinated with their primary medical home so that survey will be forthcoming and again the purpose

155of that survey is to inform how we can collaboratively work to support our students and families thank you dr boyd and the um is the school division going to be contracting to have the vaccines through our own provider do you know is that part of the contracting for the kova testing we are looking at a vendor to support us with both student testing and staff testing and with student and staff vaccination and i don't know mr smith do we have an update yet on that or we hope to have some real updates uh and finalizing that vendor selection very very soon mr smith yes we're in the process now of working with our vendor and going through the process of developing we've developed questions and and having the vendor answer those questions for us as

156we move forward but yes we are looking at uh primarily with the testing aspect and then also with the vaccination aspect and again the the current vendor in which we're speaking uh will be able to provide both of those options for our community thank you i mean i have to say i'm just floored that this is the work that our public school system is being tasked with doing i think we're rising to the challenge but when i look i'm looking at our mission right now to inspire and empower students to meet high academic standards lead healthy ethical lives and be responsible and innovative global citizens it's tough to do that when we are giving medicine to children with families consent of course um testing finding vendors to do these things um it really you know

157earlier this year i had expressed concern about the weight of things on our shoulders at that time and this has just compounded everything and i think it's unreasonable on us so i thank us i thank the staff rather for what they're doing and to that end i think that it is time that we have an appointed staff person who really can manage this our central office staff have done yeoman's work in juggling this with special education in the department of support services in addition to other programs and it's not sustainable and i only hope that um we can continue with the partnerships you mentioned dr brabrand to really we need you know lots of help also we can look to other partners perhaps we haven't connected with yet the nova chamber of commerce um libraries

158the office for children at the county could i nova lend us and support the blood mobile units dispensing mobile vaccination um you know when i think of it took i know over weeks um it was amazing when i walked into that center back in january and sort you know 80 some odd stations set up if it took weeks to vaccinate about you know 20 000 of our staff how are we gonna do it with a hundred thousand kids in the coming months so that's right that is my big concern and my ask of the community thank you thank you thank you miss marin miss amesh thank you uh thank you to our staff as everyone has articulated it's been a tremendous effort obviously over the course of uh just the past few weeks and being

159able to return to normal um i did well almost almost completely i i did have obviously a number of questions dr ray brandt i want to give you the opportunity right now to share with our community being realistic as we look ahead whether it's staffing whether it's you know instructional needs whether it's the safety situation we're in the health situation what is realistic to expect looking ahead and what challenges do we believe um you know may disappoint perhaps just to set community expectations generally speaking i'd say i think we've come to the realization after six weeks that covet will still be a primary impact on the school year in a way that we had hoped it would not be i i think it will be better by the end of the year but it will

160still have a significant impact on our operations through the rest of this year we need to continue to look at what things we can do with the additional health responsibilities that we've placed on our staff what else can we take away from them while maintaining a focus on instruction and right now the strain the concern that you guys hear is teachers and principals who want to be instructional leaders who are having to be medical and operational support staff so that we can simply keep the operation running that's the biggest challenge i don't think it's going to go away certainly not during this fall i hope as we enter the end of the calendar year into 2022 with vaccination prevalent for elementary we'll have less operational issues and more opportunity to return to instructional ones but

161kovid will still end up having more of an impact this year than we ever expected and it will still the year will be certainly the first six months of this year will still be dominated by kova 19 in our schools and that's just the truth yeah just wanted to be loud and clear that it's it's certainly going in the right direction but it's not over it's not over yet yeah and i appreciate that um i wanted to dig a little bit into some of the academic pieces that you shared with us slides two and three just as a snapshot of what's going on and then slide nine on family engagement if you can share a little bit on how those compare to previous years well sure uh i'm just going to go back to the

162slides as you reference them in terms of slides two and three uh slide two where we were just talking about demographics our our enrollment this year over last year is about the same we wanted to capture we wanted to capture that projected enrollment that was really done pre-covered and we've not gotten back those those folks just simply haven't come that we projected would have come some of that trim is back in the early grades some of it again we can see that early grades are down below the projections and we also see that homeschool is up so i do hope that homeschool numbers are going to again based on what principles are being told families are saying when i can get the vaccine i am going to enroll my kid immediately in fcps so we

163hope to have different numbers and we'll have updated special ed numbers not in september but in december is when we have the final special ed count so we may see some additional movement then the graduation rate is one of the big stories here one i think it talks about when you get additional flexibility from the state beyond just the sols to measure a kid's success we can get more kids to walk across that graduation stage and we've done it across all kinds of demographic groups our english language are economically disadvantaged or latino and this board put direct resources in schools that were underperforming on graduation rate graduation counselors and coaches to make sure those kids knew what credits they needed and they were getting them done or they were going to summer school and we

164ran summer school three times the 66 percent larger and that's got more kids across too so i'm very proud of this 95 almost 95 graduation rate uh it it's it's thousands of more kids graduating now than just a few years ago but we still have more to go until we're really every child by naming by need means this still has room for improvement and those are just the things that i would say i'm most proud of there in terms of academics and as i told you uh and shared earlier i'm proud that we've really continued movement around a diverse workforce to reflect our diverse student body and what sean and his team have done dean brooks we need to keep doing and i think that will change our culture and climate too as we bring

165more diversity into our school there will there will be i think greater learning opportunities for kids and staff alike yeah family engagement was the other piece doctor slide nine the family engagement the bottom line out of the family engagement we we dip stick twice last year in the fall and winter in december and then in the spring and our numbers moved in the right direction families see more focused outreach but let's be honest as you've said for some time our our historical work on this we have fallen short but we've acknowledged it and we're doing more now more language translation more specific outreach with all of our material in multiple languages the technology helpline the family liaisons and 31 schools miso mesh that they weren't in before right if this is important it needs to

166be important in every school not just in some schools so we're moving we we moved it from parent to family we're broadening the sense of responsibility for what that is it's not a simple translation job it's about family engagement involvement and we recognize when we did the new family engagement policy just a few years ago with the prior board that we were going too narrow language only is not what it's all about it's about inclusiveness it's about respect it's about continued communication i can speak to you in your language and still be rude and still be ex exclusive so language in and of itself was not enough and we've we've changed the the training we've changed the mission and we've added more uh and we've not only added more schools schools with existing family liaisons

167have gotten additional hours to directly let those family liaisons spend more time supporting them so i hope to see this engagement number continue to creep up in the year ahead yeah i know absolutely and i think especially as we compare it to previous years making sure we're constantly yes uh steadily moving up yeah even in a tough year um so i appreciate you outlining some of that um can't know if we're getting better if we that you know don't know what that's relative to on slide 18 i did want to dig a little bit into the accreditation piece i know uh you know some of the state requirements have laxed a little bit giving us some room at the same time though in the future we're going to be tested on that uh based on

168the sol data right that's right so what are we doing to kind of prepare to make sure that we're not um stagnating uh in that sense or falling even behind since we're not accountable in the same way this year yeah well let me go back to one thing too about family engagement about improvement it's important to recognize that it's just been during this last two or three years that we did the first ever family engagement survey so we we've made a sea change to say that family engagement needs to be assessed needs to be measured needs to have resources responded to we had not done that we've talked about it but we've never surveyed it and unless you inspect it you won't be respecting it so i think we're going to see a success but

169we don't have a long trend line we just started to dipstick this just before the pandemic as far as the accreditation purposes dr presidio do you want to say anything about that i know our our schools are hard at work doing this initial assessment um and i the only thing i'd add before i turn it over is i think our teachers are excited for once for the first time in virginia to be able to be measured on growth over time versus one moment in time in the spring it is more assessment time during the school year but the focus on growth really gives a chance to say where do we take a student from instead of just a moment in time but dr presidio anything else you'd add well i would add a couple things

170uh one it's still a little bit unclear exactly how the accreditation process is going to work because this is the first time as dr brabrand mentioned that this growth assessment is being administered so you know our schools are in the process of administering it right now so we're still learning about what that's going to look like and how the state is going to calculate those results so we're in close communication with the virginia department of education on that but more importantly i would say to to your question we've been very proactive in supporting our schools based on the other data indicators that we had from last year as well as entry assessments that we gave to students as they return this school year so all of our schools are using the mtss process to identify

171those students that do have the greatest academic needs and we're deploying our central office staff to support the schools that have the greatest percentages of students that might be in academic jeopardy so our department of school improvement and support are in schools every day based on those needs that have been identified in our schools so we're being very proactive we're looking again at how the state is going to develop the accreditation ratings and we'll have more information to report to the board as part of our academic and wellness plans using our essar funds we've committed to providing ongoing progress monitoring reports to the school board so we will have more of those reports even before we get to the accreditation phase that will give you some sense about where we're at yeah i really appreciate

172that um and and building off of that i know one of the cornerstones and the three kind of main pieces here were ss is one of them right and you outline that you want to listen to students and respond to their needs so i'm wondering not just when it gets really bad with the accreditation risk right but in general if you can just speak a little bit more to how we're evaluating that because we know the gaps are have increased they're going to continue to increase um so what's that assessing and modifying process look like well dr presidio would you do you want to add anything to that i i i will be in real time i mean i don't know yeah go ahead sorry well one of the things i'd say is we need

173to continue to remember that we have a professional learning communities in our school with our teachers who are regularly designing lessons assessing kids using the feedback from those assessments to drive further interventions or refinements to instruction and it's a it's what we call a professional learning community cycle it's part of our theory of action you may hear a lot in elementary school about oh my god i've got this many clt meetings each week but that's part of a central part of our strategy the teachers need to come together look at what they taught look at what kids results are and so they're doing that they're doing that real time is just part of the nature of work each day and it's reflected we've given uh isd has given them some material to do short quicker

174form of assessments to help see where kids are i think some of it is going to emerge here in the next few months how deep the gap is but also how quickly kids are accelerating now that they're back right one is what the gap was but two is how quick the growth rate will be and we're just six weeks in it's just a little too early to be able to speak definitively to that and i don't know dr presidio anything else that you would say over what i shared no i mean i i think again you know schools are in the process of building out their esser plans so now that you know the state has approved the esser grant that we submitted those funds will start being distributed to schools and they'll start to

175put those academic supports in place and we'll be able to have a better understanding about you know how how well students are responding to those supports that they have in place i guess the one thing i might just elevate a little bit is we definitely need to be looking at some of these standardized assessments like the sols but those aren't the only types of assessments i mean we definitely want to be looking at a more holistic approach to assessment we want to value what students can do as they come back we want to keep them engaged in the learning process and we want to provide them with additional supports that are also rigorous enriching and engaging at the same time and trying to strike that balance is going to be really important um as we

176move forward in supporting our students yeah absolutely i think i want to emphasize specifically that identification piece and you know in advance right because we know that once those gaps exist and we don't notice them maybe over time it gets worse by the time we've uh seen the evaluation process which to your point dr presido isn't necessarily even clear how it's going to happen yet um you know then we find ourselves way behind and could have intervened far earlier uh so that's i wanted to emphasize that piece in real time finding those gaps and needs um i want to pivot a little bit just to the budget part with the foundation specifically um whether we've seen you know how that's compared to things in the past um and then also what our budget needs evaluation

177process will look like as we look at at the last portion of esser so a couple of things there in terms of budget priorities you all are going to be talking about budget priorities for next year's budget very very soon esser as you know you prioritize school-based funds for academic and social emotional supports one thing also if i could go back ms omesh that's important that i'm coming to the realization of and many of our colleagues are too whatever gap that the kid has is not going to be uh the gap isn't going to shrink in a quarter it's the first report isn't going to tell you we've yep we already closed the gap or the january one we hope to make progress but i need to be sober minded in sharing with you that

178i'm tentatively here in the beginning that the gaps that there are are going to require a lot of hard work on behalf of the staff and the students to close those and it may not all happen in one year i wish that it would but it may not does it mean and it's not an excuse because we need to be seeing ourselves do better but at the very beginning we may not see as big the gains it may not be a simple and a quick fix of just time back with teachers it's really going to have to be trying to accelerate through content um in a way that we just haven't had students do before so we'll we'll keep you posted i will keep you posted in this board if you could just answer the

179foundation part about what part how how things have what how the foundation funds compare to previous years oh the foundation that's about about the same actually the foundation would tell you and i'll work to get a report that our funds our business community stepped up we did not see a dramatic decrease miss cohen i know is on our foundation board and we did not see a dramatic decrease at all in fact we saw funders step up and support us really at levels i think even a bit higher than prior to the pandemic and i think the foundation will have a lot of exciting news to be sharing soon with this board and the greater fairfax community beyond what all the great work they've done already thank you miss miss eisenheiser um i will try to

180be brief because many of my questions and thoughts have already been discussed or brought up by my colleagues um first i just want to say dr brabrand and um to your team and i have to give a shout out to dr boyd who i don't know if she's still here online but i know how incredibly hard you all have been working but especially dr boyd in helping to manage many of the changes and adaptations we've had to make due to delta and the realities of covid that we were hoping wouldn't be the realities of covid this fall so i just wanted to give a shout out to your team and especially to our principals and our teachers who are working above and beyond i you know my heart goes out to hard work they're doing

181and i hope they know how incredibly grateful we are and how much it means to us that they're doing this for our kids having said that i wanted to ask i am thrilled that we're trying to do more for our kids who are paused and quarantined i wanted to ask what we're doing for our teachers to help them especially with those office hours which you know i believe very strongly in because our kids need that connection what can we take off their plates can we compensate them what can we do to help so we are in the middle of having some dialogue about how we can do some additional targeted compensation for those teachers who are going to have a larger number of kids any teacher that has kids that are pause quarantined or isolated

182that requires time to work beyond contract hours so we are working on that right now about what additional flexibilities we can give principals for the use of those targeted funds to support um those interventions so we'll we'll have more to share i think very soon but we recognize even if we can't change and we all want to provide the support how can we try to compensate that to the greatest degree possible the other thing is just continuing to talk about what works in refining what can be done can you talk to a group of kids all at once and that counts as a collective check-in for everyone yes does the check-in have to be 30 minutes no depending on the group of students and the individual student that check-in could be super brief really a

183five-minute or ten minute check-in do you understand the assignments i got are you clear with what to do do you need any help some will need more it's going to vary by age and ability of the kid and we need to provide and we're going to work to provide even more refined guidelines so teachers understand it's about meeting those kids where they are i do want to say why this is so important we've already got some kids entering their second quarantine 28 days without a teacher or instruction is not something we can do either we have to have both the parent hat the teacher hat the administrator hat but we are looking with refined guidelines and additional uh compensation supports where we can uh for for this work and i i'm so glad to hear

184that dr murray brandon i really do appreciate also that you brought up the fact that this isn't just a you know out of school one time and like it was pre-culvert or a kid may be sick and coming back this is maybe more than once especially until we get the vaccinations for our younger kids and it's really important after this last year to have them connected and have that sense of belonging and a live or a person not just asynchronous work it's vital i think to their long-term success so i really appreciate the flexibility for our teachers but also the opportunity for our students thank you um i wanted to bring up you know i'm so glad to see the higher graduation rate and i think it goes to your point of showing that the

185importance of flexibility in demonstrating competency for graduation and i think it's something that we should push for for the state to make sure that we're not artificially holding back students who are capable of demonstrating the knowledge for graduation to graduate um i did want to mention that i know that accreditation is is you know being waived for one more year but our requirements for our high school students there's less and less waivers for graduation so i want to make sure that for our high school students who 9th 10th 11th grade part of that time was their year in virtual that it's not long term going to impact them negatively so i think something this board should think about when you talk about legislative priorities one of the silver linings of the pandemic was greater state

186flexibility and it needs to be retained beyond the pandemic what we learned is kids in fcps classrooms held to high standards can go beyond a standardized test and walk across the stage with their peers kids that before had a standardized test and this board has been clear and i've been clear that standardized tests have been often barriers to admission or barriers to learning versus accelerating and igniting learning and passion in kids the flexibility targeted flexibility that the state has given us is something that needs to come out of this pandemic including around locally verified let local groups of educators review the kids work and make a determination about whether they are ready to have a credit verified for that particular course so that they can move forward for granted i think that's the key right

187it's not that we don't expect the high expectations for our students but there's flexibility in in local control of how we make sure our students are demonstrating that they've passed those high expectations and i think that make sure we know what we're graduating our students with the knowledge we should graduate without having an artificial barrier of our standardized test in their way so i appreciate that feedback i would just like to say that as you're looking at this on-time graduation rate and looking at special education students make sure you pull out that applied studies diploma in that on-time graduation rate and don't include it there you know i was going to say that for two years okay i'll keep saying that thank you i don't i don't think it's been released the state detail hasn't

188been released uh released yet but we'll be sure when we release it that we have that breakout as you've requested before yeah just just because there are very very different beasts the applied studies and standard or advanced diplomas and they lead to different capabilities in terms of post-secondary and jobs so it's not a apples to apples number if those are combined into one so i just want to put that out there proactively this year so thank you very much and again thank you for your team our principals our admins everybody for all their hard work and our bus drivers our staff thank you okay um i'll just share uh i think you know last year was a a horrible year due to a world wide pandemic that unfortunately just won't let go but there's so

189many great things happening and i think you know we have to say that you've you've shared many of these tonight i want the community to hear that and for those of us who are going into schools and seeing them and talking to the teachers kids are learning kids are engaged teachers are happy to be with their students everybody is working overtime and doing everything they can to get kids um back into in-person learning and re-engaged and and starting to close those gaps and i think it's important that we just say that and ensure that we keep telling people that and at the same time um you know as some of my colleagues brought up there are still lots of areas of concern and i appreciate miss marin who um brought up the vaccinations i mean

190that is the next big hurdle for this school system for this county um and i i am very interested in seeing what plans you're going to bring us dr brabrand to address that um very quickly can somebody talk about the k um k2 devices what did we end up doing for our youngest uh learners with a technology mr smith or mr sethy i don't know mr smith did you want to take that or have mr sethi i can let mr uh set the answer some questions or answer the question a bit more fully but we did look at a combination of tablets and laptops for our youngest learners those devices remain at school they don't go back and forth uh with students and and that was again after input from a variety of stakeholders and

191a review of a variety of devices but i will let mr sethe provide more information to the point of refresh we have also applied for grant funding that will allow us to bring in additional funds to help buy and refresh those technologies so as mr smith was saying we done pilots and we have a small amount deployed through our pre-k team in some schools and getting tested out and then we are looking for large amounts to replace with additional funding as available through grants or other means thank you um and something that like mr frisch i'm going to get back to some of the pre-covet advocacy um you know time on device has always been one of my concerns so um what guidance have we given teachers this year especially in those lower grades into

192how they should utilize these and these devices with these kids and and time on devices specifically have we mr smith do you want to talk about that or dr presidio well we don't have set timelines and guidelines around that i mean um largely at the younger grades um you know students are really not on the devices obviously like you would see use usage levels at the secondary level but having the devices and having the ability for the students to maintain that connectivity when they need it when they're out on quarantine is something that is essential and having the ability to have access to some of the digital curriculum that we have that is student more self-paced and self-directed is critical but the time in the classroom with the primary grades there's very little time that

193really that the students are on the devices okay i'm happy to hear that you know i want our kids outside and especially after last year especially the youngest learners um and i know just anecdotally some of the teachers in these younger grades have made it a point individually to tell parents that they are limited limiting so i'm just hoping that that is a message that gets out to all and with that we are thank you dr brabrand no thank you all this was a fun exciting opening of schools report and i really appreciate your comments and questions and i look forward to further updates during the school year thank you we are going on to agenda item 4.01 confirmation of action taken and closed meeting this is a portion of the meeting where the board

194will confirm any action regarding issues that were discussed in the closed meeting these issues may include action taken regarding student disciplinary matters board members have discussed it each individual case and at this time will make several motions to confirm the recommended action i call on miss daranak kofax for a motion i move to deny the school reassignment appeal of a student who was found responsible for a violation of regulation 2118 and to confirm the decision of the division superintendent is there a second second seconded by ms cohen all those in favor please raise your hands miss tolan miss um i'm sorry miss daruna koufax um miss cohen mr frisch mesquiz gemara miss corbett sanders and myself all those opposed dr anderson miss mclaughlin miss sizemore heiser miso mesh um all those abstaining miss marin that

195motion passes okay are we okay is corbin sanders yes i move to suspend the rules and consider item 6.01 as an action item is there a second let's check that seconded by miss tolin it is moved and seconded to suspend the rules and consider item 6.01 as an action item as this is a request to suspend the rules the motion is not debatable and it requires a two-thirds vote to pass if adopted we will suspend the rules and take up item 6.01 as an action item rather than as new business to be scheduled for a future meeting all those in favor of suspending the rules miss tollen eisemar heiser miss cohen mr frisch mesquiz gemara miss o'mesh and miss corbett sanders and myself all those opposed dr anderson miss marin uh miss mclaughlin miss darren

196at colfax uh that motion passes and there are there are fewer than two-thirds in favor of suspending the rules i'm sorry no no no i call him as corbett sanders for a motion i move that effective october 9th the superintendent be directed to increase transportation salary scales 2.5 across all lanes and steps excluding those whose salaries increased based on previous direction to increase starting pay to 22.91 per hour at an estimated cost of 1.5 million dollars and reduce the fuel contingency reserve by 1.5 million dollars is there a second seconded by ms tollin ms corbett sanders would you like to speak to your motion yes thank you very much and i know that this is unusual to do this tonight but it is because we are facing a national driver shortage the national association for

197pupil transportation survey which was completed in august indicated that 79 percent of the school systems in the northeast have had to alter their routes similar to what we have had to do here in fairfax county because of the shortage of drivers the rate of pay was identified as a major factor affecting their ability to recruit and retain drivers locally fairfax county public schools prince george's county prince william county montgomery county and loudon county are recruiting for over 500 drivers here in fairfax we have about 180 vacancies we've been talking about this pending challenge for over a year and on tuesday at the work session we discussed it in detail that there was continuing to be a driver shortage tonight's motion is important as we face this national and local bus driver shortage as our decision

198to raise the floor and offer signing bonuses address the need for competitiveness in recruiting new drivers tonight's focus is on ensuring that we not only retain our valued employees but are able to recruit more seasoned employees as well twenty percent of our bus drivers are eligible for retirement and we have known that this has been an impending challenge so what we're doing tonight is to send a message that we value our transportation staff that we want to do this as an interim step while we wait for the more detailed market scale survey and then it may be necessary to do further adjustments that market scale survey is not expected to be done until december that market scale survey was actually a follow-on motion from last year so in reviewing neighboring district pay scales we know

199that their pay ranges exceed errors some are a little bit lower some are higher tonight's action is a step in the right direction and i hope that each of my colleagues will support me in pursuing this effort so that we can attract and retain the best and the brightest and get rid of those double runs ms tollen would you like to speak to your second yes i would thank you being the drainsville representative i think i would be remiss and not supporting this motion drainsville is in area 4 and area 4 has been impacted most across the entire county so i'm hearing daily from families that you know have issues with their bus runs so you know i view this as um you know a long-term way not just you know looking at you know

200we've already looked at how to attract new drivers but we need to look at this longer term and send a message today to our existing drivers so that we value them and that we will pay them the competitive wage that they deserve so that we don't lose them and as mr clovis henders pointed out that we can also attract more experienced drivers this is not to say that we won't ask to continue to work with hr to get the full report that we've been talking about for an overall look at the bus driver scales but this 2.5 increase that we're talking about now is necessary we need to do it now so that we can retain these drivers even just putting this off for another two weeks is a delay in another pay period and

201we're talking about 2.5 over the year each pay period makes a difference i just heard in the last presentation if i heard it correctly that just by increasing the pay for our starting drivers we went from five applications per week for bus drivers to over 20 to 30 applications per week we need these drivers and we need them now so i'll support this motion thank you miss tolin ms cohen well we've got wait a minute okay miss omesh go ahead i move to amend the main motion by adding quote and to direct the superintendent to examine salary scales to recognize years of service for existing employees steps one through five as a result of this change and return and to return to the board with a plan to include the necessary modifications after consultation with

202key stakeholders as a part of the market scale study findings scheduled for presentation in december is there a second second second at my miss cohen all right mr mesh would you like to speak to this yeah absolutely i want to start by thanking um miss corbett sanders and miss tollin for bringing the motion i know they put in a lot of time back and forth with staff to get it right um and of course uh thank you to dr brabrun for being responsive on ensuring that we are sending a clear and loud message to our bus drivers that they're valued and that we want to reflect that in in our compensation this step is in the right direction though i want to make sure that when we to make that step um it's it's a

203holistic approach that considers the way it's going to impact our current employees so this change is a positive one in the right direction but then we don't want to find ourselves in a situation where by increasing the amount for incoming employees that we then put them in the same place as employees who've been around for many years before that so this hopefully will direct our superintendent to look into how this may affect steps one through five and then the subsequent impacts of course because once we improve one through five we may then be looking at needing to reconsider six through eight and and and so on and so forth um so really trying to be holistic in how we think about this and having a long-term perspective um that will hopefully add that cherry on

204top to make this the perfect motion for our bus drivers miss cohen would you like to talk to your second i would this is really just trying to codify um the conversations that we have all had um and dr brabrand has mentioned multiple times about that there will be a study that will be coming out in december and miss omega night in several conversations with um some of our support employees bus drivers in particular have just recognized that the that increasing the starting salary as a bonus is great except when we go through the scales one through five and as a five-year driver if you're going to be making the same as a one-year driver or as a five-year driver you're not making anything close to what you'd make in stafford as a five-year driver

205our drivers who've been on the job for five years right now we're only at a step three because we held steps back as as a you know as a part of our budget conversations when things went south with our with coveted budget so understandable why it happened but we don't want to continue building on that and as i said the impact becomes that we build a really outstanding farm team for our surrounding jurisdictions and so the goal with this motion with this amendment to the motion is just to ensure that while we're doing the 2.5 now awesome but we want our drivers to know that we're going to be working to ensure that along every step along the way that we are market competitive with our neighboring counties ms mclaughlin thank you my first question

206dr bray brand is based on this um oh shoot all right well then i guess we'll go we'll go to uh lee and sean mcdonald one of you might be able to answer um for the superintendent does this amendment to the main motion reflect anything that you did not plan to do like basically without the board's direction was this not going to happen i i can answer that miss mclaughlin so that is part of our regular uh study so we're going to be bringing the board a benchmark comparison of neighboring jurisdictions uh with an analysis of the minimum midpoint and maximum of those scales as well as with some explanation of how we have compressed the scales and what the possible impact would be of making adjustments at the lower end of the scale and

207what that could mean for financial impacts for the upper end of the scale so that is part of the work that we're doing so mr smith if i understand you correctly everything that's in this amendment to the main motion is something that by best practice you all plan to already do it it is part of the work that we already do sorry the work you plan to do so my colleagues here's my concern is we can pass this which i you know i i always believe on getting the most robust data and best practice do we want to signal that either the board doesn't understand that we have a superintendent's team who was doing this best practice work and so we had to through redundancy direct him to do the very thing that they profess

208they're already doing this is why i'll be speaking later why i'm not happy about what we're doing here tonight there's way too much rush discussion i respectfully disagree with the characterization that we talked extensively as was stated at the work session there were so many topics at tuesday's work session nothing was spoken about extensively this is a new business item it was perfect for us to advertise this to the public we all care about our bus drivers we also care about all of our employees so i'm i'm torn on what we're doing here tonight i don't think it reflects the board's best work i appreciate the amendment with with the fact that it had good intentions but we just heard from staff that this is already what they're planning to do so i i feel

209foolish honestly to vote for an amendment that staff sorry told us they're doing and if we just had time and not rushed here tonight we all 12 would know that they plan to do exactly this so i i want you all know where my concerns are i i don't see the point of adding this in but you know i i would ask why we're doing this thank you miss mclaughlin mr fresh thank you um i think that the two motions uh miss corbett sanders miss tollen miss omesh miss cohen are [Music] signaling to our bus drivers and the increased bus driver applicant pool that we heard about that we mean business and that's okay at any given time you will find members of this board uh solemnizing things that the superintendent has said that he's

210going to do um and you know i think that's a perfectly debatable thing to to have conversations about um in this case i think that it's a good thing to do this has caused significant problems that we've all had to deal with throughout the county these first initial steps uh get us part of the way there to fixing this problem this gets us another step there to fixing this problem and then getting the people hired is going to fix the problem this will help us do that um and i have no problem look staff is working on a lot of different things we heard tonight on a follow-on motion that this board passed a year and a half ago that they're not yet ready to get it implemented because they're busy well i think that

211this work is more important than that motion that i passed uh or that this board passed that i i sponsored a year and a half ago and if it means that we signal to the superintendent and his team who are working very hard that this is a priority for us to get it done by december i think that's the right thing to do best intentions backed up by the will of this board can get us somewhere thank you mr fresh miss marin thank you i um i feel similar to miss mclaughlin that i feel like this is a bit um out of sync and especially when i look at the communication that we received from advocates that represent the um school bus drivers and support staff in the bus driver attendant advisory council and the

212fairfax support professionals association i understand the the intent of the amendment but given that staff is working on this given also that the calendar process that is an area where our drivers and support staff have also advocated a lot it's not just about money i mean i've been advocating since the get-go since i got on the board about let's put people on a salary and give them benefits and so they don't have to scramble and put together all these different jobs to go to and well of course we want to increase their pay is this little bit at a time and doing a piecemeal really the best way i don't think so we're starting the calendar process in october we're going to vote on it scheduled in january showing our staff that we are hearing

213what they're saying it's not just about pay it's about time that they are clocking it's about job security um i think that does more to honor our commitment to them than just sporadically increasing even salaries especially that dr braeburn just shared earlier that our application rates are up a lot just in what's been done already so just in the world of limited resources when i think of all these things together this just seems out of sync with the other things that are already happening around and that we can be more holistic and really show our our people that we're thinking about all the different aspects that makes them want to stay in fcps thank you miss marin dr anderson thank you just point of clarification um miss picarski are we speaking to the amendment or

214to both of the motions we're speaking to the amendment okay um speaking to the amendment i do want to echo what miss marin and miss mclaughlin have shared you know just earlier today you and i had a very long conversation about should we be bringing forward things that are already part of the staff's work we talked about this earlier and i know i reiterate that to at least two or three other board members this is doing the same so i have to be consistent in my approach and thinking and if this is work that's already started i really don't see the need to reinvent the wheel on this one even to codify it i have a lot of other statements and some questions and i'm trying to see if they all are to this one

215you know what i'm just going to ask them anyway because i'm not sure what which motion it goes with so well we're speaking to the amendment so if you're only to this i don't know which one it goes with but it will help to give me some information so i wanted to ask the staff can we stick to the amendment though just want to make sure they're directed yeah it's related to this it's related to all of this work i just have not been able to parse it out um we talked about obviously what you shared earlier which is that the um that the bonuses have been doing a great job of attracting drivers to fairfax county do we have any idea what the shortages are in the jurisdictions around us mr mcdonald do we

216have information about other school district actual vacancies for bus drivers i don't have numbers on actual vacancies i have more anecdotal information around the fact that other divisions in region 4 are also struggling with finding a sufficient number of drivers to transport students i'm also aware of a nationwide concern there's several news articles and reports all across the country of school systems struggling with the same issue i'm also aware of the fact that there's a an acute issue in the state of massachusetts where they activated the national guard to transport students so we're not unique in our need and i am aware on an anecdotal level of needs and surrounding jurisdictions just not specific um vacancy counts okay thank you i think i'm just going to stop right here and just go back to the

217amendment on the table which is i feel it's redundant and i won't be able to support it thank you are there any other school board members who'd like to speak to the amendment yeah oh thank you mr kofax yes um i am going to um agree with my colleagues who just spoke tonight this board uh we talk about the need to be more efficient and strategic and here we are at 11 i don't know what is ella 10 50 10 50 at night discussing about passing an amendment or to the motion which the staff just told us they're doing i i i i it it i i i don't disagree with this work i i don't you know we we value our employees and what this needs to happen but staff told us they're doing

218it i see no it it makes zero sense to me that in any strategic way or efficient way that we should pass this when mr smith just told us he's doing it so that's the reason i will be abstaining from this i don't disagree with the premise but if staff is doing this i see no reason to continue to discuss this okay thank you i'm going to go ahead and call for the vote on the amendment be oh mr please go ahead yeah i i just want to clarify and address a number of these pieces this is not exactly the same and and part of this actually came out of the the challenge the community response to the motion that was posted there's a misunderstanding and lack of clarification as to whether we're going to

219take into consideration a holistic view and looking at those folks who have been in the steps that's number one number two i want to make it very clear that this includes a requirement to consult with key stakeholder groups because they've felt that they've not been a part of this process and we've already sent the wrong message as to how we what what our stance is for supporting our bus drivers with past decisions and and now and this is an opportunity to show differently and to ensure that our staff engage those key stakeholders the advisor groups and others in coming up with the solution and finally how many times has we as a board commissioned a study looked and requested a report and found findings that are not necessarily what the community is comfortable with or

220that may have left out pieces that we are looking for so this is a key piece here in ensuring we're explicit as a board and pointing out exactly what we want to have come back to us which is that piece in examining how this is going to impact the steps and make sure that we're making long-term decisions that are taking into consideration all the various components so i just want to make it very clear that there are additive pieces to this that are different than just directing the superintendent in broad terms to come back with the findings of the study and if nothing else we should at least have a very clear statement from our superintendent that that's his commitment and as a board back that so i ask you all to consider those pieces

221because what we're communicating to the community by this motion alone is that we're piecemealing this to get it off our backs as opposed to really being intentional and keeping in mind all our employees including the existing staff if nothing else the reputational value and and the care and culture we're trying to build is enough to to be reasoned for this thank you dr anderson thank you dr breitbart can you speak to and i know this is work that is in planning what was the thinking in terms of who would be involved in this discussion um i don't know if this is mr smith or yeah i'll let mr smith uh go to that as we were going to go start to look at the salary scales how we do that process and who we involve

222mrs smith well initially when we're doing benchmarking we look at other jurisdictions we do a review of the market we look at our scales as a comparison to other scales we have actively been engaged with our stakeholder groups the emails that you're getting the conversations that you're having we have had those same conversations and so we take all of that into consideration as we bring a recommendation back to the board thank you and dr brabrand as missile mace just said we are looking for some commitment that this is going to be done in a timely manner in a thorough manner by december can you provide us with that commitment i believe mr smith we previously shared that we would have it done by the end of the calendar year yes we will be bringing a

223recommendation back to the board yes before the end of the year thank you so i i think in this conversation i have what i would need from staff to move this forward and so again this is redundant work for me okay excellent miss cohen i just think one of the most important points that i want to emphasize is that we can't do one without the other what we're arguing what we have said many of us today and since school started um our phones our emails are plagued by people who are having trouble getting their kids to school and so we're trying and i think we're generally you know working awfully hard to find real solutions that are crisis solutions and sometimes in a crisis we got a triage and the best way to do that

224is to ensure that we are comprehensively looking at this which i think many people on the board have expressed frustration over the years that we fix one thing but then we accidentally don't fix something else and then their unintended consequence is quite the opposite of what we intended so when we initially put out this conversation on tuesday that dr brabrand was having about the two and a half percent we were very fortunate to have a lot of folks reach out to us who this directly impacts and say two and a half is great but the real impact is going to really set back drivers who are in this five-year the step three to five are going to struggle in this capacity and if you can't signal as a board we value you we value drivers

225who are you know not brand new who are here because remember drivers who are current are not getting the three thousand dollars right that's a recruitment bonus so i want us to remember we're trying to bring people in but we're also trying to stop the bleeding of having people leave this system so i i i guess i struggle a little bit with the idea that as a board it isn't our responsibility to communicate to our community and to our staff we hear you we hear this is a major problem your child's school day begins the minute that they get on the bus or the minute that they don't and the minute they don't it becomes your problem which for so many of our families means kids are left out at bus stops neighbors are called

226to scramble and try to get kids to school kids are left you know get home an hour and a half late because we don't have enough people not to do double backs we recognize this as a problem we need to comprehensively address it and the idea is miss corbett and miss tolin's motion is awesome but it cannot live alone and so we want to show that this is essential and is essential to include our stakeholders and one thing cannot happen without the other and that's the message and the point of this amendment thank you i will go ahead and call for the vote on the amendment before us on the screen all those in favor miss tollin ms sizemore heiser miss cohen mr frisch mesquiz gemara ms omesh ms corbett sanders and myself all those

227opposed dr anderson all those abstaining miss marin miss mclaughlin miss stair neck of facts that motion passes and we will now go back to the main motion which will be put on the screen before us school board members who wish to speak to the main motion dr anderson thank you i i think i'm going to start with some of my questions that fit here a little bit better if this motion were to pass dr brabrand and staff when would um our drivers see this in their paychecks uh mr smith or miss burn uh when it when uh when would it take place in the paycheck i think we i think it said october 9th is when it would take effect but in the actual paycheck isn't that a two-week delay but i'm not the expert

228so i'll defer to the right person it's october 23rd october 23rd two weeks later october 25th 23rd 23rd october 23rd is the answer october 23rd so just a couple of weeks before this um full study is to be provided um one of the things that i want to really be mindful of is you know i've had conversations with other people before where about other topics where people are telling us what is it that they want and for us to listen to it is what they want so i want to come into the spirit of this conversation with that um an event tonight we were at we were asked by one of our participants to listen and i want to do that you know we've got some very info some very good information from the co-founder

229of of fspa and the chair of um vdac the bus driver and attendant advisory council and what was shared to me under no uncertain terms is that he is not feeling as if this motion as it is will highlight will help to address the inequities that stem from the situation that we're in it is well intended i think we all know that but there are still numerous questions that are not answered um impact to benefits could not have highlighted more for me the need for a thoughtful reform to the bus driver scale that is comprehensive and thorough information in terms of this is just a band-aid this is what was articulated to me this is a band-aid approach and i believe we have to be more strategic than that we talk about that all the

230time i would like to have the benefit of all of the studies that mr smith shared that they will be engaging in in order for us to make a thoughtful conversation i'm sorry thoughtful decision what i'm also worried and this was race to me because i'm not in the ranks is that this may um result in a rift between drivers i don't think we want that among the employee group where one group is getting something right now and the others are still waiting for something to happen for them come december or whenever that happens we do need to be competitive we do need to retain our drivers we do need to attract more drivers we do need to pay them their worth i do need to have my kid on the bus that's not a

231double run coming into school at 9 30. all of these things are important but i think we need to be thoughtful and have a comprehensive approach that impacts all drivers on all of those scales from one to level whatever i don't know what the last step is so i want to buy us the gift of time to approach this issue in a comprehensive manner thank you mr mclaughlin thank you um a couple questions for staff uh mr plattenberg and then uh mr mcdonald as uh the transportation superintendent and then the assistant or the superintendent for hr did either of you um lobby or or advocate to the superintendent that we really needed the board to vote on this tonight versus in two weeks or at any other point in time i mean was it your

232urgent your urgent advocacy that we needed to move this up and and get this voted on and put in place tonight well i haven't even seen the amendment until until this point some might but anytime that there's an opportunity for pay for employees if someone were to ask me you know if i was going to get paid now or later i think you know i if someone were going to give me a raise i wouldn't turn it down but i hadn't even seen this so i don't know about mr mcdonald he didn't specifically uh come to me and say to pass it tonight that's the answer okay the reason i ask is because mr plattenberg as you know i reached out to you today because i respect your role as the head of transportation and

233i really did want to understand the urgency piece because i want to make clear because of statements that are being made tonight every single board member all 12 of us do care about our bus drivers we do value them we do want to make sure they have competitive pay we also care about every single one of our employees there's no this this employee is more important than that employee and so when we're talking about making changes to pay scales changes that happen to one employee group if depending on since we don't have the market study i don't know where the 2.5 came from so dr brabrand can you share with the board because this wasn't explained what's driving the 2.5 number what's that what's that based on i i'm not sure about the 2.5 percent

234i'd have to uh defer that to mr smith or mrs burden so there were questions about uh what a two percent increase would look like for our employees and what a 2.5 percent increase would look like for employees and this came out of also having conversations with members of some of our employee groups looking at possible increases for bus drivers as we looked at raising the starting salary from 22 or from 18 to 22.91 and so that's uh how we started looking at some of these numbers uh while also wanting to remind the board that we were in the process of undertaking a comprehensive study to address what other jurisdictions are doing with their scales and bringing that information back to the board about minimum midpoint maximum for a scale recommendation okay thank you um

235so it's it is my understanding um that uh this this band-aid is how it's been characterized uh we put this in place then mr mcdonald what is what is the chance that um putting this in place could end up putting us over the market and then how do we talk with our other employees even in other employee groups about why we're paying our bus drivers x percent over market but all the other employees are paid at market like is that going to create an equity challenge for us so yes there is an opportunity or a chance that you know making this adjustment could put us in a position where we would fall above market i don't have all of the data currently available to make the assessment at this point in time ultimately as we've

236had these conversations not only this evening but throughout the the past couple of weeks and months around this need ultimately there could be an inequity between employee groups yes i would acknowledge that if we're we're falling above market we always have that that opportunity because of the cycle of our review that there are going to be groups of employees that perhaps may fall above or below market um depending on that review cycle but you know this is a recruitment and retention challenge for us and and sometimes you do need to step out a little bit from that traditional path and take steps like the board has already done in terms of raising the floor of pay for our bus drivers to to recruit that talent into the organization thank you mr mcdonald as i recall

237you said you've you you're waiting on about four more wavy schools to get their pay scale data so i guess the other question that i have related to this is um board members have expressed concern that we're losing um bus drivers and so and that waiting two more weeks treating this as a new business item which has been my advocacy from the beginning taking this as an action item in two weeks where we will have more pay scale data to make an informed data-driven decision and a fiscally informed decision how many bus drivers have we lost in the last two weeks and that we could project out that it means we're going to lose x number of bus drivers in the next two weeks were we to wait like how many how many bus drivers

238have have we hemorrhaged in the last two weeks my understanding for my team is that over the past three weeks we've lost two bus drivers we've lost two bus drivers in the last three weeks so to the concerns that some colleagues have shared with me there isn't any evidence that if we were to wait and be more informed and use the data in two weeks that we demonstrate to the public that what our best practices have always been you listed as new business you have an opportunity to make sure any more information we need to make an informed decision occurs and then we take action on it two weeks from tonight so i know that it's very late um i just want to reiterate because i really am uncomfortable with things that have been said

239behind the scenes and even at the board table make no mistake every single one of the board members at this table cared deeply about our bus drivers we're supportive of the bonuses we're supportive of making sure that we have competitive pay but we should be doing it in a thoughtful informed data-driven manner and that's what makes me uncomfortable about what's happening here tonight and it's why i do plan to abstain from this motion abstention meaning you need more information ms cohen i appreciate getting to speak to the motion um you know i just certainly want to say nobody's trying to characterize that the board doesn't care about any class of employees this board has consistently targeted specific groups of employees at different times to try to figure out either one where we are hemorrhaging employees

240just like we did the at contracts that we just extended for sped employees last year and the two years before that we worked on our ia salaries targeted just those groups before that we just did our teachers so i i feel like i just want to explain that there are different times when we have to rise up and need meet the needs of individual groups and this isn't done on a whim this is a conversation that has been ongoing in fcps for two years that we're losing bus drivers losing bus drivers when we got onto this board we're already 80 drivers short so this isn't new this is how do we figure out comprehensively together i don't disagree in any way with what dr anderson said that we need to make sure that when we

241have open enrollment again in a few weeks that for all of our employees across the board we don't wind up having them ultimately lose money in their paycheck because health goes up but that affects everybody that's something we're going to have to address for every person right now we're talking about a very targeted group of people who we have got to keep and the two and a half percent just so people have some idea out there in the audience if you are on step six so meaning right now you've been driving for at least eight years in fcps this two and a half percent will give you 58 cents an hour more so we are not talking about a world where you're all of a sudden going from nine dollars to 15. we we're talking

24258 cents an hour roughly 46 bucks a paycheck so at the end of the day the idea is we have a massive problem that is impacting every day and people on this board our own children as a side note so we are trying to be responsive to the needs of our constituents and right now those needs mesh very nicely with the problem we've long had in fcps with attracting and retaining bus drivers so let's comprehensively work out how to do it together and then we get to move on to some of the bigger areas that we have where we're talking about diversifying our you know employees we're talking about trying to make sure that we're getting them the best health coverage at the best price we have many many things to tackle so let's knock

243this one out we have happy parents happy kids happy bus drivers man that's a winning combination let's just get it done it's 11 o'clock miss corbett sanders um thank you i wanted to address a couple things um there was a concept that we might create a rift the rift exists because we took a made a decision back in august which was a necessary decision to raise our floor and there are people who realize significant pay increases um percentage-wise to get to that 21 and change but there are other people that didn't get a raise and that sent a message to the bus drivers which then you know you say oh we only lost two bus drivers in the past two weeks but we were already short a significant number of bus drivers so losing two

244is a big deal what i'd like to know uh mr smith is to better understand from you by raising all these uh categories by two and a half percent will that allow you or actually uh mr plattenburg can answer it as well will that allow you to actually recruit bus drivers into more senior levels people that may already have their cdl licenses from other jurisdictions in the same way that we lost to so so yeah yes that would allow us to place bus drivers at a higher place on the scale if they're coming to us with experience excellent um and so i guess one of the things that i'm looking at is that this is a holistic but the other thing is when we talked a bit about the study you said in in this

245follow-on motion from last year was to have that study completed by the end of december to have it come to us in december so that it could influence next year's budget cycle isn't that what the original intent was yes that was the intent so for us to wait we're not talking about waiting a couple of weeks and then i actually asked you when we were having these conversations about well if we wait can we go back and um as when we had this conversation of back in august when we first started talking about most recently started talking about pay raises for the other bus drivers there was a concept that we could possibly um pay back you know go back and pay people for the higher rates at a later date and what was the

246uh in having that conversation we were told that that was incredibly labor-intensive and that we didn't have the staff to be able to do that is that correct so it is incredibly labor intensive to uh do that look back and in terms of where we are at this point in the year and with the multiple things that we are i would say juggling in hr at this point with multiple pay scales multiple stipends multiple bonuses that have grown out of esser our our hr staff our payroll staff our operational staff is stretched extremely thinly excellent so it's actually if we're talking about trying to get pay into people's hands and if we wait and they don't see it until november that's almost that's two months into the school year is that correct yes so two

247months in what percentage is that is that 20 percent of the school year it's actually maybe a little higher because the middle months have a lot of holidays approximately yes and of course we there are months where our drivers do make less because they work less fewer days okay thank you very much i appreciate that clarification ms tolen yes i just wanted to make a couple of comments um i don't think anyone would argue with the fact that of course we could get more data and we could study this more thoroughly is it a band-aid yeah it's a band-aid and we need it okay i've got kids in drainsville that are showing up at school an hour late every day and they're taking ap classes and they're missing school so i know it's september and

248i know we've got you know every year that this is can be an issue but this year we are really short of bus drivers and these are working families that can't drive their kids to school so do we need a band-aid i think we do we have added this amendment we're going to study it we're really going to look at it for the longer term but you know i think we need to do something now we do have information on our neighboring counties um miss corporate sanders you had pulled up some of this information you know prince george's is short 200 drivers montgomery county short 100 drivers we're short what did we say 177 you know people are scrambling to hire all around us so i think we need to be doing the best job

249that we can to recruit drivers is there not cofax yes so um i just do have a question mr plattenberg what's the average salary of our bus drivers like an average salary i'm sorry i don't have that off the top of our head i know that uh when we raised it to 22.91 mr mcdonald do you have that i don't have that number today um we didn't we haven't rerun it because we have adjusted the salaries so you can't give me a range we have i mean i don't have a distribution of folks by pay step at this point now we i mean we have i can tell you what the pay range is but not the number of folks yep so we're starting out at 22.91 yeah uh and we go all the way

250up to uh 34.49 an hour but you don't have an 34 what 34.49 49. okay but you don't have a range what these drivers get on average you you have no nothing dr brabrand do you know oh he's not here either i'm not trying to be flippant on this point or call you out but you know i have been really looking at some of my issues where we have retention issues or we can't find people you know in some of my special education classes we have you know our public training um public health assist public health training assistants and public health attendance and these people we can't find we can't find enough of these people either and i was trying to get a salary range to see if they were in this same circumstance because

251these people make about twenty three thousand dollars a year and um up to thirty six so what i am struggling with i i hear everybody's advocacy i know we have to get the kids to school so i will be and i support our bus drivers we um i have had a long standing record of working with these employees and making sure but what i feel is that there's whole pockets of missing information here that i don't know about and when we there are other people that we need that have severe recruiting needs what are we doing there so i feel these one-off things are very they're slippery they're slippery and um you know when i can't even get a salary range and then when i you know and some of these groups they're just smaller

252groups and so they don't have the advocacy around them i will be most likely supporting this but again i think we as a board have to be more strategic we have to ask of our staff we we have to have that information it's astounding that you can't give me a a annual salary range for this and i also just feel as though when we have other vacancies that are very very important um it's um you know i feel like i could have brought an amendment like that for them tonight um because we're trying to recruit them and you know with starting salaries at twenty one thousand dollars that there they do some of our most um what should i say angelic and hardest work for some of our hardest special needs kids so um that's

253what i just want everybody to understand um how difficult one-off situations are even if the intent is well and because we are in a crisis i am hopeful that this will help and but i think it is not strategic in the way it needs to be because we have other other groups of employees that we can't hire and they have they have low starting salaries and then low pay grades and have hard jobs as well so thank you thank you mr cofax miss marin yeah you know i do want to say i know it's late um but i think it is good to to have transparent conversations like this i think we can get better at scheduling them during daylight hours perhaps but you know what you said mystery and equifax really does resonate with

254me i mean i think about the substitute shortage we have we have central office staff going in to substitute classes ias lunch staff um special education teachers i really do think that it is we're not being strategic if we're just going to do these one-off things we happen to hear a lot of pertinent advocacy from a a critical group of people but all of our staff are critical so where do we draw the line and making a decision like this one off we have a budget committee to do this kind of work maybe that can happen there and come to the board we're having a budget meeting in a few weeks it's this is just it's i'm i'm not happy with how this is operating especially since i also was seeking to bring forth motions

255this evening but sought not to because they needed more time they needed more coalescing and i wanted to be consistent in what we're doing so i don't think this is a precedent that that i want i want to enforce thank you thank you i'd like to take a few moments to speak as well um i can appreciate i think where some of the concerns are coming we do want to be transparent we do want to have all the information together um easily accessible um i feel i did get a lot of this information yes it may have been a little bit disjointed through you know um because it was fast and as somebody who did bring that follow-on in the last budget i do think this is strategic i think i mean this is a

256critical need that we've been talking about for the longest time and honestly kudos to our budget team who were able to figure out a way to get this done sooner than i was with that follow-on in the last budget um cycle uh that directed us to to bring this back in december i don't think it's a one and done i mean obviously we're still going to to to look at this but i think this is a critical shortage very very well documented and i i i hope this helps and i'm sure we're going to evaluate it and and continue to um continue to [Music] uh you know discuss ways that we can oh okay thank you i thought i was go ahead miss keys camaro i'd like to call the question oh i didn't mean

257to cut you off i was ready to call oh no no no i was ready to take the vote that was it i was just sharing my comments so thank you um so back to the main motion which is on the screen and i will go ahead and call for the vote all those in favor miss holland miss sizemore heiser miss cohen mr frisch miss keys gemara [Music] miss corbett sanders and myself all those opposed all those abstaining dr anderson miss marin miss mclaughlin in that motion passes i will now turn the meeting over to the vice chair for the consent agenda agenda item five consent agenda are adopted rules of parliamentary procedure robert's rules provide for a single consent agenda listing several items for approval of the board by a single motion many items

258listed have gone through board review and documentation has been provided to all board members and the public in advance items may be removed from the consent agenda at the request of any board member prior to the meeting the consent agenda items are on the screen is there any objection to approving the consent agenda hearing and seeing no objection the consent agenda is approved agenda item 6 new business the following are new business agenda items there will not be a vote on these items but action is scheduled at a future meeting the new business items are on the screen i will turn the meeting back over to chair picarski agenda item 7.01 superintendent matters and i call on dr brabrand thank you chairman picarski i'll be super brief but i do have one announcement i want

259you to know that sangster elementary school has been named a 2021 national blue ribbon school by the u.s department of ed [Music] fairfax this ca county school is one of seven schools in virginia just seven to receive this honor the blue ribbon schools program from the u.s department of ed honors high performing students in schools making exemplary progress toward closing achievement gaps sanctuary was noted for its high achievement in reading and math in the 1819 school year and sanctuary was recognized for closing the achievement gap in math a gap in math by 15 for students with special needs in special education as principal allison djankovic says sanctuary strength lies in the welcoming and celebratory environment it strives to create where everyone who walks through its doors know that they are valued and appreciated and i

260know that allison and also lisa rydell who was principal there prior to allison both are super proud of this this wonderful designation so the department of ed will be honoring all of the schools including sangster at an awards ceremony november 4th and 5th so we can't wait to celebrate with sangster congratulations sanctuary elementary school thank you dr brabrand agenda item 8.01 board committee reports and i call on ms corbett sanders for a budget committee update yes thank you very much chair picarsky the budget committee has met with staff and put together initial plans for how the board can set priorities to discuss with the superintendent and so you all have each received a questionnaire uh to go through and then uh respond back to both miss tollen and myself and then we will be having

261a meeting on october 5th to work together as a team to establish the priorities to share not only with the superintendent but also so that we can go to the joint meeting with the board of supervisors in november coalesced along the priorities that are important to this board i want to personally thank miss marin and miss darren at kofax for the excellent work that they did last year in developing much of this process and we are building on that process to ensure that we continue to work to set priorities and give a heads up so thank you ladies for all your hard work and we'll be building on it thank you thank you and now we will go to agenda item 9.01 our board matters um and i will go ahead and call on dr

262anderson thank you given that it's late i will be brief i want to quickly highlight the three schools that i was able to visit this week bailey's primary sleepy holler and glenn forrest i was very excited to meet all of those principals who i have not yet met in person because they came in during covid so it was nice to see them from behind the screen principal dues principal fallon principal herndon wilson respectively at those schools it was just fantastic to see all of the kids working hard really demonstrating resilience in their new normal and i just really wanted to just highlight the efforts of all of the staff teachers and principals who are working to not only educate our students but really handling so many pandemic related impacts and i think that takes up

263a lot of their day also regarding national hispanic heritage month which is from september 15 to october 15th falls church high school esau teacher ms telez-perez was highlighted by the u.s department of education office of career and technical education in celebration of national hispanic heritage month miss teles perez immigrated to the u.s with her parents from venezuela as a young child she shared that she sees her story and many of her students she describes her students as resilient and hard-working and she strives to make a connection with them every single day thank you to ms telez-perez and all of our wonderful fcps teachers for making a difference each and every day in the lives of our students lastly i do want to share with the justice pyramid community that the follow-up meeting following the bound

264the proposal for the edition and all of the um related issues with justice park that meeting has been confirmed for october 12 at 7 pm you'll find more information in my newsletter about where to sign up and also occr will be sending a message as well so i look forward to hearing the updates with the community from staff regarding our next steps and thank you for your feedback thank you um miss corbett sanders yes i'll be brief i want to thank my colleague miss daranak kofax for joining me yesterday at the original mount vernon high school where we did the ribbon cutting for the senior center and the teen center this is such an important activity because of the intergenerational work that will be done at that center and i was thrilled to hear that

265grand involved is also active in working with the community there and grand involve is a certainly one of the best examples of intergenerational work in support of our kids but also very supportive of our seniors that are working with our kids edu tudor is also working with students in that area i want to thank the various principals who have invited me to their schools i've been doing some school visits and i am just amazed at the excellent work that is happening in our elementary schools i will encourage that we get more of our kids outside thank you miss marin followed by miss omesh yes i just want to continue to recognize that september suicide prevention month and there have been many resources shared and i particularly though want to highlight that this month also saw

266the observation of physician suicide prevention month and we heard earlier how pediatricians in particular are overwhelmed with the amount of family seeking help for their children so you know please parents and families you know consider the uh you know what you can do to be patient and kind towards these professionals who have dedicated their life to keeping us and our children well they need our support i want to congratulate taraset elementary school librarian deanna duano who was chosen by time magazine as one of 29 educators who quote saved a pandemic year school year so she delivered books to students and loading up her car and visiting as many as 50 houses every monday with a curated stack of books for the students there so her visits were the source of excitement and connection for learning

267and the teresa community thank you and in honor of hispanic heritage month which we're now in through the middle of october i wanted to give a shout out to constituent paul berry who serves as the 100 mil appointee to the career tech education advisory committee he is the chair of the virginia latino advisory board and actually is receiving an award from senator tim kaine in recognition of his public service contributing to the um the welfare and benefit of the latino community so we're very pleased to have him advising the school board in those matters so this week we had a really exciting meeting with some staff around get to green planning really figuring out how we can include that in budgeting and ongoing work and making it um very accessible to teachers we also um

268we i helped a lot of constituents with constituents with facilities challenges especially during renovation i was pleased to attend this week on the vienna town green the mayor's award ceremony for which i was humble to be included in a group that helped support the liberty amendments efforts all those activities amazing activities that happen this june and observance of equity and advancement of the liberty amendments and i've also been really thankful for constituents applying to committees had a lot of vacancies on our committees including our challenge materials committee which is the appropriate venue to bring materials such as the ones for older readers mentioned earlier this evening which were inappropriate to share for an audience of all ages which is who this public board meeting is accessible to and just coming up this weekend is the

269reston multicultural festival from 11am to 6pm at uh lake ann so come one come all rain or shine all ages songs dance food art i will be there and then i'm looking forward next week to the 50th anniversary of cornerstones so it began in 1970 to address homelessness and affordable housing and now it's a really significant human resources human services provider and during this last year they served 16 000 individuals including 5 300 children who experience homelessness poverty and inequity in northern virginia that's all thank you all right so a number of my colleagues acknowledged of course hispanic heritage month which we uh continue to be in i want to just highlight the true importance of facilitating a safe and nurturing environment for our students to grow confident and proud of their identities we certainly

270want to raise the future hispanic latinx whichever term floats your boat because i know there are different opinions about it all but that generation to be proud of who they are and strong through their journeys in life supported by their culture and heritage every step of the way in recognizing that hispanic heritage is also american heritage um i also wanted to thank our staff our school community and our strong support teams for helping resettle very quickly 80 different afghan families refugees that have come in recent in light of the recent events and then of course want to also acknowledge that we did just complete our first month of school so congratulations to everyone to our students who have successfully pulled through to our staff who no doubt have had tremendous difficulties but have prevailed and

271of course our leadership team from the top all the way down for their hard work throughout this time i'd also be remiss not to comment and acknowledge what happened today in our meeting i want to just put out there that you know there was a lot of pain in the room today i think we have to continue to acknowledge that we're all coming from different walks of life and we are coming with different perspectives as we approach our school system uh and and that we come together ultimately in what's best for our kids uh and and that's the piece that's gonna bind us together that's the part we have to always center and remember and that there is a mutual respect that needs to be engaged with of course and that we all need to

272maintain uh to be able to communicate and understand otherwise this is going to be the demise of all of us you know our vision and our dream of one fairfax this idea of a place where you know every person can grow and authentically be themselves and bring their full self to the table and channeling a little bit of dr williams here where we have to hold that muscle and hold that space for when we disagree and when we're confused by things that we hear from one another because we again we all come back to that common goal we're trying to build a school system that is safe that is healthy that is a place where all of our children can thrive and certainly as a board i know we're committed to ensuring everyone feels heard

273and respected no matter their perspective but that we also ensure that we're cultivating an environment that is conducive to those values i know for everyone in the room no matter who they are um so i i put that out there it's these are the growing pains of getting to that place uh where we can come together and and hopefully fight for that goal together um and the the alternative you know of course is to venture into our own extremes which is not going to move our country forward which is not going to move our community forward so i say this um having reflected a lot over the past summer but really you know truly wanting to hopefully uh remind us all of our common goal our common objective and wanting to make sure everyone feels

274heard that we hold the space for people's pain um and then have productive ways to move along so long as we're on the same page that this is the place for everybody miss tollin followed by ms keis kamara thank you it has been my pleasure to visit a number of schools in the in the past weeks and to monitor the school news across drainsville two things have really emerged from these visits and from my reading of all of these great principal newsletters community building and student passions and interests perhaps this is what i picked up on because i feel that these are such important parts of what we do as a school system on top of providing exceptional academic experiences for our children we are in a position to help our overall communities grow and

275prosper and we can instill in our children a love of learning and a way to build on their strengths and interests i attended the celebrate mclean evening last week and was very happy to talk to most of the clubs and activities represented and to hear directly from the students why they were spending time and energy outside of school to work in these areas some were sports some were academic like science olympiad and some are varied interests like financial investing and many of the things these kids were working on were service related and they had amazing ideas as usual i was so impressed by what our students are doing and are able to achieve even as we're still dealing with the pandemic i visited tj dear in eighth period yesterday and saw the same a myriad

276of clubs astronomy stock investing dance biotechnology oceanography etc we must all work together to be sure our students thrive and grow in this manner i've also been really impressed by the community building efforts of our schools over the past weeks the mclean celebration including elementary schools parents and community members was such a great example of this a huge thank you to the ptsa for putting this event together drainsville elementary school hosted a chalk for peace event and lemon road elementary school hosted an environmental cleanup on september 11th it was so nice to see families with little siblings big siblings all together just meeting and greeting each other in a relaxing atmosphere and working on productive things together forestville elementary had an outdoor event last friday evening that sold out immediately after the first advertisement they

277made some adjustments and added space and it sold out again in minutes our families and our kids are hungry for this kind of interaction and we must work hard to continue these efforts i know our teachers and staff are working hard on community building for our students every day and i so appreciate the work that they are doing i met with our drainsfield pta leaders yesterday and the safe community coalition and they are all working to build community in our schools they have great ideas and have already started wonderful programming please join your pta pta's btsas and support their work i also applaud community groups like we talked about tonight the league of women voters that are working so hard to help us foster civically minded students and also happy to announce that the fairfax

278county federation of teachers recently spearheaded a successful grant to work with three of our schools to help us develop additional outdoor learning spaces we must continue to develop important partnerships like this to offer our students what they need know our road to opening schools with the delta variant has not been perfect we are still working on transportation issues which is higher vote to support our bus drivers was so key today we are still monitoring our procedures around pauses and quarantines we've talked about that and need to be aggressive about making sure we are doing the best possible i'm dedicated to making sure we stay on top of this and keep our children safe and in school for the in-person school they deserve once again i extend a plea for us to all put our agreement

279disagreements aside listen to one another as our speakers ask tonight and to work together in our communities to do the best for our children congratulations to the drainsville national merit semifinalist herndon langley mclean and tj and if you liked the music you heard at the beginning of the meeting tonight you need to show up for some saturday fun at herndon high school where they will be hosting the 24th annual virginia showcase of bands this saturday from 10 to 8 30 pm it's a great opportunity to see 24 local high school marching bands perform in one place enjoy thank you thank you i too wanted to uh congratulate our national merit finalists we had 214 in fairfax county um because we rocked like that so i just want to i just want to say congratulations to

280our students who work so hard who i know have a bright future ahead i also want to thank the folks who participated in the alfred street baptist church education and justice symposium where i was able to participate in a panel regard on resolving inequities revealed by the pandemic i know that this is an ongoing work but i was very happy to be able to have that conversation and to take questions from the audience i want to also point out that we just celebrated on september 17th constitution day the day that we established our constitution for a representative government and a document that is designed to help us to understand how to live together even though we disagree so i'm glad to be reminded of that today after this particularly exciting school board member and despite

281our various different approaches to religion and faith and education and how we resolve what we are doing i am grateful to remember that our forefathers knew that we would have disagreement and that we can work together so um i also want to acknowledge and thank my colleague ms toland for the resolution on voting and remind you that the last day to register is october 9th finally i just want to mention one thing because i've noticed that oftentimes when we talk about what we want to do we need more data or we need more this and i understand we need that but i also want us to weigh the cost of waiting we've talked a lot about our bus drivers and how important that is our employees we talked a lot about a lot of initiatives

282and we will be talking about you know i have the john lewis issue coming up and i think about how we have talked about waiting and perhaps have not considered what messages we may be sending to our students or to our employees and so in the process of how we watch the slow wheels sometimes of government i'd like for us to think about what message we are sending i know we all care i know we all want data but i hope that our students understand as we go forward how much we value them so thank you have a good night miss mclaughlin followed by mr fresh i'm going to refrain from trying to circle back on references on people who focus on data and wanting to make informed decisions and trying to also be effective

283and expeditious in the decisions we make it's really late and i thought we were going to be trying to just stay positive and respecting the fact that there's 12 of us who all come at this work with you know diverse perspectives so i will just say to [Music] our employees and in particular our principals our staff our teachers in the buildings everyone who's serving kids every single day in the buildings thank you for your incredible dedication from day one when our students came in the building is such a gift for them to be back with you and with one another and i want to say dr brabrand thank you to you and your team i i know that um you and i have spirited conversations and um you know i appreciate that you and i

284always end up in a good place with one another regardless if we see things differently but i am sorry this evening that it's now 11 45 you and your team especially the senior leadership that's sitting right here in the building you've worked extremely hard and i do hope that you will be able to recharge your batteries not just over the weekend but even tomorrow because it's a marathon for us and i know it's a marathon for all of you so um and and ms amish i do want you know i heard you and appreciate what you were trying to say i think we all have to very much um remember that all 12 of us carry a big heart this is hard work and i don't doubt for a second that all 12 of us

285care so thank you for what you were saying earlier thank you as was noted september is suicide prevention month tonight i want to talk about mary griffith who passed away last year just before the pandemic took hold in 1983 mary lost her gay son bobby to suicide an avoidable tragedy mary rejected her son his death changed her heart it led her to reconsider her views and become an outspoken advocate for families like hers after tonight's disruption during public comment i hope my colleagues will indulge me i feel compelled to read some of mary's words about her son and children like him this is what she said during public comment at her local government as her local government considered an lgbt rights ordinance she said because of my lack of knowledge i became dependent upon people

286in the clergy when the clergy condemns a homosexual person to hell and eternal damnation we the congregation echo amen i deeply regret my lack of knowledge concerning gay and lesbian people had i allowed myself to investigate what i now see as bible bigotry in diabolical dehumanization slander against our fellow human beings i would not be looking back with regret for having relinquished my ability to think and reason with other people people i trust for truth and guidance in my life and in the life of our gay son god did not heal or cure bobby as he our family and clergy believed he should it is obvious to us now why he did not god has never been encumbered by his child's genetically determined sexual orientation god is pleased that bobby was a kind and loving

287heart in god's eyes kindness and love are what life is all about i did not know that each time we echoed amen to the eternal damnation referring to bobby is sick perverted and a danger to our children that his spirit was broken until he could no longer rise above the injustice of it all bobby ended his life at age 20. it was not god's will that bobby jump over the side of a freeway overpass into the path of an 18-wheel truck killing him instantly bobby's death was the direct result of his parents ignorance and fear of the word gay an injustice has been done not only to bobby but to his family as well god knows it isn't right that bobby is not here with loved ones correct education about homosexuality remember this was written

288in 1980s would have prevented this tragedy there are no words to express the pain and emptiness remaining in the hearts of bobby's family members relatives and friends we miss bobby's kind and gentle ways his fun-loving spirit his laughter bobby's hopes and dreams should not have been taken from him but they were we can't have bobby back if we could we would say to him as we say to all gay and lesbian people around the world these benevolent words love yourself accept yourself forgive yourself and be good to yourself because without you the rest of us are without a source of many wonderful things there are children like bobby sitting in our congregations unknown to you they will be listening to your amens as they silently cry out to god in their hearts their cries will

289go unnoticed for they cannot be heard above your amens your fear and ignorance of the word gay will soon silence their cries before you echo amen in your home or place of worship think and remember a child is listening thank you good night mr kofax followed mamas cohen thank you we are all tonight um saying some heartfelt words about how we need to bring people together and we need to continue to make comments um we need to not make comments that divide and yet while we're saying that sometimes we maybe inadvertently do that so i want to [Music] thank all of the people that i spoke to this week and there have been so many because of the pauses because of what's going on in our schools because of the cases i have in our

290schools i i want to thank the parents who are patient with us i want to thank the teachers who are working so hard as well as this administrators in the building as i spoke to earlier we all have we are all at the point where we are at a breaking point and i spoke to dr brabrand about it and i spoke to other members of his leadership team about it and i think what we have to do we have to find ways to have difference of opinions but realize we are all working to toward a common goal we are in a place where i think right now a caring culture it we always said student success was the most important thing of our strategic plan and right now i want to elevate caring culture as

291something that needs to be first and foremost in all of the action that we take and because there are so many difference of opinions how we can get there i ask us to have grace be patient with each other and listen before you make judgments on people and i just saying that collectively to the universe right now it's not directed at anyone but it has been a particularly tough week in lee district in region 3 and i think we had a tough night here tonight and i think again it was all in the name of a caring culture but a caring culture requires listening and trust and we need to work to build that amongst our constituency um our meaning our our parents our teachers and with each other so i thank you all for

292indulging my comments and have a good evening i want to thank mr frish for his beautiful statement and words it's certainly difficult to follow that but i do want to say it was very interesting tonight to hear a few times the prayer of saint michael repeated because saint michael became such an advocate for jews that he actually occupies a place in our literature which um is really rare because jews don't believe in any sort of intramured intermediaries between us and god but he was so special that in our religion he's seen not as a defender but as a protector and it's just a reminder to me why all of us are called to this diocese all different clearly all from different experiences all from different backgrounds and as ms mclaughlin has said many times we

293all bring something very different to these seats when we come here but every single one of us everybody on this dios everybody over there in the peanut gallery we are all here because we were called to protect and support kids any words to the contrary to that are not true and though we disagree with one another frequently there is not a person on this diocese that i don't believe for a minute is not working their tail off every single day because we are here in the words of saint michael to protect and support and i appreciate all of you good night seismo heiser well start with what she said all right ditto um honestly i will i will say um i respect all of you all at this dice and in the peanut gallery so

294very much for your passion for your hearts for your caring for your work to try to make things better even in the face of i will say a lot of um unhappy people whether they're in this room or out of this room and we still work very hard to do what we all came to do which is support kids but i wanted to sort of talk a little bit more about something else as a child of immigrants one of the things i was most proud of growing up in this country was the fact that it was a democracy and i could say what i wanted to about what i thought about the way our country should be run by our government about our society about our schools i could lead a walk out of my

295high school before you got in trouble for it um you could just express what you thought and i as i went to law school as i taught constitutional law the thing that i loved the most was the recognition that the the bedrock of our country of our democracy of our constitution is based on us talking to each other of us listening to each other and building on our ideas and that's what i when we are at our best up here and when we are best in that room what we are doing is talking to each other talking with each other building on our ideas together with trust and faith that we are all here because we love our democracy and we love our country and we love our schools and we love our kids and

296so what happened tonight in this room it hurt my heart because i believe firmly in the value of respectful discourse whether we agree or disagree and it hurt my heart because respectful discourse can never be around denying somebody's humanity that's not respectful discourse we are all human and we have to start with that premise so what i'm trying to say tonight is that when we have statements and discourse that doesn't allow for other people's statements in discourse and doesn't allow it to listen as well as to speak and doesn't even allow for voices to be respectfully heard whether it's because of our own perceptions our own viewpoints our own passions or because of the way things are said it hurts my heart and it hurts our country and it hurts our schools and hurts us

297and worst of all it hurts our kids so i hope we can find a way and i know we all work very hard at it i know i fail i know others fail but i hope we can find a way to continue to have this respectful discourse with each other in a way that respects all of our humanity and all of our differences thank you well um following that i would like to uh just remind everyone that miss cuscamar and i will actually be having a town hall on september 28th at 7 00 p.m so i know we're looking forward um to that um so i urge my constituents to come out we really want to hear how the school year is going and your concerns um i also had a great visit this uh

298past week to lee's corner elementary and it was kind of an unusual visit because i i i had the opportunity with um principal d'amato to actually uh go through the uh lunch line and um serve students so it was fun it was a lot of fun and they got a total kick out of having him um serve him and trying to push his um chili beans to every child who refused to take them but i also got to talk to the regional food and services director there and got to learn a little bit more about about our amazing food and nutrition services and how hard they work and i think they were really appreciative that they had the opportunity to kind of talk about their work a little bit so i urge my colleagues to

299if you haven't done it you definitely um should should try it it's a lot of fun um tomorrow we have two homecoming parades and games chantilly and westfield and i won't be able to go to both and i will say i'm going to have to choose my kids um school as they will also be marching in the parade and i'm really excited about that and with that i know it's late and i think my parting thought for tonight is i want to remind um the public that when we sit up here and we discuss and we talk and we have what i hope is usually respectful discourse because we are all working towards a common goal i definitely believe that of everybody on this board but we are not just talking about other people's children

300most of the time for many of us we are talking about our own children decisions that happen here impact our kids and i can guarantee you there is nothing more important to anybody making these types of decisions than treating every kid the way we want our own children to be treated and children are always watching they are always watching adults and they are learning and we get to decide what we want to show our kids so with that thank you everyone and the meetings adjourned 12 o'clock you