FCPS School Board Work Session Committee Reports 6-22-21 Pt.2

001okay miss cohen miss corbett sanders i see you good evening ms darren at cofax frisch hello excuse gamara hello miss mclaughlin good evening miss marin picarski and see you hi um miss seismor heiser hello miss tolin good evening all right let's go back around miss cohen hi good evening it's darren at covax good evening miss marin okay um so today now we're gonna be uh hearing from tpack the title one advisory committee as you guys know um title one are schools that are eligible for additional supports based on the percentage and fcps it's been 55 which was a recent change but um is what we had and just over this past year that's 41 elementary schools and one middle school so i'm going to pass it on uh to mike waltz who's the chair of

002our of this committee and i believe and hanum is here too who is the vice chair but mike go ahead thank you mr mish and i will share my screen okay so i'm not going to go through the report in great detail it's not that long hopefully it was a quick read even if there's a lot of content there i will just briefly refer to the recommendations and hit some high points but and neither will make additional comments but we really wanted to have time for discussion so this past year actually let me go to the next one because this this was for the 2021. so the charge was to increase parent capacity comprehension of title 1 services and opportunities including providing information and materials in various languages exploring the impact that behavior health and

003well-being have on students educational success and examine the curriculum and all elements of staffing to ensure that they are anti-racist and content and implementation so i am pleased to say that we did have language services language services for all of our meetings in spanish we always want to increase you know what services are available but it it's an improvement from previous years so we're very glad for that sanderson do you have a comment see your handle no okay this is going to go right to the recommendations for this upcoming year so the first one and i'll speak to each ensure more robust delivery of advanced academics to all students developing data among title 1 schools that illustrates whether aap services are being provided with greater equity and create opportunities for greater collaboration engagement between the

004tpac and the aapac so i think what stuck out is really two parts one is communication and the other is really purpose or mission in terms of communication you know i don't being that i have a high schooler now and middle schooler who are no longer in the aap as you know we know in the elementary level not something that i pay attention to anymore but the fact that it was so low i think it was like point 12 out of the news you choose email and something that gets as much attention and discussion as advanced academics i even remember return to school pta meeting last spring of 2020 where you know regardless of whether the child was in person or not parents are just so i just make sure they have access to ap

005and whether we like that being the reality we know it is so being that it gets all this attention it has so much focus communication has to be commensurate with that and not having at least a standard practice whereby schools have to have this information promptly displayed in their communications or in singular communication or even more i looked through my phone and saw all the text messages i got that were not relevant necessarily to our situation but they were county-wide why couldn't there have been a text message about aep and maybe because i have a fifth grade or an eighth grader maybe it's targeted for k through two or k through five or 54 but it seems like that type of information should be something that we communicate in multiple platforms in multiple ways and

006the fact that we found out about it just through one of our members happening who you know is very meticulous and checking things and they almost missed it too so you know that was a real concern about how many people do we really want in this program in terms of diversity you have to use different methods multiple methods and you have to test those methods i don't ever remember getting through the times that my children were in the program any type of surveying or information gathering to assess how we knew about the program you know how was the application process what was our engagement with our advanced academic resource teacher i don't ever remember any of those things and if there's an intention or a desire to improve representation then you have to be able

007to talk to those that are in the program and figure out what's working what's not and i don't know that that's ever happened the other part really is just the function you know instead of having committees of folks who determine which children will have access to [Music] full-time level four and the reason why that's relevant is because the math that students have access to through level four sets them on a different path as soon as they get into middle school instead of having committee determining what kids can get there we need to get the in get the content and we need to get the academics to all students and i don't know that i'm taking a step back to really look at how that's being done whether it's an equitable manner you know are there

008certain schools that are delivering it more robustly across the board than others that's a big problem if we know certain schools are getting certain students and schools are getting things that others aren't i mean i think that's a broader discussion but it's one that we have to have if the intention is to diversify the access second point developing a comprehensive marketing education preparation strategy around the cte program starts in elementary school so there's greater access to participation across all racial and ethnic groups within the county also explore opportunities for greater collaboration between tpac and cteac that just reminds me i'm going to jump right back to recommendation one for a second there really should be i don't know whether it's a liaison from the tpack to a pack but if students of color throughout the

009county are a group with whom representation is ought to increase why is is there not more conservative efforts to partner and work with groups that can large constituent base are students of color families of color even if we don't have somebody going to each meeting there should be some type of parallel track or reporting or information or even facilitation through the school board where we are informing and measuring and evaluating through feedback in our experiences how effectively it's being done all right so i'm gonna jump back to two now the ct i gotta say i knew very little about the program and it's something that when we think about topics to make pta meetings or even whatever other information sessions that happen in elementary school more engaging this is something that should be front and

010center if there's access and if there's support and if interest is sparked cte is a spectacular option for many students to take advantage of but there's a lot of ifs in that equation has to start earlier so that parents and students are socializing it thinking about it and anticipating and preparing while they're in new school if you're only finding out about it at the end you're really not going to be in the best position to take advantage of because part of it is since there's not a uniform offering at you know all schools whether students need to transfer because they want to be in a certain program or whatever decisions families want to make they need to have time to make those if we want cte to have legitimacy on par with college then we

011need to treat it as such and it needs to be something that ptas talk about that you know back to school night whatever i mean whatever methods that we have for large-scale communication with families that needs to become part of it but with the existing program there doesn't seem to be enough interrogation of how effectively courses are being offered to all students in the program and what can be done to improve what is currently there this doesn't seem to be a lot of data and if we want to improve what we're doing we have to measure what we're doing now and the fact that we don't know you know specifically the race of students who are in certain programs and not in other programs there's a lot of always conversation about you know improving non-white

012student access to stem but do we know whether in cte program they're having access to cyber other i.t related courses i i can't really tell you what that looks like but i know that we need to investigate and acquire what it is if we want to actually improve in terms of greater collaboration between tpac and cteac as i say the same thing as with aipac if there is a desire county-wide to become more anti-racist to increase equity and you have to have groups that really specialize by lived experience if nothing else speaking to the areas in which that equity is lacking so whether that's somebody again listening in on meetings or attending quarterly there has to be some way that we know what's going on right now there's some good communication and relationships between the

013two committees that i've mentioned but it should be greater than just a relationship with individuals there needs to be a process in place that no matter who's sitting in the chair that information is flowing that there's opportunities for collaboration and input to meaningfully improve what a program is providing and i think i don't know how long it would take but i know we're a long way from that recommendation three that fcps make ongoing anti-racist training and development for staff mandatory which must include more time dedicated to this training the necessary expertise in human resources and required funding to meaningfully implement this as a core value of fcps in addition to providing resources for staff there must be ongoing engagement requests for feedback and collaboration with students families and members of the community so that efforts

014to become more anti-racist can be undertaken with fidelity know that there's you know staff training and development now and it may be some around bias or cultural persistence proficiency but with anti-racism it has to be ongoing continuous it has to be measured needs to be surveyed and be evaluated needs to be challenged and the only reason why i'm better at racism than many people on this call is because i've lived with and if you don't live with something you're just not going to be as good at it and you're going to need a lot more time and exposure and work with it so it doesn't do any good to staff if they just have even candy speak at a high level at a leadership kickoff that gets filtered down several levels and may not even

015make it to staff and even if it does that alone is not enough i did not see the talk but i don't know that what came out of it was anything challenging folks making them uncomfortable moving them to take more drastic measures than are currently being taken and this is something that's really incumbent upon our elected leadership school board members thus far there really hasn't been any serious policies yet approved or implemented with anti-racism yet there's been so much noise i don't want to just call it criticism a lot of it's noise because it's uninformed it's ignorant it's racist and there really needs to be a recognition that is just beginning and that it's going to get worse in terms of the volume and maybe even the number and the types of criticism but you'll

016have to take a stand you know there's a two-way message sent by taking a strong stand on something you communicate to people which you're not going to tolerate you communicate to other people what you're in support of i think la this past year some of that messaging has changed but i always chuckled when i see in a statement about something that happened you know there's no place for that here there is a place for it here but if we don't want there to be a place for it here we're going to have to say it in policy and we have to say it in operations there's no place for this type of racism or sexism or lack of respect for gender identity sexual orientation all those things if we don't take strong stances in terms

017of policy and operations and accountability then there is a place for it and that place will still be here and they'll be quite a comfortable place while this wasn't a recommendation i think it kind of flows into the charge for 2021 and 2022. it's about the public and not only just what the public engagement committee process and i have to say i'm someone in the dark on it because i was reached out to behalf of the public engagement committee and i was never followed up with i reached back a few times and never heard back so i don't know where things are in that process but there has to be some consideration contemplation on what is the purpose of these committees are we just to meet talks amongst ourselves and present recommendations or just present

018you know a recap of what we talked about to the school board or are we to have a say in how fcps is going to be run our children are the ultimate stakeholders and are the ultimate clients we are stakeholders they are as well they are really the foundational stakeholders in this but there just doesn't seem right now there's no real clarity and i think part of that comes to you know i think the process by which this structure even was formed or evolved i think it proceeded most or all of your tenure on the school board but it wasn't something that i don't think was deeply contemplated at the time it was probably more of a bureaucratic box checking exercise to where we have community input we have community feedback we have community participation

019i mean even the name of this committee was previously called the district advisory council and nobody had any idea what that meant at least now even if we're not doing what we want to get done at least folks know if your title one parent advisory signals enough about who is the core membership of this group and what is our area of focus but it doesn't seem clear how folks even gain membership on these committees i know that with tpack it comes from principal we call it nomination sometimes it's begging and pleading just because i think a lot of principals don't have a clear understanding of what it is we're supposed to get done and you know they may look to it as you know it's like the pta it's really not like pta because unlike

020the pta we do have a direct line to the school board and that's really the power in what we do we we have a direct voice to our elected leadership in a way that other groups don't but i think the question is what is going to be done with that voice the other the other committees i got to say i'm not really certain as to how they're populated i don't know if it seems to be school board nomination but i don't know if this is a process where in each magisterial district folks are reached out to for if they are if they're interested in to apply this way i've never seen anything to that degree but the current method of populating and running these committees is guaranteed to keep us from getting the voices that

021are most needed at the table to have decision making and influence over the operations so wherever the process is i say it needs to have you know broad community input i don't know how much of a step back needs to be taken if these committees just need to be i'm going to say tweet i would say we probably need to we need to add more committees but i think the process by which people get to these committees needs to be you know overhauled or created because i don't know if there is a process right now but i think there's a lot of power and experience and talent and wisdom amongst families in this community that are far from being leveraged to their full capabilities i think that's all i have i can keep the screen

022up let me just get one to the charge and i think that kind of i basically said it but just to be clear we we want to empower this committee more influence over policy development and implementation through more regularly scheduled collaboration with school board and other fcps senior leadership we do a lot of it ad hoc but it has not become embedded institutionally and it really does need to be so that the type of changes the type of issues can be something that you know when we're meeting i mean just imagining what our membership would think of we're talking about something that's going to be implemented in schools in a year that has a whole different framing than these are topics of interest that we're going to talk about and i think we need to

023really think about how you know how that's going to be done but if we really want some of these long-standing issues to move forward in a positive direction i think it's going to have to happen i want to give the vice chair the opportunity to add any comments that she has before we take questions from board members sure thank you mike and uh what i you you've said this um but i just want to emphasize that you know we make these recommendations but oftentimes we don't get follow-up so can we get a commitment today from the board to have a follow-up meeting at some point to discuss the progress on these recommendations what work is being done on the ground to implement these recommendations so that we as members of a citizen advisory committee we

024can report back to our membership to our school communities that there is actual action being taken on these recommendations all right um thank you mr heinem um dr anderson perhaps you know we can have board members comment um in response to that question uh folks if you'd be amenable to a follow-up meeting uh about these recommendations and then dr anderson obviously you know um maybe that's something you guys can discuss and shares just to consider but for now let's go around and have our um our board members comment so dr anderson okay thank you if i may respond to that piece just not for my time um just to talk about the follow-up that is something that has come up in chairs and um dr bray brand who i'm sure is here maybe he'd like

025to speak to this as well did talk about having a session where we do this in the fall where we have the opportunity to respond where staff also as well as the board get an opportunity to respond and have some structured time to all of the advisory committee's um feedback that we've received in these reports um if dr braeburn does not want to add to this i want to have my time be started and just jump right in thank you mr waltz for in committee for this report i have a number of questions that i'm hoping that i'll have a chance to get to um the first recommendation where you're speaking about how to increase opportunity for our students to advance academics i i definitely am in great support of this idea it's not just

026shoving more and more kids into the program but it's providing opportunity for all so i wanted to make sure that i articulated that but most importantly i wanted to also lend my support to the idea of having someone from the tpac committee to the aipac committee because that will help to really address the situation that is before us which is how to increase um participation in our title one schools so i would be happy to continue to carry that um to champion that idea to whomever it needs to be championed too but to have to have that happen you talked very quickly regarding other committees um other committees magisterial members are and at large members are all provided with a um with an opportunity to appoint a member to the committees title one is one

027that that does not happen that is handled differently um i do want to point to the i believe the recommendation that speaks to the cte um you talked in the report regarding demographic data i wanted to point to that um two of our colleagues ms tolin and ms seismor heiser during the last cip did put forward for a program audit which and i think we also no we did this in a forum which will also speak to this because this is good information to have we need to know what programs are available where and who are attending so definitely on the right track with that and the board has begun um some of this work in terms of putting it in front of staff as a priority i also wanted to talk a little bit

028about um recommendation recommendation three this is work that definitely has begun and if dr williams is with us i would love for her to give some sort of summary in terms of where we are in this part of the process i'm here good afternoon um and thanks for the opportunity to speak to this recommendation um certainly the work around the anti-bias anti-racist curriculum development is going to be seminal to this recommendation but in addition there is cultural competency training that has been ongoing um principals this year received training around leading for equity um and how to coach for that type of transformation so it's just important to lift up all of the efforts that are happening at present but certainly this recommendation and the policy environment will strengthen this work as we move forward thank

029you thank you dr williams the other piece that you talked about in the report i believe on page five talked about standardizing the practice for communication could somebody on staff speak to what is the current practice because i know this is constantly a conversation where we want to ensure that all of the information is translated that it's provided and different practices are in place throughout the division but what is the general expectation when it comes to the communication that we sent to our families in in this realm well dr anderson i'm not sure we have miss lloyd with us this evening uh to answer that question we certainly do put out a lot of our major communications in seven languages uh and we've continued to uh enhance the number of communications that go out on

030those seven languages um i'd also just like to reference you your earlier asked just for a quick comment this is a structure like mike said this has been around for multiple boards we have advisory meetings at the end of the year right at the end and then we do provide a staff response that's provided by the end of the summer the beginning of the fall i think the board's actually been exploring this issue in governance or in peck about how to better close the loop after the presentations are done in june and then we respond to the board in fall how do we bring everybody back together to say which of these recommendations um the the administration is moving forward with and which ones are not and uh they're not and why not and i

031think there's room to explore how to have that conversation and i think it has been one of the the one of the tensions and one of the opportunities for improvement in communication and the way the structure is set up and we'll be glad to work with the board as you all uh look at the best way to do that follow-up with these committees and their recommendations that they bring you each year thanks and thank you if i could just add to answer your question regarding the aap and the whole process um all of the materials are prepared centrally and and including the translations and then the timeline for dissemination and the windows when they should be going out are provided to the schools to then put out to their communities i do know that there

032has been some further discussion around how can we more centralize this process to make sure we're reaching everyone and i the instructional services folks would have to speak to the progress on that thank you so much dr ivey the other thing that i wanted to share is i believe that we had a very similar conversation um last time we had a presentation from the um from tpac when it comes to standardizing some of the communication pieces i i want there's a space here where we can make this a little bit more robust because this is a topic that is very important to many parents whether it's at the bottom of an fcps news you choose when we're talking about standardizing all of the things you've provided plus including our parent liaisons plus a text message

033we need to add some additional things to have better access or rather better outreach thank you thank you dr anderson miss mclaughlin great uh happy to follow uh dr anderson um so i do appreciate all the hard work put in by tpac this year the committee and the recommendations in front of us i did want to share with the committee chair mr wolves as well as the other members who might be watching that in my nine and a half years on the board we certainly have heard from just about every one of our advisory committees a similar concern that you put in a lot of hard work provide recommendations and then it's unclear what will happen with those recommendations in particular people know that our our committees whether it's advanced academics or whether it's school

034health advisory whether it's the minority student achievement oversight committee we frequently get the request on where do things stand and part of it is because we do this right at the end of a school year then we roll into a new school year and so it's it's really tough for staff um to get these reports um during the the the bridge between the end of the school year and start of a new one and they're ramping up to start the the next school year so i do think that we are long overdue as a board to really uh work with our senior leadership and the superintendent to really look at what's a logical time so that we can build that in um and and make that happen because we appreciate the amount of time people

035put into this i will also ask mr waltz on how much detail did uh our school staff and central office provide you um in all three of these recommendations about what we currently do because i know our cte advisory committee would like us to continue to improve on this and it's not just our tpac communities but around the county access and awareness to cte is is an ongoing challenge um as well as even people being aware of aap ap services accessing aap services in again in our non-title one school so i know it's it's like a school system dividend-wide challenge uh so could you maybe comment a little bit on that on how much presentation and information you received about what we're currently doing and did the community or did the committee then decide that

036what we're currently doing is insufficient i'm just wondering what level of detail you got well we've had presentations let me try and me to myself okay good we've had presentations from staff from aap off the ap office for several years and it's not the information per se it's how it's how effectively it's reaching everybody and how well the program is being implemented i mean i think if you read a book or if you read the fcps book a lot of it's good but if you use it as an implementation guide it breaks off so it's really not a in terms of cte it came from more communication with chair of that advisory committee and you know i don't know that we don't i mean it's not even feasible to have enough time to even as

037it is we had to have this report much later than it was originally scheduled for because i work for a living still so this is volunteer and we need time to be able to do this and because of that it was like there's no way we're going to be able to meaningfully put things together middle of may when we've just met so that's part of why that collaboration needs to happen earlier and often because it's not even you know title one staff is great support for us but they can't be expected to run around and get all this and get all that information i think that it would be more helpful if we could access all the information on a site you know that broke things down demographically socioeconomically whatever then you know in compiling

038our report our discussion then we could have that just you know that that i think greater collaborative process where they can inform this inform that i mean of a lot of this comes through systemic experiences you know it's not just any goals year after year different person different school same type of break off and experience i mean that's what really you know brings us us to these recommendations you know i mean some things go on really well other places they don't and what does that tell you yeah individuals can be great but a system fails if it doesn't have standardized practice that's reaching everybody in the method that it's supposed to yeah so yeah no finance go ahead oh i just want the to to say we have basically empirical data right we have members

039all over there they have children all over the county in title one schools and specifically regarding the ctec data there is we asked the chairman of that committee for the data on demographics like which students are in the cyber security program which students are in uh the auto mechanics program for example there is this data does not exist yet or it wasn't provided to us i mean someone said oh it will be he asked i think two staff members who work on this and they told him it's not available at the moment they will send it to him and that was i think over a month ago so that just tells you the uphill battle it is to get data in terms of demographics for aap the same thing but we actually know the answer

040because i was told whenever the number of um we could say minority students or any really any student group is less than 20 they will not share that breakdown on the um the publicly at least online or you know i'm not sure how to get it otherwise but it just tells us that the number is so small like for example at my um child's school the number of uh african-american students in the aap program is so small that they don't do a breakdown so that for me answers my question that they're not enough minority students um in that school because although it's 60 percent um i think latino we still have like the the numbers that they can't share them for latino students so that tells me the answer that there are less than 20

041uh students in that program who are latino although the school is 60 latino for example well again thank you both and i i do agree with you that one of the things we continue to look at is how do we take our our best practice guidance at central office bring it down to 150 elementary schools and then another you know 25 middle and and 25 high schools and try to then have that standardization of practice so you're capturing something so thank you for your your work and services this year all right next is ms mclaughlin she just spoke i'm sorry about that um okay we have mr frisch thank you um first uh let me say that i uh applaud the work uh and the recommendations around expanding aap i'm not sure if our program

042review will give us a clear picture of how we're doing in terms of equitable implementation of aap across the county but i'm hopeful that will happen and then we'll have some serious conversations to have um on the the question of cte i want to applaud your committee for collaborating with our career and technical education folks i think it's great to see committees collaborating together um and how critically important it is to begin that conversation at a very young age to encourage students to to think about all of the different paths that are open to them and all of the great programs that we have in fairfax county public schools i know it was said a question about standardizing communication to make sure that these and other things are being communicated to all families i would

043argue that you certainly want to standardize like a base level of communication but we're going to have to think outside the box in some places where we're not going to have to think outside of the box in others so my hope is that we'll have more thoughtful communication as opposed to checking the box standardized communications where we're doing the same thing everywhere because we're gonna get wildly different results just like we currently do um give any um thoughts on the types of communication that might work better in other places that may not be needed elsewhere that's a good point and i think maybe the a better word is really standard practice you know it mean it will not be the same method if a school is 90 english speaking far fewer resources are going to

044need to be devoted to language support but that doesn't mean you should overlook them all together and usually if the percentage is small enough you know it's a term i heard years ago statistically insignificant population which means they just don't get counted so i think the biggest shortcoming of current communication is there unless it's happening and just not revealed to us there doesn't seem to be a good way of measuring if it actually reached your intended audience or targets i look back to the decisions that were made like mid-july about whether return in person virtual hybrid whatever those options were and i don't know what the rate of response was but i think the problem with that entire endeavor is that i think the county as a whole had been taking for granted how effectively

045its message were reaching its intended recipients or audience it's just something as vitally important as how are you coming back to school came up we had never developed a really good system for reaching out to folks making sure we reached them what the follow-up is we even had a discussion i think in the winter time about just kind of doing a diagnostic of how families well actually i think to have to track or measure or see if families who are no longer in the school system if there's a way to even know who's there how do we know they're there or not there anymore i just think that communication as a whole has to be measured for effectiveness it can't just be let's try these three ways and if we get 60 it's like why

046aren't we getting the full hundred what's happening and i think that takes a lot of trial and error but i think it has to be intentional so that when the real situation comes it has to get across to everybody we don't have to wonder and hope you know of how many people it's going to reach i can appreciate that and i think you know it comes down to a question of strategy versus tactics if we're focused entirely on the tactics we're missing the forest for the trees right we're thinking about well i checked the box on social and text messages and phone calls therefore outreach has been done versus a strategic approach which looks at the adequacy of those outreaches to see if they need to be supplemented um so i i can certainly appreciate

047that and that's something that we've obviously talked about as a board in meetings about other types of uh community engagement you know the limited perspective versus trying to get out there and get more one of the things you mentioned mr waltz that i really appreciate is how we can better set up our advisory committees for success uh and i'll let our pec chair ms seismore heiser speak to this but we did meet today the public engagement committee and one of the things that we've been talking about is formalizing a process process for formal feedback and progress reports for our advisory committees and that's not something that peck will do unilaterally it's something that they will ultimately come up with suggestions for the board to consider and then the board will go forward from there so

048i think that's uh going in the right direction additionally we've been talking about ways to set the committees up for success whether it's um some kind of formal onboarding for committee members so they know uh what committees do you know right now you nominate somebody and you give them the best information you can maybe they sit down with the chair before the meeting starts uh and then they begin their service to the community um we could be much more thoughtful about how we do that so that we're arming our committee appointees with the tools they need to succeed on the committee and a full understanding of what what the commitment to those committees are because right now it's just like any other volunteer endeavor um people give their time and some people give a lot

049of their time so pecs moving those those balls forward and you know i'm i'm hopeful that in the in the near term we'll be able to make some progress there [Music] all right um miss corbett sanders thank you and i'm glad to follow uh mr frisch and i know miss seismer heiser is following me so all of us at keck and you were there as well miss omega can add a little bit but one of the things that was very important about the dialogue at pac and it's something that i learned when i was the chair of the advanced academic programs advisory was the importance of cross-collaboration between the advisory committees and that is something that will also be coming forward as a recommendation on how we can more closely have our advisory committees collaborate

050to on different projects and different areas of importance to uh the school system and the school board but uh mr waltz i found your report very well written and very um helpful i look at it as something that you could summarize your recommendations in essentially three buckets one is the importance of communications not only strategic communications but ongoing communications and i would urge that the superintendent working with ms lloyd make sure that this communications piece is built into the communications plan that is going to come forward to the board soon because i think this is critical the second is access to opportunity and when i say access to opportunity we talk about access to opportunity for advanced academics as well as career and technical education and um opportunities in the field of math but what

051we're talking about is access to opportunity from the moment that students walk into our buildings and so often what happens is we have gateways and we don't talk about the future opportunities until our students are at the precipice of taking advantage of them and what we really need to do is start early on from the day that students walk into our buildings and i would love to hear your input on this and actually have almost an individualized plan that we begin to work with our parents to develop that opportunity pathway you know is it through advanced academics is it through a more robust cte which means that you have to clear up opportunities in your schedule in high school which means taking um courses in middle school and then finally you uh you mentioned about

052what the availability in different places and that really is something that this board has consistently talked about which is the fidelity of implementation because we do know that uh the opportunities are not consistently available that the fcps promise is not realized at every one of our schools and so we do need to do that audit but i am glad that we'll be talking a little bit later this evening with the cte advisory and they have started that audit process so we can unpack that a bit more but uh mr waltz would you like to talk about uh respond to my comments yes and i think the main one is what you said about from the time children enter school i like that idea a lot and i think what it actually does it creates more

053of that village that we talk about because it's a continuation but it's also it's a potential it's an asset-based approach it's value-added it's you know we're going to help this child the student build what they want and i think the importance of something like that is when decisions would normally be made at the end of a second grade year i think that process itself will say why are we making this decision in second grade we don't know what's going to happen by the time they're in ninth grade and even though they're you know their readings scores or whatever aren't a certain level they really do like this thing in math but we're about to take them away from that because of this and how is that going to affect them down the road you know

054there's there's a lot of students who have no interest in something because somebody snuffed that that flame out early on the student doesn't remember you know they don't know exactly when it happened but they just consider a certain a whole area not for them and i think if we start with you know boundless opportunities for them and allow them to pursue it through you know whatever path i don't say program because programs can be too restrictive it's multiple pathways right i think that that will it will help spark and maintain their attention and interest throughout great years as they promote i think we look at we don't look at discipline well there's a lot of issues i have with house look at one that we seem to overlook is how engaged is a student in

055their classroom experience you know a lot of times if you are turned off for this or that reason you'll find yourself in trouble or whatever else but how often are kids just bored not connected disaffected you know detached from what they're learning and we don't appreciate the impact that has on them or what we're setting them up for so i think if we really listen to them and let them tell us what they're ready for what they want to do and give them access to it we're going to have more engaged students the word behavior which is another problematic word will not become uttered as much as it is now there's just so you know more useful ways that we could be starting their path so i like that concept that you started that you

056mentioned and whatever form or where that's at now that's definitely something that i think our group will be you know thrilled to take part in i will tell you that i have been an advocate for ensuring access to those opportunities for well before i was on the board in one area in particular is the access to advanced math opportunities which the previous board did make two boards ago made some changes too but unfortunately the implementation limited it to only ensuring advanced at math at the sixth grade level so we want to pull that back and see it being pushed down into all elementary schools thank you just a reminder so that things don't happen again um please lower your hand if you finish speaking um mrs seismer heiser thank you and i'm very happy to

057follow both miss corbett sanders and mr frisch um and as well as as the chair of the public engagement committee it's really fortuitous that um you brought up some of the thoughts around our advisory committees because um miss mayor and i actually brought a forum topic around this last year on really looking at our advisory committees and how they can better um you know how we can increase and improve the functioning the collaboration the ability to get um you know ongoing advice from our experts on these committees on policy and issues so i'm really glad you brought that up and many of the things i'm not going to repeat sort of um miss corbett sanders and mr fresh they shared many of the good things that peck is doing but we literally had a long

058conversation today about many of the things that you discussed including how do we do some of this cross-committee collaboration that you recommend in recommendation one between tpack and apac we're really looking um holistically at all of our committees and where are there natural places for cross committee collaboration how can we encourage that as well as how do we have systems and processes built in place for regular you know if not formal reporting but at least regular collaboration and conversation about issues that are going on so we're not just waiting as mrs mclaughlin said to the end of the year for the report but we get information year long as well as a more formal report at the end of the year that we can act on we're talking about follow-up actions and having a process

059for that follow-up for committee recommendations so you know not just sort of a response but also a follow-up on actions taken in response to those um committee recommendations and i think it's helpful that many of us on this board were members of these advisory committees before we became came on the board so we're familiar i know mr meshwas ms mccarthy myself miss corbin sanders cohen and i know other psychologists have missed any names but so we're familiar with with you know the desire as um to give back and to bring expertise and um the really wealth of knowledge our advisory committees can um support and one of our next steps in impact now that we've sort of come almost finishing what we're calling an operating manual is to get community feedback on this operating manual

060and of course bring it our recommendations to the board for their feedback so i'm really excited you brought that up and it just shows really the need for this work that peck's been doing all year the public engagement committee um i just wanted to sort of mention one of the thing i really like your recommendation too around the marketing education and prep strategy around the cte program and i think that's you know not just our academies but all of our cte classes um because i've i've said to others before i really think we need some sort of exposure or information or something to upper elementary or middle school for our students because sometimes you know if we're trying to help our students find whatever their path to success is sometimes they don't know what they

061don't know right and so much where education is focused around you know sort of traditional academics that our students may not realize that they have a passion or interest in cte if they don't think so i don't see so i think that's a really good recommendation and i hope we can sort of flush that out further so um that's just my my thoughts thank you very much for this great report [Music] any response no okay um miss picarski thank you thank you for all your work um now following the scorpion sanders and miss seismore heiser i i'm gonna sound redundant but um really focusing on this recommendation number two around cte um i agree with with what they both have said um we we i think we have a systemic problem here when it comes

062to parent education about opportunities um and and student education and really understanding what is available to them understanding how they can harness their strengths and their interests to kind of set a plan for themselves you know we have opportunities in these programs to perhaps earn a certificate and then you can go off to work and perhaps pay for college so we are not i know we are not doing a great job of ensuring that our students and our parents have this information and can look forward so i am one who is very interested about seeing what we can do earlier in those early grades to really provide a more individualized you know kind of transition plan if you will and i know ms seismar heiser and i have talked about this a lot for students

063uh with opportunities once they move on to middle and to high school and um i just i am you know i think this is an ongoing problem of communication and uh one where if we can uh find a way to individualize more it will really help our students uh in terms of access and in terms of just planning out what they want to do what their goals are and and finding ways to to actually fulfill those goals and be successful um and i you know i definitely see areas for things like uh parent education videos i know we do academy open houses but a lot of those things just don't trickle down so i'm i'm really interested in ways that we can use some of this technology uh that we have all gotten so good

064at utilizing during the pandemic to disseminate more information and parents um you know feel like they have control and understanding of all of the many many wonderful offerings of our school system and i know um even i every day as a long-time parent would learn about new things thank you going to speak to that really quickly and a few other previous comments you know the importance of getting this earlier is that we never know when that spark is gonna happen in place that student may have never appreciated never understood that it was gonna be and if they're able to see early on this is what you could be and you know it helps to you know be strong in this area you can motivate them to have a different level of focus and engagement for

065a subject they may not have had before because they need to see that connection why does this matter so much for this i mean as functional adults most of what we do is not beyond fifth grade math but if you tie other things to certain careers and think about iron man he's an engineer but nobody thinks about the stem aspects of him because he's cool and all those other things we have too many examples to make things tangible for students and we're not taking advantage of and they continue to be our greatest marketing tool so during whatever they call on a you know my son's middle school is panther time whatever period they have for i'll be honest i don't even know what the total purpose is if it's like a free period study hall

066just overall development how would you slip a video to a student they'll tell parents everything if they see something they like they'll tell they'll tell us everything we need to know about it like we do not use our best marketing tool as often as we do i go back to attending concerts every time there's a concert anytime there's a ward ceremony there is standing room only and we don't think parents really are engaged or care but they do we're not communicating as effectively why they should care about this and what this means that same energy you know that same type of movement could take place if we're doing it the right way so that students very simply oh i want to do this listen to this there's many ways we can bring more people to

067the table thank you mr waltz next we have ms tolen thank you um thanks for this report and just to um as i've been listening to the discussion um you know happy to hear these comments i have a question it's probably for staff actually um i'm just trying to think about piecing things together and things that we already have in place i know there's there was considerable work done you know a few years ago on um taking our um system that we had for you know kids to you know house their um act or sat scores and you know general interest and information about you know colleges to bring that down to the middle school level and do like a myers-briggs kind of thing with the middle school kids so they would you know get

068you know some ideas about careers and in areas that they might be interested in um and then that was available to the students and the um the parents you know i'm just listening and of course middle schools you know i agree we want to get the kids earlier than that but at least that might be another avenue where if a student um it goes through this process and it's identified you know for a particular interest in a career area or something like that that may be a time to bring up these various opportunities that we have across the school district whether it's a cte you know offering or advanced math or whatever might be available it's our movie report through the system can anyone remind me what that system is and what some of the

069potential might be for that looks like dr presidio yeah dr presidio cam thank you miss colon and um good evening everybody and thanks again for that question so we actually have uh our academic and career planning process which is an elementary middle school and high school process but we've mostly focused in the implementation at this point as you pointed out ms tolen at the high school level and to some degree at the middle school level it's been a goal for really the last couple years to expand that work down into the elementary school level and there's career exploration work that happens we have different programs that we use one of them is called naviance that helps investigate different career pathways that they might be interested in and set goals so there's really a lot of

070resources and infrastructure that we have built in but we're just a little bit behind our timeline for expanding that work um as you can imagine we didn't really take take that additional expansion work on during the pandemic so you know as we come out of the pandemic i think these recommendations um definitely would support the work that we're trying to implement around academic and career planning for all of our students thank you yeah just looking for ways to you know utilize systems i mean you were like this of course he said we've all got this technology out there let's use what we already have um so i'm happy to hear about that thank you was that all stolen yes other than just a huge thank you for all the work that this um committee has

071done i always appreciate the um advisory committees and the work that they do thank you mr wolf all right uh mr enoch hopefuls yes uh and let me begin by thanking the committee chair and its members for all the hard work that you do um we do appreciate it and um i will say as i go through the recommendations i i'm going to start with number two about the cte and we have worked and very hard i think to try to make this happen but i think we have fallen short as far as one thing that's been difficult and for me as a new board member when i was a new board member i realized the disparities of the cte programming and we still haven't gotten to the point where we are able to have

072offerings at least in each region so everybody can access it easily i know as a parent my daughter was not able to access something that she really wanted to because there was no way to get her a bus there and it was impossible for her to drive there without missing two full school periods so that has been a frustration of a lot of people i think for that and i um i know that part of it has been financial reasons but um i think dr brabrand and dr presidio this is something that we as a system need to continue to look out for um number one i am um the liaison this year to the advanced academic program advisory committee and i'm certain um that group and its staff would welcome any type of collaboration

073your group would like um tpac would like um one thing i think that i am very happy about and i you probably already know this but i do want to say that you know two budgets ago we were able to add advanced academic resource teachers in all of our title 1 schools this year even in a restricted budget we added them to another cohort it's our goal to get them everywhere we also have been talking about front loading making certain that we have advanced academic programming at some level available to every child so they need it so that every child is getting the most rigorous thing that they're needed again i think we continue to fall short there but i think with the front loading of the young scholars program adding um a lot of

074um teachers and positions to support that in this year's budget will help us some and i am concerned a little uh not a little a lot about what you said about the the model not being um spoken of and maybe dr presidio you can help me um talk about how do we connect families and how do we communicate to families about advanced academics i know apac a few years ago that was their sole purpose how to change communication strategies and they feel like we've upped our game but maybe we're not quite there but dr presidio if you could kind of just speak to what we do on that level sure um you know i mean i think there's definitely areas that we want to continue to improve in so i think these recommendations are very

075helpful and we certainly appreciate them but as you point out we have worked really hard over the last several years to really expand our family engagement so there's a lot of things that happen from school-based events for parents in terms of information sessions to help them really understand the programming the four different levels of service the application process for students to be identified for services and to apply for level four services we've really done a lot of direct outreach to individual families um using our aarts for students that maybe need a little bit of additional support and assistance so our young scholars for example level three students that might need information about how to you know be considered for level four services receive direct outreach from our aerts and we've done a lot of work

076to integrate aap in the general education setting with advanced academic curriculum and teachers again you know engaging families about the curriculum that they're using that is part of the aap program so there's a lot of different things that we've done certainly a lot of you know multilingual communications that have been increased but um again there's always uh certainly room for improvement so absolutely thank you and that's all i have thank you again mr waltz and your team for um this report we appreciate it all right um i'll go ahead and take my turn um thank you mr waltz and miss fennel i think miss mcdonald had it she had a comment regarding oh i'm to add a couple of things you know when i look at things like on paper on the website everything like

077looks good the ap program uh i looked through the arabic the options if i was an arab a parent who preferred to communicate in arabic it was messed up and they shared that with kirsten right like when i clicked on something it becomes the english again and uh for in arabic at least there is like a lot of usage of google translate that is not accurate a lot of times it doesn't even make sense so we really can't say we're serving the families if this is what's happening and sometimes the quality of translation is an issue and family just give up honestly they're not even willing to take the time to read um so there needs to be like more accountability there and in terms of the aap program i think i can speak from

078my child's experience when you have like one teacher in one school um and you don't have options you know this person is gonna be there maybe all seven years of the child being in this school and i didn't feel that person for example like had the cultural sensitivity or awareness or what what now and if this is the experience that other parents have at other schools it obviously does a disservice to our students and our families and without the data you know this thing that i spoke about when there is less i was told when there is less than 20 students from a particular demographic group that the data will not be broken down that already tells us you know we're failing right if a title one school is you know over 60 students of

079color and there are not enough in the aap program we already know we're not doing enough so i believe there needs to be more oversight more accountability and i mean hiding the data really doesn't solve the problem because whatever is hidden is clearly like not something that the school system wants to share with parents honestly i mean as i've learned now being in this committee for a couple of years so i just wanted to highlight and emphasize that and lastly about the recommendation for anti-racism it would be like remiss of me not to mention one thing that i've seen time and time again in the meetings i attended about equity in fcps we cannot pick and choose the kind of hate that we want to fight based on what's cool at the moment so with

080the death of george floyd of course anti-black racism came to the forefront it's long overdue by centuries that we address that kind of hate but we must also address the other kind of hate that our students and communities face for being arab for being muslim for being jewish for just really being different um so i just wanted you know that to be highlighted because there's no anti-racist curriculum if we're just you know thinking oh let's just be cool and help this one group that's getting all the media attention right now when our student our school system is so diverse and they think the attacks on abraham really highlights me just they bring back memories of my own trauma as an arab american muslim woman visibly muslim and and the hate i face the worries i

081have for myself for my child for my community and i just hope that's always addressed in pd in the staff development because there is really a lack of i mean virtual learning exposes us what how the teachers are teaching our children and what i've heard from parents is you know sometimes a complete lack of sensitivity to cultures that are not the dominant culture in this country okay um i'll go ahead and take my turn um thank you mr waltz and mr manum for your presentation and emphasizing these points um a lot of the work on which has been long overdue um i did want to just address you know in speaking to the family engagement i think that this committee is unique because uh you also have representatives from every one of the title one

082schools and so i just wanted you to touch on that a little bit mr waltz if you could just help uh clarify you mentioned earlier that you have the data at the table in the committee and i just want to make sure that that's clearly delineated especially in better understanding you know what these parents feel and think um having represented all these schools around that family engagement piece i mean what's their feedback on that make sure i understand the question he said we have the data can you you said that oh there was a comment made earlier um i think it was you but uh about saying how you have the data available to you because you have representatives from all these different schools who are on the ground and understand the realities it may

083have been missing it was one of you oh i i think that i don't want to speak for spanish inaccurately but i think what i'm saying is we can speak to our communities students and families can speak to what's really happening i think because of lived experiences we can talk about how students are being ushered away or led to advanced academics being over disciplined facing racism islamophobia i mean i think that i don't know if i'm really answering it in the best way i just think that there's such you know in 40 schools across the county there's and one middle school there are such variety such variants but still similar stories similar situations and if you're 30 miles apart but you have the same situation then it's not about kindness it's not about how somebody

084was raised it's a system failure and we're able to often diagnose how effectively something's happening just based on what our families say and i think that's why in speaking and talking about collaborating with other committees like it's essential if everyone's specializing or if each committee is focusing on a certain area but you don't have the committee focusing on the group that's supposed to be receiving it you're definitely going to miss i don't know if that answer what you're saying yeah yeah no no that's exactly i mean your point on um being able to kind of diagnose the extent to which we're implementing effectively because people on the ground are are speaking to that and let me get so i can tie that to even recommendation three it's really important that staff has time they need

085time for this training and it's really it's learning i think training i think of training as something that you know it may be a set time set period learning i think is more an ongoing process and that's what it really needs it needs to be learning my two children's experience and i only have a rising high schooler even though we're at a different different socioeconomic level that title one is defined by because they're black voice in the school system there is and there's volumes of writings documenting how many ways the racism in this county manifests itself every day and these are both aap the good black students if you will a teacher hung up on us because they were confronted over and not follow following the grading policy that the board recently implemented late winter

086if that's happening over following policy that you all implement over grades really have to take a close look on what it's going to be when it comes to anti-racism what's the pushback going to be then what's the possible retaliation going to be then what's the blowback going to be again one of my children reported discriminatory treatment from a teacher follow-up action that alerted us to it was the teacher yelling at him in the hallway waving a clipboard in his face and it was only for his counselor who came by in the future situation that we ever knew about it because the school and i want you all to really appreciate this and talk about engagement engagement engagement but it seems like after elementary school it's like okay you're on your own we need more engagement

087the further students go because they're transitioning into adolescence they're more independent there's opportunity opportunities but they're going to be situations for more confrontation because they're getting closer to adulthood and it just seems to be a free-for-all and the danger is that suppose an sro saw him react negatively being confronted by somebody who he already said was discriminating against him what happens to him then because we force the issue because we take things proactively you know we can ensure more successful path for him but it's that very reason why i'm on this committee because i recognize that i'm unique and a lot of people are not comfortable or familiar experience in this path and those are the people those are the students that need this more than anyone yeah thank you miss smith i see your

088hand sure mike's been doing such a beautiful job you know sharing thoughts but one thing i want to lift up a lot of what mike is talking about and and a common theme i'm hearing is two-way communication and as you recall from that family engagement survey we did a few years ago that is an area that we're so large we do a lot of talking to talking at we are not co-designing with we are not talking with and so i'm i'm hopeful and i'm excited and looking forward to the work around the family engagement policy which with subsequent regulation because that is where we may be able to get um not only our values down but some expectations to mike's point around doing things with our families not to our families co-designing co-creating um and

089so i just wanted to lift that up as a connection to some of these charges as some possible future work but i appreciate all the things that mike and nina have shared yeah no thank you for that um i mean yeah to my colleagues you know i would share that having worked with this committee i guess for two rounds now um the two words i think about and describing you know how they characterize their experiences are frustration and confusion there's a lot i mean um the the stories that you know our chair and vice chair shared there are many many more that get and get shared in these meetings um and i i'm just really concerned about you know what we're doing on that front the language piece you know there was some testimony today

090that you know the qualities are concerned but even the extent to which translation is available what is translated i mean these are all places where there are major gaps and we have to commit resources so i just want to flag this because i know this time around we committed you know certain positions to esau which is another neglected area which we continue needing to support um this is another one of those places where you know bridging that gap for families to provide the best opportunity for kids to be successful is going to be essential and we have to commit those resources the next time around we look at that budget um i also wanted to touch on the advanced academics piece and the anti-racist work um i had a question for you guys from your

091understanding what is the biggest hindrance um to accomplishing these pieces especially expanding equity and access to aap i would say for ap it's i think it's the discretion you know and the oversight or lack thereof i don't know outside of you know they're supposed to be information sessions you know i never know what it's like on the back end or what families understand or experience or what what sense they get of whatever was delivered and presented to them you have to be on such a high level of awareness to even sit where i'm sitting right now that it's hard for me to appreciate what somebody who's not seen here what it's like to navigate and to understand and to parse out what's important what's not what do they need to know i mean i talked

092to somebody this past spring who's like oh i totally missed the whole thing about ap and they were looking into having an appeal or a test at george mason i i just think that with the with and maybe somebody can can form that but i don't i think there seems to be a baseline in terms of you know what has to be provided and not a measurable goal on how effectively it's being provided like we know the same way as i said earlier you know there may be a school with 90 percent you know native english speakers so they're not going to need the same language services there are families community schools where large percentages of the parents there are already keyed in to how to get their students connected to opportunities so they don't

093need as much support if you will but for those that don't i mean it's like they're there but they're not really there and i think this is part of why we talk about this advisory committee structure we will not get people who we need if we don't look harder broader wider and deeper we need to have people on an advanced academic committee who applied and didn't get in we absolutely need to have people there because they can identify what's missing what's wrong what didn't go right the only reason we were able to be successful in getting our students grade change to what it should have been i happen to be on a focus group about grading policy secondary grading policy and i literally said out loud i said i feel like i need to do

094an audit now because when i saw certain policies i was like huh late work should be accepted minimal penalty i wouldn't have known if i wasn't on it and based on the communication had with teacher we were not the only one we were not the only one and i know we're not the only school so that's one big component the other it was regarding i think you know anti-racism the biggest biggest hindrance is the willingness to be criticized for doing the right thing anybody going into it thought it would be let me think of some boundaries are always a controversial needed topic but if they thought it would be close to as bad as boundaries they really don't understand racism this is going to be the fight of your tenure on this board because this

095has been the fight of this nation's soul since before it started if we are not recognizing leaning into all the opposition that's coming but more importantly finding all the support that's there but doesn't believe that you really are gonna are going to do what's what you said you're going to do then we're missing an opportunity and we're also kidding ourselves this will be the fight of your tenure to make this school division more anti-racist it's funny that the county that i grew up in loud you know they're talking about the crt which none of this is it's just basic history i mean reading a book that one of my college professors wrote about it's called ebony and ivy it talks about how the earliest universities the most prestigious ones in this country did not just

096benefit from slavery they were dependent there was a relationship a deep relationship and that's something that we should be teaching students they should know and understand why is harvard so prestigious because it was the first university that profited was created from the slave trade that's why it was the first in time first in line we don't teach that and what's interesting is that one of the criticisms said about crt oh it'll teach you to hate white people i'll tell you a little story i was in my ap u.s history class 11th grade and i remember that at the end of our two day or so lecture on slavery our teacher decided to editorialize and you know if you're back when you wrote with a pen i guess in class taking notes and i remember she

097said not all aspects of slavery were bad and some masters really loved their slaves i can tell you one person who hated white people at that moment i stopped writing but the danger was not even me to me as much as it was for all the other mainly white students in my class who kept writing internalize that they're the people out here now who think the soul of their country is being challenged because they were so poorly talked we have to be steadfast we have to correct inaccurate depictions because this is not close to crt that's another discussion that's another time we're not ready for that this is the foundation i think there has to be not just a survey that went out in the spring but there needs to be more partnering more engaging

098with community organizations that are committed to this and members of the community to get our stories i've written plenty to you all you've read them you may have forgotten them so i and i'm just one of a hundred plus thousand stories of racism played out in this county but not because this county is unique but because it's in the united states i really think that's those are the biggest challenges and that's something that we will in partnership have to fight against together now i appreciate you outlining that i mean i think you know in in kind of putting together here as a board what we want to take from this one as we said committing the resources especially for language access and having depth and quality but two based on what you're sharing you know

099with advanced academics i think we've had opportunities where this has come before us and really thinking about how we want to expand that access um beyond you know i i've you know been pushing for us to really consider opening the gates and allowing people to opt into that um and i would urge my colleagues to consider the same since we keep hearing it from mscoc from tpac and various other committees and the second piece it's going to be our role to um clarify some of the confusion out there as mr owels pointed out around some of the anti-bias work because that is going to be essential and i hope that we can be thoughtful maybe collectively at our equity at our retreat coming up but uh whether or not that happens being thoughtful before we

100speak on these issues just so that we we get the language right and don't shoot ourselves in the foot and undermine really important work that's been um happening for a long time or has been waiting to happen for a long time um so with that i know that we are short on time so um i'll pause there i i i hope that you know dr anderson we can follow up on this meeting as they requested i feel strongly that that's something we can and should do um but otherwise i want to hand it off to ms corbett sanders for the next session thank you mr waltz and miss benjamin thank you have a good night thank you miss omega i know that we are now about a half an hour behind schedule and so i

101apologize to the members of both the cte advisory committee and the adult community education advisory committee that we are going to try to catch up a little bit i asked the my from my colleagues that instead of ending promptly at nine if we could go till 9 15 and that way we'll get about 50 to 55 minutes with each of our advisory committees because like the tpac these committees have put in an extensive amount of work and there is a lot of intersectionality between what the tpac did and the work of the cte advisory committee and the work of the adult and community education advisory committees so with that i would like to introduce everybody to the chair of the cte advisory committee mr charles britt he is known to many of you and has

102been a devoted member of our community and a leader on cte initiatives with the county and in addition to mr britt i would like to make sure everybody knows uh whitney ketchledge who has been the school the school system liaison to the cte advisory committee and with that i'm going to let mr britt take over good evening thank you karen appreciate the introduction and good evening to everyone um in typical fashion i'm sure i can help you make up about 15 minutes of that with my presentation particularly since i talk rather fast i will defer to you all how many questions you asked afterwards but i do agree that that was a very timely and important conversation so and as she mentioned there are certainly intersectionality with the work that we did as an advisory

103committee to the conversation that you just had around equity in programs within the school division uh whitney i'm not sure if there was something you wanted to um add before i get started with the presentation now good evening everyone thank you for having us tonight and i'll let charles kick us off okay so i think i've been given the capability to share my screen um so let me find proper screen here i believe i am sharing a powerpoint presentation is that visible to everyone yes charles it's very visible thank you okay so let me so i am going to uh provide the annual report on behalf of the career and technical education advisory committee for the 2020-2021 school year this is our charge that we were given by the school board in collaboration with key

104stakeholders we were to ensure and look into equitable access inclusion and participation in all cte programs i was the chair of the committee for this year and my vice chair was alexa crazel on the next sign is a list of all of the committee members once again we had the pleasure of having ms corbett sanders as our school board liaison and their respective school board representatives are listed in addition to community representatives from the pta business and industry and as well as representatives from the central office from special populations teachers as well as career and transition services these positions were not or say these slots were not field last year so it was certainly a added benefit to the committee to have input from those specific uh representatives to the work that we were doing

105and we appreciate fcps given the flexibility for those individuals to participate in our monthly meetings in addition to what you have read in the annual report i just have a summary here of the committee activities this was the first year we actually or i should say conducted a new member orientation we had several new members thanks to new members coming to the board and some members of the committee that had been on for a while resigned or stepped down so with that there was a conversation during our september meeting that those individuals sort of wanted to get some history some background on the things that the committee had been doing as you can imagine we have a very short timeline with which to do our work and they wanted to get up to speed as

106soon as possible alexa and i had talked about the idea of the orientation on numerous occasions so it was very fitting that this year early in october actually held a virtual orientation for the new members where we went over the purpose of the advisory committee the history behind a lot of the recommendations that we had given in the past recent changes that had taken place in the cte program and also provided them insight into the work that we were going to be doing throughout the next year and where why their role and the background that they had was important to the work that we were doing i did receive feedback from those attendees that it was very helpful um and they anticipated and hoped this will be something that could be done in future meetings

107and i've shared with the new leadership that they may want to consider having new member orientations moving forward typically each year we also do an endorsement of new courses i should have taken this bullet out because i did talk to whitney ending the school district did not present um endorsements of new courses this year but i know that that's always a part of our agenda in the early part of the year but she did confirm there were no new courses added however the one thing that did take place was the endorsement of the 22 perkins budget request as well as as you may have heard from the last committee i took it upon myself to actually give presentations to the minority student achievement oversight committee the title uh one parent advisory the fcc pta uh

108ambassadors program and the northern virginia district pta um as you can imagine during the covert there were a lot of virtual presentations going on so i received invitations from each one of these groups to come and talk about the work of the ctac and why it was important for their specific stakeholders to understand the value and benefits of the cte program and you may have of course seen in the last presentation and you may have heard through your own community channels that there has been a lot of talk about the need to expand those cte offerings as a school board member indicated to all parts of the county as well as ensuring that parents and materials that are distributed actually communicate the program in such a way that folks are aware of those offerings and

109can easily sign up and you'll see some of that discussion come out a little bit more in our recommendations so once again this year we broke into sub committees again like every other committee we worked virtually throughout the entire year when we were face to face um it was very important for us because we have such a large committee to kind of break down some of the work that the committee does into these subcommittee structures this year we focused on program resource gaps uh communications and outreach as well as program accessibility and content delivery i certainly can't speak to everything um that each one of these subcommittees did but if you read the annual report i did a better job of sort of outlining and bulleting what the output was of each of these but

110at a high level i myself was a member of the program resource gaps and we looked at analyzed market labor market data and research from the nova workforce division and compared that to cte course enrollment um to determine where there may be gaps where we see large growth around certain occupations but not necessarily large growth and engagement and enrollment at the cte programs in addition that data is appended to our annual report and you'll see that we also we have a chart of the cte enrollment and there's a chart that was created that shows you the numbers as they are mapped to the the occupationals the top occupations in the northern virginia region next was the communications and outreach uh this particular subcommittee looked at how the school division was actually getting word out about

111the cte program and they reviewed and sort of had conversations around current activities focused on educating parents and community stakeholders about the cte program there was sort of some cross work between this committee as well as the program accessibility because it all focused on uh reaching out to the ptas having conversations with the counseling staff as well as where ways that other community groups and organizations can be engaged to help spread the word but then also help support the school district in developing after school as well as summer learning opportunities that give students greater exposure to the cte program next was program accessibility and content delivery and this specific subcommittee researched how cte is communicated and promoted specifically at the middle school level across different regions so they used um anecdotal data that they were

112able to find from the middle school websites some of them had conversations with middle school counseling staff and others just basically used what they knew about their own regions based on their participation in the pta and other community groups to identify best practices and then discover possible inequities across those uh across the specific regions as it pertains to how cte is communicated to the parents and a subset of their work um again this committee was busy we only meet once a month and that doesn't include december and january um they also slid in time to discuss how the cte program was pivoting to adapt to the virtual learning so there were a couple meetings where they got briefings from whitney and other staff members about how all the programs were pivoting to virtual learning and

113the impact that that was having on students learning not only learning but also access to certifications that would need to be passed and those students who are participating in more hands-on programs like the fire academy and construction how those programs were adapting to ensure those students were engaged and received proper credit for their enrollment in those programs and courses the next two slides will basically summarize what our recommendations were based on all the work again if you in the annual report there's more specifics around this so i gave you the high level of what those specific groups did but i think the recommendations kind of flesh out what our findings were and where there's need for continued growth and support to the cte program to address inequities or potential inequities as well as other areas

114um for enhancing support for the program as it continues to grow and um seek new uh participation from students across the entire school division so i won't go into i won't read quote unquote line for line but recommendation one the topic of uh how it's communicating consistent messaging keeps coming up over and over um this is i think a sort of different variation of the recommendation we've given about two or three years in a row about how the program is actually communicated to the communities we've received a lot of feedback from the groups that i spoke to that i told you about where they talked about having materials about the cte program translate into other languages opportunities for presentations such as town halls or information sessions around the cte program that can be held in

115all the regions particularly at the elementary and middle school level and not necessarily in high school when students have already committed to a specific track um and there are other examples there that we have pushed and recommended that i know the ct department has heard us talk about before and are working with their you know internal and external stakeholders to develop social media campaigning around the program and ensuring that i knew a couple years back there was a a constant communication about the cte program through keep in touch so expanding those so that it reaches again the largest audience and also investing time into potentially doing division-wide information sessions the committee has heard and believes would sort of support this this need to expand how the program is communicated across all regions and all communities

116recommendation number two talks about expanding resources and learning experiences focused on highlighting the connection between regional occupational outlooks and cte programs if you look at the data um i'm not a you know a statistician but it wasn't difficult to see that there are certain occupations that are growing significantly in our region it has been highlighted by workforce boards um the virginia government and other folks around the nation but that does not necessarily seem to translate to enrollment in those courses within the cte program and of course there are a number of factors that go into that as far as you know the size and how much you know how many students can be enrolled in a particular course we didn't dive into those details but i think the new committee leadership has already talked about

117sort of taking more of a deep dive into those numbers and ensuring that if we are trying to prepare um the student population for careers for access to college in these high demand fields then there certainly has to be more of a robust effort to ensure that enrollment matches that so that the workforce demands are being met and that that's also communicated to parents and others when students are thinking about which courses they're going to take and what they're going to enroll in and we sort of did give a nod to the fact that we're not trying to sway students away from the particular career path that they may have a desire and interest in pursuing but um it goes without saying that if the goal is to place them into high demand career fields

118and fill the pipeline of employment opportunities in the region that there has to be of course increased emphasis placed on the courses and that have the county has invested money in such as i.t and stem and robotics and and other programs that i think were highlighted in the report as you see that don't necessarily correlate to the demand that's in the workforce um and that is across all the programs that's not necessarily just the ones that are technical in nature but i think the the data that we showed clearly shows that there's a need to enhance that across all and also think about which programs may need to be sort of tailored or cut back i'm not you know we're not just advocating getting away with doing away with programs but there may need to

119be a sort of shift in resources toward um rescaling teachers to be able to teach courses that are more in demand and give them that professional development so that the school district can meet the need for those courses once the word gets out that there is a demand for those number uh recommendation number three speaks to the committee's desire for the school central office staff and teachers to collaborate with industry professionals to update course descriptions to include language that reflects current industry and career terminology i know this one was a personal passion of mine as we were doing research and talking to schools and the committees that i mentioned to you about the courses and what's being offered there's clearly a disconnect with the language on whether it's being borrowed from standard language that comes

120from the state or if it's something that's done internally there's a need to ensure that industry i won't call them buzzwords they're just industry terminology around certain technologies certain skills and knowledge that should be infused in those courses so that folks have a better understanding of what students are being exposed to so if you have a course in programming or coding as we would call it you actually call out those coding languages that are being taught and just don't say we're teaching coding but we're teaching java or we're teaching sql things that folks in industry and parents in the community may understand and recognize as being valuable skill sets just based on their own interaction in the workplace the other reason why this is important is because it ensures content ensures consistent learning across all

121the regions in classrooms if you make the description generic someone could be teaching one thing at one school and someone teaching another based on teacher skill sets or just desire of what they want to teach but if we're able to infuse those industry and career terminologies we're in that lexicon we'll see that there's a of course consistent way that those courses are taught and that curriculum is developed so that every student is getting the same access to the same knowledge and skill sets across the school division and then last but not least investigating the feasibility of expanding access to naviance to sixth grade students that was something that the board the committee was a real champion behind this came out of that group that was looking into how cte is promoted at the middle school

122level i mean we did also get this feedback from the title one parent advisory committee that information about cte and courses and what that means as far as how students are mapping out their career interests or naviance should start in the sixth grade um because by the time of course they're in the seventh grade or students who may be entering the ninth grade there's a lot of loss of information and knowledge that would be helpful as they're thinking about their course sequences particularly for those programs that require um a a prerequisite or you know combined a a session one course with a session two in order to earn some type of career credential or certification and if you aren't armed with that knowledge early enough you will not have the opportunity to then be able

123to take advantage of that because you didn't have the information so expand that access to naviance to the sixth grade um is something the committee feels very strongly about and i think as we spoke with folks from the counseling staff they said this was something that they're already investigating and looking into as they're continuing to address the number of recommendations we have given over the last couple of years so this is a new slide um it's new because in years past it was i was always going to be the new chair but i thought i would highlight the fact that i am passing the mantle this year after eight years on this committee and four as the chair i am passing the baton to mr joseph parker with into stem who's been a committee member

124for the last three or four years has been elected the new chair of the committee the committee's new vice chair will be irvine raconia burkoni excuse me who is in the supply chain operations education space both of them as uh have been members of the committee for quite some time and have the full support of the membership have a good vision for where they would like to take the committee there was a certainly a vibrant conversation following our last meeting about what the charge will look like and the things that they would like to tackle in the new school year with the support of the school board so i think the committee as well as the central office staff were excited about the relationships that they will build with these two individuals as they continue

125to push forward the work of the advisory committee um again it's been as i explained to them it's been a pleasure working with all of them and i'm just excited that we do have individuals who are just as energetic and passionate about the cte program as i am to continue the work that we're doing to make this one of the best or if not the best ct programs in the region and with that i will turn it back over to corporate standards thank you charles uh not only for this excellent presentation but more importantly for the many years of service to our community uh not only as the chair of the cte advisory committee but uh also with your work with northern virginia community college and other uh organizations here in northern virginia we are

126forever grateful so thank you um i am now go ahead no i say it's been a pleasure [Music] it has been a pleasure i've known you for many years i'm now going to call on board members so that they can provide comment uh miss marin followed by miss cohen thank you and thank you mr britt i thoroughly enjoyed this presentation and again having been to the construction site yesterday for the foundation for applied technical education i am really jazzed about this so what stands out to me about your report is it's curious to me having been on the board for a year and a half that i'm seeing all this data about the offerings through an advisory committee um because i really think that this should come from staff from instructional services during the course

127of the year or during budget work so um you know that's a curious thing for me um what i'm hearing from tonight and what i've heard from the board board colleagues and constituents and students and staff is that we need more career focused learning but i think that it's we need to i to clarify the definition of career and technical ed and what the goals are because for me i think of cte largely as an alternative pathway from a four-year college that helps students even get fast-tracked onto credentialed works and after high school and whether that's upon graduation worth one or two years yet i see the opportunities in the report that to my knowledge would require someone to obtain a four-year degree or more and that's fine and could be desirable to have options

128like that like engineering or marketing but the school division needs to be really clear about this and the intention of what's offered and as it's advertising these experiences because it's worthy to have students sample different occupations but if this is students like almost you know career path i want to say lifeline but if this is their way to make their way in life it can't just be this smattering of nice to try things it has to be real intentional what are we doing to help students who are not going to do that for your career path secondly we need to expand these offerings you know we have about 58 000 high school students and some of these programs we have handfuls of students in them and in several cases only one location for a type

129of study and and that's just not okay for fcps um i think the model of how we offer cte has got to change to allow for more interest and i've heard you know barriers and things that need to be addressed including we likely you know need to add central office staff or we can pick your central office staff to manage partnership and programs we have to have space and compliance with osha of course we need communications and marketing to inform students of opportunities yes and transportation but you know yesterday i i saw these amazing houses and a common refrain was well you know there's no more new space we don't have any space left in the county to build well let's think of it differently you know let's find ways to partner could we when

130we issue rfps to do um updates and renovations on our fcbs buildings could part of that rfb rfpb that the um the contractor has to allow for us to do some um construction and you know um cte work and of course all this is gonna have to be done safely but i think we really need to be way more creative and way more expansive with this and that's gotta come through in the budget um and i just wanna say lastly my two minutes my one second i think it's up darn it but that'll have to be for that it was a tech it was an administrative thing for the committee thank you miss marin uh does mr britt or uh i mean really i'd like to hear the staff i mean i was about to

131offer that miss maron i was just about to ask whether or not this kit lynch wanted to answer thank you so uh first uh miss mr britt and then uh miss ketlidge yeah well i'd really like to hear um dr if dr presidios on or miss clemenco i would like to hear one of the leadership team members of isd please thank you miss marin so with that dr presidio well i think you raise a lot of really good questions and a lot of really good points and i i can't really address them all right now a couple things i would say though just for board members to know that we do have these issues on our agenda and are working on many of them right now so for example um we are doing a study

132with an external consultant of our cte programs we've completed the rfp for that and we'll be working to collect more stakeholder feedback about equity and access to our programs looking at the programs that we do offer in terms of alignment to really labor and industry um trends and developments and looking at you know national models of best practice but you know overall i would just say one thing to keep in mind is that our career and technical education programs are very very broad in scope right so i mean we have you know programs from cosmetology to carpentry right um and to cyber security so our our programs are really built around the national model of uh career academies and they're essentially 16 different areas of career academy so we have very broad programs and i

133do think that the intent of the study that we're doing is to bring some information to the board and to the community for us to you know do a comprehensive review of the program offerings that we have in fairfax county and see if there you know is a possible need to refresh some of our programming and also to really talk about you know the long-standing equity challenge of making our programs more available and more accessible to students across the county so that work will be work that we'll do with the community and with the board next year i mean i certainly would be happy to address more specific questions but i see other board members have their hands up and i don't know in the interest of time maybe i would just leave it at

134that to start okay thank you dr presidio uh mr britt do you want to respond and i also want to call everybody's attention that miss glazier is here and she is uh oversees the cte department um yeah i'll just add by uh similarly as dr presidio said because of the the breadth of the programs um it does take sort of this this work that he talked about the committee had been recommending years ago that there be some more additional studies done on the program to ensure that the programs that are meeting workforce and labor demands are the ones that are growing and that the resources apply to those it is you know as she stated the ct program nationally is a pathway to both college and career it's not just to folks who are not

135going to college just for folks that also are going to college that have opportunities to go there so when you think about who needs to hear about it who needs to learn and be involved it is a larger group that may not necessarily be getting that information um today so i certainly agree with the comments and excited to see or learn in the future about what the study finds about how the program could be sort of further enhanced and tailored to make sure that it is meeting the needs of the school district without necessarily um having you know 17 000 programs across 16 schools but we're also focusing on eight programs that could really provide um added benefit to the not only the school district but the community as a whole thank you mr britt

136i'm going to go on to miss cohen thank you so much um well we are really going to miss you on ctac i feel really lucky to have gotten to serve with you you were we we all voted best chair um and the report was awesome and as melanie said i think so full of so much information that is incredibly helpful to us as we go forward and we're really appreciative of that um you know i think a few things nothing new i i think you probably fall in the same camp that i do that it's a little bit frustrating to see year after year some of the same recommendations but i'm super excited to find out about the program review i i think placement is a really big issue we've all had this conversation

137i think pretty continually as a board of looking at where programs are placed and do they make sense where they are or do we need to expand access um what is the limiting factor here if it is really that we need like boeing to come in and do some massive lab like got it if it's just that we need some space um and a teacher and there are some barriers then i think you know one of the things i hope that we'll look at um is maybe some additional collaboration with the county we talk a lot about county spaces and county the county fairfax county having you know some um office buildings and spaces that are that are empty and so maybe there's a way for us to re-imagine some of our um spaces because

138i think it's highly unlikely as you said that we're going to wind up with like a brand new chantilly academy type program you know somewhere else in the county so trying to be creative on on that is a big one um and the other thing you know just speaking to the the placement as well and availability you know the idea that in so many parts of the county that our kids would have to give up three class periods to be able to access these opportunities um and we're certainly that way in my part of the county um to be able to go and access any of these and they're just outstanding and i agree with you it's the same conversation we've had again of trying to expand the information so kids know what is available

139and i i do feel like particularly with our sped kids um at least the way that our um you know current school counselors are working i don't think that we're hearing as much as some kids who are already going to be getting all kinds of opportunities tend to know more about these opportunities and i think that's a shame i think we need to do a better job of getting that information out because they are just unbelievable it's amazing to me that you can walk you can walk out with certifications um or this new lease on life in a direction as you walk into college that has become so incredibly expensive to have a direction walking in is pretty remarkable um one thing i would say though and i hope the program review is gonna is

140gonna is as you said tying in what is what we're offering what businesses really need right now to fulfill the workforce so thank you again you guys are amazing and we're always excited to have you come present and best of luck charles thank you miss cohen uh does anybody want to provide response to that provided response to that i think dr presidio given the comment about the um review and whether or not that review will also look at availability in different regions and accessibility for different groups yeah it will and um you know i would say that's not the only you know partnership that we have looking at some of these issues uh we also do work pretty closely with northern virginia community college and george mason university and the county looking at workforce trends

141and we actually have a meeting coming up with them to do some of this collaboration work in just another week so we can continue to you know to try to do a better job briefing the board on that work thank you dr presidio and i would also hope that we bring in the economic development authority as well um dr anderson thank you very much miss carpet sanders like my colleagues before me mr red i do want to say thank you for this very comprehensive report it it was quite um it was quite interesting to go through much of this data that is here and i'm sure many of the points that you've shared with us will be incorporated in the program with you which staff is also going to be working on i i just

142really want to echo my support in terms of some of your recommendations which is the expansion of programs and areas of the county where our students can most likely have access to them i think that's imperative so that um we have students who have opportunity and so i'm really looking forward to see some of your response to that as well um dr presidio when we have that program review i do have one question um i believe it's in the executive summary you talked a little bit about the use of care cares act funds to help with the resources and to fast track implementation can you be a little bit more specific in terms of what is it that the committee is thinking about um when it comes to this budgetary implication so the idea came

143from the newly elected it started with the newly elected vice chair irving regarding opportunities for students to get additional uh hands-on training or hands-on learning that they may not have received virtually during the school year so if there are courses that are going to be offered or certainly summer learning opportunities that those funds be used to sort of maybe curtail the cost of the teachers or the cost of the space that maybe students may have been charged or may not have charged i don't know i mean that's something i know that you all are working on how that summer learning is going to look but if those funds were available the committees i believe was that it saw a lot some of that should be allotted toward addressing that um loss of loss of learning

144that happened because of the virtual learning where students that are in the hands-on did not get that or may need it in order to study and pass the certification tests that are associated with it because some of them do come with hands-on requirements that you have some have so many hours of that so if that's needed that funding could be used to support that and then in addition on a broad perspective i believe the community committee's um belief was that if there are costs or barriers that have prevented um the cte department from implementing recommendations that we have presented in the past that maybe some of this money could be used to help fund those things i mean we often hear that there are resource issues which you know working in you know the private

145sector and government space we totally understand all times recommendations come they sometimes come with needs for resources so this is what the committee felt was an opportunity that if they're going to be you know discretionary funds that could be spent maybe it could be used to address some of these challenges that the district is having to expand the program and increase the communication that's going out about the program if cost has been a prohibitor in the past no thank you i very much appreciate that comprehensive response which leads me to a question for dr presidio i'm not sure if we had some in-depth conversation in terms of how we are going to recoup that learning loss for students and programs that do require the hands-on practicum can you speak to that a little bit in

146terms of what our plans are maybe i've missed it well and and i would say you know we're still continuing to um well let me say it this way we're looking at a long-term approach to address learning loss for students so not just focusing on what's going to happen this summer but focusing on what we can do to continue to support students next school year outside of the regular school day and even in probably to the following summer in the following school year so we're really taking a longer term view at this for those students that did need support for some of those certification exams we've been trying to make sure that they have that additional support even before the school year wrapped up and will continue to try to do that during the summer

147so we really are working with students on a you know individual student by student basis to make sure that they get the support that they need some of it has to be now some of it has to be immediate but we're really also looking at a longer term view and approach to that support okay thank you i'm very glad to hear that the only other piece that i have is how are we communicating to parents that this is available for students to reach out to on a case-by-case basis who are they reaching out to somebody essentially at the school no at this at the school level teachers and counselors and administrators have been working with individual students really for the last several months to this end and we did make um and again the other

148thing just to remind folks in the community is that our summer programs are all uh free um there's not a charge this year there are some enrichment programs uh that are um are charging tuition but even in those programs we created scholarship opportunities for students to make sure that students did have opportunities to participate in those enrichment camps free of charge thank you very much the last thing that i wanted to point out i chuckled a little bit when i saw recommendation four which is to expand access to naviance to sixth grade students when this was a conversation that we had with the prior um committee report from tpac again mr brent thank you so much for this wonderful work this was very comprehensive and very thorough we're very grateful for all of your service

149and best of luck to you thank you so much i appreciate that thank you for your service as well thank you dr anderson miss mclaughlin great uh happy to follow um dr anderson first charles thank you for your service as well i also want to give a shout out to my braddock district appointee alexa presell who i know served as your vice chair and uh i also shout out to our own board member karen corbett sanders i heard really great things karen about your work this year as a liaison very very helpful very hands-on um and a shout out also to whitney who i was told she stepped in for long-serving uh staff member beth downey that whitney did a great job so dr presidio you've brought a good team together on this work to

150support our appointees i cannot emphasize enough what board members have said about the experts here in our community serving on cte um and charles thank you for capturing something very important that for nine years um i know our board's been talking about which is what is cte and it really is career and technical it is meant to serve every single child regardless of where their career education paths can take them so i thought you captured that really well and we do need to keep growing it um as the parent of two recent college grads i know that data science cyber security a lot of the the computer science fields uh we need to do better in fcps to really expose kids sooner earlier to what ms cohen said uh here in the braddock district right

151next to springfield we really don't have enough uh curriculum options and as ms marin has talked about you know how do we make sure that we get that access and that students aren't going to be having to give up two to three classes in order to access them so i think we'll want to look at really the delivery model to it but um overall i just am very grateful to everyone who served on ctec this year and uh everything that you're doing to help us bring this to a 21st century learning model for our students we know with the cost of going on to university even students need exposure to careers so i really second the notion that let's bring this down to the sixth grade level let's make sure that by the time they

152hit middle school they can start taking these cte electives and starting to understand where their passions lie they could often spark their academic passion by getting exposure to again cte level courses but overall um i guess i would just say um dr presidio if you could make sure that your team works with our communications person helen lloyd i'd love to get the specific language about the summer enrichment camps we can go ahead and send those out in our school board newsletters and make sure people don't miss the summer option so do you know the registration deadline at all i believe the registration deadline actually might be passed it's been open for several months but uh i'll have to double check on that and if it's not passed we'll be happy to get that information out

153to the board okay thank you thank you miss mclaughlin miss holland yes thank you um thank you for the presentation um charles what's up it's good to see you um yeah i had to laugh when i saw the recommendation number four after the mic the question i asked in the last session about naviance and what it was and how we were using it and uh would love to see that expanded and perhaps used as as part of the educational tools for our communication tools for recommendation number one um you know very sensitive to how powerful the cte courses can be my younger son went all the way through fcps and is currently a civil engineer um and could have benefited so much from some of the engineering courses offered at places like marshall high school

154but we didn't find out about it until it was too late to really for to plan for him to be able to take those courses and and do the transportation and you know have everything else he needed um in order to you know graduate and you know go on to engineering school so um you're very sensitive to that and i hope that we can do a little bit better with that because the opportunities are incredible i did want to mention also um earlier today we were discussing our joint environmental task force goals and we have a set of goals around workforce development and working with cte staff you know uh rachel dahmer and matt bechtel are on our team looking at uh and and we'll be looking this summer at potential opportunities um i was

155very interested in the the data and information that you collected around uh you know what is our workforce really needing here in the geographic area and what are we offering and this is the kind of work they'll be adding and we can potentially add to your chart i just i just want to put that on your radar screen um that they'll be looking at careers in sustainability and renewables and what is the um the demand here in northern virginia and what is the student demand and and can we move forward and offering some courses you know in that area as well so just want um you know think about that i am yesterday when i toured the um the house um that you know the the feeds program put together i've had a great conversation

156with cte staff there and one of the things we were talking about was the great expansion of the entrepreneurship courses um across the county and so i said wow you know you really need to talk to our c-tech representatives um you know i mentioned in particular our janesville representative you know juan pablo gonzalez and his connections with you know the venture capital community and entrepreneurs in the tech industry and so um you know hope you know that i see you guys as a real really great um you know potential teachers are real life people for our sea tech students to talk to so anyway thank you for your work really appreciate it mr britt or miss ketledge would either one of you like to speak about how we would go about expanding the cte to

157include the get the green careers that miss tolan mentioned or referenced i'll defer to whitney on this question yeah good evening um i also second all the third or fourth all of the thank yous to mr brett for all of his hard work this year and for welcoming me to the team um we have looked at quite a few courses that are available and and coming from vdoe there's a whole pathway and a new career cluster for power energy and we're bringing on a new trade and industrial program manager very soon so finding ways to connect all of the trade and industrial courses that we have some of the i.t courses that we have technology education courses that we have and pull in the power and energy and environmental elements into those forces along with

158adding additional courses so those will be part of our review of the occupational outlook and new course opportunities and new curriculum to add to our current courses coming this fall excellent thank you so much uh would anybody else like to add to that or shall we go on to miss picarski okay let's go on to miss picarski thank you just want to offer thank you mr britt for your um work and and wonderful leadership on the committee and for for everyone's um time and expertise this is an incredible um report and i just found the data within it so helpful to me to really understand um where a lot of these gaps are um and the discrepancies between high schools and who is accessing um ctr cte offerings and who isn't um so i i'm

159very much interested in what we will hear um you know from leadership i know dr presidio is working on many of these issues and this did come up in in the prior committee but the communicate the need for better communication earlier communication as you said with navion starting in sixth grade and not only having the conversations i think with our students but really broadening that and making sure that we are also bringing in our family um because i think sometimes there is that missing connection and while our students may hear some of it in school or they may get it from counselors you know it doesn't it doesn't click there is not that that long-term term thought uh that really families can help solidify so so i'm very very interested in the work that we

160can do as a division with um as ms corbin sanders said uh earlier that individualized approach for each student because i mean just beyond the opportunity to to try different things learn different things i mean our students can actually earn certificates and earn money i mean have a great paying job uh that's regardless of whether or not they go to college afterwards that is that's amazing and we have to ensure that that is trickling down and and people know that that is a real option in this in in in our school system so i'm very excited about a lot of the work that is happening and and the recommendations that you have put forth so thank you to everyone thank you miss picarski i'll take my turn just briefly uh because i've had the pleasure

161of working very closely with the cte advisory committee uh over the past year as its liaison uh just a couple of comments i do think that you're highlighting or your focus on the importance of early and more frequent communications is appropriate and um also changing the lexicon to be updated with the terminology that professionals are using and in today's workforce i think is critical as well as the naviance and i'm just hoping that the uh not only the availability of naviance is uh earlier um age but also that uh there it's multilingual communications so it's not limited to just english because i've had the benefit of speaking at a couple of our um non-english speaking ptas and when i raised the um the availability of the cte programs they are always very receptive and also

162very surprised at the availability of all that is available so i encourage that we do that and before i close out this portion of our work session i also want to thank staff and thank mr britt for including this robust amount of data in this report it is only with data that we can make can have informed decision making and sharing data with our advisory committees even if it doesn't reflect everything we'd like it to reflect is critical so that we can get the best advice from our advisory committees in the form of their recommendations but it also is essential for us as board members to be able to do the work that we do so i encourage you dr brabrand to make sure that in the future um we continue to not only make

163the data available to the advisory committees but also share with the board absolutely thank you thank you and with that um mr britt you're certainly welcome to join us for this next part of this session uh where we will talk about adult and community education and we are very lucky to have this year's chair of the ace advisory committee brian graham with us this afternoon or this evening now as well as miss williams who is the staff liaison to the advisory committee and that's karen williams and i am also would be remiss if i didn't also welcome lois passman today to this meeting as the long-serving appointee from the mount vernon district and so um brian you guys have done some incredible work and there's a lot of uh overlap between the work that you

164all are doing and the work that uh is that the cte advisory committee has done as well as the work of um earlier tpack and so i hand the microphone over to you and i hope they've shared given you the privilege of sharing your presentation thank you miss yes mr gordon sanders thank you uh i i'd also like to point out uh that the cte of vicer irvin varconi from the providence district is also present um as well as uh ken baldwin uh who is the appointee from um uh from the braddock district as well uh in addition to ms lowe's passion so um thank you for that introduction i will share my screen make an attempt to at least there we go [Music] okay so um i'm going to go just through a kind

165of a a reset i think most of the members of the school board are aware um that there are kind of two portions uh that are under advisement from the adult and community education advisory committee um and well areas that are funded by the ace fund but also areas that are funded by the school operating fund so just wanted to point out and remind members of the school board about the difference that the adult high school completion program that's on the top right of this graphic here is from the school operating fund but the community education and adult use all components of ace are funded from the ace fund so a separate fund that receives a transfer from the school operating fund each year so just a reminder as we talk as questions about finances

166and things like that kind of come through that a lot of the operating costs and things like that are for adult esol and community education are run through the aids fund and not through the school operating fund and just to very very quickly uh remind folks about the things that are in these areas community education has some k-12 programs um career development programs which you know is a connection to tie into what we just heard from cte um in adult enrichment programs as well right so there are um obviously the driver education behind the wheel i think all of you would be familiar with uh and there are some ace components as well with test prep um although um a test prep for various tests um the kind of classes that bridge the gap from

167one grade level to another when for helping prepare students for the next level in math and and then of course some world k-12 world language programs a lot of those k-12 programs uh did not happen this year or or started kind of very late because of covid and a lot of the other programs uh didn't happen or happened in kind of newer different online delivery methods compared to a lot of the in-person delivery that we saw from community education in the past um adult esol is also a huge important component of this of course um the the school system is required to have an adult eso program um but but there are um there's teaching of practical english skills there are tie-ins to uh important skills for workplace readiness which are tie into some of

168the funding from the grants and then it's just always important to remind everyone that that ace for fcps um it administers the grant um kind of regionally so fcps uh gets a million of the 2.3 million for the kind of regional grants um uh so which includes loud and then prince william and arlington alexandria and the masses uh systems and then finally adult high school completion i think you all are aware of the fairfax county adult high school and the options to earn a diploma uh either advanced standard or adult diploma depending on uh kind of how the requirements are met and then and then also the opportunity to uh earn an equivalency credential through the ged so just quick quick refresher on what we're talking about here um the the school board's charged this

169year was to talk or for us to assess to the advisory committee but it was for us to assess how community education adult esol and adult high school completion those three components can be better positioned to serve the lifelong learning needs uh given the new learning involved environment necessitated by covet 19. so of course we at this point we you know all of our meetings were virtual because we had um the the the the impact of the coronavirus uh so and as a result of that we did um kind of internal discussions about how what information we needed to gather to to understand how well we're doing this and we kind of decided to focus on um on the digital divide as a an important component a lot of ace programs are meant to be

170kind of easy to access not inexpensive but also can provide similar credentials and things that can turn into real money making opportunities for fairfax county residents so so reflecting how well do we reflect the needs of those things um we created surveys for ace instructors and for uh for adult students um to kind of ask how they thought things were going you know whether or not they were still able to teach their classes um in in covid or whether they didn't really adapt to to covet um and uh and also kind of whether or not students and teachers preferred those methods whether they thought that there was better engagement or or not um and and ken balboena from from the broad district is invited today um because he did a lot of the analysis uh

171statistical analysis as a result of that so if we do have questions as that's kind of an appendix to our report but there is some real data that the advisory committee created in addition to some of the data that we we've been able to see from staff uh over the year as well um and and then we we've obviously in our meetings had discussions with staff about how the programs were adapting uh to in responding to kova 19. um i think just generally speaking uh we we felt like the high school completion programs um especially with their access to or being able to provide computers or to students um it you know adapted like everyone else in terms of providing virtual learning and actually was had a fairly successful year so the recommendations that we

172have today are are not focused on the high school completion program um because we we didn't see uh dramatic kind of issues or concerns there um we we we hope to kind of do a more critical look uh at the high school completion program uh well all of all three programs next year uh as well so um just uh just a note um the uh just another uh the ace community adult adult esl programs did pivot to online classes but did not collect enough revenue from the tuition to cover all fixed costs we have uh kind of issues where we don't have the same access to k-12 programs in terms of providing laptops and internet and a reliable internet uh to to students so um so there's certainly there was kind of a mix of

173new opportunities for students who now had access to classes where they would have to drive across the county or whatever else because now they're offered virtually um and and also students who uh you might have lost opportunities because they didn't have um a good enough computer or reliable internet or whatever but there were students that were taking classes on on ipads and phones and in all kinds of things in addition to uh to laptop computers so uh finding ways to adapt to that was uh interesting if we have more questions more specific questions about the survey um and the results we'd be happy to entertain them later but uh just to be brief i do want to get into the recommendations um the first recommendation that we have is to consider additional coronavirus relief funding

174to enable ace to restore previous programs moving toward full in-person classes while maintaining a virtual option so um i think this this recommendation also because it was originated by mr varchoni as an idea as you see from ctn here um but but i think the justification here obviously is we had some programs that that were not able to keep running so to kind of maintain some momentum that a little kickstart from from some of the uh the care stacks funds or maybe elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds from the american rescue plan act um uh could potentially be used to maintain some resources and programs um to help kind of fill in some of the gaps that that uh that were here uh that kind of kick-start things uh that that were interrupted from

175the pandemic because not all the programs and offerings were were able to continue during uh that virtual uh period so uh that is generally our first recommendation um and and i guess it kind of related to that there are um if there are ways to add an emphasis on continuing education requests for the legislative approach preparation packages uh i think that there's could a good tie-in obviously to to what the ace programs offer recommendation two is to ask the fairfax county board of supervisors for direct funding of the ace fund to demonstrate support of ace program alignment with the one fairfax policy and draft fairfax county strategic plan so uh i know the strategic planning kind of got interrupted um but but obviously there are a lot of ties to kind of equity programs through

176ace um ace has i think and i think the committee thinks clear value for the county in general if the county is saying that that these things are important if lifelong learning and or education and learning is important it providing uh residents with new economic opportunities um and empowerment support for residents facing vulnerability we see that ace programs kind of fit into a lot of these areas and instead of asking asking for uh fcps operating fund to pay for some of these things uh and and for them to be kind of put up against the core mission of fcps that is k-12 education um we thought there might be some willingness for the school for the school board for the board of supervisors to directly fund some some of these things from the county budget

177as well um so um both the first two recommendations are kind of money related um and and if we get into questions about that there is because of the downturn uh and and uh in in courses in enrollments in revenue related to those things but also because there is a kind of a base level of staff uh that is necessary to kind of maintain the program um there is going to be you know a gap in there that that we need to find some way to to resolve um in the funding uh the next recommendation is recommendation three which is to continue to support virtual and hybrid instruction as a desirable class format using data driven decision making to determine which programs can sustain enrollment and generate revenue as ace adjusts to a post-pandemic academic

178setting so a lot of the virtual class offerings that that we kind of switched to during the the pandemic era um were new experiments for ace a lot of a lot of classes were never provided or offered that way um most of them were offered in person so we we think that there's kind of a balance uh in in uh in some students feel like they learn better this way or that this provides them an opportunity to learn something while they're at home dealing with their children or whatever else right so there are there there is kind of an access component um that that this is off this is open new opportunities um so we think that this is a way to kind of continue to maintain some revenue or potentially increase the revenue that's

179that's run through the ace fund by continuing to offer these some of these programs in in virtual formats or maybe some in-person lab formats with virtual instruction or or whatever if you look at the new the new uh i think the program is really already doing this if you go look at the the latest ace catalog it talks about how we have we have classes in person but we also have classes hybrid and we have fully virtual and even self-based uh options as well so um i think they are really embracing that but but but we do want to see kind of the data pushing the adoption of those things the selection of offerings as well the fourth recommendation is to implement a curriculum that expedites the completion of ace career pathways providing opportunities that

180allow students to pursue specialized skills i think this is kind of a following from a recommendation that we had last year in terms of uh identifying um what i think we what we call career pathways but but there are a lot of growth areas in northern virginia that require credentials and certifications and if we can find easier ways to connect members of the community with these offerings to to seek employment in these high demand field areas as quickly as possible without having to take several years of of classes to do that you know that i think that is a an important increased focus um that we can in my understanding is that this is also uh potentially in the works from staff as well and then and then our last recommendation is to expand outreach

181to the community leaders local human services organizations and county agencies to increase the impact of ace programs and inform the work of the advisory committee so previously the advisory committee had last year the advisory committee had asked for the advisory committee to be expanded and there was some discussion i know we've been kind of talking around how advisory committees work and engage with the community just in general but we did spend some time talking about organizations that we thought would be good uh to reach out to and we and we had kind of an experiment where we uh where we had invited the united united community um to uh from the mount vernon lee areas um at uh at lois passman's uh urging to a meeting and kind of in in that kind of we

182formed a connection between those between the organizations um so the uh the united community now kind of understands uh and we understand what the united community is dealing with and they understand some of the offerings uh that ace has and and it kind of as just in this short period of time this happened a couple months ago um we already have a number of students that are that are enrolled in in these courses for certification um as a result of that so um we have um some in the pharmacy technician and some in the certified nursing assistant courses so um but we think that was really great but i think we view this as an opportunity um for for for for staff in in the advisory committee to engage uh uh with with with the

183diverse the diverse groups of fairfax county that are helping to support vulnerable populations and and help connect people to new career opportunities um so uh we look for the school board support in in continuing to do that uh just uh really it's a to wrap things up we know that adult learning programs uh are important to fairfax county um that ace is not just adult learning programs though it just also has k-12 support as well um equity really is at the core of the education that is provided by all three of the the the program components of ace and we we feel like um with one fairfax and and with other discussions that have happened that that there is a kind of a clear need for ace um so we need so all we're really

184asking for is uh is continued support uh to to help drive for uh maintenance and growth of ace programs um and the challenges that we had over the last year with some some programs interrupted um we'll need some financial support uh for uh continuance and in in relaunching um so i think that uh wraps up my presentation um and uh i will give the floor back to you miss corporate sanders for uh questions thank you thank you so much brian and thank you for all of your hard work and the hard work of the whole committee this past year because i know uh you have brought a lot of innovative thought and approaches to the work we do have a couple of board members who would like to speak i'm going to start with mr

185fresh thank you and thank you mr graham and mr verconi both providence district residents so welcome to the meeting tonight um one of the areas that i'm particularly interested in hearing a little bit more about um is the first recommendation and leaning into the virtual or hybrid option um i imagine when community colleges began very heavily pushing students tour or you know adults um towards virtual online instruction that there was probably a hesitancy by those who had always gone the traditional route what advantages do you see by the school division what advantages do you see with the school division leaning heavily into maintaining a virtual option and i i can't tell from the recommendation maybe this is something i missed whether this would be like a concurrent hybrid situation or would we off would we

186offer both in-person and virtual versions of the same classes right so i think uh just in thank you for the question i think that in the past the the the ace programs have kind of operated from a if there's enough enrollment then they'll run a class model there aren't lost leaders they like classes uh really only run if they have enough enrollment right so if the class is close to enrollment they'll spend time kind of trying to push uh trying to either through social media or whatever else past students trying to find connect people to opportunities right so i think really the idea is that they can offer both and and kind of let market forces decide right whether or not students want to continue virtual instruction or whether or not they want to go

187back to in person obviously some some like adult esol doesn't trend especially with kind of the the beginning uh levels of it all you saw does not translate very well to online instruction but um but there are but but the the recommendation really is to encourage multiple channels to to provide options um to have the most flexibility because we we know fairfax county is a large county there's traffic if you're not close enough or if you don't have a car whatever else like sometimes the computer is the equalizer that provides an opportunity where whereas uh you know if you if you're close enough to a place to be able to take class um you might not you know it might not be able to go if you don't have a car or if it broke

188or whatever else so we view the virtual learning experience as a silver lining as an opportunity and and and we are encouraging and it looks like staff is embracing that as an opportunity to potentially offer more classes to more fairfax county residents well and to that end um if there are programs and classes that are not best done online there are clearly other classes that can be done entirely online and marketed properly you could certainly amp up the number of slots available to students if there was significant interest which would bring in significantly more funding for the operation um beyond the course catalog that gets mailed out how are how are we marketing these opportunities to the general public i think we might i i think i might want to let staff respond to that

189or and maybe respond to the previous question um there has been a growth on social media just from from our because we do have some discussions about marketing um the catalog sharing not paid to my knowledge um but um but i could let mr steiner or someone else kind of respond about uh marketing efforts better than i ever could just to chime in thank you just to chime in very quickly uh all of our marketing on social media it's all what i would call organic we don't have any paid marketing at this time so it's retweets and i know a lot of school board members retweet us and we really appreciate that support well i appreciate uh anyone who thinks that our retweets are are as valuable as as as some might um i asked

190that question because technology has evolved a great deal over the last 10 years in how we can approach people right so you know years and years ago if you were a trial lawyer and you wanted to reach people you would buy the back of the yellow pages for a full page ad and that's what your marketing would be for the year right and if you're a trial lawyer who's still doing that you're wasting your money right you're doing very strategic targeted advertising for far less than you ever paid to run your full page ad in the yellow pages so when i think about all the data we have for for families that have signed up for our ace programming that tells me that we know exactly the types of people to be targeting with digital

191advertising to sign up for these programs especially programs that are online perhaps that's something worth exploring in a little bit more detail now that that technology is so readily available and i'm sure mr frisch will offer his expertise in this area to anybody in the ace uh program office that would like it can we count on that mr fresh sure happy to have the conversation dude i i i would just note um that uh you know that uh the staff staff is making an effort in this area it appears at least to our to our appearance um in trying to understand kind of where web traffic is coming from and things like that right so i think there definitely is uh and then and then there are kind of there's information that we can look

192at based off of you know class uh class information that comes through after after people take the catalog and look at the catalog the catalog is cheaper i don't remember the exact numbers stack would tell the exact numbers right but the catalog that they that they made and produced this year was way cheaper than it's ever been um and it's much more lean it really kind of recommends or leans on sending people to the website to sign up to sign on or sign up for things but but it really kind of highlights some of the key opportunities that are that are made by the program and they also changed the paperweight so that it was cheaper for mailing uh dr anderson please thank you it's at the end of the day my voice is totally

193going um mr graham thank you so much and thank you for the entire committee for all of this work and definitely a major shout out to my representative miss jessica strelitz on her work with your on the committee um recommendation number one where you talked about using some um coronavirus relief funds to help support some of the efforts do you have ballpark any numbers that we can start to ponder or staff does anyone can anyone provide what this may look like i don't know that the advisor committee does uh maybe staff does um uh but uh i don't think we have a specific number uh in mind i think the the idea was that that there might be some funds available that could help um maintain uh some of the programs that were potentially lost

194during that time period not to put anybody on the spot but i remember at some point i saw a report and maybe jessica provided to me it had it had the budget page um i can't put my hands on it but maybe staff can provide some idea of what did it take to provide all of the options virtually this year so we could get a sense of what this may mean when we're talking about how to disperse and use our esser funds the other question that i have is you talked quite a bit regarding um the online options obviously there's some convenience and feasibility for some of our participants who may not be able to get to an online class i i know that you also mentioned it earlier that there was a survey that

195was distributed regarding the online offerings can you give a little bit more specificity regarding what the participants talked about as highlights or challenges of the online offerings sure and and if ken uh is uh amenable to this i i'd like to uh throw this to uh fellow member ken bob um to to talk about some of that of course we can make the actual survey responses available to you as well but uh mr graham i appreciate it i was just about to do the same thing so mr babuena all right dr anderson thank you very much for your question the student there is a student survey as well as a teacher survey the instructor survey it did have a little bit more meat i would say to the qualitative as well as the quantitative data

196in terms of the qualitative like some of the the comments there the comments were um talking a lot about how some of the classes were not necessarily you know optimal for um for online instruction and that reflected a lot of the data that they also said in the quantitative findings some of them talked a lot about that there may be a negative impact on the students but they didn't really specify it too much as far as the student survey goes the comments on the student survey were mainly geared towards a small little error and one of the questions where they were asked to check all that apply but they were not able to check all that applied and then their other comments were really geared on how wonderful some of their instructors were so there

197wasn't anything that was super informational about how an online format really impacted them i would say that the quantitative data however did provide a lot of insight into that and i'm happy to expand on that if you would like oh definitely if you have anything that you could share with the board regarding those surveys i think we would all appreciate having the opportunity to review um the data that you spent considerable time collecting i do have another question and i'm not sure who this goes to because earlier brian shared that the options that would be provided next year virtual in-person and also self-paced option was that also an option that was provided this year and is that with or without an instructor um i i think i don't know exactly when that was uh put

198into place um but i think mr steiner probably could answer that question uh i i believe a lot of it is uh is through a partnership um and the name of the company is uh is failing me so uh that mr sander please help mr steiner yes we are using a vendor uh ed2go is the vendor um that provides actually a variety of online courses that are focused on career pathways and some enrichment courses primarily what we've been focused on at this point is career pathways and they have a mix of offerings from a self-paced course that would almost be like an online correspondence course um to something that is instructor supported where a student could interface with an instructor and then uh instructor led um and i in our conversations with them they are

199actually in the process of retooling their offerings and how they describe the uh self-paced versus instructor led versus instructor supported so that nomenclature i'm using with you is actually changing so there's a variety of what we would call self-paced options and in that what we mean is generally a student would be able to choose i'm free on a tuesday night at eight o'clock that's when i'd want to take this course um so that's the option that we are extending to students as opposed to we have a class wednesday at 3 p.m or 7 p.m but you have to be there wednesday at 7 pm so that is what we're extending to our students utilizing this vendor and did you find that [Music] participation was greater in those classes or was it just um fairly equitable

200with the classes that you offered that were teacher-led that were the more traditional classes so at this point i would describe participation as growing we went through an rfp process that completed and then staff has been implementing these ed2go courses in various ways um for example it's very hard to find a networking or an i.t instructor so we're utilizing a lot of their network and i.t courses to serve the need in the region we are also looking at ways that we could improve upon our pathways add subject matter to some of our career pathways that would help uh broaden or make sure that the opportunity for students is more concise and they can complete this and complete the career pathway in a more concise amount of time so the in terms of student participation in

201one or the other at this point it's still growing and i really don't have a very large sample in one or the other to to give you um in time i will well i'm going to invite you to ponder on another question when we're talking about finances i know every year we have this conversation because ace does draw from the operating funds of fcps which one of these options were the most budget friendly was it the um the ed to go um offerings or the more traditional offerings that ace provides that's a that's a tough question and i believe uh our finance manager is she's probably listening in on this meeting also and she may be able to chime in on this but in terms of the best budget friendly options um i think we're

202looking at probably some virtual programming that we are able to run that maybe did not utilize some of our costs for building use so building coordinators and other things like that that we would have to incur if we are hosting classes on site um so those are most likely our budget-friendly options also with what we've learned from this is i can tell you that a virtual component of classes is something that we are always going to have going forward looking at our apprenticeship classes which is a large section of our business a hybrid option makes a lot of sense in terms of allowing someone to complete the pathway faster access because you know we offer in-person classes across the county but traffic may be a barrier location may be a barrier so the virtual component

203is going to be something that we are going to utilize going forward and that will change our financial model going forward so um that's you know my answer is i think it's a it's a hybrid component going forward but i think virtual was are probably our most cost effective option thus far okay thank you and my final question is regarding membership um i don't know if this is a question for you or for brian can you speak to us a little bit in terms of what did membership look like during this covered year as to compare to the years prior just to clarify membership of the advisory committee no i'm sorry participation enrollment thank you oh enrollment there we go um yeah um i mean enrollment is certainly down i believe we have enrollment numbers

204in our report in an appendix i would also add uh dr anderson that that kind of to your original questions uh that the appendices include kind of statistical analysis and tables from from the actual data that was generated from the reports as well um that were so there is uh there is more information in there um if you have kind of more specific questions about enrollment i think we have to defer them to staff but but there is a report that came from staff as we looked at multiple reports from staff over the year as an appendix to the report okay thank you i seem to be missing that page for some weird reason and what i had printed so i will definitely look for that okay if not if not of course we can

205we can get it to you no i see that it says it's on page 10 but my pronoun doesn't have page 10 oddly enough so that's why i may be missing it but thank you for all of the information and for all of the work i'm very appreciative of um this very difficult task that you had before you for this year because we had the pandemic and that really impacted um your participation the participation of um students in the program thank you thank you dr anderson i now have ms stern at kofax and follow it followed by miss seismer heiser uh thank you and um thank you mr graham and your entire committee for your hard work on this report we appreciate this very much i don't really have questions per se but i have

206comments i do think we have there have been many supporters of this adult programming for a long time and we have struggled and one of the things um you know how much to invest versus what we get in return i think this is the opportunity for our community and as a school system we have a role to play with it a play within it um i do appreciate your recommendation number five um to expand the outreach to community leaders and also um to um asking the board of supervisors for more direct funding now what may perhaps one way you could do this is if have you ever i guess so this is my question have you ever approached the skipped committee it's not particularly their charge but um your comment about reaching out to united

207community um and the united community skipped there they are intertwined there so have you reached out to that group at all and all their partners as to how this could be um you could develop more partnerships all at once there um so a simple answer no it was recommended um by um i was carrying corbett sanders at one of our meetings as our liaison actually in the last last meeting or two of this year or to do so so i think it is something that that is kind of on the agenda for uh for subsequent meetings yeah because i i think that's very important because it's joint school um the leadership is joint school board members community members miss mclaughlin's hand is up i see her shaking her head miss bakarski are also i was

208the liaison for many years i stepped down this past year but i think that would be very very important and um i also think it is time for an investment somewhat word of mouth is not going to continue to be our our way forward to promote this program because there are amazing opportunities here for our adult learners both young right out of school um and those who are who are older so i appreciate this work and i do think those i i appreciate the recommendations i think they're well thought out and i think we need to keep moving forward don't get discouraged um just um because i think the majority of this board is behind you and we're going to continue to make improvements to this program because it is so important i know good

209timing miss daryn at cofax i was like miss seismer heiser thank you miss corbett sanders and thank you mr graham and mr and everybody for this really great work and um i just wanted to mention i know you had started a new conversation about looking to add um other committee members this year or organizations this year and um i'm the chair of the public engagement committee and we've been working on our forum topic around our advisory committees actually in that process so we're actually a lot of good work today really close to bringing our recommendations to the board so um hopefully you should have a good process soon for adding additional members or bringing those suggestions to the board so i just want to kind of update you on that piece of it and then

210um i i really appreciate these recommendations especially around you know let's take the lessons we've learned from what we have to do virtually and try to use that to expand access to our really great ace programming there's a couple of thoughts um my other job is actually a college professor and i teach a lot of online courses and i have since 2006. so i was you know kind of there well before we were in this world and so one of the things you want to think about as we're going and continuing the um online is accessibility writing to make sure and sometimes it can be quite expensive when we're looking at accessibility issues for people with disabilities in that online platform so just something to put out there as you continue to work on that

211is how do we ensure accessibility issues and and that our online class are accessible the other thing i'd put out for something to consider is looking at our drivers training programs um and you know looking at issues for students with disabilities i had two emails today in my inbox around students with disabilities and drivers training so i think it's a room to look at just to make sure that um our programs are differentiated and scaffolded in a way that is accessible to the needs of students with disabilities so something to put out there for you as well and then the other piece i think would be really great when we talk about marketing our great ace programming is to do some intentional collaboration with department of special services right and our special education students especially

212those who are leaving davis and pulley and step and maybe graduating and looking for additional we may not have had access to our academy programs for example to take back from the previous report because of the need to take um intervention classes in other classes but may benefit from the great programming ace has for certifications and career um so i think that's a really great place to do some um sort of intentional marketing so just a few suggestions but i think you have some great ideas and i love the idea of trying to expand accessibility and marketing by using that online platform it's actually following along the lines that a lot of colleges have done to expand um access to students who didn't traditionally have access to college degrees and also expand on the pool

213of students available for colleges to help with enrollment colleges so it really it mirrors really what higher education has been doing for a while in the online platform so thank you very much and you know welcome any comments or thoughts you have and what i shared but really i appreciate all the hard work you've done this year oh thank you um we have had conversations about accessibility but uh but i think probably not specifically well especially with online um and and and also with driver's ed so i think those are important and interesting things that we should continue to look at so thank you and just one last thing um i've done some work with some of our um county supervisors around um you know practice traffic stops for students with disabilities but it's something

214that i think would actually be very valuable for a lot of students for both our you know officers and our students so just something to consider as well as part of the driver's education programming thank you thank you very much thank you miss seismer heiser uh now we have miss keys gemara or i'm sorry miss mclaughlin followed by miss keys gamora great thank you um first not only do i appreciate the committee's hard work and brian's leadership uh but also very much appreciate my braddock appointee ken beldueno doing significant amount of research analysis and uh i know our time hasn't really allowed for that but i i will want to ask him to just just before i finish my comments can could you just spotlight for us what you felt were some of the most

215impactful findings from all that research that you did that the board really should take under careful consideration sure and thank you for the appointment i greatly appreciate serving on the committee it's been a great year i would say the biggest takeaway really from the data analysis is that in general the instructors preferred to teach in person over virtual 100 virtual that said when you compare virtual versus hybrid if you break the classes down into which classes are classroom based and which ones are more tech or lab based for example there is a preference to teach to teach hybrid over virtual in some cases and then there's a preference to teach you know in person over over um over hybrid and in other cases i would say the classroom based classes there's a preference a greater

216preference to teach hybrid than um than virtual and then for tech based classes they obviously prefer much more in-person over hybrid so that's definitely something to consider when you're looking at that and i have all the summaries at the very end of the report as well for the qual quantitative findings also instructors who feel prepared to teach online or feel that they have the necessary tools they also prefer to teach virtual over hybrid or in person so that's a consideration for a staff when they're hiring instructors if they're looking to increase the number of virtual sections that they are offering they may want to look for teachers who feel more confident and more prepared to teach online there's also an increase in perceived student engagement for that when you look at the student surveys the

217student surveys greatly mirrored the exact same findings of the instructor surveys except when you measure for statistical significance there's greater statistical significance in the instructor surveys than there are in the students and i think a big part of that is because there's a greater representation of instructors and disciplines in the instructor survey versus the students where you didn't have as great of a representation of the various different disciplines so i think that definitely impacted things but i think what was most interesting is to see that there was there were some mirrored findings between the instructor surveys and the student surveys great thank you well i i'm gonna encourage our superintendent his team to uh dig a little deeper with you on the data because everything we the decisions we make need to be driven by

218that especially when we're looking at costs um switching over to costs i know we just don't have time tonight but i want to spotlight for my colleagues um ms darren at kofax in particular knows for our entire time on the board there's been a real understanding that unless the board of supervisors want to give us more money um we've got to be really mindful where our k-12 mission is and so um i really appreciate page nine brian you and your team making sure that we had on the net income changes and i encourage um the superintendent that your your team come back to us sooner rather than later about the um net income drop and challenges that ace is facing um i also noted on page nine exhibit one the enrollment uh numbers that um

219dr anderson was asking for um they're significant so i would ask uh our chair brian what conversations did you have with fcps staff about this dramatic drop and what how is that gonna um impact then um the the budget needs rolling in from this ending cycle going into the next fy 22 budget right well there's still i mean there is going to be significant a budget need and and i think that's kind of why uh why we're asking basically anywhere anywhere money can come from way to help support um and fill in the gaps uh because there were a lot of programs that were not offered but basically basically i think all of the kv-12 programs except for eventually um behind the wheel uh were were suspended um for this time period just as an

220example so if you look at the year to year there is a kind of a huge decrease in in that and then some of the courses really just were not able you know if they have in person you know like plumbing classes teaching you how to do certain things or whatever obviously that doesn't really translate to an online version discussions that we had in the committee that talked about you know why some things were not offered and and but on top of that there were just reduction reduction enrollments um and you know maybe i mean there could be a variety of reasons for that um but there's certainly kind of a gap left from that that basically need to find a way to resolve um and and get back to uh where we were before

221the pandemic at the very least yeah the fy 2019 year enrollments then looking at the big drop in 20 and a bigger drop in 21 fiscal years it's it's almost staggering um you know prior boards we've talked about the importance of adult esol is a core mission for a strong community that's always got to remain a high priority for um ace and for our board to support um and then cte development um but i you know we also talk about how nova north virginia community college and also fcps's cte offerings how those then overlay with ace so i think we're going to need to really have some intentional work as a board with the superintendent and ace this is going to be a critical year for that um and the only other thing i would

222say is uh you know overall i i really appreciate um the fact that there there are areas like um behind the wheel and it's that's where ace i think is really successful along with the esau um and sadly i've run out of time if i just briefly respond i mean uh we do have discussions about uh kind of preventing overlap and things like that we view kind of ace programs uh i mean ace programs are much cheaper than a community class course is an example right so if that's not if that's not something that we want to provide that way we need to look for ways to provide and maybe this is not just fcps mission or whatever but that's why we talk about the county as a funding mechanism for this if these are

223things we important we want to connect residents to to educational opportunities to help them build their own careers and and and you know provide for their families then you know we need to find some ways to do those uh obviously you know the the division is required to have adultery cell has its clear um that purpose but but there's also you know it's covered with the grant but you i mean personally i would like for us to have free adult install right like why shouldn't we be teaching people in paradise county english but um but but that takes an investment from um you know that that's going to take a huge investment and we you know you can't rely on just the school transfer or the school the k-12 school budget to to do that

224so there are certainly opportunities and things that we still need to have serious conversations about so i think that i i do see that mr uh polio has a sand ray so i'm i'm assuming he wanted to address some part of your comment as well i'm gonna actually mr graham i'm gonna actually suggest two things one um obviously uh mr polio does have his hand up so he can address the adult esau but your comments about the synergies and the disconnects with northern virginia community college class offerings i think dr presidio should um just briefly talk a little bit about the conversations with the with northern virginia community college and the difference now having those conversations with the g3 program in which community college courses are paid for by the state under that get skilled

225get a job give back and um so really more closely aligning uh all three aspects the uh cte the ace and nova brian let's make sure we get the skipped meeting together with um supervisor lask that's definitely an important one yeah yeah just just real briefly because i think miss corvis sanders you did a good job kind of setting that up but just again to remind um well not to remind to let folks know that we are continuing to have conversations um with nova and george mason university um about how we can continue to partner to help use our programs like our ace program as a stepping stone and a starting point for adult learners to get re-engaged with education and oftentimes it happens through the context of you know upskilling basically um for their

226current jobs and their uh that that they're currently in which will then get them on a track uh hopefully to complete certifications uh and degree programs both at nova and at george mason university so we've been partnering in this effort for a while previously what our partnership oftentimes has looked like and brian has already mentioned it is not overlapping in the programs and not competing for the same students but what we're really attempting to do now is to align and articulate our programs through ace all the way through the community college and the four-year university system so we're excited to continue that partnership work we do have another meeting set up coming i think it's uh actually next week again and i do want to thank and acknowledge ms corbett standers work and leadership in

227helping us along the way in this partnership and we're also working with county staff and board of supervisor members in this work as well thank you dr presidio mr polio thanks mrs corbett sanders i i just wanted to i guess maybe piggyback a little bit on um something that miss mclaughlin said earlier and just talking about adult esau and then also brian that i think one of our challenges are probably our biggest challenge for adult esol in the past year um was you know we had computers we had teachers that were ready to teach and we you know we kind of ramped up very quickly but our community did not have access to laptops our community did not have so that's i think this is definitely a an area of advocacy for both the board

228and for us as staff with the county and with our community members um that you know our families when you know some many of our families as you know the only laptop they may have is a laptop that their child is bringing home uh with them from fcps and for many of our adult esol students um just weren't able to participate in that in our virtual classes because they didn't have access to a laptop so we would love to be able to continue um as mr graham said i think moving forward both in person and virtual classes um but that that will definitely be contingent upon our ability to provide either provide laptops or just work with the county so that more members of our community can have access to technology so thanks for that

229thank you mr polio it's so important and now i have uh miss keys gamora followed by miss carski thank you thank you first i want to start by thanking my please committee we're having a little bit of a challenge hearing you it sounds like you're speaking through a uh wire mesh could you maybe adjust your um no unfortunately it's not could i please uh go to miss bakarski and have you come back in sure great thank you [Music] mr carson right i mean you can thank me again later but yes i did hear you thank you [Laughter] i'll go ahead and thank you mr graham and everybody on the committee for your work and your time especially this year which has been unlike any other um i found your report uh very very helpful and

230i agree we need to use the data to kind of catch up to um you know where we are now after the pandemic and being able able to offer more individualized approaches to really expand the reach of these courses and the number of people who can um participate i'm also supportive of helping to advocate to our uh board of supervisors for a greater resource allocation um this is the lifelong learning is part of their strategic uh you know plan goals so i definitely see a space there for collaboration uh going forward um and i'm also you know interested on rn how we can utilize some of our family engagement strategies to help uh market uh some of these ace courses more especially to our parents because the reality is that if we can um you

231know ensure that our our our own families know that this these there are options out there for them you know ultimately it does support our kids it is kind of a a circle but at the end of the day it really really does come back stronger families um ultimately support all our students so i don't have any questions but i really wanted to share those thoughts and um i look forward to speaking through the skipped or how we continue this conversation and advocacy so thank you to all of you thank you miss picarski miss keys kamara is this any better fantastic okay all right well i want to start by thanking brian again because he told me to uh but we really do um appreciate all the hard work and i'm i'm glad to go

232behind miss picarski it was i think it's providence because you know while we're we are truly in this purest form directed at k-12 this is this is something these services impact adults who need to be a vital part of our economy our community be able to support their kids and uh if we don't support them then they can't do any of those things so the more that we have these conversations tonight the more that i um am finding myself advocating for you know specific programs that the com that our board of supervisors needs to be aware uh that we need their support and funding for um and so i just i throw that out there for my colleagues to consider because i for one would not be comfortable to see this go away without a

233broader discussion um you know is it going to be provided through nova is it going to be how is it going to be provided otherwise we're going to have parents who can't contribute who won't probably won't be able to enter the workforce as successfully and so those are all really big concerns um so i i did i know that um this is not a part of tonight's discussion but we had a headline uh from ace this this week uh with respect to expanding locations before i go into that i do want to say i fully support the expansion of the use of virtual where appropriate and we can get perhaps the county to pay for some laptops but speaking of money but if you could speak to that expansion that happened that we was recently

234approved i think it might be helpful to the community or if anyone could speak to that so that we have maybe greater understanding yeah i think um probably it would be helpful if i could speak to that a little bit so um the board did approve on the consent agenda at the last board meeting the um expansion of a new lease that will allow us to expand our program offerings in the herndon region and essentially uh the existing lease space that we have is expiring and we have a significant need right now our programs in the herndon area are confined to some pretty small space including some trailers at herndon middle school so this new lease is going to give us the opportunity to expand our adult esol programming our registration and assessment for incoming

235english language learners and in our system as well as additional ace classes in additional adult education classes so basically what that article was referencing is a new lease that's going to replace an expiring lease that the board approved uh in the last board meeting okay well thank you i know uh in years past we reduced the number of locations for ace and now we have as as far as i recall and now we've had more virtual and so i wanted to make sure the community understood exactly what that meant because we never had a discussion but overall um bravo support the recommendations brian really appreciate all the hard work all the the research and i'm looking forward to excuse me us collaborating to make sure that we can get continued support for these programs thank

236you thank you miss keys gamara before i close out this session i do want to just briefly provide some comments because this committee is an amazing committee made up of dedicated professionals who are passionate about ensuring that we have a lifelong learning culture here in fairfax county and so we very much appreciate all you're doing and i am glad that you are going to meet with the skipped team as part of that skip team you will also be meeting the up opportunity neighborhoods folks and the opportunity neighborhoods folks are people that actually have monthly meetings with people that include groups like united communities but all the groups that support populations in those areas that have some of the most challenging situations with food security and housing security and so i think this will be great

237for you all to do that but i would urge that going forward in addition to looking at making sure people in those communities know about ace programming that we also ensure that our counselors at each of our secondary school levels are aware of the certificate programs available through ace because some of our students may have a full academic schedule but would like to get certificates that allow them to earn more than a living wage out as soon as they graduate from high school and also to support their college experiences and so i don't know how we make that happen but perhaps that might be part of your charge for next year is how we infuse um the or we more closely align our cte work with the ace programming work as well i know that's

238been mentioned in past years so uh i think spending the focus on that would be helpful i i did i i would just like to thank again mr uh ken bob bueno for his numerous hours looking at the data analysis analyzing it um through statistical tools and things like that um but uh but really the full committee uh for their support and uh in the in mr varchoni and and this has been since they are here um for their support uh this past year thank you thank you and thank you brian for all of your hard work as well and with that it is 9 30 i wasn't able to catch us up but this meeting is adjourned thanks you