001so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so my do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] ah yes the meeting will start in two minutes i just want to check the microphone of our school board members participating at home ms keys gamara is there not cofox is that colfax would you please test your mic i'm here thank you so much and i just lost miss keys gamara whenever you're ready please go ahead and test your mic mr anubudo go ahead and test your mic as well please i'm here terrific okay i think it's the lights okay it is now 7 15. this april 201 april 22 2021 regular meeting of the fairfax county school board will now come to order ms cohen good evening miss corbett sanders good evening everybody is there not cofax good evening mr fresh
002hello miss keys gamora good evening ms mclaughlin good evening miss marin hello miss omeg hello miss picarski hello miss eisema heiser good evening miss tolin good evening everyone and mr anubudo hi everyone please rise as student representative nathan anabudo leads us in the reciting of the pledge of allegiance followed by a moment of silence i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you you may be seated in order to comply with section 2.2 of the code of virginia it is necessary for the board to certify that since the fairfax county school board convened a closed meeting on april 22 2021 and to the best of each member's knowledge on only public
003business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board during the closed meeting motion made by miss corbett sanders seconded by miss mccarskey all in favor miss corbett sanders miss tolin miss bakarski massimo heiser miss mclaughlin mr fresh miss omeg miss cohen miss marin mr nakofax miss keys gemara and myself that is unanimous if you would like a copy of the agenda and any agenda item that is being discussed tonight that information may be found at the back of the auditorium or on the website at fcps.edu school board board docs tonight's meeting is being broadcast on channel 99 and live streamed on the website at fcps.edu tv ch9 item 2.08 naming of the
004black box at woodson high school has been removed from tonight's agenda and will be rescheduled item 2.05 introduction of hr assistant superintendent has been removed from tonight's agenda and will be rescheduled i call on mr anubudo for a few announcements thank you dr anderson first i'd like to recognize teacher appreciation week the week of may 3rd through may 7th 2021 has been designated as teacher appreciation week teachers change the lives of millions of children every day and in a year where instruction could be virtual uh or in person or a mix of both their immense work and impact have provided a much needed sense of community despite the challenges of the kokomo 19 pandemic educators across america are working hard to ensure every student has the tools they need to reach their full potential take
005a moment to thank a teacher during teacher appreciation week secondly i'd like to recognize national school nurse day national school nurse day has recognized the significant role of school nurses in the educational setting since 1972 and will be recognized on march 12th of 2020-21 professional school nurses meet the needs of today's students through their delivery of healthcare contribution to local school communities and promotion of safety prevention and wellness throughout the school year school nurses are central to the academic success of their students and continually strive to make a positive impact in their lives during this challenging year school nurses have adapted to changes and taken on unprecedented unprecedented roles in support of identifying strategies and mitigation for the health and safety of and of all in their care school nurses are an invaluable asset to
006those they serve the school this school system works in collaboration with ferris county health department to provide quality services to the students of fairfax county public schools and recognized as may 12th as national school nurse day in fairfax county public schools thank you dr anderson thank you very much mr anubudo agenda item 2.06 school nutrition employee week i call on ms dental at colfax for the introduction your microphone is not on i am sorry i will start over and i will say that i am honored to read this recognition school nutrition professionals have proven to be much more than dedicated employees who prepare and serve fresh healthy and nutritious meals they have become recognized as essential frontline staff who work tireless tirelessly to combat food insecurity with their welcoming and caring approach at the onset
007of the covet pandemic our food and nutrition services staff immediately and bravely stepped up to serve the community when there was little guidance on how to safely navigate the global crisis the food service and nutrition team has provided consistent access to meals on weekends holidays breaks and all summer long serving meals outdoors in neighborhoods and from school buses in the cold in rain and snow or the sunshine school nutrition professionals strategically balance many roles behind the scenes while striving to meet the needs of their school communities these thoughtful employees offer valuable contributions to enhance the fcps premier education system and care for the most vulnerable families every day this is truly meaningful work that is worth celebrating and i thank you all for doing that our fns staff has served over 13 million meals since
008march of 2020. thank you very much for that and um resolution miss um donna kofax item 2.07 children's mental health awareness day i call on miss marin thank you good evening children's mental health awareness day positive mental health is essential to a child's healthy development yet over one in five of our children and youth in the u.s have a mental health issue and only half of children and youth with behavioral health issues receive treatment this has a profound immediate and lasting impact on our community the cobia 19 pandemic created additional barriers to accessing treatment and had a wide ranging impact on the mental health of children and youth throughout the pandemic fairfax county public schools invested in school-wide programming to support students mental health and well-being school counselors social workers and psychologists provided more intensive
009support to students experiencing mental health challenges school staff also engage in extensive and ongoing outreach to families and communities providing timely information and guidance related to students mental awareness excuse me mental wellness and offering strategies and tools that parents can use to foster mentally healthy youth in addition fairfax county public schools is a partner with county agencies and non-profit organizations in the healthy minds fairfax initiative to increase awareness of signs of mental distress and to address barriers to accessing services through the coordination of prevention early intervention and treatment services this system of care empowers family with the knowledge and resources they need to support their children's mental wellness and teaches children that caring for their mental health is a vital part of living a healthy fulfilling life the school board is pleased to recognize may
0107 2021 as national children's mental health awareness day in fairfax county virginia this is an opportunity to celebrate the work of our school division to increase awareness of the connection between mental health and social emotional and psychological well-being our students are contributing to this increased awareness through their work on the student advisory council and through participation in wellness clubs and activities in their schools together we are committed to offering acceptance respect and support to all children and their mental health needs thank you very much miss marin item 2.09 arab american heritage resolution i call him a seismo heiser thank you whereas for over a century arab americans have been making valuable contributions to virtually every aspect of american society in medicine law business education technology government military service culture and whereas since migrating to america
011men and women of arab descent have shared their rich culture and traditions with neighbors and friends and have been and continue to be engaged members of the community and whereas they brought with them to america the resilient family values strong work ethic entrepreneurial spirit dedication to education and diversity in faith and creed that have added strength to our great democracy and whereas civil rights abuses harmful stereotyping and bullying of arab americans must be combated through education and awareness and whereas arab americans join all americans in the desire to see a united and diverse society where every individual is treated equally and feels safe now therefore be it resolved that the fairfax county school board joins the arab american foundation in celebrating april as 2021 national arab american heritage month in recognition of the many contributions
012arab americans have made to our society iso move is there a second miss thank you miss eisema heiser would you like to speak to your motion yes just briefly i am very honored to have been asked by the arab american foundation to bring forward this resolution recognizing arab american heritage month indeed because of the advocacy of many arab american groups for the first time this year the u.s department of state has announced april as arab american heritage month so this month is a time to reflect on the rich and wonderful history of arab americans and to commemorate the numerous contributions his population made to this country i am particularly proud to bring this because i believe that not only those who belong to certain affinity groups should speak out and speak up and be recognized
013but all of us should recognize and celebrate the many diverse cultures and groups that make up the unique multicultural fabric of the united states after all we all have a heritage and we all belong here that is what makes us uniquely american i am proud to celebrate and recognize arab american heritage month and i look forward to hearing my colleagues and hopefully have their support as well thank you mr smallheiser mr mesh would you like to speak to your second thank you i'm proud to second this resolution to recognize arab american heritage month as i believe the first arab american elected in this county um our arab american identity which is different than muslim identity the religious identity of which only 15 percent are arab and different than arabic the language that more than 422
014million people around the world speak but people often confuse to be arab but arab american the identity so many in our country immigrant and generations rooted here christian muslim jewish orthodox jews and baha'i well-off poor and everything in between with richly diverse histories languages dialects and customs carrying ties and origins from the from western asia and from north africa and the horn of africa encompassing people from countries of algeria bahrain komoros djibouti egypt iraq jordan kuwait lebanon libya my family's country of origin mauritania morocco oman palestine qatar saudi arabia somalia sudan syria tunisia the united arab arab emirates western sahara and yemen it also of course of course includes populations of the arab diaspora around the globe 3.5 million of whom live right here in our country arabs and arab americans are most importantly valuable
015inherently for their shared humanity and the beauty that brings them as a part of our common fabric but their contributions are robust and plentiful they include but are certainly not limited to the invention of algebra and algorithmic math by muhammad ibn musa al-khawarizmi the development of one of the earliest written language systems the world's oldest university in morocco founded by an empowered arab woman a role model of mine fatima alferia the invention of surgical instruments still used today and an early method of administering anesthesia to patients by al zawahiri and fun fact the earliest evidence of the complex written mathematics system in approximately 3000 bc which brought us our current zero to nine numerical system which we rely on every day and in fact is formally called the arabic numeric system since the formulation of
016the us people of arab descent have continued in every aspect of american society and culture and contributed with more than a hundred years stated which was stated in the resolution but in fact for longer and have sought greater justice for all through public service and activism since before this country was even known to be america ralph johns organized in solidarity with african americans in greensboro sit-ins during the civil rights movement naji daifullah organized in the u.s labor movement alongside cesar chavez on behalf of farm workers today dr monahan hatisha researches and brings attention to the ongoing water crisis in flint michigan and hundreds of arab american staff who serve our students across this school division every day you might also recognize names like ralph nader or steve jobs or ml clooney or even shakira paul
017abdul and yes dj khaled with all the beauty that the identity represents for our nation in the world i'd be remiss not to also acknowledge realities and hope that in celebration together together today we commit to better in shaping our country in this system's narrative all too often we have seen minimization and erasure of arab-american identities and experiences to commend arabs for being peaceful while well-intended is loaded and offensive especially since 9 11 many arab americans including my own family and hundreds of families right here in fairfax face profiling criminalization surveillance and bias treatment under the law hate crimes continue to persist as does discrimination with law enforcement in airports and in public places these images have not only been harmful to people but have been used to justify great violence at the hands of
018our own across this country and around the world fueling imperialism across the globe even in our own system my own younger brother told me that he saw a video called why they hate us but with these realities in mind there is a need to think about how we fold the arab-american narrative in our anti-racist work in the curriculum and the practices that we talk about intending to be inclusive in i hope that this month will aspire inspire us to see that arabs and arab americans in our own system are just like anyone else and i ask that our system build from today and consider this a welcome step let us see our arab and arab american students and staff by making this identity a separate category and how we think about ethnicity i've always had
019to take the box white because while growing up this system and many others didn't see me but today is a welcome opportunity as we celebrate this month and taking a remarkable new step and following the president's lead to finally inaugurate recognition of resolutions like this i hope that as as a board as a community we can all recognize the realities involved and celebrate together in this month by taking positive steps forward thank you miss omesh any other board members wishing to speak to this resolution ms corbett sanders yes thank you madam chairwoman um i want to thank uh miss rachna seismer heiser and miss omash and the arab american society for bringing this resolution forward i had expressed concerns earlier about the limitation in this resolution of it only being a hundred years of contributions
020of amer arab americans to our society i wanted to do some um a little bit of history i i think i i would be remiss in not congratulating this omesh for giving us such an in-depth history lesson but i wanted to share some arab american history in that a month and a half prior to our signing the declaration of independence here in the united states an arab american died on behalf of this country to in fighting for in the revolutionary war we had multiple incidences of arab americans who had immigrated to the shores of north america that fought on behalf of the colonials and the very first country in the world to actually acknowledge the existence of the united states in the form of a treaty was that of morocco which in 1787 they actually
021entered into the treaty of friendship between the united states and morocco and so when we look at arab americans i think we are remiss if we limit it to a hundred years and i just want to encourage people to understand that like other nationalities or other ethnic groups in the united states arab americans have contributed throughout our history and they've contributed in the arts in the sciences in the halls of congress and are known for their wonderful philanthropy not only through arab american organizations but also in the um in areas such as health care with saint jude's hospital for children and so i just am so appreciative of my colleagues for bringing this forward tonight thank you thank you ms corbett sanders seeing no other speakers miss marin please go ahead yes just briefly i
022want to thank both of our motion makers and particularly miss omega who i've learned so much from during the campaign trail and and here and certainly this evening and i think that you know our school system has done a lot to increase our awareness of racism around black americans and african-americans and slavery but we really need to bridge this frontier of other marginalized groups who have been dealt a narrative that is not true to who they are so i encourage our superintendent to keep working on the social studies curriculum and infusing more anti-racist anti-bias work into our curriculum about this and other groups thank you miss marin seeing no other speakers i will now call for the vote all in favor of this resolution brought before us by miss seismo heiser and mr mage please
023raise your hand we have miss corbett sanders miss tollen miss picarsky miss eisenheiser miss mclaughlin miss mr frisch missalmeish miss marin miss cohen miss darren koufax miss keys gamara and myself that is unanimous agenda item 3.01 citizen participation the next order of business is citizens participation speakers are requested to limit their remarks to not more than three minutes the school board will not hear statements involving issues that have been scheduled for public hearings such as capital improvement program budget and boundaries speakers should address new business action items or resolutions as listed on the meeting agenda complaints regarding individual students or school-based employees should be directed to the appropriate school principal or other school official speakers should refrain from using personally identifiable information in connection with an individual student and are expected to deliver their comments
024with the decorum and respect appropriate to the conduct of the public's business in-person speakers should wear a mask stand behind the black line on the floor and speak into the microphone please be sure to not touch the podium thank you for your cooperation and thanks to those who have come to speak to us today tonight 10 citizens have signed up to address the board and we also have three video testimonies and i'll ask the clerk to call our citizen participants our first speaker is kathy shane good evening my name is kathy zang and i am a junior at mclean high school at 6 20 p.m on march 22nd 2021 just a few weeks ago out on the field of launfulah middle school where i was once a student an asian teenager was verbally harassed and
025spat on by four other teenagers this incident shook me and i wonder how easily this could have been me or my younger sister currently at longfellow unfortunately across the nation similar asian hate incidents and even physical attacks have been on the rise aapi american youth have been emotionally impacted for a long time many view the race as an obstacle rather than an asset others are confused by their identity and feel left out in society growing up i've seen and heard many feel embarrassed by their physical appearance the food they eat and even their names i appreciate the support that the aapi community has received from our board members in schools amidst anti-asian hate however i hope that this support can turn into real and lasting action we need improvements to our educational system and changes
026to the curriculum we teach our students education holds the key to increased understanding and creates sympathy empathy amongst different groups therefore respected school board members and dr bray band i strongly advocate that asian american history be incorporated in our k-12 required school curriculums i specifically advocate for the inclusion of projects deeper discussion and entire units that cover both asian american struggles and triumphs currently aapi students make up around of the fcps student body however based on my experience from kindergarten all the way till now in junior year i have not had a single unit entirely dedicated to aapi history or significance save for the chinese exclusion act or japanese internment camps the experiences and contributions of aapi americans have been absent in fcps curriculums the impact of additions to the curriculum is twofold first students
027and teachers will learn more about contributions of aapi americans in u.s history and society to aid understanding and secondly of equal importance students of api descent will become more proud of who they are and feel a greater sense of belonging last week i had the pleasure of meeting our school board member miss karen keys-kamara as a student representative something she said left me a strong impression whether it is african-american history asian-american history or other histories most definitely including arab american history these are not just the histories of individual communities these are all american history thus i urge the board to take action and incorporate aapi history in our fcps required curriculums because no student should have to experience what the teenager boy outside longfellow experienced and no student should have to feel unrepresented in classroom
028learning thank you our next speaker is tom gudreau on april 8th i asked the school board to provide fcps special education students more protection than they had this past year sadly fcps's presentation tonight is absent any commitment to not repeat what they did this past year this past year my son's individualized education plan wasn't worth the paper it was written on the plan we had in place as of may 2020 was simply not supported by fcps last august through november three of his five iep goals were not addressed because fcps refused to provide the services the progress made the prior year was undone and new negative behaviors emerge as a result of the fcps virtual education program this past october i wrote to members of this school board explaining in detail my son's dilemma i
029included the facts pertaining to his case and shared the fcps collected data documenting his distress i either did not receive a response or in one case was politely listened to with no real assistance offered when i finally filed a due process complaint fcps fully resourced their legal fight they sought to have the matter dismissed they fought requests for discovery they even froze my letters to the school board well fcps would not spend fairfax county taxpayer dollars on supporting my son's iep they did spend heavily on fighting to preserve their right to deny my son promised services and fcps has increased their legal budgets to continue fighting parents of special education students the only special education safeguard this past year was the due process hearing officer the state of virginia appointed mediator and the law sadly
030it takes time to enforce the law school board statements of quote covet has been in charge unquote make clear that fcps believes covid waves your idea obligations i don't see in the fcps application a statement that fcps will ignore ieps while kovit remains a risk but that appears to be the approved fcps practice your fears are not sufficient reason to ignore the law a purpose-driven organization cannot ignore their principles one school board member offered that dr boyd joining the team would make things better and i hope that's true but i do worry that the systemic failures of the past year cannot be overcome by simply hiring one new assistant superintendent i worry that fcps and this school board have opened the door to additional quote unusual circumstances unquote that make idea conditional rather than a
031legal or ethical obligation good night our next speaker is steve crowell hi how are y'all i want to say i appreciate you letting me be here to speak i'll start off by saying i apologize up until this afternoon my wife was scheduled to be here so i had little time to prepare you're going to get my rambling thoughts she's the business development person probably being more eloquent than me stuck with the engineer although i did perhaps appreciate misha misha's commentary all of it certainly but perhaps the one in the room who most appreciated the mathematical references so um i do want to say that i said to myself how could i come and help what value could i bring to this conversation and you know i'm an engineer right math data science that's my thing
032so i said let me look at your school board statements i think it was the laws of governance or the rules of governance you had and what could i maybe bring to help you make decisions and and uh open open the county like get kids back in school that was really the thing my wife told me to focus on i did realize though that you guys probably already do that right i mean your your rules of governance say you're going to come to these meetings ready to discuss everything with the data already in your minds you've studied you've become prepared so i'm probably not going to tell you something you don't already know i looked at the statistics and some of them were confusing to me honestly um but i did get the impression that
033public input the community's desires were kind of an overarching theme to what the school board wanted to achieve and i'm not gonna lie i don't i don't envy you guys right because you got a massive county you got tons of people that are here and trying to distill all of those thoughts and desires and opinions into a single action that's going to be successful for everyone it's got to be next to impossible but i did come across one statement it's actually the number one item in the belief section of the county which said and i'm going to try and paraphrase here but that each student is entitled to an excellent education meeting their individual needs i felt like that was the one opportunity that was sort of given or allowed to the school board to
034not try to have to find a one-size-fits-all kind of solution i don't think you're going to ever get to a point where everyone's going to be happy you know some people will feel comfortable coming back to school some people won't feel comfortable yet i know the last speaker spoke about covet and those concerns obviously a real thing but but i think the opposite is true too there are some folks who strongly feel that their kids could safely get back to school and i would implore you as a group to reach out and and look for opportunities to be creative and find solutions and get kids back into school my mom taught in fairfax county for 30 years i know the county's been a leading school system but sometimes it's okay not to be a leader
035right i mean there could be other ideas from other systems other folks who have successfully brought kids back to school genius steals right i mean there's no shame in getting ideas looking around and sorry anyway appreciate it y'all have a nice evening thank you our next speaker is christine knowles thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak for you tonight before i begin i must state that the following comments are my own personal opinions and don't represent those of any professional organizations my husband and i are both department of defense employees who moved to the area unexpectedly in the summer of 2019 with little time to learn the area or house hunt we simply found the first home that could accommodate our family's needs with one stipulation it had to be in fairfax county
036we chose this county because we were told that it had some of the best schools not just in virginia but in the country though many positive strides have been made over the past few weeks i'm not going to mince my words this past year has been an unmitigated disaster for many families but it has affected your military-connected families in ways that you have probably not thought of families who moved here a few months ago from states where schools have opened now see regression in their children's overall achievements families who are set to move this summer to states where school have been open are concerned that their children will be academically behind their peers i know service members our family included who struggled to meet the demands of their military professions for over a year because
037schools have not been open and they needed to be home in order to ensure their children are being educated for families leaving this state the damage has unfortunately already been done so let's focus on how to improve moving forward this past year has highlighted that we military families lack representation at this school board level to advocate for our unique challenges and needs i understand that there are supposed to be entities that provide this voice for our community at large the virginia military interstate children's compact commission representatives and school liaison officers assigned to each local base have been touted as a military family's voice to their local school communities but in any meaningful sense these entities have been silent this past year when we have needed their advocacy the most therefore i'm proposing that the school
038board develop better methods to partner and work with its local military community without meaningful advocacy the school board will continue to see frustration from military families and an overall perception that fcps cares little for its military children outside of the money that they generate from turning in their federal impact aid forms the school system's inability or unwillingness to find meaningful ways to provide the free and appropriate education children need deserve and are required by law to provide have decreased our family's confidence moving forward despite reassurances given otherwise given the flail surrounding the attempts to bring back students to the classroom over the past year and more recently the drama associated with bringing children back to four days of in-person instruction at this point i'm not at all confident of cps's statements that they will provide
039five days of in-person instruction in the fall april is the month of the military child wearing purple or posting on social media platitudes about supporting military children mean nothing to me set the example to this community state and nation that you actually support your 14 000 military connected students and their parents who have raised their hands to support and defend this nation and develop better ways to work with your military community and commit to getting our kids back in the classroom five days a week thank you thank you our next speaker is iman abdul rahman thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today i'm a fairfax fairfax county parent and an emergency department uh emergency medicine doctor i come here today to talk to you about a little bit about my experience i've
040been working in the emergency department for 10 years and i understand today we're talking about mental health and children one of the most difficult cases that i treat are families that come in with mental illness including suicidal ideation into a societal attempt sometimes the mental anguish that brings them to the emergency room is related to academic achievement and the resulting conflict with their parents and caregivers i am very worried about the effect of a year of learning loss will have in children this year and and that's why i'm here today i'm a little nervous speaking i don't like um speaking in public but um i found that i needed to get the courage to come speak to you today because of the enormous enormous aspect of this problem during the pandemic my son was a
041kindergarten student and i recognized that while he was reading he was guessing at unfamiliar words and this was causing a lot of stress to me and to him and it was getting very frustrating if i didn't intervene i knew too well the consequences of poor reading will have on disruptive behavior and depression later on among other consequences incarceration as a pediatrician i like to focus on prevention so i spent many sleepless nights looking for an evidence-based curriculum to teach him how to read and that's when i learned that the curriculum being used to teach him actually was not based fully in science what do i mean by the science of reading for decoding aspects of reading a curriculum that teaches the 44 sounds of english explicitly and teaching the patterns that represents those sounds systematically
042using books known as decodable books to practice those sounds i'm talking about teaching children k to three the code to be able to pull words off the page and be proficient by third grade i'm here to talk to you about the families that don't have the same resources that i do to help my son and that will be at risk economically as well as in their physical and mental well-being which is our topic today i would like i appeal to you to use the opportunity of this year-long loss of reading to fully implement the science of reading in the curriculum so that we don't miss one kid the current system 30 of children are not proficient readers thank you thank you our next speaker is vanessa hall hi i'm here to ask that you approve
043the special education budget for fiscal year 2022 this year 600 plus million dollar budget will support about 27 000 students one of which is mine in her short life my daughter has benefited from a myriad of services starting with a preschool visit to child find for hearing issues we've traveled the world of special ed from assessment to speech pathologists reading specialists and so much more support for her 504 which eventually became an iep we've witnessed only a small portion of the dedicated professionals and services that are covered by this budget but i'm thankful every day even in this crazy pandemic year for all the professional care and proactive support that scps provides i know that educators and staff are the fundamental component of any good special education plan they're often the first line of defense
044to identify learning disabilities and they are the ones who make the most difference in a child's life to overcome their unique challenges and be able to learn for us the benefits of fcps and their special education services are clear teachers enabled my daughter to read and honestly i can never repay that gift this is why i ask you to also support collective bargaining for our teacher and staff associate associations i can't even believe i'm talking about this because other than my grandpa who was in the steelworkers union i never thought about unions outside of american civ class decades ago what has changed well i've witnessed horrific accusations and threatening behavior directed towards teachers and the school board this year i've witnessed the chilling effect when teachers are silenced and they cannot advocate for their own
045safety the safety of others are even on critical aspects of children's education they're teachers if they can't talk about education without fear of retribution then who will honestly i fear what this means for my children and other students if teachers are silenced and their lifetime of work is undermined by outside organizations so please pass a comprehensive collective bargaining resolution when it comes up this can't just be about salaries and benefits education employees need the ability to bargain on all aspects of their working conditions because it's clear that teacher working conditions are student working conditions by empowering teachers we empower their students the quality of instruction can only improve if teachers are able to negotiate for the educational tools professional time and smaller class sizes that they need and we need so that they can provide
046quality education teachers supported and taught my daughter to read and write despite severe dyslexia now it is time that i return the favor by writing and reading this public input to support them pay teachers well support them and give them full collective bargaining rights from personal experience i know that they will use these rights to improve the lives and educational opportunities for all students so again when it's time full collective bargaining rights for teachers please and thank you very much for your time thank you our next speaker is kimberly adams good evening chair anderson members of the school board dr bray bran and leadership team my name is kimberly adams and i am the president of the fairfax education association in the first week of may we once again celebrate all of our school system
047employees during teacher appreciation week we particularly honor the contributions of our food and nutrition services staff for their work to provide meals to students and their families which were more critical than ever during this pandemic in the second week of may we acknowledge the work of our school nurses it is important to note that they have been administering vaccinations through the health department often working seven days a week more than eight hours a day and most recently in addition to their regular school hours the fea thanks each of them for their immense contribution to the battle against covet 19. all of your employees have faced this pandemic with as much grace as possible and done everything they could to make it work for our students as you report as you are reported to tonight some
048of those employees are no longer with fcps i submit to you that many left because the working conditions were untenable and they had to put their own health or that of their family first that is a choice we are often forced to make when the decisions are made without us at the table take the job as it is or leave that brings us to the need for deeper collaboration your employees are the ones who make everything happen inside our schools centers offices and depots for decades the fea has been engaged in problem solving and bringing solutions to the table we must ensure student success through a world-class education for our students that must be led by a premier workforce maintaining a caring culture with prudent resource stewardship the system's own strategic plan guides much of
049what we engage in daily as employees of fcps without question everything we do is to support the needs of our students making sure that your employee voice is heard and respected is critical to keeping our system world class the fea endorses and believes students need to be in school as much as possible safely we are ready and willing to work to make sure that this happens this fall we recognize the extraordinary difference between what we know today about covid19 and what we didn't know just 12 months ago the plan for next school year that the fcps leadership team proposed on tuesday needs some revision you should have received a proposal from the fea on how we might move forward as a system in the next school year we believe that a number of families may
050still need to choose a virtual option as we have repeatedly stated publicly we do not believe this is best satisfied in a concurrent learning model fcps has proven that it can provide a virtual option and an in-person option and we believe that each experience must be separate from the other virtual students paired with virtual teachers and in person with in-person teachers as much as possible not hybrid and not concurrent for most classes this can be achieved with a great deal of flexibility and some creativity we appreciate that the superintendent has committed to discussion on the proposal we will be ready and we can do incredible things this fall together but this challenge requires that we truly work together thank you thank you our next speaker is jenna hamilton good evening i'm a parent in the
051mount vernon pyramid and first i want to thank the principals in our area who have worked hard to provide the opportunity of four days of in person to many students particularly the teams at whitman middle school and mount vernon high school who have shown key leadership as the board reviews the separations report i wanted to address an issue impacting teacher retention namely i've yet to meet an exhausted teacher or parent who feels the concurrent teaching model is benefiting anyone in the system and i'm glad that the board recognized that this week at the same time the idea of fcps creating a permanent proprietary virtual education system should not be a priority right now as fcps changed the grading systems to cover failing grades and encourages students not to take sols for many reasons including an
052inability to fully cover the curriculum virtually there seems to be tacit acknowledgement that virtual is not producing a high quality educational outcome for most students why would fcps institutionalize such a system in our pyramids schools already struggle greatly to keep up attendance and to keep students especially older students engaged a system-sponsored virtual option that allows for more generalized enrollment is likely to lead to more lost students fcps should provide its pre-pandemic tightly targeted virtual option for specific students encourage families who wish to keep children at home to investigate virtual virginia and spend all of its efforts renormalizing the idea that being in school and fcps means attending school in person full-time many students i've talked to in my area no longer view that as true or necessary i can't stress this enough after over a
053year they no longer understand why they have to bother to attend school and many will tell you they prefer the ease that comes with taking tests at home a permanent fcps virtual option will create a system where the quality of education runs on two tracks and that's not acceptable today we cannot forget the current hard-working effort to move hybrid students into four days of in-person that has created a school-by-school patch or quilt of access for students while over a hundred schools seem to have offered four days to all hybrid dozens have not begging the question if fcps cannot get this much smaller subset of students but students back in school for four days system-wide how can we believe it will happen for almost all students five days a week next school year simply saying don't
054worry about it we believe we can do it isn't a sufficient answer because parents have 14 months of evidence for exactly why we should worry about it fcps needs to be transparent with families about exactly what's going to make fall work better or be honest with families if five days can't happen unless the cdc eliminates all school guidance we cannot have a fall experience where students are made to feel less than as many do now because they were not picked for the full-time school team in the fcps metaphorical gym class better more robust support consistent expectations and goals must be provided to all school teams in the system in order for families to have faith in the management of fcps thank you thank you our next speaker is nan ital thank you i am man
055i tell the parent of a high school junior who has been actively and constructively engaging with the school board and superintendent's office for over a year now on reopening fcps schools full and equal access to public education is and has been the greatest equalizer of opportunities for americans for generations i am the proud product of a public education a deep believer in its value and the granddaughter of a public school teacher and elementary school principal who was a legendary trailblazer in the deep south until her retirement decades ago today as part of a select and favored few my son went to school in person for the third day in a row for the first time since march 12 2020. given this school boards and this superintendent's lack of leadership and can't do attitude for 13
056months i am deeply grateful for the can-do attitude of our high school principal unlike most of this board she removes obstacles and doesn't create them unlike the superintendent she can develop and execute a plan and unlike most of this board and her actions and her strategic leadership she demonstrates that she cares deeply for her students and for her staff likewise i'm grateful for the many teachers who've returned to the classroom at my son's school and across the county three key points to address briefly on the return to school first all students who want to return to school in person now should be allowed to do so two if fcps cannot return all students to in-person school five days a week now how will you possibly do that come august and three do not impose a
057concurrent teaching model in the fall no matter what you do first there are students across fairfax county who want to return to in-person school now but who have been denied a spot because of capacity issues arising from the rules of return this is indefensible dystopian decision making a hunger games level of random cruelty imposed by your decisions to separate our children into the returned and to the denied whoever thought children would have to beg to get on the list to go to school second what will be different on august 22nd versus today april 22nd with respect to cool school capacity and distancing there's no indication cdc guidance will change yet adhering to that guidance is one of the exploitation explanations for limited return now you have misled fcps families repeatedly for the last year and
058broken our trust even on the inflated grading scales you've implemented to hide your many failures you still get an f in leadership third to my knowledge no one including the teachers associations believes concurrent teaching should resume in the fall that appea but that appears to be part of the plan not only is this an undue burden on teachers it deprives children of their teachers undivided attention in the classroom there are other options fcps should avail itself of those open fcps five days a week thank you our final speaker is bethany [Music] heim hello my name is bethany heim and i am a parent of a kindergartner and first grader i am believed that school board members agree that concurrent learning is not optimal for students and teachers and i hope that concurrent concurrent learning will
059not be pursued in the next school year at the same time i understand that virtual classes have worked well for some families to support those families i encourage fairfax county public schools to actively promote and partner with virtual virginia also i hope the school district embraces virtual students by allowing them to participate in their home schools sports and social activities this will help foster a sense of community and enable some of the same development and socialization opportunities provided to those who attend school in person to be clear i support allowing all students the opportunity to return to school five days a week as soon as possible teachers were prioritized for the vaccine to enable this return the cdc and county health officials have stated that it is safe for students and teachers to return to
060the classroom my husband and i both work full-time jobs and unfortunately we do not have confidence that students will return to the classroom five days a week this fall given the politics and bureaucracy associated with public schools we also fear that the classroom experience will be harsh and unwelcoming so our family did not want to take any chances we enrolled our kids in a private school for the next school year i hope my fears are are not warranted and i hope fairfax county figures it out and now i want to switch to a different topic i have read that the state of virginia is moving forward with the virginia math pathways initiative while there is still much for me to learn my initial reaction is to wonder why this initiative seems to be taking away
061existing opportunities that work well for many students in order to address achievements or testing gaps why not take a more focused approach target targeted to those students who need additional resources and support i hope the school board will consider having a work consider having a working session to discuss this topic and to share your thoughts with parents thank you we have video video testimony now from robert rigby good evening school board members dr brabrand and senior staff i am robert rigby co-president of fcps pride which is an lgbtqia plus organization for feed people in fairfax county public schools now i've read the srnr for 23 years now and i think it's improved a lot there's less about justice and punishment and more on reconciliation and problem solving there's more information about non-discrimination and anti-harassment than
062ever yet lgbtq plus students when they trust you to talk speak often of unsolved harassment for years i've been frustrated with their re their denial of naming names um as admins often say to me we can't do anything if we can't get in it the kids say of course the naming names and fingering a harasser usually only makes it work worse so what do we do scps's approach of finding the perpetrator and doing something about their behavior only solves a fraction of the larger and more endemic problem the solution is to change school culture by making schools overtly and obviously welcome the new state model policy recommends assemblies and lessons for every student unwelcoming and understanding it recommends things like stickers and flags all over the school stuff like that our linden celebrate celebrates certain
063lgbtqia plus awareness days with poachers and displays in the lobby and flags all over the school and and such um we could do that too um schools should show that they're welcoming not just quietly indicate that they are tolerant would you know that a last general anti-bullying lessons that don't say usually gets bullied have almost no effect on behavior you really need to say who you want kids not to bully black people asian people especially now people with disabilities lgbtqia plus people bigger small people immigrants of military children you already have a list so to stop harassment we need to celebrate communities and change school culture thank you for listening we have video testimony from christy hudson thank you to the schools who have done the right thing by opening their doors for four days
064of in-person learning on behalf of parents of thousands of struggling fcps students we are grateful to our principals who used creativity ingenuity and herculean efforts to open schools we recognize and thank you teachers custodians and support staff thank you for rearranging desks for the millionth time for pitching tents and for your unwavering support of the students in this system to our fcps leadership team you have also done something extraordinary you have somehow managed to fail everyone principals and school admin have not been provided proper guidance teachers have had impossible demands placed upon them parents are angry and students are failing as the saying goes you can't please everyone but it's an impressive feat to upset every stakeholder in the system at the time of this recording 95 of fcps's schools are opening for four days
065of in-person instruction to students who want it what about the other 100 plus schools there is chaos within the system we have siblings not being offered the same opportunities we have elementary age kids thinking their teachers don't like them because they weren't invited to attend school four days like their classmates were listen to that invited to attend school you have created a system where families and students are having to be invited to attend public school this is a problem this is not what public education in america is supposed to look like you have messed up so spectacularly we now need to normalize the fact that children go to school we now need to normalize the fact that children go to school your only hope of redemption is opening schools five days a week in the
066fall for all students with a teacher in the classroom without teachers being forced to teach concurrently you've said your plan is to open five days but now tell us how it's not enough to announce it we've lost trust and faith in the system show us how you will open five days a week when you can't even get all hybrid students in the school now for four days how will you do it we're waiting no more delays no more pauses and no more empty promises save the school system before it's too far gone our final video testimony is from guadalajara my third grader attends a title one school in the district and has an intellectual disability we also have a second grader in private school enjoying in personal learning for eight months now despite the pandemic
067my son in private school is doing great academically and emotionally but my son in fcps is not doing well emotionally or academically because for almost a year he wasn't allowed into his classroom my son was set to return to school last october with group three but the board's poor planning actually meant he returned to school until four months later his startup is continued to be provided virtually and this has only changed because i not you have been pushing the school to do better fcps is now having to provide recovery services for children with disabilities some of these recovery services are being offered on saturdays virtually students did recovery service because virtual learning didn't work so why is the recovery being provided virtually bad ideas abound at fcps lead the expert representative said at the last
068war meeting that most students are currently virtual because of fear of covet let me tell you other important reasons that weren't mentioned number one students today are stuck with virtual because this decision was made lockable many of these fines which they could change their choice number two what you offer last year was never full-time option but a hybrid model several parents said sending children two days complicated award schedules and was inconsistent so they chose virtual number three summer school like my sons presented to us a reality of in personal learning where kids would not be allowed to socialize not allowed to use materials will not have recess and we're told they will continue to use their laptops all day the scenario was so sad it made virtue appealing my school board representative also said that
069schools aren't open because covet was in control the last thing we want to hear from our elected officials is that they aren't in control we get the groceries the mail electricity doctor appointments and i am glad all of these service providers remain in control as did my son's private school and more than 50 percent of the school systems in the country considering how much from our taxes goes to fcps i had expected the school district that today will be leading the way during the pandemic ensuring their students receive the best education despite the challenges instead its reputation is blasted everywhere in the media teachers are exhausted and the students are leaving why even today are schools not open for all you have the vaccines you have millions in covet a and you have students eager
070to be in the classroom the only thing we're clearly missing is leadership those are vocating for schools to remain closed this past monday night in a free appropriate public education to my child with special needs should resign you did not leave the district based on needs of the students you represent but instead allowed interest groups to influence your decisions after all lead district representatives said it best the school board members are now in control item 3.02 student representative matters i call on mr anabudo dr anderson you hear me yes thank you um first as always just want to say thank you um it's an honor to be able to speak before all of you tonight um first i want to speak briefly because i realized that you know i didn't speak at my last representative
071matter so i haven't got to talk on this topic for a bit um but i want to speak briefly about instances of hate um instances of hateful behavior are on their eyes nationally and are unfortunately also being video recorded of the hate that exists within our current school system i want to echo the concerns of students who have come to speak to you today um we've heard from one student and multiple students who've come to speak to you in past board meetings who are imploring the school board and leadership to ensure that we're using the power of education to not only highlight the importance of minority communities within fcps but to educate away ignorance that exists in the behavior and practices that we see from students across the county it is important that we work
072together as a school system to use the power the light that education is to ensure that we are happy we are raising we are developing we are nurturing young minds who are not ignorant and who don't act in ways that are harmful or negative or derogatory um to other members of our community that's the role school that's the world this you the school board members and leadership can play in this part but equally important i want to speak to any students who are watching and i want to say that i call on you to be better you must pick your words extremely carefully and remember that each and every single one of them carrying weight and they carry power as ridiculous as it might sound i urge you to reject the rhetoric that we all
073too often hear from the adults in our lives you must know that the way you speak and the way you act has impacts on the people around you whether you realize it or not many of you may have heard that before some of you might not have but it's extremely important and it's extremely true and we need to continue to try and be better as young people who care about the way that our peers feel and the way our school system is perceived because some of the stuff i've been seeing online recently is not positive and we can work together to change that that's the one piece about that that i wanted to speak to and on a slightly lighter note i wanted to also touch on the student representative elections that are happening on
074monday and fcps student voice is an extremely integral part of our school system and is part of the reason i'm proud to call myself call myself an fcps student on monday we will be electing the next student representative school board the person who will take over the position that i currently hold starting july 1. i am extremely excited to hear from all the candidates we have over 100 people running to be the student rep this year and i could not be more thrilled it's a testament to the way the student advisory council as well as leadership prioritizes the voices of young people across across the school system and it's also a testament to the young people in our school system who are willing ready and able to make a difference and impact change because they
075care about the way our school system is being run the need to adapt and change and grow and continue has been highlighted by this pandemic and it will be one of the pri primary things that the next student representative has to face as we deal with the whole swath of now high school students whose transcripts whose time in high school have been forever altered by this pandemic my class the class of 2021 in many ways while we've got you know they'll shorten the stick as far as senior year goes we've got it easy as far as post-secondary stuff goes because the pandemic affected only one of our high school years that's not that can't be said for the rest of the classes and that will be a very very tough challenge for the next student
076rep to have to tackle um and i will partner with them with that and i plan to start right now um as i move into the next phase of my um leadership i plan to start meeting with students to find out specific things need that the school board needs to address to ensure that we're helping students deal with post pandemic recovery in ways that are in addition to the things that leadership has already identified like virtual learning recovery and and fifth quarter recovery and you know summer school and stuff so that's my plan and i want to highlight and urge the school board to make sure that we're prioritizing student voice and wellness in this transition process you know as we talk about five days of in-person school in the fall and as we talk
077about getting returning as many kids as possible back into school buildings we i want to make sure that we understand that any type of transition and any type of change is difficult for students especially in a year that has been full of change and transition and uncertainty so i'll say i've said it before and i'll keep saying it centering student voice and centering the wellness of the young people who have been through so so much already is going to be the key to not only a successful transition to the fall school year but successful outcomes beyond just the school year for students and young people in fairfax county as we move out of hopefully which has been a very very very difficult school year and with that i'll turn it back over to dr edison
078so thank you thank you so much mr anibuto item 3.03 fcps's request to apply for the school division of innovation sdi designation i call on dr brabrand for the introduction thank you chairman anderson members of the school board really excited to talk about this wonderful opportunity for fairfax county public schools to apply for the virginia department of education school division of innovation designation and we have our chief academic officer dr sloan presidio here to give you a brief summary of the application and we'll be glad to take any questions that you may have dr presidio all right well thank you dr brabrand and uh good evening everybody and before i talk about the application to vdoe i just want to say to mr anabuto after nine years in this position and working with nine different
079representatives to the school board you have set the bar incredibly high and i hope everybody heard that we have an unprecedented number of over a hundred i actually think it's over 120 applicants for this position that will be running on monday and again nathan i think that's not a testament necessarily to the work that we're doing as a system a lot of that is a testament to the leadership and engagement that you've shown this year so thank you for that and we hope that you're going to stick around and do some mentoring of your replacement as well so so thank you to nathan um i do want to thank the board for this opportunity to speak briefly on our application to vdoe for our recognition of the school division of innovation uh we do believe
080that seeking status at the state level as a school division of innovation would really be an important opportunity for us to pursue some of our equity goals namely to make sure that all of our students are engaged in rigorous learning experiences and engaged in work that is is really innovative in terms of teaching and learning practices in the classroom so i'll talk about that a little bit more in just a minute but if we could go to the next slide i wanted to provide just a little bit and it looks like we have the wrong presentation but that's okay i'm going to tell you about it anyway the the school division of innovation application essentially is an application that's put forward by vdoe to recognize school systems that in their language quote improve student learning
081educational performance and college career and citizenship readiness skills and the application itself is a designation by the state department of education to encourage innovative practices in school systems so that language is very broad there's a lot of leeway in what your application could look like and entail but specifically the uh the requirements uh and details are really outlined in in the code of virginia which is included in our full application that's posted on board docs three of the big points that i i would point out about the application process one it's a three-year designation by the state department of education for divisions that are recognized there is an annual reporting requirement to the state about progress towards our goals the application date is incredibly important because that's may 3rd right around the corner and then
082the department of education will review the applications make recommendations to the board of education that will vote on the applications on july 22nd so we'll go ahead and go to the next slide and see maybe we can catch up a little bit here i want to talk just a little bit more about the specific goals of our application and again i apologize the slides don't really match with what we had prepared but i want to talk about the goals we have three goals in the application and the first goal is related to ensuring that students are engaged in learning experiences that support development of portrait or graduate learning outcomes so really focusing on developing students critical and creative thinking skills communication skills collaboration skills and specifically our application will really be targeted on extending portrait
083of a graduate presentations of learning and those are opportunities for authentic assessments using a portfolio-based assessment process where students have an opportunity to reflect on their own development of portrait of a graduate skills and present evidence and demonstration of those skills and their growth over time the second and the third goal of our application represents an extension really of the use of local performance assessments that the state has allowed during the pandemic in lieu of sols so we currently this year have flexibility in social studies in grade four grade eight high school and eighth grade writing to use local assessments that we create in fairfax in our classrooms in lieu of the sols and that's a really important flexibility that we've been granted and one that we want to extend into the future because we
084really do believe that authentic assessment practices are one of the best ways to measure student learning sol's multiple choice standardized assessments are not the only way and not the best way to measure student learning really what we want to look at is multiple ways to measure student learning so we want authentic examples of where students can show their work through writing samples through presentations through projects through experiments through demonstrations and that's a much deeper way to demonstrate learning and actually gives teachers more actionable information about what students know what they can do and what additional support that they might have moving forward also this flexibility would give us an another extension of opportunities for students at the high school level to learn to excuse me to earn locally awarded verified credits so as as you
085know students have to verify their credits through assessment processes at the high school level this would give students another opportunity an option to do that which would support our on-time graduation efforts so moving forward i just want to tell you catching up to the slides here just a little bit about our application and how if we could actually go back one i apologize and how our application really is focused on emphasizing authentic assessment practices which really is a key practice to drive equitable learning outcomes and we've chosen this focus because we really do believe that you know what we assess how we assess and how we use the data of assessment really determines what instruction looks like in the classroom and there's a lot of evidence to show that performance assessment is really a driver
086for instructional improvement in educational equity and cultural responsiveness so there's just a few examples from the research that i'd like to share to support that premise which for example performance assessment provides learners with creative ways to really demonstrate their learning and show more depth of understanding we know from research that performance assessment provides more information and robust and actionable information about student learning we also know that performance assessment provides more information that's in alignment with workforce readiness skills than standardized assessments do and most importantly perhaps performance assessment really elevates student voice and in the research we know that students who feel engaged and have a voice in school are seven times more likely to be academically successful and academically engaged in school so our innovation practices uh in in this particular uh application are in
087alignment with our portrait of a graduate which has been values in this system since 2015 when it was adopted and the state adopted profile of a graduate about three years later so we think that this is a way to really align our local division priorities to continue to push state policy and make sure that we are looking at additional ways to assess student learning so in conclusion i would just say you know what what is it that fcps would get if our application is approved you know what are the benefits in the gains to us first we would continue to really uh internalize and incentivize internal accountability around assessment practices in fairfax to try new and different practices we would have some additional relief from external assessment pressures and i think it would send a
088very important message to our local community and to the state and perhaps the nation as well about our beliefs and values around effective assessment practices so in conclusion i would just say our application is due on may 3rd which is about 10 days from now so we've placed this item on the consent agenda for tonight's board meeting and i'd be happy to address any questions that board members might have thank you very much dr presidio board members wishing to speak please go ahead and let me know miss tolin thank you for the presentation um i know from for the last several years we've had in our strategic plan goals around um this type of performance assessment proportion of graduates i know we've made progress toward meeting those goals how would you see this type of
089designation moving us does it help us move more quickly toward meeting some of those strategic goals that we have i think it does because it provides a little bit of relief from some of the additional external sol pressures so it gives us an opportunity to take some risks with some of those new practices like our presentations of learning in those grade levels where those sols have been removed so it's not asking teachers to do one more thing we've taken something away and we're using a different practice instead and i think that that can accelerate some of our work without adding additional workload that's already as we know too high and just one other quick question is this a new program is this the first time that we're applying for this so this is a program
090i think it's in its second year now um and i'm not really sure how many applications the video he will receive we don't really know much about the process of course last year you know the year that we're coming out of being a pandemic so this is really kind of our first attempt to see you know how our application might be received thank you thank you thank you miss tola miss eisenheiser thank you um first i'm really excited about this work because i know you and i've had many conversations about moving away from standardized testing and about portrait graduate skills and performance assessments so um i have a couple questions um first of all can this be used sort of down the road to having multiple pathways to a diploma in terms of having students
091have better access to being able to get verified credits to performance assessments and having the more flexibility to pursuing paths of areas of strength can that can this build to that work eventually i mean that would be part of the hope i mean right now the application really is kind of limited in terms of our flexibility for where we can seek some of the assessment flexibility so it's really limited at the high school level to social studies right now our advocacy would be to be able to demonstrate you know success with that and then to continue to seek additional opportunity for flexibility in other content areas so then the other question i guess i have is that these presentations of learning do you see room for those to be done in classes outside of several
092core academic classes right now and you know it seems like in some of the classes i see there's academic content in terms of reading plays for example and doing projects in a theater class is there room for some of those assessments and then some of that data to be used as part of this project or future projects yeah honestly the best way i think that this works is for the students to really have a lot of choice in ownership around what evidence they bring to that evaluation process and that portfolio process so you know the schools that we've been working with and the teachers we've been working with we really encourage a lot of student ownership and choice so bringing things from the arts bringing things from electives and not just focused on core content
093classes and then um are you you know with these presentations of learning kind of expanding some of these authentic learning and performance assessments are you looking at these sort of across um student groups so are we using these in special education classes are we using these in advance classes gen ed or is it specifically focused on certain student groups no this would be something that we want to have for all of our students and again you know a lot of what we're talking about here are best practices for all students but also essential practices for a lot of our most you know more diverse student learners who need different ways to demonstrate get their proficiencies their skills and for us to be able to recognize and celebrate their strengths yeah and that i would encourage
094that so i'm glad to hear that because i do think that whenever we have new initiatives that look at more authentic learning opportunities that we make sure that we are consistent in offering those to the the breadth of our students so i appreciate hearing that thank you yeah thank you thank you massage mohizer miss mclaughlin yes um dr presidio thank you um for bringing this uh and certainly at a very high macro level i'm very supportive of of this approach um i think i just have a couple of concerns as a veteran board member and it really i'll bring it to dr bray brand i'll say again i know you are absolutely committed to partnering with our board but when i see a letter from george mason university dated april 1st endorsing this application and
095we're sitting here as a board in on april 22nd getting a public presentation for the first time and it's on consent agenda which i know is a chair vice chair decision i i'm just really uncomfortable with where we found ourselves here tonight because this is something to celebrate and i don't understand at the last school board meeting we also really didn't have a heavy lift on our plate and i just really feel like the board needed to have the two weeks for this to be presented for us to be able to look at it and then tonight it should have been an action item not a consent agenda item and so i'm just trying to understand how long did your team know that you guys were going to consider this apply for it and why
096did we find ourselves here tonight with literally a presentation and a consent agenda happening at the same time um because i i i feel like there's a lot of different questions we want to ask to really wrap our arms around what this is going to mean for instruction in the fall sure miss mclaughlin i would say you know in the end the you know we work at chairs to try to determine the abort agenda and where things are uh from everything that we have heard working with this board and i have heard working with this board uh over the last several years the the interest in doing innovation particularly innovation away from just the sols has been something i've heard again and again obviously if you're uncomfortable tonight with consent i defer that to your
097chair and the rest of your colleagues so um really as as dr presidio said this is the second year of a program we're still learning a lot about but i do think fairfax county public schools is the largest school system in the commonwealth needs to get its foot in the door to stay to the state it's time to let local school districts innovate across the portrait of a graduate that frankly as you know uh you're the prior board and my predecessor helped create in the state followed now we want more flexibility to be honest we would love to have applied for it uh last year a few things got in the way of us really getting an application together and one thing i'll just say about timing with everything going on and this month has
098been very very busy uh perhaps not with school board presentations but certainly with administration i wanted to make sure we had ample time to make sure our application was in by the deadline you know there is an early decision going on necessarily with the state there's not an early admissions process but i wanted to be sure that we had our information in early to make sure the state knows our interest in wanting to pursue this path but obviously if the board wants more time to discuss we can work with uh board leadership and determine the appropriate place to do that now i i appreciate that i'm certainly not asking to set this aside and this is an operational matter but i did want to call this attention to my colleagues and to everyone really in
099the shared work we do i just i i think it's problematic that something as i see is important and also something for us to again be partners in it if george mason has a letter dated april 11 april 1st it means george mason knew about this in march in order to produce that letter and i just think that the board should be finding out on april 22nd about the division's desire to apply for something like this certainly support the innovation piece but i guess to my colleagues what i would say is i i hope we will direct the superintendent we very much want you to as this proceeds any change that this would have in the actual the way in which we assess and instruct our students will need to know like if the application's
100fine but how this then impacts our kids and finally to something that other board members already raised this can't be that suddenly our teachers have like the key word here was um performance assessments touring our schools and seeing 30 kids in a classroom is i mean that's a lot of kids so i think we're going to dig a little bit deeper in understanding what a performance assessment means because it is certainly faster and easier we know sadly to do things where it's a multiple choice test so there's just a a lot that we won't be able to fix tonight um i do know you all come at this with good intentions but i really hope in the future we won't be finding out sort of what feels like the 11th hour so i i thank
101you um for your answers tonight thank you thank you miss mclaughlin um just a reminder to everyone every item on the consent agenda can be pulled for consideration at a later time and we're happy to do so if that is your request this evening so just let me know um whenever you're ready our next speaker is miss corbett sanders yes and uh dr chris presidio i want to thank you for uh taking my call earlier today so you you answered many of my questions um however i did have some thoughts subsequent to that because of um the the promise of this opportunity and the promise is that it's more individualized learning for all of our students in the um especially in the social studies curriculum and we've heard over the years that we are concerned
102that our students are not learning enough about civics and about about our social studies curriculum because of the advent of the sols so moving away from the sols and looking at more individualized learning it seems to me that it aligns very closely to the ib approach of a portfolio is that correct sir yes i mean i i think the general idea with uh with this is that um similar i guess i would say to the international baccalaureate assessment system that you're looking at actual authentic samples of student work not multiple choice answers that you provide on a standardized assessment so it could be a writing sample it could be a research paper that someone has done could be a presentation that a student is given but looking at those authentic samples of student work so
103does this give our teachers and our students more of an opportunity to take advantage of what i call the natural resources of being in fairfax county the proximity to washington dc the proximity to some of our historic properties and to be able to do more primary research and an exploration absolutely it could do that i mean i think the limitations really are just in terms of you know student choice interest and uh and time to complete assignments but um choices is is really one of the driving factors here so students have a lot of different opportunities to pursue how they're going to demonstrate their learning in different ways and and we know that that's a motivator for students and it's one of the most important things that we can do to support students both with
104unique learning needs that need some of those choices and opportunities and students that have maybe been disengaged or disenfranchised from the you know the learning environment with the more traditional learning experience so what are you going to do from from the professional development perspective to ensure that our ki our teachers tap into those natural resources and i think you know what we would really advise uh and have been you know working under the assumption which is in our application that this would be something that we would continue to support uh teachers really in scaffolding this in and there's ways to do this and ways to start that aren't overwhelming but again i think you know we are coming out of a pandemic stress levels and workflow levels are at an all-time high and we need
105to understand that recognize that and we need to move pretty slowly with this process but we do have a very robust professional development support system that we've provided as the as we've been working with schools on this in the past we've got about 36 different schools we've been partnering with over the last couple years around presentations of learning presentations of learning are actually in the strategic plan the division strategic plan is one of our key measures so we have been kind of going slowly at that and i think we need to continue to move slowly and scaffold in these experiences for teachers and kids well thank you i think it's great and i actually think it offers it will be liberating for both our teachers and our students to be able to walk to move
106away from the standardized testing so i appreciate it thank you i appreciate it thank you miss mc uh miss marin yes thank you over here thank you dr presidio um you know i first do want to comment on miss mclaughlin's point i think it's a fair point i also think that it's helpful to try new strategies to streamline our work because we have so much so i'm i see both sides but but i do support it and i support it because i support doing something different than standardized testing is a hold over from no child left behind passed in started in 2002 that was designed to defund public education it was designed to make vouchers available take money due choice that is my experience from working in the us department of education during that laws
107enactment so i think that this kind of innovation is exactly what we should be championing in fairfax county and i hope that or i would expect that our communications team is there to make sure that this is a possible solution to standardized testing and also that our legislative advocacy this year when we update our legislative agenda in the fall thoroughly reflects this approach in that advocacy thank you thank you thank you miss mary miss picarski thank you dr presidio i just quickly wanted to say thank you this is exciting work i mean authentic assessments really is a best practice in education and you know giving our students ownership of their learning that's very powerful and and it gives them an opportunity to really develop their metacognitive skills which is really what we're going for at
108the end of the day as we you know try to develop these portrait of a graduate skills so i'm excited about this thank you thank you okay seeing that there are no other speakers i will take a turn um first of all i am highly excited by this endeavor it is reminiscent of at least to me um of the professional learning model by the divorce and i wonder is that how you're seeing it too rather just not just for the school but rather for the entire division where you're just reflecting on your practices in the effort of continuous improvement am i making a similar analogy here i think i think that you are i mean for folks in the community that don't know i mean a lot of that work is about improving you know
109educators professional practice through collaboration and through reflection and i think that's a similar you know analogy i guess if you will to what we're doing here we want students to reflect on you know their own learning outcomes and set new learning targets and new learning goals that they can use to to continue their progress and to have teachers better able to target support too okay terrific um i have a few other questions i did see the letter regarding the partnership with george mason is that a required part of the application or it's just the extra piece that we've added to strengthen our application yeah thank you and thank ms mclaughlin for that as well i apologize i i didn't mention that in the presentation so all of the applications are required to have a university
110partner and we're very fortunate to have a number of university partners that we work with both in the state and out of the state but we work most closely with george mason and we meet on a regular basis with them at least on a monthly basis around a really a portfolio of collaboration projects that we have together so they were probably the best partner that we thought was situated for this particular project and they were happy to provide a letter of support and that partnership would involve what exactly is it the creation of alternate assessments is the evaluation of the plan what does this mean exactly yeah and and to some degree that's still to be determined um but like i said we meet on a regular basis and review portfolio of uh our collaboration
111projects so we would add this to that portfolio um we would ask for their technical assistance and and looking at our approach both our professional development approach to the work as well as monitoring our progress as i mentioned we'd have to report to the state every year in terms of our growth towards our goals so they could provide consulting services technical assistance in both of those capacities thank you um on slide six you talked about the pathway to relief from external assessments and i know we didn't get a chance to see it but my notes identify it can you say a little bit more in terms of which assessments this is going to provide relief from um i you mentioned uh something with um writing and in eighth grade i'm sorry was it in fifth
112grade but i i didn't get the specifics that this application would provide some flexibility with so if approved this application would extend the flexibility that we've had under the waiver this year for use of local performance assessments this year in social studies at grade four grade eight and then at the high school level for social studies courses as well as grade eight writing i'm sorry repeat that again social studies grade four grade eight and high school social studies as well as grade eight writing okay thank you for that um authentic assessments i think are best and as ms mccarskey said it's definitely best practice because it really evaluates the application of the learning not just regurgitation of information on a standardized assessment however um the standardized assessment the comfort it does offer to some of
113our families is the fact that there is a an intent uh in an um an intentional look at all of the subgroups when we do engage in the local assessments do we have that same approach where we are going to review the performance of students in each of the subgroups that are typically identified in your sols your more standardized evaluations yeah we have the ability to do that we've been doing that and i guess what i would refer to as our pilot project that we've been working on for presentations of learning so we are able to look at overall division trends as well as disaggregated sub group trends and of course individual performance so okay thank you um my last question is regarding um something that's very early on in the presentation regarding current methods
114and strategies the conversation as of late has been regarding reading how do you see that dovetailing into this opportunity where we're talking about k3 literacy and now we're applying for this additional flexibility talk to me if you can i know this is probably a little bit of a shot in the dark here where do you see some intersectionality with that work well i'm not sure that i see a lot of intersectionality with that work right now this application you know again the the latitude for how school divisions would choose what goals to include in their application was quite broad so we looked at kind of two major criteria when we were determining what we wanted to focus on there's a number of things that we could have focused on of course in our application but
115we looked at the portrait of a graduate which is really the you know the outcome that we've established beyond state expectations uh for student learning and an area that we know that we have a lot of growth to make in our school system as it pertains to equity so that was one of the major goals that we chose for this particular application the other was to extend some of the current state flexibility beyond this year as a best practice i mean something that we would like to continue to grow in terms of flexibility that doesn't mean that we don't have a lot of other improvement efforts underway and certainly we have a lot of work that we know that we need to do that we're engaged in right now around our literacy program i spoke
116a little bit to that earlier this week in the work session i had some questions about you know what we're doing in our summer program how that extends to some of our literacy improvement efforts that we see beyond summer and into next year and i would just say again that there is a lot of work to do there we know coming out of the pandemic that we need to make sure that all of our students are continuing to receive the support that they need to read on grade level particularly students that have been most impacted and affected by the pandemic so we are doing a lot of curriculum work professional development work this summer and that will be a major strategic initiative our of ours coming out of the pandemic into next year we need
117to make additional changes to our curriculum as well as our professional development moving forward to make sure particularly at the early grades k through three that all of our students are receiving effective instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics as well as the other domains of literacy like fluency and comprehension so i don't necessarily see this particular work intersecting with that work but i do see them on parallel tracks at this time okay fair enough i actually had the same notes regarding phonics and phonemic awareness as kind of a not necessarily a new method but a more intentional method in the instruction of literacy here last question is regarding timeline you mentioned that the application is due made first when do you expect to hear back regarding acceptance and furthermore what happens once that happens are
118you on the clock to begin things are we in a space where we can produce these assessments these robust assessments in a timely enough manner can you give me some sense of that of what that would entail so the information we have on the timeline is that vdoe will review the applications and they'll make their recommendations to the board the state board of education on july 22nd and at that meeting we understand that the board would vote and we should know after that time whether or not we had been selected for this designation and then after that we don't know exactly what the timeline would look like in terms of additional information technical assistance possibly some opportunities to pursue some additional funding resources in collaboration with the state we just don't know there's not a
119lot of information about that i'm not too worried about the work because again this application is based on work that we're already doing that we want to continue we want to expand into more schools so we already have resources uh prepared and ready to go thank you and i guess one last thing i i lied the last thing was not it when we're speaking about replacing some of those assessments virginia studies in grade four is also one of one of the big ticket items speaking to ms mclaughlin's point we really need to be sure that there's clear first awareness of our parent community that this is going to be a change i i'm just slightly concerned about that i think that's it for my questions are there any miss mclaughlin please go ahead hi dr
120anderson as well i'm so sorry i'll wait because oh i apologize i did not look down at my computer screen miss there not colfax why don't you go ahead and then we'll have the go backs shortly thank you dr anderson and you asked many of my questions i do want to just make a comment that um from the time we established the portrait of a graduate to our strategic plan it was always our expectation to find alternate assessment pathways and we've had to work with the state to get this done so dr presidio i i commend you for completing this application during this most uh exciting year that we have been in um i i since you've kind of outlined that the time frame for approval and what will happen i i do want to
121say i am hopeful that if we do get approved that we will have a more of a robust opportunity with a work session to better understand this as well as to offer um you know community engagement because um as many of my colleagues have stated this is something that we have been looking for these authentic assessments have been looking for and asking for so um i want to make certain that um people appreciate what's been going on but people really understand it and i as a board member um and and i i don't want to um take away from the good things that this is but it is a bit frustrating because it's comprehensive there's lots there's a 32-page document attached so we unfortunately you know weren't able to engage in a way with multiple
122questions that i would like but most of my overarching questions have been asked so i would just um make that suggestion to our your leadership team and uh to our board chair and vice chair that if this is approved we take a deeper dive into this award and um thank you for doing this thank you and we'd be happy to do that and one other thing that i could offer in the future in the past we've done an educator share fair where folks come together and share the work that they're doing in their in their schools and their classrooms and share the student work we've had some board member participation in the past that's another great opportunity to learn more about the work so we'd be happy to do that as well yeah just alert
123us to that thank you mr nachofas miss mclaughlin yes uh i'm sure some colleagues wish i would have a go back but i i am just increasingly more concerned as we listen because there's no doubt this is this is the direction the goal we want to go towards but what troubles me is dr presidio mentioned this work that we're already doing and i mean part of me wants to say to my colleagues can you all take a quiz right now on what school's doing this work what does the work look like where how is it you know what are we seeing from it i mean there's like i feel like the more we're here tonight the more we're learning about stuff that the board should already know and so uh i really don't want to
124keep hammering at that but i want to reinforce what was darren koufax said and i really want to thank our chair miss dr anderson because you too asked a lot of really great questions that were just swirling in my mind from all of this because the the intent and the goal is phenomenal and ms marin said it too but i've been around long enough that one of my concerns always is how do we actually implement what does the execution look like and when i first joined the board there was a pilot study being done in one of my high schools it hadn't been pilot tested it affected grading and assessing and the parents were taken by a major surprise and had to do with honors biology and high school grades matters we know for college
125admissions and it just was a well-intentioned pilot but it had not been vetted there had been way too much freedom given at the principal teacher level and there was a lot of cleanup work that had to happen including really upset community and so when you mention that we're already doing this work how vast is this work we're doing is it just a few schools within our 200 is it across all 200 schools and you know what what is it that's that is actually to the breadth and depth is already here yeah no those are really good questions and i appreciate it a few things i would say and of course we would be happy to do a work session if the board would like to have a work session and you could hear from you
126know even folks that are actually doing this work in their schools um which would be great i know folks would be very excited to share that information with the board when i say that this is work that we're already doing the portrait of a graduate presentations of learning are in the strategic plan as the board approved metric of how we're measuring portrait over graduate outcomes for students so we've been working with pilot schools that signed up to take on some of that work and work with central office specialists to really try to figure out what would that assessment process look like how would we really measure a student's critical thinking skills um and how could we do that well and what would that look like and one of the things that we came up with
127was the portfolio process that i've talked about and we've been pilot testing some of those assessment instruments doing some of the data analysis that we think that we can scale up to more schools now we have about 30 schools that have participated in some of that pilot work but it's really just a few teachers in each of those schools so the sample that we have at this point in time is really still pretty small and normally where the board would hear about that work is in the presentation of goal one on the strategic plan but of course this year those presentations were redacted and we didn't provide as much detail as we had in the past just due to scheduling issues related to you know return to school work session time and other priorities so
128i think that's probably why board members wouldn't recollect hearing about some of that because it's really been over a year now that we've had an opportunity to share that work but again we'd be happy to to talk more about it in a work session and then also individual board members that would like to have uh conversations we'd be happy to do that with individual board members as well now i i appreciate that because uh interestingly that you you connected that for me i did have families reach out to me and ask megan what's this new portrait of graduate assessment my my child's teacher is saying they're going to be graded on puerto rico graduate and as one of the board members who you know helped usher that into this school system it took me by
129surprise too because portrait of graduate is the skills we want in all of the content areas not that there's actually like a testing and a quizzing of are you a portrait of a graduate so that that already had concerned me because i we want that out of our students just as learners in general and doing the whole testing thing again well the pros the process we have is not a test um you know again we refer that to as an authentic assessment process and there's a couple different methods we use for that one is the portfolio process where students collect evidence of their growth as communicators collaborators over the year and they reflect and we have a reflection process for them to identify their strengths and areas of growth and each of the attributes a
130portrait of a graduate others are through presentations of learning so tying the portrait of a graduate skills to content that the students are learning in a class and that might have been where the grading came in is in terms of you know the content from the class um also associated with uh the integration of the portrait of a graduate skills i think that's probably what that person was referring to i know in june we hear there's post sol post ap and ib exams and there's the fatigue and so we've talked about how do you make june a really dynamic robust learning and that to me would be where it's it's more of a an assessment but not this culminating the intensity of everything always feels like it's about striving toward a letter grade for especially
131our high school kids so i won't take up any more time but i do um i do appreciate all the information you're giving us here this evening i really do hope in the future though that we won't find ourselves in a business meeting you know getting this presentation and that's not on you at all um that's for me to talk with our superintendent and our chair and vice chair to figure out where the disconnect was because i think we this is almost at the core of what i would hope our board does and just again we're going to need that work session so that we do our due diligence to make sure how this translated into the classroom learning but i do want to applaud you all for the the passion and the commitment of
132what you're doing here well i appreciate that and next time if we do do a work session i'll bring more information i'll actually bring the right slides as well so that might help certainly thank you miss mclaughlin thank you dr presidio i also think there's space here to deter to to mention that we are still in the application process you may not be accepted correct that's correct that could happen but if you are successful we should certainly have a more robust discussion in terms of what that entails you know as a parent of a sixth grader and a third grader i see very routinely some of the pbl activities that happened in the school honestly i haven't seen so much this year but in years past it's been something that i've looked forward to and
133also as an educator this is always something that i i gravitate to because it really allows kids the opportunity to analyze their learning and not just state dates and facts because then it doesn't really mean much to them um i did have one last question that i think i skipped and now i cannot find it but in the interest of time i am going to let it go um i thank you colleagues for your questions on this i don't see any other hands um to speak on this matter thank you dr presidio and best of luck to you all right thank you everyone the next item on our agenda is 3.04 student rights and responsibilities dr brabrand please provide the introduction thank you chairman anderson a couple of things we have a work session for
134this srnr coming up just to put that out right out of the gate so we're doing a presentation we have a work session coming um and then there'll be a vote uh really in a little over a month so that there's plenty of time to see the sr one of the things i just want to set the table with if we can rewind time remember we had a long long work session and school board meeting just as the pandemic was starting to take place about sr we made a lot of changes with this board's direction but you're going to see when dr boyd shows you the number of incidents this year because so much of the year was virtual is 98 less than the years before we're talking 30 or 40 000 behavior incidences logged
135and 600 this year so this year the work that we did in srnr the work that you did and we worked together in partnership really hasn't had a chance to be fully digested because we didn't have that classroom experience and that data we are going to be taking all of those changes and really working hard with some additional tweaks some feedback some board members gave a little bit of feedback from the general assembly to help us tweak some of the major changes that were made in the srnr last year and then we really hope a year from now we'll be able to come back with some robust data about the impact of the srn changes made to help reduce disproportionality in discipline for our students and really create that caring culture now dr boyd is
136here our assistant superintendent for special services she's here virtually and she'll be here in person in the future for her presentations and her and her team will be going through it and i would just say again it's the presentation tonight we know that there's sometimes a need for a question or two but we do have a full work session plan multiple hours because we know how important this work has been to the board and to the community as we move forward to continue to reform not just our sr and r but really push a whole new way of how we look at school discipline and address disproportionality so dr boyd i'm going to turn it over to you and your team and and thank you for your your hard work dr boyd thank you dr
137bray brandon good evening all as dr bravery shared this evening we are going to be providing you with an overview of the revisions made to regulation 2601 which is our students rights and responsibilities that's proposed for the 21-22 school year in order to ensure we provide the breadth and depth of the discussion due to this very important topic the following persons are present to assist in responding to questions and to provide feedback deb scott director of the office of intervention and prevention services john foster division council liz noto principal of herndon high school cindy conley principal of irving middle school and marie lamont principal of bailey's upper elementary school this presentation as we look at our next slide in our agenda this presentation will provide background information as it relates to regulation 2601 which include
138general updates based on board feedback state legislative requirements changes made to ensure alignment with the state model guidance division-wide behavior referral implementation and proactive supports and we will conclude with the timeline for approval regulation 2601 or the students rights and responsibility which is often referred to as the srnr is aligned with the virginia board of education model guidance for positive and preventive code of student conduct policy and alternatives to suspension and is reviewed each year and approved by the school board the srnr describes students rights and responsibilities in order to foster a responsive caring and inclusive culture where all feel valued supported and hopeful and where every child is reached challenged and prepared for success in school and in life as dr bray grant shared earlier significant changes were made to the 2020 2021 sr
139such as the hybrid distribution model alignment of the dress code with the state dress code equity act implementation of the new student behavior and administrative response or s-bar codes leveled behavior response charts reflective considerations for disciplinary practices flow chart for administrators and limiting police reporting requirements the changes to the 21 20 excuse me 2020 2021 regulation were presented to the minority student achievement oversight committee the advisory committee for students with disabilities and the title one advisory committee with the opportunity to provide feedback ask questions and make recommendations for improvement as we look at the next slide the total number of behavior incidents entered to date during the 2020-21 school year as dr brabrand shared this evening is significantly impacted by our covet 19 pandemic as a result the impact of the most recent changes to
140our srnr are not fully known due to the phase return of our in-person instruction in response to covet 19 and the limited ability to implement the srnr with our full school complement there has not been significant changes to the 21 22 sr to allow for sufficient time for implementation of the current changes data trends and impact will be closely monitored once the division resumes five days of in-person instruction in the upcoming school year we'll now take a look at the chart displayed on this slide which shows the total number of behavior incidents entered into the student information system over the past four years the data entered for the three quarters for this year equals less than three days of behavior incidence entries for a traditional school year or pre-pandemic year the standards of accreditation changed
141at the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year this is one of the reasons for the spike in behavior incidents in our student information system as administrators were more frequently documenting truancy interventions this increase in the documentation impact impacted the total number of incidents causing a substantial increase in the 18 19 and 19 20 school years more detailed data points and notes were recently shared with the board and made and the public in the bray brand briefing dated march 19 2021 we will now look and review updates to the srnr based on school board feedback from the srnr approval process this past summer and changes that are necessary to align the regulation with the current policy and practice next slide please the language has been edited throughout the document to reflect gender neutrality specifically removing references
142to he she and his or her and replacing it with they there or the student each section in chapter one has been clearly outlined as a right or a responsibility next the title of chapter 2 has been changed to more clearly aligned with the order and the content of the chapter in which the current title is acts for which students may be disciplined disciplinary procedures and interventions and finally throughout chapter 2 language has been expanded to minimize the use of the words inappropriate or disruptive language around the school resource officer's primary role in schools has been expanded and examples of safety concerns have been provided we can go to the next slide please thank you school resource primary school resource officer's primary role in schools has been expanded and examples of safety concerns have been
143provided and definition of aggravating circumstances have been added to the suspension of students in grades k-3 in the paragraph in chapter 2 to ensure clarity title 9 language and codes have been moved from the addendum into the main document along with information on retaliation to align with current federal requirements and regulation 218. the topics of racially charged language and slurs toward marginalized groups to include those in the gender expansive community are addressed in the regulation and throughout our policy and practice in fcps however we will be editing language to emphasize the need to address slurs and hate speech through level interventions more prominently within the srnr and noting with more focus that these behaviors cause harm to others as a result of our ongoing collaboration with stakeholders additional revisions are pending to further clarify when
144school administrators are to make reports to law enforcement reinforce the rights and responsibilities outlined in the srnr and corresponding interventions and consequences apply when engaging in school-sponsored activities on and off fcps grounds to include athletics clarify that persons can opt out of having directory information released without consent and expand on how professional development or training on the srnr is provided to all stakeholders to name a few as we look at our next slide we're going to look and notice that just very briefly this year we did not have to make any changes to our srnr based on outcomes from the legislative session [Applause] next slide please we'll now look at model guidance fcps implemented the student behavior and administrative response codes this school year and has anecdotally seen the benefit of focusing behavior conversations on
145the impact of behavior on the learning environment and addressing it with a level response that includes appropriate sanctions and interventions per the virginia department of education additional codes have been added to the sbar data collection to reflect persistently dangerous behaviors that require a referral to the division superintendent and additional documentation for state reporting these codes have been added as category 6 which have the highest impact in the code charts and require referral to the division superintendent these codes will be used across the commonwealth by all school divisions next school year and will provide consistency and transparency within our data collection for the focus of the 21-22 school year as we return to buildings five days per week to re-establish our tier one or universal routines and expectations while providing proactive social emotional support for our
146students as we look at our next lab we'll look at our data collection and proactive support in addition to reinforcing universal tier 1 expectations fcps will implement a division-wide online behavior referral system in default paired with our teacher and administrator training to support tier one implementation implementation of this division-wide referral system will provide more accurate data at the classroom school region and division level the behavior incidents entered into the online system will populate the multi-tiered systems of support workflow in the student information system which will provide a school school-level dashboard for easy access to data that is updated each night which will assist us in developing targeted plans for ongoing improvement finally the current timeline for approval for the srnr or students rights and responsibilities includes a work session on may 4th and action on
147june 17th we look forward to ongoing collaboration with stakeholders and we thank you in advance for your feedback at this time i turn it back over to you dr anderson thank you so much dr boyd i know that we have a work session coming up for this presentation and so the questions may not be forthcoming and i do not see any at this time from my colleagues i do see one comment by miss corbett sanders madam chairman thank you ma'am i apologize i keep forgetting to look at the screen today because so many of us are in the room my apologies ms keith gamara i'll get back with you as soon as miss corbett sanders is completed actually uh my comments are related to the slide that says that you've made changes based on board
148input does that mean changes have been made to the draft already and that a new draft will be put will be posted in advance of our work session thank you so much for your questions corporate sanders the changes reflected on the print slides or changes that were based on feedback from the board on last summer but some of the description and the narrative that i shared was based on some of our collaboration in the recent days that will be updated and provided and shared with board members prior to our next work session as we continue to collaborate however i did want to share that information with the board now are some things that we are planning on and have drafted some changes to within the last couple of days that's fantastic i really appreciate a
149couple of items that you listed in particular the extension of uh the language in the document to make sure that everybody knows that the srnr also applies on our sports fields so that there is a very clear understanding of what is acceptable behavior and what is not so i appreciate that additionally uh dr boyd and i very much appreciate the amount of time you spent with me on the phone about this were you able to get to the state code on the requirement to report infringements of students bringing alcohol onto school property or marijuana usage so we're going to provide some updated information we wanted to make sure that we didn't move too swiftly and identify the incorrect code so we'll provide those updates for the board and what we'll do if it pleases the
150board is that we can make sure that the questions and recommendations that you have similar to what we um did with the restraint seclusion we can identify what those recommendations were and highlight where those um updates have been incorporated into the next update so it's very clear that your concerns and questions were addressed explicitly that is very helpful i really appreciate it and i appreciate your spirit of collaboration that you reached out to board members to identify any of our concerns and that was just so welcome on my part and i really look forward to this the board discussion in more detail i will let you know that i am i raised these issues last year and i continue to be concerned about the school to prison pipeline potential when we turn information over to
151the police on minor infractions by our students the other area and i'm just letting my board colleagues know i have concerns about the language on marijuana usage and how that meshes up with the recent changes at the state level on the legalization of marijuana and wondering why we would treat marijuana usage different than alcohol because they are now treated the same by the state and so thanks a lot i really appreciate all you're doing thank you thank you miss corbett sanders ms keys gamara thank you just give me a moment to get my camera on okay all right well first of all i do appreciate all this work dr williams i'm sorry i wasn't able uh one of the people who got a chance to speak to you but for my fellow board members as
152well as yourself i wanted to identify the areas of concern that i will be raising at the work session um of course we are this is a living document we're constantly working on continuous improvement so the first area of concern is really i think there is some work that needs to be done to make sure that the language is focused on reaching students it when i read the document i get the sense that we're notifying administrators which is great they need to certainly understand um and you know what their authority is but i do think that there needs to be greater clarity with respect to actual notice to students and parents um you know for example the intersectionality between cyber responsibility and what can happen with those violations we we just have we use the
153word obscene material which is not defined in our definitions and given the fact that we have students very early fourth grade fifth grade etc having a phone i think it's important that we work on that language i also want to make sure we understand those discretionary areas and how professional development can help make sure that we're implementing these things with fidelity to avoid those disparities uh the second area of concern really comes from a lot of discussion with young people with our students about how sro sros are included in our school environment i previously had a forum topic that i put on hold because we were focusing on return to school i do plan to reactivate that so that we can make sure that given the most recent and things that we've gone through in
154the last past year we certainly want to recognize how students are feeling and have a more complete discussion about supervision of sros of the boundaries of how they are a nexus to criminal involvement and making sure that we really are focusing on restoration and then my final concern has to do with our special education student our special education students and making sure that we have the clarity that we need there as well so thank you so much and i'll i'll be more i realize we're going to discuss this in a work session and so these will be the areas that i look forward to discussing with you thank you thank you very much tomorrow thank you we look forward to my apologies thank you mr fresh but did she have a response i'm sorry i
155would love to hear it um dr boyd did you have a comment i was just going to share that we look forward to um following up and having some really detailed conversation i know we are only able to to get through some of the topics here and i apologize for not being able to have in-depth conversations but we do plan on having very detailed um discussion with each of you as we work through this document because we know it takes a lot of collaboration and partnership so i've made note of your concerns but i look forward to talking with you further thank you thank you mr fresh thank you um thank you dr boyd i i want to thank you for uh meeting with miss marin and i earlier um i think it was this
156week it's a bit of a blur and talking to us about what more we can do within the srnr to address the use of hate speech um and i look forward to having further conversations about how we work that out i know it's a tight rope in terms of how we can police this and make sure that students are not being harmed by it um so if you'd like to add any uh comments to that based on our conversation or any thinking you've done since then i'd i'd love to hear it thank you so much mr fresh we've talked as a team and we really want to make sure that um i know when we talked in our small group that we've identified um things relative to hate speech as it relates to racial slurs
157um identity expression and a number of things and we want to make sure that we really bolster that information we know part of it is going to be around professional development and one of our public speakers noted that on this evening about really educating um and doing that piece so we know that it's going to need to be twofold the educational piece and working in collaboration with our equity office and also how we strengthen our language within the srnr so that all stakeholders understand the importance of really making sure that everybody feels welcome in our school community right you know i know i'm not the only school board member who has spoken to many students who talk about hearing things um seeing them go and not not even reporting them because they think nothing will
158happen so i think anything we can do to crystallize the school division stance on the issue will be helpful i also appreciated mr rigby's comments about changing the culture in our schools because you know teenagers or teenagers they're not going to report everything and so we need to do our best not only to provide consequences when when warranted but also to provide a culture that is conducive to an environment that doesn't include hate speech thanks thank you miss mclaughlin thank you i know we'll have a work session on this and and be able to dive more deeply in it i would uh first ask uh if there's been any uh just consideration of how much time we'll be able to have for this work session uh because years past uh this is a really um
159important area of concern and focus for the board and so i want to make sure we plan for sufficient time some years we've even had to have two work sessions because the breadth of the work was so so much that it couldn't all get done in one work session so i would uh just suggest that maybe talking with dr boyd and and superintendent brabrand to gauge the amount of time another option is uh dr brabrand you did a fantastic job on recent issues with this board where two by two you met with us to really kind of flush out where board input needed to be and and that might also be another consideration um i just want to echo something that my colleague miss um kisgamara said it's so important that we work on definitions
160so that students really understand what things are oftentimes they they just don't realize that in their own teen behavior and in particular i am very concerned about texting and sexting and so i want to make sure we really uh go to that we've also had cases in the past where particularly middle school when boys and girls are learning to interact with those that they are attracted to and um sometimes they think they're flirting and it's it ends up not being received that way or it's crosses the line but intent versus you know not intent is going to be important there and then in terms of our sros and schools i know our nation is having a lot of conversation about um the how we best utilize law enforcement and as someone who has for years
161talked about that our sros can be a very positive presence because we want to build for children this sense of understanding the partnership that happens in having a safe and secure environment and that law enforcement isn't always there just to find you doing something bad but to be there as a source of support and those are positive lessons however i'm also mindful as a social worker that for traditionally our police officers are taught to to prevent harm from happening and they haven't in their training [Music] been given all of the other um social emotional uh rounding out of of of the population they're going to work with in this particular situation it's with children and i'm proud of the board's legacy for now almost a decade in wanting to make sure that our student discipline
162practices are focused on discipline which is to teach to help students learn how to make good choices and it's not about punishment and that will be important for the role and where we try to clarify what an sro's role is and what it is not um but i i feel the need to really emphasize as we we tackle this really important issue because the boar supervisors fund our our sros and yet you've heard me and others talk about why are we not as a county funding school nurses when you think about what we invest in where we put our money in children being healthy so that they can then be best prepared to learn if we're not investing in that i struggle at times why we invest so much money in the sro program and
163not in the school nursing program so i know some might not see that as tangential and related but i do think they're interconnected because uh in our srnr and we talk about the role of sros in our schools at some point we have to be talking about you know again why where is the role and that and the mission critical need and how if we reform that then there are other benefits to how we best serve and wrap around the supports to our kids i'm i know it might seem as a little roundabout but i still see the connection there so thank you and um dr boyd i i really do appreciate this is a lot for you to take on as you're learning about our system and the srnr as many point out is
164one of the most dense in public school systems so uh there's a lot to learn just in that booklet alone thank you miss mclaughlin and you're definitely correct we had similar discussions with dr bray brand regarding the um importance of the srnr and how much time it requires and we actually had the same discussion regarding the two by twos and phone calls to ensure that we were comprehensive and maximize the opportunity for discussions that we sometimes don't get in other other forums miss mary thank you floor yes thank you um dr boyd this is a question for you and perhaps also also to you dr anderson as our chair will we be discussing sros and whether what to do with that program at our work session about srnr i know that i know i think
165a forum had been maybe proposed i can't recall now where we were but um i'd like clarity please thank you sure i think the sros were the forum topic that miss um keith gamara just referred to that she had put forward while we were still in pandemic and postponed into another time and i'm sure that will come forward as she just shared it is not an embedded part of the srnr but obviously it's a related topic dr boyd did you want to add anything regarding your expectations on that conversation no just that we're just happy to have the discussion and collaborate we want to make sure that everyone is clear and that we're all working towards the same and so we'll make sure we follow up um and i'll be making sure that i'm very
166intentional to get with miss keys gamora to find out what we can do to support the form or what what support she might need from us their information thank you um so i wanted to share this thought from my colleagues so you know that i try to promote us being very thoughtful and planful in what we take on and talking about sros could be a very big topic and we have lots of other big work on our plates at the same time i'm not understanding why we would need a forum topic to be proposed to talk about sros if sros are already in our sr policy and can't that be part of the discussion at the work session so it's a procedural question and also a question of bandwidth here but we know that the
167community has been seeking our action on this or to have a conversation on it it seems like the appropriate time so i guess chairman anderson perhaps you want to respond i don't know where colleagues want to respond i'm not sure if i have a different response because i think the forum topic was geared towards a particular uh a slant and so that wouldn't be necessarily what is provided here i think again they're related there's a space for that discussion but i think miss um keith gamara's forum topic was very specific and that requires some board support for that to move forward okay well i'll just leave that at that but certainly would like to hear from colleagues either tonight or other time soon and just what to expect in the discussion um at the work
168session for the srnr will we be discussing our thoughts on the sro program i think it's appropriate to discuss it there and if we still have a forum topic then that's great too but it seems like a ripe opportunity and a parallel opportunity thank you thank you mr maish thank you happy to follow miss maren actually i i do think process-wise it might make sense um if we're able to time the forum discussion if we do decide to maintain it as a forum uh so that we it can inform our work in the srnr i mean given the mentions in the booklet there would have to be amendments if we do decide a certain you know path forward but i i understand that we have a work session coming up i just wanted to flag
169three things in advance of that that perhaps could be presented and useful information for us to consider number one i remember before dr void uh you know you joined us uh teresa johnson had been talking about the system that we've now put in place to collect data differently in a more centralized way that allows staff to have more of a reflective look back at as to decision making that's occurred on discipline i think it might be beneficial to have an update on some of that and where we've uh where we've come since that point so that would be one ask i have three my second is you know constantly i think in these conversations and i shared some of this even in a return to school work session but with what as far as the
170srnr goes we're thinking kind of from a compliance based perspective what has the you know what changes have come in the law has there some you know what's the state forcing us to do and here are the amendments we're going to make accordingly i would love to be able to see i mean in this presentation you know like okay there's the board feedback section which i mean comes down to whatever we kind of come up with and think about from what we're hearing from constituents doesn't seem to be following consistent process a little bit arbitrary but then we have you know virginia legislative changes virginia board of education model guidance and that's what's informing the changes we're making in the document or in our policy i'd love to see you know dr boyd you're new
171to our system i i think in the opportunity you've had to really give this a thorough look uh feedback that's beyond that let's think of the ways that we can improve upon what we have in you know innovative creative whatever ways that we can perhaps move past uh ways of doing things that are no longer best practice or that are no longer you know trauma informed etc so that would be my second ask is to think of our own fcps um you know uh thinking or around how this could be modified and finally um in light of a lot of what we've seen over the course of the year i know some work has begun begun to address in a more serious way you know what mr first said about hate speech and and such
172incidents i'd love to see some you know work alongside dr williams perhaps in building out some of that accountability uh mechanism that we're hoping to see reflected at minimum as a learning moment from the past but it's always been warranted so i those are just three components i would love to see reflected in the work session i don't know you know dr bray brand if you have thoughts on some of that but in moving us towards really kind of being visionaries ourselves rather than just making the tweaks every year that we're required to make by law anyway you know no less responding to what we have seen to be very real on the ground circumstances and a national conversation that that i would hope is at minimum awakening thank you mr o'mesh and we certainly
173will make sure that we're using our data um the new online referral behavioral system that will be implemented on next year will really give us an opportunity to highlight areas that we're doing well and also areas that we're not doing well and as we look at um the behavior infraction that's just what is that symptom but we want to make sure that as we look at our data that we're responding more to the manifestation of what's going on so do we need more um training and support for various stakeholder groups our students our families our staff our administrators on cultural responsiveness as you said trauma informed schools those various things so i think that that data will certainly help us to inform what our division needs but also what are very school specific needs as
174we move forward to really make sure we're not just doing compliance but really outcome improvement for all of our schools one of the things miss so much i would just say too is dr boyd and dr williams and i will talk about how we can help work with the board i know you're already doing some two by twos um but so that we can maybe do a little work prior to the work session uh i know there was mention of a second work session but we may be able to do some individual work with board members so the the work session that we already have scheduled will be rich focused and really make make it feel like progress and one thing i just want to say to the board and community just a reminder go
175back and look at the srnr in 2017 prior to my arrival and look at the srnr now look at the change in the srnr in four years what has been done this is not the srnr of old in fairfax county public schools we have together in partnership because this was a priority of the prior board and this board made a massive number of changes working with the board the leadership team and working with our principals to make changes in how we create the caring culture there's still more to do there's no doubt about it but i really believe we have been very proactive we had board members actually join us down in richmond as we went to these state conferences around disrupting what ms corbett sanders talked about that school classroom to courtroom pipeline and
176i think we really if you go back and look at an old srnr document from just three or four years ago to now you can see and feel the difference and what we need to do is take that momentum of partnership that we've had and keep going with it ms omesh as we move forward so i look forward to the work session and i really appreciate again dr boyd to to you and ms scott a wonderful presentation tonight thank you for representing us so well thank you dr brabrand ms tolin yes um i just wanted to react to some of the questions that were brought up around should we tackle the topic of sros within this work session i guess thinking about you know mr carson i've already talked about being meeting managers for this
177particular session the number of topics that people have just brought up tonight and i think you know although srl's sros is maybe a a parallel topic to srnr it's also a huge topic um you know karen keith camaro and i've had a number of discussions dr braven i've talked about it it's a big topic i mean looking at expanding our mou maybe different training different requirements you know it's huge so i think it warrants you know the separate forum topic and a separate work session and discussions and community input all on its own so just my two cents on moving forward with these topics thank you miss tolin miss cohen yeah thank you i definitely look forward to digging into this um at our work session but i did just want to flag um an
178area of concern and i would definitely be interested in having dr williams speak to us as well but i i still remain concerned about how we're treating tardies um and you know really trying to dig into in particular in elementary school where those tardies are coming from and making sure that we're not in a punitive way you know having kids bear the consequences for for decisions that their parents make um and so you know i think we've seen many times that tardiness is sometimes more of an indication of what's going on at home and i recognize when we get to level two um you know then we wind up with the consultation and look at some mtss but i'd like us to do a little bit deeper dive on on how we deal with tardiness
179here thank you miss cohen and now we'll have an opportunity for um board members would like to speak again we will start with miss pisgamara thank you um i did want to respond to the comments and thank you miss tolin for um because we have talked about the whole sro issue uh if my colleagues may remember when we discussed the srnr last year i also brought up concerns regarding sros and the position of the board at that time was that this was a discussion more focused on sr e s r and r and not sros and so i'm happy to address this anyway that the board believes is appropriate but i do not believe that this is something that is outside of our banner the concerns that our students are expressing the concerns that we
180have heard repeatedly in the public arena even just getting through this week has been difficult for many of our students and so i think we have to have this discussion um i'm happy to work with my colleagues on how we do this but i believe that it has to be done and so i look forward to hopefully getting this forum topic scheduled um i'm happy to i probably will be revising the language from last year because a year has passed um but we do need greater clarification so that our students can feel safe so that our parents uh have a greater clarity on what to expect and uh we can go forward with the understanding of what we have learned in the last year so thank you thank you miss keys gamara miss seismo heiser
181thank you um i'm not gonna add too much the discussion i know we'll have a work session and i look forward to i love the idea of a two by two to really be able to dig into questions so we can save our work session for for more robust discussion amongst the twelve of us and staff um i did have and this doesn't need to be answered today but just as we go forward i am curious about the 635 incidences and and were those related to when we face students back in person or those related to online so i just want some more information on that even for this year and whether we need to have some analysis of those incidences um and looking at our srrs um i do agree with ms keys camaro
182and many of our colleagues i think we need a very robust discussion about sros and i think it's gonna be difficult to combine the two so just for my chair and vice chair um the last question i wanted to talk about um dr boyd last year when we had these discussions with miss johnson we talked a lot about intent and we talked a lot about protections for both iep students and five and students with 504s we talked about looking at issues of intent especially for our special education students so as we dig into the srnr this year that is something i'd want to sort of dig into a little bit more as well as self-determination because when we talk about hate speech and we talk about bullying and we talk about the relationship in our
183sr and r we often rely on students either self-reporting or bystanders or champion self are reporting those incidences and i think we need to do a good job with our students with disabilities self-determination and knowing um what to look for and protecting themselves and so and also looking at intent when we're looking at behavior so i just want to dig into some of those issues i just want to put that out there for you as we move forward in this conversation thank you massaismahizer at this point we will close this initial introduction of the srnr and we will prepare oh we have another speaker miss mclaughlin please go ahead i just because i know that this is new work for our board to be doing i just wanted to make sure there is no misunderstanding
184of where i have been for the last nine years even when we had some deeply tragic school shootings and there was community discussion about adding sros into our elementary schools i was vehemently against doing that again i pressed the need for we need to get school nurses in our schools before anything else so for anyone who's taking my comments about trying to have a holistic discussion about sros i'm just trying to be respectful i think that we we need to have that respectful holistic conversation on all counts but i don't want anybody take away for a moment that as a social worker my focus has been what do we need in our k-12 schools and we need to first be having the therapeutic support services and health care services before we put police officers in
185schools and that i've been consistent so i want to make sure as my colleagues you guys know how strongly i stand on that thank you miss mclaughlin we are now going to sunset this part of the discussion as we have more plans for robust um discussions and conversations during the work session next week so thank you all and thank you to dr boyd for the presentation agenda item 4.01 confirmation of actions of action taken and closed meeting i call on miss corbett sanders for a motion thank you madam chair i move that the annual contracts for the instructional personnel identified in closed meeting not be renewed for the 2021-2022 school year according to the terms and conditions discussed in the closed session is there a second thank you miss picarski all in favor miss corbett
186sanders miss tolin miss picarsky ms seismo heiser and myself all opposed those abstaining miss marin thank you now i will turn it over to miss picarski for the consent and new business items thank you item five consent agenda are adopted rules of parliamentary procedure robert's rules provide for a consent agenda listing several items for approval of the board by a single motion many items listed have gone through board review and documentation has been provided to all board members and the public in advance items may be removed from the consent agenda at the request of any board member prior to the meeting the consent agenda items are on the screen is there any objection to approving the consent agenda hearing and seeing none the consent agenda is approved item six do business the following are new
187business agenda items there will not be a vote on these items tonight but action is scheduled at a future meeting and they are on the screen thank you very much miss picarski item 7.01 superintendent matters dr brabrand thank you chairman anderson i'll be brief in my comments to you all tonight uh given the hour but i wanted to share just a couple quick things music recognition fcps has been named the best co best community for music education by the national association for music merchants foundation we were recognized for outstanding commitment to music education and providing efforts to support music access and education to all students and to qualify for this designation we provide information on funding grad requirements music class participation facility support for the music program and community music making programs we're one of
188686 school divisions nationwide and again they're 10 000 plus school districts nationwide 686 that receive this designation wonderful speaking about returning to school in the fall we have kindergarten registration well underway a reminder to families with kids who'll turn five on or by september 30th it is time to register your child for kindergarten for more information on how to register your child please visit our website and contact or contact your child's elementary school if you aren't sure which school your child will attend you can go to our website type in your address and find that school for your child we'll be welcoming our kindergarten students and all of our students to five days of in-person instruction and people have asked i heard even tonight in public comment how are we doing it differently we talked
189a lot about that earlier just in this work session earlier this week first we're going to be following cdc guidance to the maximum extent practicable given the virginia state law effective july 1. we've been following state guy cdc guidelines of course now and we're going to continue to do our best to do it to the maximum extent practicable we're going to have our bell schedules back at pre-pandemic schedules we're going to have our classroom monitors gone and all of our teachers back in the building so things are going to be different in the fall to allow us to have all kids back i want that to be very clear to the community and finally i really appreciated uh this board tonight having the arab american heritage resolution and the comments of miso mesh and other
190board members and i wanted you all to know that i was invited by the arab american foundation sunday afternoon i'll be making comments as they honor national arab american heritage month so i'm excited about doing that and spending my sunday afternoon sharing comments and really celebrating the rich cultural and ethnic diversity of fairfax county and fairfax county public schools so thank you all very much and i will see you all soon thank you dr brabrand and gen agenda item 8.01 board committee reports i call mr frisch for a governance committee report i think you'll keep this quick the governance committee met a week before last and we moved several policies forward for the full board discussion you'll see those on our agenda tonight under new business dealing with procurement contracting um also dealing with school
191counseling services so i look forward to those conversations in the future thank you thank you ms keith gamara for a for an audit committee report thank you we had a rather robust uh audit committee meeting uh first we talked about hiring the hiring and onboarding audit it has been completed and will be discussed at the may meeting it will provide a benchmark hiring and onboarding procedures to identify any areas for improvement to evaluate hiring policies and procedures for new employees in review for consistent adherence to schools and central offices and to ensure controls exist around employee verification and eligibility we also review the request for a business continuity plan audit fcps management requested an extension and this audit would cover um how we have our crisis plans and cetera do the to the pandemic our
192superintendent and our staff as for that extension but he also promised to complete allow us to have access so that we can complete that audit by during the 2021 school year we also have completed the fidelity of implementation of school board actions audit the report has been shared with the full board and the finding was that for both school board motions and forum topic consensus items there was no centralized tracking or reporting process to document and ensure all actions are seen to resolution when applicable in a clear and conspicuous manner our auditor general made several recommendations and the audit committee will be reviewing this with respect to motions as well as next steps we also have the budget driven audit recommendations three outstanding recommendations from the fiscal year 18 facilities maintenance and audit are budget
193driven and the audit committee will be working with our auditor general in order to make sure that as we considered our budget we can also consider these recommendations thank you thank you miss keys gamora agenda item 9.01 board matters as we've been doing as of late i will call them three board members so please follow each other we will start with ms general kofax ms keys gamara and miss cohen mr koufax keys gamara and cohen um thank you madam chair um briefly i just want to say i look forward to celebrating the dedication of john r lewis high school tomorrow night i look forward to seeing my colleagues and many other um of congressman lewis's colleagues there as well and i know there will be some student performances which i'm looking forward to seeing but
194due to some social distancing restrictions much of the community has been provided virtual links to this so i really look forward to this this has been a long time coming and um that is it for tonight so we're looking forward to celebrating tomorrow yes i want to report that i have the opportunity to meet with our chinese american parents association and discuss their concerns regarding uh some of the recent difficult things that the our asian community has been experiencing and i look forward to collaborating with them in the future and i too am looking forward to celebrating with our colleagues as we uh recognize and place the fully officially recognized the name of john lewis on the high school i also want to thank whoever wrote the jeopardy question and included our high school there
195and allowed us to have uh such a timely celebration in an unexpected way so i look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow and have a great week everybody since may 25th we have watched george floyd's murder on every news media outlet we've heard him cry out for his mother and plead that he could not breathe we have wept we have marched we have prayed for not only george floyd and his loved ones but for the soul of our nation on tuesday we watched a jury say the words that we prayed to hear that george floyd mattered that his life mattered that black lives matter on tuesday we watched the criminal justice system work as it was designed to do but let us remember that this day was remarkable because our black and brown friends have grown
196accustomed to a system that holds no justice for them so while we celebrate the jury's decision let us not forget that the work is not done and that that work begins here in fcps it begins in our classrooms and in our hallways and in our homes i'm grateful to our equity team for beginning that work here and i look forward to partnering with them to make our schools a place where all of our students feel not only safe but feel seen and heard i do want to say that i'm so appreciative of all of our staff and everything they've done these last weeks to get even more of our students back into our buildings safely and successfully i know that the creativity that they have had to show including kids bringing beach towels and figuring
197out really creative ways for snack time and nature walks i just appreciate all that you've put into it i really enjoyed my time at silverbrook elementary west springfield elementary cherry run elementary and was super excited to purple up for my visits to fairview and white oaks elementaries yesterday i look forward to visiting greenbrier east in the morning it's been wonderful to see all of our schools do what they do best and it's been wonderful to see our kids back in the classrooms and doing really well online and i look forward to a lot more of that in the weeks to come and in the fall for sure thanks thank you miss cohen the next speakers miss omega miss marin and mr fresh thank you i'm happy to follow miss cohen um i think you know
198reflecting on obviously the chauvin case uh shows us not you know it shows us what's possible so there's some hope and optimism there but it certainly doesn't show us what's probable in our country and i think that's something for us to continue thinking about and i just want to name over the course of the past month you know we heard today from a student of course about uh the hate that asian americans have been experiencing uh we know that there's continued hate against so many different groups uh you know our trans brothers and sisters across this country have also been experiencing quite the bit of hate uh in in recent weeks uh and i think that those are things for us to reflect on uh right before the celebration of louis tomorrow and thinking of
199what that symbolizes uh and hopefully the page we can start to turn even more uh here starting right here in fairfax um and it leads again to the conversation about accountability what are we gonna do structurally to say that these are not things we tolerate and that we want students to grow and to develop in their thinking and their ability to understand one another and that's not going to happen because of talk so i really do look forward to some of the steps moving forward as i've shared with colleagues that i plan to bring and have been pleased with some folks who have already reached out about their interest finally on a lighter note happy earth day to everyone i do think it's you know a beautiful time for us to evaluate our own practices
200to remember how we can be you know more environmentally friendly this is a year that we saw our first electric bus be introduced in fairfax county a really you know exciting development and of course the conversations around outdoor classrooms which i know some of my colleagues are really passionate about are continuing so i hope that as we talk about social justice we also think of environmental justice as a key component within that um and we continue to grow together in in better understanding how we can shape a better future for all of us good evening and happy earth day yes um i actually had a fantastic earth day celebrating with about two dozen students from carson middle school and robinson secondary at the annual school environmental action showcase or seize and this is an event
201that i've been part of in some way for many many years and it was a thrill to be able to facilitate a conversation today for our middle school students with uh state delegate david bullava and another local partner miss celeste land who has been a long time environmental ed supporter and the students were very focused on electric cars and what kind of legislation was going to support more electric cars more renewable energy also talk about reducing single-use plastic and plastic bags so i think they learned a lot about how to advocate and certainly share the resources of get to green i also was reminded today that the state budget did approve two to staff members to work on environmental and outdoor education at the state level so this is huge and it's something that ms
202tollen and i advocated for before we were elected and so it's a great opportunity and it's one of the things i'm very eager to get back to focusing on as we get through covid the other thing i'm focusing on is environment assuming is anti-racism and anti-bias and so this sunday i'm having a town hall to discuss those issues and hear from the community about bias in our curriculum so very specifically about the content that our children learn but also how our staff is trained to engage them and facilitate that content expanding uh you know what we're teaching not only about arab americans but all sorts of groups and cultures i've been reading so much and there's just so much that our kids will benefit from knowing i too am excited to attend the lewis rededication
203and you know while it is remarkable in some ways it's also unordinary it's not really extraordinary because it should have been done a long time ago and it should have been done in response to community requests so friday we will celebrate justice though and we will honor our students whose educational home is now in a building bearing the name of a civil rights warrior and i that is something to be celebrated just on monday i'll be focusing on rest in there's two community meetings one with neighborhood school readiness teams that do a lot of work to ensure that children especially those that haven't had early childhood education are coming into our schools as prepared as possible and then that evening i'll be joining assistant superintendent for facilities and planning jeff plattenburg at the invitation of
204hunt of a hundred mill supervisor walter outbourne to talk about to attend the rest and comprehensive plan study task force and we've been specifically invited to talk about facilities needs for our schools as resting goes through some you know creative work about the community so i really appreciate mr alcorn's inclusion of us in this timely discussion on other news we're in the throes of the budget season we're working eagerly with our count of counties board of supervisors so there'll be a lot more on that and um and and then i'm looking forward to teacher appreciation week coming up so we can honor all of our teachers who've done so much for us this year thank you all right as others have said today's earth day and i am grateful for students who have regularly reminded
205us that every level of government must do its part to tackle the the crisis of climate in this country and it's thanks to their advocacy on electric buses solar on our schools net zero buildings and more that we are on the right path so i'm grateful for that last weekend i was able to get an early start celebrating earth week with supervisor dalia palchek at blake lane park in oakton we met with girl scouts and community members and advocates and helped plant some trees and remove invasive species we also celebrated the board of supervisors vote to preserve the park by transferring it to the fairfax county park authority since our last regular meeting i have visited a few schools and talked with principals and teachers about our approach to literacy and reading instruction the challenges
206of concurrent of the concurrent model and uh the creative solutions that they're invoking to provide four days of in-person instruction each week for as many students as possible uh in the week ahead i am like my colleagues looking forward to the lewis high school dedication i'll be volunteering with food for neighbors right here at luther jackson middle school in providence district and i will be visiting more schools before i close i do want to talk briefly about the trial of george floyd's murderer when the guilty verdict was finally read by the judge this week i hopped on twitter to see what people were saying as you can imagine what i found was a mix of hope and hate digging a little deeper i found fcps students weighing in they talked about the nature of justice
207they debated the future of policing they argued about the persistence of systemic racism they tweeted about the emotional toll these events and these incidents have on their mental health i think we all know that systemic injustice did not start with one case and fixing systemic injustice will not be done with a single case but watching the dialogue of our students that i saw following the verdict gives me tremendous hope about our future and knowing that we're all in this together to fix this and get it right is gratifying thank you thank you mr fresh our next three speakers i'm miss corbett sanders miss towin and ms mclaughlin thank you very much and i'm glad to follow mr frish before i talk about specifics of board matters i do want to address the importance of lessons
208learned from the showdown case and the fact that the reason that the successful verdict was arrived at was because of the brave people the young people who pulled out their phones and videotaped and made that information available and held the system accountable and that's something that i think we should be applauding because it shows a hope for the future but it also indicates that we need to support the willingness and the innovation of our students in and young people in holding holding the system accountable and so i would urge that we we use that same approach when we address challenges here in fairfax county and within our school system uh dealing with bias and hate and so because let's be clear that was hateful what occurred nine minutes and 25 seconds of hate so moving
209on um this week has been a chat you know it's it's had its um pain and it's had its celebrations and one of the great celebrations that i was able to participate in was the dedication of the historical marker being reinstalled in gum springs for those of you who don't know about gum springs it is the oldest black community in fairfax county and it is historically very important not only for the county but to mount vernon and due to a traffic accident where somebody took out the historical marker and didn't have any insurance and the way that the system worked we had to raise funds to get the marker back up i just thought it was wonderful to see and then to come back and read an email that says that the state or the
210county wants our students to identify locations for historical markers in each of the magisterial districts so i'm very excited about this opportunity for all of our students to do this and i'm hoping that there might be a historical marker on quanda road soon i also want to send a shout out and a great thank you to all of our principals our facilities folks and our regional staff in making sure that as many of our buildings that have opened up for four days a week have done so and that they're continuing to work to get even more of our kids back into school four days a week so it's it's wonderful to see it's been fun to visit schools and see our kids it's an exciting time additionally i'm going to be cheering on south county
211stallions on saturday as they compete for the national or for the state championship against the james madison warhawks and so i know drainsville and i know providence you all have students at madison but i will be hoping to see the stallions bring that trophy home then just one additional piece fairfax county public schools is not only registering for our kindergarteners we have slots for pre-k and early head start and that means for students from six weeks to two years old so if you know children that can benefit from this and meet the criteria for head start please have them register we certainly want to have as many of our kids in early education as possible and with that good night okay happy earth day i had to start with that i also spent the morning
212with our robinson high school ibess class hearing about projects on endangered species and clean water where i worked with senator jennifer boysko and secretary of education kearney to encourage the students work and advocacy many of our students or many of our schools like robinson participated in the student environmental action showcase today students presented solutions on renewable energy clean water wildlife habitat transportation etc all ways to make the earth a better place for all of us big news from the showcase today hot off the press rachel carson middle school took fourth place fifth place and seventh place with three of their teams um they took three places out of ten of the top ten places in the caring for the watershed program so congratulations with picarsky and also hot off the press i'm super excited this
213is a great earth day announcement delegate murphy passed house resolution 545 which was a resolution to honor franklin sherman elementary school as a two-time eagle schools green flag winner franklin sherman is a green flag school that has kept their eagle schools team going through the pandemic franklin sherman elementary school has promoted waste reduction and energy management built and maintained habitats for wildlife produced vegetables for the community from raised beds bed gardens with help from a nova horticulturalist student the school donates used unused food from the cafeteria to a food bank and members of the franklin sherman elementary school's pta coordinated a local cub scout troop and eight local families to clean and mulch the school's garden beds to prepare for to prepare for new crops in spring 2021 they will they are planning to donate
214the food that they grow in these beds to share of mclean so craig congratulations franklin sherman on other notes of news in drainsville um churchill rhode elementary school has a new playground thank you so much to facilities for your help in um putting that up we celebrated that last week i'm looking forward to being out at churchill road this week working with the second grade team to get the kids outside hiking through some of the beautiful outdoor learning spaces that they have at that school i've also had the good fortune of meeting with our chinese american parent association and you know hearing about some of their resources that they have for families and will be planning to continue these conversations herndon elementary school just started the search for a new principle so that's very exciting
215i'll be meeting next week with your angel pta leaders and student leaders and tomorrow visiting herndon middle school helping out with their outdoor lunch spaces and i will also visit herndon high school tomorrow super excited to see our students in school four days a week and happy that many of our drainsville schools most of them have done very well with this super proud of our principals and teachers and all of our staff thank you so much for all the work that you've done to make this happen um the alongside middle school and cooper middle school teams are both going to the national science olympiad competition so we're very proud of them i also want to commend um michelle liu from longfellow middle school you all met her at the last meeting that we had when
216she unpresented her video on work that she's doing around aapi education and curriculum she was honored last week with an award from e-girl power for her work in raising awareness around the need for aapi education the celebration took place yesterday at longfellow middle school and i was thrilled to be there she also won an essay competition for a piece that she wrote on this topic i'm also very proud of her maclean student that spoke tonight by kathy zhang who spoke to us about the same topic that was a long list for drains we'll pass it on to the next speaker great my turn uh first of all uh like uh many of my colleagues um i have really enjoyed being able to go out and visit the schools in the braddock district i've seen eight
217of them in just the last two weeks and dr braber and i just want to tell you that the dedication of your principals and their staff to find the solutions to bring back as many children as possible who were eligible as hybrid students has been phenomenal your regional teams have also worked extremely hard and i absolutely want to give a shout out to our amazing deputy superintendent francis ivey i know that she is leading by example in helping this problem-solving effort and i couldn't be more grateful on behalf of our families every email that i get from them the joy and excitement the kids every time you ask them they're they they put up double hands when i say how many of you enjoying being back it's double hands some jumping out of their seats
218they're so happy and so for that i'm very grateful i've also heard how our custodians are unsung heroes how they are just absolutely finding the ways especially reopening spaces like gyms and multi-purpose rooms reconfiguring our cafeterias it's just outstanding so it's made me so proud of how hard our system took this effort coming back from spring break and so quickly doing it and i also want to thank our families as well your continued advocacy your focus in in helping us to identify where our challenges are it helps make a difference we cannot do this alone and your partnership and your patience and your your desire to help your child and help every child thrive is greatly appreciated in terms of happy earth day i do want to say that a special shout out to our
219assistant superintendent of facilities jeff plattenberg and his team i was interviewed by the robinson students morning show today and i'm going to send out to all of my colleagues the responses to the questions that i received in advance jeff and his team put together incredible amount of information and i was told by the students that the wealth of information i presented just was very exciting to them and the credit goes dr brubrand again to great staff you have and what they produced for me um and then finally i do want to say how excited i am to join my colleagues tomorrow in celebration of the renaming of the john r lewis high school it really is um just a profound and happy celebration not just for the louis community but for this board and for
220fairfax county schools in general but i do want to take this moment and really thank my prior colleagues on the board because i do want to reassure all of you sitting here tonight that the prior board absolutely under the leadership of ms darnak kofax brought it to us as soon as her community said that we would like to consider this name change and for all the right reasons when we changed justice high school's name so i don't want anyone to be left with the impression that this the prior board didn't do or didn't act soon enough we absolutely did what our what we were committed to doing which is helping to um create a dialogue a conversation we also work to improve our renaming process and all of that lent to what i believe is
221going to show tomorrow when we as a board partner with our communities we can find ourselves in a really beautiful place and so i i want to thank miss darren at kofax because i have the opportunity here at the microphone this has been a long journey for you in representing your community and you've put in a lot of work behind the scenes that nobody knows in preparing for tomorrow's celebration along with the principal along with the regional superintendent but it really truly is going to make tomorrow very special and i'm excited for that thank you massage mohiser the miss bakarski thank you i appreciate it and um i just wanted to say i i too am thrilled to see classrooms both virtually and in person i'm thrilled to um see our students back in the
222building but also see them still learning online and our teachers doing amazing efforts and balancing both i'm very excited to announce that this saturday will be our second traffic stop event for people with disabilities and police officers to practice safe interactions for people with disabilities um both people who are already driving and those who are not in parked cars so i'm really really thrilled about that i'm also thrilled about the changes to the governor's restrictions on spectators for arts and music because our arts and thank you to everybody who advocated for that because our arts and music parents are just as proud as our sports parents and deserve just as much right to safely be able to watch their students perform so i am thrilled about that so thank you dr bray bryan i know
223you all advocated strongly for that i just have to say breaking news we expect to have further guidance that will actually expand capacity for our in-person graduations and for social gatherings we'll have updates in the days ahead to share with the board and the community from another update from the governor just in the last 24 hours thank you yay well that's exciting i was gonna say i'm excited to actually be able to see my son perform in his high school play so um but i also want to say i'm wearing purple today for a month of the military child i have as a former military spouse for just a short time i saw firsthand the amount of sacrifices our military families and our connected children make and so i just wanted to give a shout
224out to all of our children for their resilience and their strength especially in this year i did want to especially thank our principals our facility folks our staff our regional leadership and as ms mclaughlin said dr ivey it's been an incredible effort on the part of our principals and all of our staff to go from expecting two days a week to change cdc guidelines to bring in students for four days a week and i am so impressed not just that their ability to do it but their grace and and kindness and empathy in the way they've done it and the way they've communicated about it so i just wanted to say i i really appreciate the work of our principals and our region leadership in supporting them in that work um as earth day today
225i um i always think about this on earth day that in the midst of all of our differences we actually share one home and that's our planet right and and kovid has laid bare to the truth that we're also all responsible for each other we're all one people and we must come together to save each other in the last year what i've seen more than anything else is our students recognize that truth and shoulder that responsibility with a maturity beyond their years even as it seems the adults around them are fighting and divided this weekend i was at the lake braddock bruin band bash say that five times fast and um this was for these kids their entire marching band season in one day and i stood there and i watched the three drum majors
226who had worked for four years as hard as our athletes do to become drum majors standing on their stands tall and proud directing their peers on the field for the first time and they all wore shirts the back of their shirt had the word ubuntu these shirts were a gift from their band to the students this word ubuntu is an african philosophy that roughly translates to i am because you are it is the common humanity a oneness of humanity and you and me both these students with the embodiment of that humanity they stood there they weren't lamenting they weren't angry they weren't sad they were tall and proud and united and grateful and joyful in making this music and accepting of their role in combating a global pandemic they understood that they are because we
227are on earth day in the middle of a global pandemic the ones who knew the best that we are all interconnected and responsible for each other were those students on that field and those drum majors leading them they were the perfect embodiment of ubuntu they will show us the path forward to healing and unity if we're willing to listen thank you excellent thank you i also want to thank all our regional superintendents that have worked with our principals our staff our teachers everybody has really moved mountains um and and and families are really grateful for it and so our kids um it it really makes a difference so i'm i am forever grateful that we have been able to do that this year and i'm really looking forward to the fall um also as a
228parent i'll be honest um today i got to go to a ribbon cutting for our first solar array at centerville elementary school yes and it really was the highlight of the week so i did send miss mulberg some pictures because i wanted you know to share some with you it was great this is part of the solar in schools program from dominion energy and it provides our students the chance to observe and learn first hand about solar energy in addition to the solar panel our students received our schools received educational materials and training and our students will be able to actually track the generation of electrical power by viewing it in the in the data system through their ipads and they'll be able to actually have competitions with other school districts so it's a lot
229of fun and you know we talk a lot on this board about outdoor learning and environmental i mean learning and centerville is an amazing amazing example of things we can do so i i invite any of you anytime uh to come over to the sully district and and visit us because there are really some incredible um things going on and i also want to say say congratulations to quite a few fairfax county students who participated in the fairfax parks poetry contest for earth day and including one one of my sully students at bull run that won in grades four through six so that's pretty exciting um our kids are are pretty exciting and they're really neat and the future is in good hands and i urge you to find those poems and read a little
230bit and and hear their voices so thank you okay thank you miss um picarsky very similarly to my colleague mr frish i will be here tomorrow along with my children while volunteering at the food for neighbors event here at luther jackson this is a an event that takes place every other month and they're expected to have numerous volunteers to sort groceries and drivers just collecting them it's just a wonderful opportunity and i'm looking forward to con contributing we've been very busy in the mason district and i have to say we have kept our region office hopping so i do want to send a very special shout out to dr zuluwaga dr menue dr mitchell and miss gross at the region 2 office because this week it seems as if i spent most of my time
231with them between between meetings for principal selections for columbia and justice the braddock renovation this week and the numerous meetings that were held for the boundary study with the justice pyramid community three options were presented to our parents over four separate community meetings this week and the options were based on the feedback that we received the previous month over 400 community members registered for these meetings and this is not due to any small feat dr zuluaga was very dogged and determined and worked very hard with our parent liaisons to make sure that we could have really significant outreach in order to have that many of our parents participate i'm also very grateful that we had some school board members who participated miss seismor heiser joined as well as miss tolen so thank you for your
232support and guidance we're looking forward to the next steps of the project where we are able to provide a recommendation where staff is able to provide recommendation to the board and the public hearing and to move that project along for glen forest i also want to say i'm very excited about the john r lewis rededication tomorrow and i'm looking forward to participating in that event for me it will be the best the best capstone of this very difficult week which many of you spoke to a little while ago my last comment is one to re to say happy birthday to ms picarski whose day is tomorrow so happy birthday to you and we have one coming up very soon and i don't think we have a board meeting between then so i want to say
233happy early birthday to ms corbett sanders because that will be happening uh on the first the third so it's coming up before we have another meeting so i did not want to miss that opportunity and i believe that is it for us for this night it is 10 38 and our meeting is adjourned good night all you