001come to order i will now take roll miss cohen okay we'll come back miss carpet sanders do we not have audio with the folks at home [Music] i can hear you dr anderson thank you miss omega is here miss picarsky ms seismo heiser i'm sorry i'm here i'm here thank you i'm here thank you mr frisch hello hello ms keith gamara good evening good evening miss mclaughlin good evening miss marin good evening miss tolin hello i'm here miss cohen and mr not cofox i'm here good evening good evening and last call for miss cohen okay we will wait for her to come in uh mr anubudo are you with us i am good evening to you please rise as our student representative nathan anabudo leads us in reciting of the pledge of allegiance followed by
002a moment of silence thank you dr anderson 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 thank you for a moment of silence in order to comply with section 2.2-3712-d 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 january 21 2021 and to the best of each member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board during the closed meeting thank you miss corbett sanders seconded by miss cohen all in
003favor we have miss merritt mississippi heiser missile meish miss mclaughlin miss corbett sanders miss cohen ms dana koufax miss keys gemara miss tolin mr frisch miss picarski and myself that is unanimous item 2.5 the red for ed resolution has been removed from tonight's agenda copies of tonight's agenda are available in the back of the auditorium tonight's meeting is being broadcast on channel 99 and live streamed on the website at fcps.edu tv slash c899 i now call on mr anabooto for an announcement thank you dr anderson um my wi-fi isn't acting up so i'm gonna keep my video off um so everyone can be clearly african-american history month february originally established as negro history week in 1926 by dr carter g woodson a noted african-american author and scholar this event evolved into the establishment of in
0041976 of february as black history month the commemoration has increasingly been referred to as african-american history month although both names are currently in use this year's theme the black family representation identity and diversity explores the wide ranging diversity of black family life from single to two parent households to nuclear and extended families throughout black history factors such as inequality and poverty have put pressure on maintaining family ties in a better life than traveling far from home this may be the reason why family reunions have always remained popular within the african-american community economic pressures that may pull families apart also often unite them that is against prejudice and bigotry many black families may pool resources to find job opportunities or simply find emotional comfort within their own communities throughout american history the black community has always
005exhibited an unwavering understanding of the value of family as an incomparable source of comfort strength and even survival thank you dr anderson thank you very much mr anubudo at this time i call on miss marin for recognition yes thank you i'm glad to recognize national school counseling week our national school counseling week will be celebrated february 1st through 5th to focus our public attention on the unique contribution of our school counselors this week is sponsored by the american counselor association and it highlights what we know is a tremendous impact in our schools for our students that counselors provide it's always celebrated in the first full week of february you know fairfax county schools employs over almost 700 school counseling professionals including school counselors directors of student services and career center specialists they are vital to
006our schools and our children as part of national school counseling week it's an honor to congratulate kathleen o'tal school counselor at mclean high school who is recognized as the 2020 virginia school counselor association secondary counselor of the year way to go we're lucky to have you we would also like to congratulate ann lee school counselor at lindbrook elementary who was recognized as the fcps outstanding school-based professional employee for 2020. we're also very fortunate to have you thank you to our counselors and we'll keep advocating to the state to give us the funding we need to make sure all of our children have your supports thank you thank you miss marin at this time i call on mrs corbett sanders for recognition thank you chair anderson this is truly a pleasure to do the recognition of
007national career and technical education month and before i read the recognition i would like to encourage all of our families especially as we start our students start planning for next year's curriculum to have a conversation about the opportunities available to them to our students through the cte programs so with that i will read career and technical education or cte month is a public awareness campaign held every february to celebrate cte and the achievements and accomplishments of cte programs across the country this year's theme celebrate today own tomorrow raises awareness of the innovation and excellence that exists in our cte programs as well as the crucial role that cte plays in relaying our students readying our students for careers and our nation for economic success career and technical education prepares both youth and adults for a
008wide range of careers from nursing to computer technicians these careers may require varying levels of education from high school to post-secondary certificates to two and four-year college degrees the subject areas most commonly associated with career and technical education are programming cyber security automotive technician cosmetologists law enforcement nursing emergency services culinary arts child development education marketing entrepreneurship electronics and engineering career and technical education is offered in middle schools high schools two-year community and technical colleges and other post-secondary schools according to the u.s bureau of statistics 18 of the 20 fastest growing occupations within the next decade will require career and technical education thank you to all of our cte teachers and staff who help students and realize in realizing the portrait of a graduate outcomes and ensure students are college and career ready i would also
009like to thank the cte advisory committee for all their hard work as well thank you thank you miss corbett sanders the next order of business is citizen 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 only 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 with the decorum and respect appropriate to the conduct of the of the public's business and speakers should
010stand behind the black line on the floor and speak into the microphone thank you for your cooperation and thanks to those who have come to speak to us today we do have 10 citizens who have signed up to address the board and i will have the clerk begin to call them miss mulberg our first speaker is josh rau joshua okay i'll move to our second speaker kimberly adams good evening chair anderson school board members dr brabrand and leadership team i was planning to stand before you this evening to speak on the red for ed resolution that's been pulled but i'll speak on other matters as the president of the fairfax education association i'm glad to report that i myself along with many thousands of your employees are halfway through our two dose vaccination process at
011the last meeting i stood before you to tell you that you needed to vaccinate your staff before returning them to in-person instruction and we are so proud that vaccination is underway now all eligible school staff including teachers assistants bus drivers food service office staff administrators school maintenance custodial as well as central office personnel are in this process now for fcps that means two doses of a vaccination the timeline and return to in-person instruction must reflect that we wait for the second dose to be effective concerns also remain that students will not be vaccinated before they return to school this will require that we maintain the hybrid model and continue social distancing masking and all other mitigation strategies we still expect to see continued health department supports in contact tracing and testing to slow the spread
012of this virus in our schools your employees are doing everything they can to continue their day-to-day work within fcps and we wish that we did not have to come to you every two weeks to remind you that safe return must be our priority in just the past two weeks we've seen covid19 cases rise across the county to over 700 cases per 100 000 residents much higher than our metric of the 200 cases per 100 000 an increase on school campuses has happened even though we are fully virtual athletes coaches and school staff continue to test positive please ensure that the fully virtual option remains for all students and staff who'd feel safest at home as european nations return to quarantine and as we as a nation have surpassed 400 000 deaths from covet 19 this
013moment is critical if we stay home just a little while longer vaccinate as many adults as possible and commit to vaccination for our students before removing the hybrid option then our community will have a strong chance of turning this pandemic around as february approaches we would also like to thank all of our school counselors who have been with us throughout this pandemic providing supports to students families and even their fellow staff members we thank our career and technical educators who bring their passion to encouraging our students to find their path in science and technology fields finally the fea wishes to acknowledge next week as virginia school principals appreciation week we thank so many supportive and empathetic school principals assistant principals and other administrators who have been truly responsive to the needs of staff and students
014during this global crisis their support has made the work easier for our employees thank you all for your time our next speaker is william horton william horton okay we'll go to our next speaker teddy guys yes hi um can you hear and see me miss mulberry yes we can thank you all right thank you hello um i wanted to really thank you dr anderson miss cohen and dr brabrand for visiting our class last week i thought it was a really special visit and i thought that you guys i think you boosted the morale of many people my class i often don't say that this class has a lot of morale because a lot of the times they don't do any of the work but i think the engagement you had with all of us really
015helped us and i really want to thank you guys for answering our questions and really providing the input because some of these issues are so pressing to a lot of the students in my class and after you left we had a little session we had a little talk about how your visit session went and everyone was very pleased and happy that you came second of all i wanted to speak if any member would like to have a future visit please let us know we are happy to accommodate people a second time or our first time if they haven't come i also wanted to really thank you miss mcguire i know she has been struggling a lot lately and i care about her deeply as to one of my best friends and i really want to
016thank you guys for helping her out because she has been struggling and your words i think have really helped her a lot and lastly i'm i'm very brief tonight um like usual i did want to thank you guys for the teachers vaccines a lot of my teachers have talked about how excited they are about this and they are saying that they can't wait to see us whenever we come back to school and i just want to say thank you because i am happy to meet a lot of my teachers in person as i have not i really want to thank you for everything all the help you've done and your visit and if you all and if anyone else wants to visit again please let me know have a good night thank you our next
017speaker is akshay devarakanda hi good evening school board it's good to see you all again first on a personal note i unequivocally condemn the attacks on you all regarding return to school you all have been unfairly vilified and harassed and i've been seeing subtle and not so subtle combinations of racism sexism homophobia ageism and or islamophobia and the online criticism directed to each of you i stand with you all and i thank you for putting the safety of fcps staff and students first i haven't yet said anything regarding the tj vote last month but i want to tell you now that i respect that you all have made your decision we all share the same goals even if the paths we choose towards them might differ i want nothing but the best for the 8th
018grade applicants who are applying to tj now and i will wait in good faith to see how the decided bond process for this year turns out however evaluating this admissions process or any for that matter requires adequate data to do so with all due respect tj alumna action group has encountered many delays and much hemming and hiring as we tried to get emissions data from scps i know the tga debate has been very taxing for you all but without proper information to properly assess the new admissions process we'll end up having the same conversations from the past 35 years we're concerned that the lack of transparency and accountability will just lead everyone in circles we've made repeated requests for previous admissions data tag will be following up again in the coming weeks and i ask
019that you make assisting us with this worker priority we wish to support scps through analysis and recommendations grounded in the most up-to-date data for tj admissions but we need fcps collectively to meet us halfway the motions approved by the board last month for tracking outreach metrics and requiring an annual emissions for our good starts a tea jag calls for more comprehensive and robust data collection so that all stakeholders can better determine the effectiveness of the new process fcps 2004 blue ribbon commission report has excellent recommendations especially regarding the longer term impact of a tj education the reality is that while tj has been ranked number one in the nation based on standardized test scores there has never been an analysis of the value added by this governor school we will also be following up with
020additional recommendations for various data and metrics that can be gathered by either fcps the tg admissions office or tj itself more generally any data collected from incoming current or graduating tj students also needs to be compared with identical metrics from base schools to provide a better comparison and better show the personal community impact of the school the underlying goal of these recommendations is to complement the work that you all are doing and to gain the necessary clarity on how tj is serving our young people we wish to work in partnership with school board and fcps and to support you all however we can thank you for your time thank you our next speaker is amanda hurst amanda hurst we'll move to our next speaker tina williams good evening school board i'm tina williams president of
021fairfax county federation of teachers i would also like to thank our our school counselors for the wonderful work that they do it is disheartening to see our school system lose dedicated and talented staff who love the education profession we believe this is directly tied to the fcps culture as the caring culture strategic scorecard notes there is still significant room for improvement on creating a welcoming environment for students and staff and achieving a premier workforce which includes hiring and retaining diverse educators we believe fcps can improve in these areas by adopting the fcft recommendations that our union has shared with you all and the leadership team on improving equity and hiring and retention of staff school discipline curriculum and professional development we must improve equity and education from both a larger systems perspective and an individual
022student perspective this should start with immediately improving transparency in the sharing of information on fcps's performance and equity practices this data should be clearly visible and available for community access on the website without a need to submit requests to acquire this data fcps can foster caring culture for staff by demonstrating that it values and appreciates all of its hard-working employees by providing the expected step increases in market scale adjustments state revenue is higher than expected and our governor has acknowledged that the importance of all school staff receiving raises this year given the incredible work we have done for our students and community through this pandemic so we urge you to utilize federal funds and other resources to compensate employees fairly fcps can also achieve a caring culture by ensuring that we reopen our school building
023safely unfortunately the pandemic continues to surge as our members anticipate receiving both doses and being provided enough time to be fully inoculated in order to help control the spread the vaccine alone will not keep our schools safe so it is important that our school system meet fcft's 11 pillars of a safe reopening prioritize low transmission rates and implement safe mitigation strategies this two-fold approach will help improve fc fcps's employee morale and contribute to staff members feeling supported and valued we look forward to working with the board on these issues to ensure fcps fully meets its goal of achieving a caring culture thank you thank you our next speaker is kweily zhukeri kweli zukari our next speaker is sam collins hello can you hear me yes go ahead please good evening my name is sam collins
024i am the parent of five children in the fairfax county public schools the youngest of fifth grader and the oldest a senior i am speaking tonight on behalf of woodson coral boosters and our children while you have approved some students to participate in activities indoors and outdoors with masks and without masks woods and crawl students have been precluded from participating in any extracurricular choral activities on school grounds or elsewhere each year for the past 32 years the woodson chorus has put on a show called dessert on broadway this is an optional extracurricular event in which many woods and choral students participate it is in many respects our annual homecoming event attended by alumni and fan delight after coordinating with our administration to allow students to come in one at a time for only 10 minutes
025each for a masked costume fitting with two masked adults we were alerted that the school board decided not to allow this to happen whether at woodson or outside of the school students and parents are like are perplexed as to why activities like athletics school pictures and sats are permitted to take place on school grounds and yet a 10 minute costume fitting with mandatory masking is not allowed to happen at all anywhere your decision in this matter sets a clear double standard and demoralizes the children in a program of 200 students do you suppose the choral members feel a part of one woodson when they see that others can participate in activities while they cannot we know that you must make difficult decisions during the times of coded to keep our children safe and learning both
026stopping certain activities and in classroom learning as well as permitting things to try to provide normalcy and a well-rounded educational and emotion emotional experience for them this is what we have entrusted you to do as our representatives however as you make these difficult decisions it is important that you make them consistently using the guidelines established by experts in their respective fields as you have for football basketball wrestling and other programs in this case you appear to have inadvertently prioritized certain activities over the arts and created an inequitable educational environment for our children on behalf of all those who choose extracurricular chorus or drama or band activities for that matter i ask that you allow these activities to take place while following the guidelines established by a university of colorado and maryland study these guidelines include
027rehearsals and gatherings only outdoors masks required at all times more than six feet of social distancing being enforced gatherings of no more than 10 students and rehearsals and gatherings not lasting more than 30 minutes sir this your time is up thank you our next speaker is george becerra [Music] yes go ahead please good evening school board members and superintendent bravery wanted to start off talking about engine item 4.02 i agree on the minor changes being proposed tonight more importantly i think the board and student representative to the school board should consider advocating to the general assembly for the student rep cabinet shall vote on the board just like pedaling does [Music] i'm so sorry if you could speak up a little louder i'm sorry is it better now worse not much change but go ahead
028just shout it out a little bit please sorry about that uh i know it'll be too late for the current student rep to accomplish this for this year's general assembly session this is this but this can be passed over the next student rep in may my assumption also is this board wants the student rip to have an official vote i'm assuming this because of the recent direction of this board and the last boards uh of increasing civic engagement to the students but also make up for being the thai vote during your sentence of the board votes and other amendment votes second to mrs mclaughlin as the joint board of supervisors at school board's successful trip and youth policy team also known as skip starts meeting again on february 3rd after a year off ms msfc
029which has been a member since the deception in 2013 would like to skip executive award made review two supervisors lesbian pound ship and the deputy county executive health and human services to allow the skip membership to decide what this should be to tackle as the calendar plays off this year the skip will not have time to make any county budget recommendations for next year's budget so we have time to regroup one of the issues that needs to be addressed is the review and accountability of the one fairfax policy of the county and school services this would be a proper place for review and accountability because the one fairfix policy was created in the sketch third from your work session this past tuesday i would like to encourage the board to do a new strategic plan
030like this daredevil exchange it's been like six or seven years since the last one was done at that time we stated that strategic plan should be done every five years a reference the board of supervisors will have done after this year two strategic plans in eight years second one started by county executive phil after he came into office in the same recession sessions was had on program evaluations msac worked again advocate for true program evaluations at the system-wide level like evaluating closing achievement that plan currently the office of research and strategic improvement is doing four or five system-wide programming valuations per year in comparison accounting value is 20 systems to my programs per unit of course it is way under staff and that needs to be addressed if you want to answer all your return
031on investment questions you all had thank you dr presidio for doing zero-based budgeting for your department i hope the whole school for people do this thank you that was our final speaker thank you very much at this time i call them on mr anubudo for student representative matters thank you dr anderson um can everyone hear me yes okay thank you um i just first went to start off by talking a little bit about a meeting that mrs tolin and i had over this past week um i believe it was last week um talking a little bit to the students about the work that i've been doing to kind of advocate about student voice um during this incredibly unprecedented school year i kind of heard feedback from students and miss tolin can kind of testify to
032this about the fact that the visibility of some of the avenues that students have to speak up about the problems that they're facing aren't necessarily clear within our school system so i am happy that we got to hear that feedback from misstoll and i and i look forward to continuing to do work on behalf of students and increasing the visibility of the avenues like the sac the student advisory council that we have in our community and others to ensure that students know and including myself to ensure that students know when and where they can go when they want to speak to students who you know have the ears of leadership um to have their voices concerned and you know address some of the things that are going on because while obviously we know that their
033school-based support staff including their administration are great places to start if they have issues with their school buildings sometimes hearing from a student and hearing responses from a student can mean the difference between reception and not so i think that working to increase visibility in the different ways that we kind of brainstormed in that last meeting was really cool and i'm thankful to all the students that i got to meet with um in that last session and i look forward to continuing to do that work also i would like to call attention to some of the recent um conversations around um ap and college board and their recent um decisions that have had students kind of spiraling i've been listening to a lot of conversations lately college board's popularity among students has been declining rapidly
034for a while now so i'm really honored that our school system in conjunction with their their stated goals of amplifying student voice has created a platform for me and a few other students to speak to college board sort of listening session where we get to kind of voice our concerns about what being a student being an ap student during this pandemic has been like and where ap can go from here to kind of address some of the needs and concerns of students because it seems like they haven't been doing so so i'm thankful to leadership um um particularly mrs small and the work that we've been doing set that up and i look forward to listening session and everything that gets to be done and in that setting because like i said it's one of
035those things where i i find my position to be amplifying the voice of students in the community and that's just one thing that i feel like there's a lot of consensus on so i'm glad that we get we're going to get to be doing that very soon um and another thing that i'd like to touch a little bit on is when i was running for this position when i was campaigning i talked a lot about the importance of examining opportunity gaps and looking for ways that we can address some of the concerns within our school system about you know the achievement gaps between certain populations within our within our community and i talked a lot about i said to the sac that i think that sometimes you know we shy away from trying to young
036people shy away from trying to tackle large issues because they we think they require large-scale solutions and one of the ideas i talked to them about was having a book drive and i thought i said something so simple like that um could really make a big difference if we if we're talking about you know third grade reading as well pass rates getting literary materials into the hands of young students um as early as possible i i told them that i thought that can make a big difference and i'm super happy to report that um in the coming weeks um probably sometime in february i get to announce details about a virtual book drive it's going to get to be happening um and i'm really excited about that and i i look forward to partnering with
037students across the county as well as a local company to ensure that we find creative ways even the midst of everything crazy that is going on to get books into the hands of young people within our school system and let the work of that the magic of um literature do the rest um so those are kind of three updates that i have and i'm promised myself i keep it brief today so in the spirit of that i'd like to close on the thought that friday tomorrow is the end of the second quarter and the first semester of this incredibly difficult and different and amazing and all the feeling school years and i just want to say thank you to dr bray brand and leadership and the school board and every single teacher within our school
038system as well as all the school-based support staff that have made this school year possible i mean there was no there was no way to do this right and somehow we still did i feel like and i just i want to say thank you to everyone who's made that possible i know it hasn't been easy and i know there's a lot of work that still is to be done and i'm excited about the conversations that um are being had about recovering and learning laws that has been present during this time period and i look forward to continuing to be a part of those conversations as we move into the next phase of this pandemic and this and the next conversations we're going to have about reopening and this summer and i know the governor's talking
039about year-round schooling and i i look forward to continuing in my role through through july about ensuring that students and their students and their needs are met um in every way that that the school system can do so i'm thankful and i just want to congratulations to all the students out there we're halfway there um and i know we'll make it no matter what gets thrown at us because we're strong and we're resilient and we've proven that this year and and we will continue to do so so thank you everyone um and that is it for me dr anderson so um i'll hand it back to you thank you mr nabuto we appreciate your very thoughtful comments as always um at this time i would like to call on dr brabrand for the introduction of
040the strategic plan report for goals one and two thank you chairman anderson members of the school board it's my honor and pleasure to share the strategic plan with you that you know is our guiding document and i'm going to turn it over to our chief operating officer mr marty smith who will set up some of the context and share the remainder of the presentation with you all so mr smith thank you dr very brandon good evening madam chair good evening board we're very excited this evening to bring you our goal one and two reports i want to remind the board in the community that this is a look back at our progress a year's look back at our progress and it's based on our current desired outcomes and metrics and if you can remember all
041the way back to february of 2020 it seems like a lifetime ago but we were in the process of revamping our strategic plan when unfortunately the pandemic hit and we had to pull back some of those efforts and so because of the pandemic our approach has been different this year many data points were not available to staff and our departments were clearly focused on our virtual and distant learning efforts and also returned to school and so at that our office of research and strategic improvement took it upon themselves at the direction of the superintendent to complete the reports to compile those reports and work very closely with our departments in collaboration and our goal champions then provided those staff responses and so tonight our director for the office of research and strategic improvement lydia herroda
042will be going through the goal reports and our gold champions dr presidio and dr boyd will be providing that staff response i want to explain a little bit about the information that's been posted we've taken a tiered approach to providing information to the board this evening you have the full reports provided along with executive summaries and we also posted the final presentation which is simply a highlight of those executive summaries and so the information that we're going to go through tonight in the presentation has all been shared with the board and you will have an opportunity tonight to ask questions uh about the information within the reports you will also have an opportunity to ask follow-up questions when we present goals three and four and uh also during those department budget work sessions dr presidio
043uh provided the isd department work session earlier uh in the week and uh there was such a great dialogue between the board and staff and so there will be many opportunities tonight's presentation in conjunction with those updates and information that we share during the return to school meetings will provide a picture of our efforts to date and create that road map for where we need to go in fairfax county and in the future because there was some discussion about this at the isd work session we will have an opportunity to bring our best thinking around updates to the strategic plan to the board we'll certainly work with the board chair and vice chair at the best time to do that where we can enhance those metrics and really think about and learn from our experiences
044with the pandemic on the best path forward for our students and so with that i'm going to turn the meeting over to ms haruda and then we will be available for questions afterward thank you mr smith and good evening i'm going to start on um let me pick the right slide because we've gone through some of them i'll ask if we can turn to slide five and talk about actually slide four sorry and talk about um the decision that will be requested from the school board um at the end of the presentation um when you it comes back for a vote would be to vote to accept the school year 20 19 20 fiscal year 20 strategic plan student success goal 1 and caring culture goal 2 reports so next slide please today's presentation represents
045highlights of the fall gold reports for goals 1 and 2 student success and caring culture it covers fcps's strategic performance and efforts for these two goals during last year school year 1920 and fiscal year 20. this year's reports are intended to describe performance metrics and associated actions to show what fcps did and how it performed last year i'll i will represent the costs and how successful actions were in achieving targeted progress orsi drew conclusions about actions to provide the school board with some opportunities to consider in the future to improve metric performance for fcps gold champions will also weigh in as mr smith said with their responses to orsee's reporting we will move through these slides relatively quickly for the members of the public there is a great deal of information in the posted highlights
046document and goal reports that provide a deeper dive into fcps's performance on its strategic aspirations the actions it took to achieve those aspirations as well as associated costs including return on investment analyses that support the conclusions drawn in the reports and presented tonight we will start with goal 1 student success the student success goal area has three different desired outcomes that are the focus of our strategic plan briefly they are the elimination of gaps early education and portrait of a graduate attributes next slide before i delve into the specifics of scps's performance and actions last year i wanted to highlight some of the important school board decisions over the last several years that have supported fcps's efforts to attain its student success targets again these are only highlights of some of the school board's actions
047that have supported the goal you can see that these include funding of numerous initiatives such as english learner supports fcps on and advanced academic resource teachers at title 1 schools as well as advocating for initiatives that support student success next slide this slide presents a broad overview of fcps's progress in its student success goal listed on this slide are the aspirations fcps works to achieve in the strategic area of student success these six student success aspirations are measured by 22 metrics for example for the first aspiration all students will be successful in reading in mathematics fcps measures its progress using several metrics including the percentage of grade 3 students who read at or above grade level the data for this metric is disaggregated for our student groups asian black hispanic white students as well as
048our english learner students economically disadvantaged students and scps's students with disabilities this allows us to measure and judge whether each group is individually making the expected progress on the metric the data in the table on this slide is a summary of fcps's performance across all 22 metrics the one metric where fcps met or exceeded its target was in the percent and number of high school students with access to an fcps provided individual computer or tablet the missing data for the six metrics were largely due to the coven pandemic for example sol data was unavailable since students did not take tests last year information about each metric and each student group is available in the narrative report next slide as we move to the discuss more highlights of fcps's metric performance last year another reminder that
049the narrative report goes into greater depth on each of the points made here firstly fcps made the most progress in addressing access and opportunity gaps meaning scps improved in ensuring that programs and services were equally available to students from all student groups and that students in fact participated or took up the opportunity to participate more equally across all of our student groups last year this narrowing of gaps in access and opportunity included the areas of providing students with access to technology providing access and opportunity for advanced academic programs and advanced coursework a particular note is that many of the metrics on access and opportunity indicated that fcps had made improvement in providing black students with more equitable access and opportunity during school year twenty nineteen twenty moving on to metrics reflecting gaps in achievement between
050students here we were focused on how our students performed and whether or not performance was similar across all our student groups the available metric data showed that overall improvement did occur during school year 2019-20 in narrowing achievement gaps this narrowing was shown in our metric data for grade 3 students reading at or above grade level students passing college-level exams students passing a college level exam or earning industry certification and students passing honors courses as well as in scps's on-time graduation rates nonetheless persistent achievement gaps continued for many of our student groups including hispanic black english learner and economically disadvantaged students as well as our students with disabilities unfortunately one of the important things to highlight here are the especially large gaps for our english learner students across multiple metrics moving on to the education metric
051this was the first year that we had data available for this outcome overall 76 percent of all students entering kindergarten demonstrated executive functioning skills at the level the state has identified as needed to be ready to succeed in kindergarten while overall a majority of our students were entering with these skills achievement gaps already existed at kindergarten entry among our student groups finally metric data to gauge progress on the portrait of a graduate attributes outcome were unavailable due to covet 19 closure that prevented schools from engaging students in presentations of learning next slide this slide focuses on some of the main actions fcps undertook to attain its aspirations during school year 2019-20 in other words it answers the question what was fcps doing last year to try to meet its aspirational targets the actions were provided
052to orsi by the gold champion central office departments and regents who oversaw the work also listed on this slide are the costs associated with each action this cost information provides transparency about the cost of each specific action that fcps engaged in last year to attain its goals these costs can be found in neither the approved budget nor program budget documents because they typically span multiple departments offices and programs the majority of the costs for each of these actions represent central and school-based staff time to plan implement or participate in the effort a description of each action and details on costs are available in the student success narrative report additionally the report includes roi analyses of these costs in relation in relation to metric data performance or other associated data to provide insight into which actions
053are helping fcps attain its aspirations and where to focus improvements next slide this slide shows similar actions and costs that the gold champion and department staff reported to orsi were undertaken during school year 2019-20 in support of fcps's early education and portrait of a graduate attributes for example for the early education outcome scps implemented at fisap and expanded the bridge to kindergarten program last year next slide moving now to goal action highlights this slide focuses not only on some of the important insights about how well actions were working or might work but also draws conclusions based on analyses or c undertook of the metric data and at times additional related data to find out whether or not the actions taken by scps were successful in helping to eliminate gaps the details of the relation between
054the actions and expected impacts on performance are detailed in the narrow narrative report some of the highlights reflected on the slide include that implementation of fcps on last year led to positive outcomes for students narrowing the technology gap among our high school students the actions taken to improve graduation rates are well grounded in research and best practices so should have a positive impact over time also on the positive side the additional resources dedicated to aap was associated with an increase in the number of students accessing level 4 and level 3 aap services including students from groups who are historically underrepresented in these programs on the less positive side while fcps made progress in reducing gaps on several metrics gaps continue to exist starting early and persisting through graduation should consider more coordinating efforts to accelerate
055the progress and meet the targeted levels of performance to eliminate gaps in particular addressing the needs of english learners is critical since the student group this student group continued to lag last year and as we know from data this year continue to be a large concern the current innovation cohorts are limited in their scope touching only some fcps schools so looking for additional actions beyond current ones will be critical to helping fcps's english learners succeed next slide taking a look at the actions described in the narrative report for early education orsi was able to connect the opportunities for participation in pre-kindergarten to a boost in executive functioning skills at kindergarten entry performance gaps do exist and more work is needed to enhance participation to influence more students before they begin kindergarten lastly portrait of a
056graduate has been a focus for fcps for many years but actions to increase students development of these attributes including formal system-wide implementation of presentations of learning and collection of associated data have not expanded to scale as described in the report the portrait of of a graduate presentations of learning that are the focus of the metric and are intended to represent how students have mastered portrait of a graduate attributes are currently not expanded to all schools so while portrait of a graduate is embedded within the curriculum itself the presentations of learning that are intended to allow practice in the development of the skills and track progress have not been implemented across all fcps schools i will now turn things over to dr sloan presidio who who will speak to the gold champion response to these conclusions
057all right well thank you very much miss aruta and i just uh want to start out by thanking you and your entire team for putting this report together this year um it's an incredible amount of work and you did an excellent job with it and you know we really appreciate that because that allowed the departments including instructional services to spend more time focused on how we can support uh schools uh staff members teachers uh and students with distance learning and return to school so it's greatly appreciated um and excellent excellent work if we could go to the next slide um what i'd like to do is just provide just a little bit more detail on a few points uh most of which miss aruta already touched on and the first point really is that you
058know unfortunately because of the school closure there were a number of data points that we didn't have available um to really help us analyze uh student performance issues this particular year and certainly the sol results were one of those missing data points but nevertheless there was a lot of data that we did have and there was a lot of positive outcomes that we saw even during a school year that was disrupted due to school closure for example you know when we look at reading performance while we didn't have the sol test we did have an internal measure that looks at student reading performance where we get the information and the data directly from our teachers in our classrooms and we saw significant gains uh in reduction in the reading achievement gap between black and white
059students at grade three and that achievement gap decreased by three percent similarly we saw really significant increases in high school language arts in our writing courses and interestingly enough we did actually complete the grade 11 sols before school closure so we do have our data there from the state and the data looks really really good we saw significant increases in the pass rates in writing really for all of our subgroups a nine percent increase for our black students 12 percent for hispanics 11 for free and reduced meal students and 12 percent for students with disabilities so those are huge gains and can really be attributed to the laser-like focus that we had on writing in our secondary language arts program this year we were able to put or excuse me during school year 1920. we
060were able to put in place a lot of additional resources with new curriculum materials to support student writing and to support teacher instruction as well as a lot of professional development in coaching and how to teach and how to assess writing and give feedback to students so the secondary language arts team did a great job working with our students with our schools and we see that in our students results um additionally really impressive gains when we look at on-time graduation in our schools overall of course we had graduation rate increases for the division but again when we start to look at you know some of our disaggregated on-time graduation rates really significant increases for students two and a half percent uh increase for our black students four point six percent increase for our hispanic students
061almost a five percent increase for english language learners and almost a three percent increase for students with disabilities and again this is really attributable to the work that our central office team members did across departments to really come together and provide as much collaboration and wrap around support services for our schools as possible with respect to on-time graduation we did invest some additional staff resource at the school level to give some of our schools that needed some additional support some staffing to support those on-time graduation efforts tracking and monitoring student progress providing family supports as well as student supports and we see that of course it paid off with significant increases additionally when we think about some of our opportunity and access goals that we have we made significant gains expanding the number of schools
062that have a young scholars program as well as the number of schools who have aap local level 4 programs increasing the number of schools with local level 4 by 14 schools in school year 1920 and then similarly we saw some really good results in our advanced courses advanced math honors courses ap ib and dual enrollment courses so we're really really happy to have made progress in a number of different areas even despite the school closure during the pandemic so just a few more updates as we turn to the next slide and take a look at some of the uh highlights with respect to early childhood education um as mr ruda mentioned um we did see gains here as well uh in early childhood we implemented a new measure for the first time last school year
063around executive functioning so really looking at students ability uh to be successful in the classroom to be self-directed manage their behavior um as early childhood education experts will tell us that's really of course important for students to be able to be focused uh and achieve academically and successfully so that new measure gave us a lot of good information and one of the things that it did show us of course is that we see achievement gaps in our school system even as early as uh preschool so we know that we have a lot of work to do to close those gaps and the more we can front load supports for students like uh preschool education the more successful will be in closing and addressing those longer term gaps that we see so when we look at
064some of that work it just reminds us how important preschool experience is for our students and programs like the bridge decay program for students who don't participate in preschool um are demonstrating higher levels of kindergarten readiness so we're excited by that but we also know that we have a lot more expansion work to do in early childhood education only about 80 percent of the students in fairfax county come into kindergarten having had a preschool experience so there are still a lot of gaps there and of course for some of our student subgroups uh the percentage of those students actually having preschool experience is even significantly lower so we're excited to have some new assessment measures uh we're excited to see the impact of some of our programs like bridge decay and we know that we
065need to do more to expand those programs as well as do more to connect with our students and our families to make sure that we're culturally responsive to their needs and can meet and can meet the unique needs of all of our students across the county and we'll take uh one last look at the next slide at the last desired outcome which is portrait of a graduate and again due to the school closure we were not able to collect all of our end of the year data and the data that we're working towards collecting is called a portrait of a graduate presentations of learning and the idea is that we want our students at the end of the year to be able to reflect on the growth that they made in the different portrait of
066a graduate attribute areas like being a strong collaborator being a strong communicator critical thinker and a creative thinker for example so we had a really robust way to collect that information unfortunately we weren't able to do it last year but from the information that we were able to collect we still see growth 88 of our schools last year included very specific goals in their school improvement plans around a focus on portrait of a graduate's skills and that's a significant increase from 50 percent really over the number of schools submitting those goals in the previous year so we continue to make growth really emphasizing the importance of this work and there's a real demand in our schools to participate in professional development associated with portrait of a graduate we had over 420 school-based staff work in
067a really extensive way to be part of the portrait of a graduate presentation of learning pilot work and 87.2 percent of those participants felt that that cohort work really led to significantly meaningful shifts in their classroom practice and instruction we offered of course a lot of varied professional development around portrait of a graduate we had five different courses that were available in 29 different sections in those courses for staff members to access and we're really trying to do professional development in different ways and the department and our work around portrait of a graduate really exemplified that where we push our professional development into the classroom using different strategies one strategy mentioned here is a lab site model where teachers have an opportunity to receive coaching and feedback directly while they're working with students in the
068classroom so it's bringing the professional development experience and support into the classroom and we're getting really really good feedback about that work so thanks for letting me share those additional updates on the goal one report and i'll turn it back over to ms aruba thank you dr presidio so i'm going to ask if we can move on to the next slide and this slide is included for some school board considerations the things listed here and on the next slide are those that fcps leadership wanted to highlight for the school board first we're going to start with some strategic concerns fcps plans to have the department of school improvement and support expand its supports to all schools partnering with school administrative teams to identify gaps that exist and provide specific recommendations that can be incorporated into
069schools school improvement and innovation plans this will involve partnering with school administrative teams to identify gaps that exist and also provide specific recommendations that can be incorporated into those plans additionally in terms of early childhood education fcps should continue to advocate for additional fairfax county funding and locations for the psep program it is well established that early education can support closing gaps by providing students with the kinds of skills they need to be successful once they enter school and orthy's analysis included in this year's report indicated that this is true for our students as well so it's important to continue to try to have all of our students participate in early education of some time as dr presidio mentioned we only have about eighty percent of our students participating and trying to get that number
070up to a hundred percent is important lastly given fcps's commitment to equity fcps should establish structures and expectations to ensure that all students receive equitable learning opportunities to develop portrait of our graduate skills including the opportunity to participate in presentations of learning dr presidio stressed the importance of those in terms of developing the skills and that's part of the advocacy here as well on the next slide let's return to that one are some additional considerations focused on budget and then policy here we have four specific things that leadership would like the right to recommend the school board strongly consider in improving the next budget first staffing for english learners at the elementary school level should be increased increased esau staff at the elementary level was a recommendation in orsi's english learner study a few years
071back and is endorsed by isd as an important action to take to support improved english learner performance second fcps should fund additional advanced academic resource teachers as a resource to schools to provide more students with advanced curriculum especially at the elementary level third expanding bridge to kindergarten to reach all students without pre-kindergarten experience should also be a budget consideration this is our program that takes students who are coming into kindergarten over the summer and it helps them do some preschool-like activities so that they get used to being part of a school and going through the activities that are typical of a school day and fourth fcps should provide additional fees up slots so more students especially fcps most challenged students can have a preschool experience finally in terms of policy considerations fcps may want to
072review and reconsider its policies on open enrollment and student participation in advanced courses to ensure that they are written to compel equitable opportunities for all students across fcks so that concludes the student success portion of the presentation and i'll now ask to move to the next slide to begin the goal to caring culture presentation the caring culture has two desired outcomes shown here the first one which we refer to as our welcoming environment outcome calls for all fcps employees to demonstrate cultural responsiveness when supporting families students and other staff and our second outcome focuses on healthy life choices by both our students and our staff on the next slide as we did with the prior goal here are the linkages to some of the school board decisions over the last several years that have supported
073this goal area these actions show the school board's commitment to establishing a caring culture throughout fcps as well as supporting health healthy life choices by our students and now moving the next slide looking at the highlight slide we first have fcps's aspirations what will we see if we achieve our caring culture goal is listed with these bullet points for example under the welcoming environment outcomes students families and staff feeling respected and included and all staff reviewing student behavior through a culturally responsive lens are important aspirations for the school division in terms of healthy life choices captured in the next four bullets fcps aspirations address healthy social emotional skills and behaviors attendance student behavior and staff wellness summary results for the 11 metrics used by fcps to measure its caring culture aspirations are shown in this
074table the metric that met or exceeded its target during school year 1920 was staff use of employee assistance program resources or wellness resources specifics on these metrics and how fcps perform during school year 20 1920 on each one are available in the caring culture report posted in board docs for today's meeting next slide please now we go a little more in depth on a few of the caring culture metrics you can see that fcps made progress on two available metrics for the welcoming environment outcome student respect and staff respect while metric data indicated that staff referrals for disruptive behaviors improved last year further analysis conducted to compare the prior year and the cobin closure year indicated that after accounting for the covid closure in march no progress was made fcps also met the target for
075staff use of wellness resources something that had been true over all of the other reporting years for the strategic plan focus and scps further made progress in reducing the percentage of students with disruptive behavior referrals but did not make any progress related to healthy social emotional skills or lifestyle behaviors the third bullet captures what i mentioned on the prior slide that we met the target for staff use of wellness resources the fourth bullet indicates that fcps also made progress in reducing the percentages of students with disruptive behavior referrals and then finally as in prior years fcps did not show progress in metric data that reflected students healthy social emotional skills and lifestyle behaviors next slide this slide shows some of the actions that fcps undertook as part of its strategic work during school year 1920
076and the associated fiscal year 20 expenditures again the actions were provided to orsi by departments and regions responsible for the work and the first set of actions supported fcps's welcoming and environment outcome while the second set supported its healthy life choices outcome descriptions of these actions as well as others with cost details are included in the caring culture report next slide in terms of that can be drawn about caring culture based on this year's reporting the report drew the following conclusions first actions fcps took to reduce disproportionality and discipline referrals appear to have had some positive impact and contributed to lower referral rates in black and economically disadvantaged student groups however fcps will need to continue to focus on targeted efforts around equity and discipline to allow the division to eliminate the disproportionality that still
077exists in discipline referrals actions taken by fcps around improving feelings of respect were targeted towards parents and families more so than students analyses indicated that to increase students perceptions of respect will require improvements in teacher-student relationships especially in students feeling that teachers and other adults at school listen to them lastly departments did not report any actions associated with improving staff perceptions of respect in the workplace so if improvements are to be made in this area departments will need to identify and implement actions to adapt to address this next slide in terms of the healthy life choices outcome our second outcome for caring culture i'll highlight two conclusions here that stood out first actions taken in support of students healthy social emotional skills and lifestyle behaviors particularly those related to drugs alcohol and especially vaping were
078insufficient to make progress this means fcps will need to engage in additional actions to support improved social emotional skills and lifestyle behaviors by students and then secondly actions taken during school year 20 1920 things such as implementation of trauma-informed instruction in our title 1 schools school mtss self-assessments which is our multi-tiered system of support and coaching to impact student behavior as well as project momentum attention attendance efforts will likely take more time to observe impacts than just the one year examined here more specifics on all of these actions and conclusions are available in the caring cultural report i will now turn this over to kathleen waltz and michelle boyd who will provide the goal champion responses to these two desired outcomes thank you miss haruta and good evening everybody um so as far as the
079welcoming environment goal within caring culture as a division we recognize that we must continue to honor the narratives of our families our students and staff and affirm the identities that they bring with them in order to create a welcoming environment for fcps students and staff especially in times such as now it is even more important to lean into these conversations a lot of work around cultivating a caring culture is about conversations and providing spaces to listen and learn during the 1920 school year there were many opportunities that may not be reflected on a goal report that were needed to initiate healing in our community around the pandemic as well as the social injustices that needed to be addressed there were staff sessions student group meetings pta meetings town halls and more that may not have
080been in the original plan but were necessary responses to the needs of our community and i'd like to recognize the our equity team and they have done a heroic job of listening healing and lifting up our fcps school community during these troubling times this aligns with our overall goal and best practice of the desire to engage in two-way communication so we do want to continue to engage in two-way communication with stakeholder groups to determine the actions and or behaviors that constitute respect and would lead to improvement under the leadership of our new ceo dr williams we want to hear from our staff families students and community and use their voices in our action steps when two-way communication is effective positive relationships develop problems are more easily solved and students make greater progress bullet 3 fcps
081is doing the work to increase cultural responsiveness this work is cognitive as well as behavioral we need to recognize that it is an ongoing process that takes time our professional development modules which are facilitated for every staff member across fcps are a great start our professional development modules this year have pushed these messages further and we have learned that staff need more time than a module allows to reflect and connect with the impact of our biases and assumptions on our actions and the impact on our students and families plans are already in the works this year to increase the time for professional development and coaching and to find additional ways to facilitate this learning through our equity teams at our schools professional development and the coaching i mentioned are the key levers in shifting mindsets
082we are considering how to leverage equity leads and build their capacity to ensure that the professional development on cultural competence is implemented with fidelity and integrity in the 1920 school year we were in year two of equity lead implementation the program continues to evolve resulting in school-wide impact through professional development modeling and facilitating reflective dialogue that leads to equitable and culturally responsive mindsets and practices key actions have recently been implemented and will likely have a positive impact on long-range disruptive referral outcomes the coordinator for equity and student conduct has begun to calculate risk ratios by school to identify over-represented subgroups in discipline data cultural proficiency professional development module 5 includes responsive decision making focused on discipline data and practices during module 5 pd which was held just before the pandemic staff dug into division-wide data
083connected bias with responsiveness decision making supporting our staff and moving towards culturally responsive and proficient and away from cultural destructiveness as we make day-to-day decisions and finally piloting an online referral system that allows school to disaggregate disciplined data is one of the key actions that we have taken during this year and now i'd like to hand things over to dr boyd thank you thank you miss waltz as we go on to look at additional outcomes or actions within our caring culture report we want to open up by saying that we do concur with orsee's assessment of our progress on one of the overarching concepts that ms walt shared as she spoke about the first set of actions in the welcoming environment that we'll now look at with the healthy lifestyle choices is many of these
084actions regard and require a shift in mindset first then required by a shift in action so as we look at some of our outcomes that may not have yielded the results immediately that we wish to see perhaps we may need to look at incorporating benchmarks as we go along the way for example as we dig a little deeper and we look at our our substance abuse we added some a substance abuse specialist but those persons typically work with students who have been identified and already having challenges with substance abuse so as we look at our outcome in students who are substance abuse free our efforts placed with our substance abuse specialist may not be manifested in our outcome so we may want to add additional benchmarks to assess the the usage of substance abuse for
085students that are working with our substance abuse prevention specialist so that we can see the return on investment there as we continue to look at our second bullet under our healthy metrics healthy lifestyles and behaviors we might be better able to determine our actions as we look at our implementation in future years again many of our things are multi-years projects as we look at shifting behaviors with substance substance abuse as we look at increasing our healthy choices with attendance and as we look at shifting those things and those supports that our multi-tiered systems of support have been implementing but as dr presidio shared in the academic realm many of our initiatives were implemented on last year and those initiatives were curtailed as a result of our truncated year as a result of coping providing additional
086feedback and getting more two-way communication with students to understand what are the things that are stressing our students as you look in our report we'll notice that stress is increased as students increase in grade level and so one of our questions we may pose is that as a result of increased workload for students as they matriculate from one grade to another are there more resources available to assist students with stress at the elementary levels the actions that we would take for both of those questions will be very different and so it's critically important that we understand the root cause and the why to ensure that we are providing resources and supports to address the true need as we noted on our last bullet um progress regarding the reduction of our discipline referrals was evident for
087black students and students with economic disadvantage but we have to continue to work to close the gap between and the disproportionality between our groups that was some of the work that was referenced as we look at our achievement gaps and the section that dr presidio share and we continue to look at that as we look at our healthy lifestyle choices within this realm and also within our welcoming environment as we look at students staff referrals for discipline so this time i'll turn it back over to miss ruda for the next section dr boyd i think you have one more slide thank you ms ruda as we continue and i think we have stepped up and i talked a little bit in advance about our attendance system and our attendance outcomes but we will continue to
088ensure that we have implementation fidelity with our supports around attendance and reducing chronic absenteeism and again this is another section where we will have to have progress and have short-term benchmarks as we're looking towards our long-term goal and really unraveling what are the supports needed to ensure that our students are attending school regularly we also talk about our trauma our system trauma-wide trauma and forms excuse me supports that we've implemented in some of our title one schools but again as we have our our indicators at the division level we will likely need to be able to track progress as we are implementing supports with a subset of our schools and then being able to benchmark and scaffold that out so that we can see if those supports and those resources are being effective and being
089able to scale up division wide lastly our access to wellness resources this was an outcome that we did achieve and we would expect that this year particularly during covet that we would continue to have a number of staff accessing eap services and we believe that that is going to continue to be a great resource for our staff miss aruta thank you very much dr boyd so i'm going to have us turn to the next slide and wrap up the conversation about caring culture this final slide highlights some more school board considerations that leadership wanted to stress first under strategic concerns fcps is implementing the chief equity officer's action plan requiring schools to complete an equity audit and address address issues of students and staff respect in their school improvement and innovation plans again schools should
090keep in mind here the importance of improving students feelings that they are listened to by adults in schools when addressing these issues secondly implementation of high quality multi-tier systems of support or mtss as we refer to it need to be used to identify and address the social emotional needs of fcps students this may be key to improving performance on some of the metrics where fcps's performance has stagnated third fcps should also monitor the level of implementation and impact of attendance behavior and disproportionality and discipline to ensure that fcps continues to be aware of where and how it is making progress in these important healthy life choices and then finally with respect to policy fcps requests support for improvement in the srnr especially changes that target increase in the equity of discipline and reduction in consequences
091that remove students from instruction and with that this concludes the goal one and two highlights presentation and in closing i just want to again thank miss aruda and her team and also place in context that this was a look back at our work last year we realized that because of the pandemic there were things that we wanted to do that we couldn't do there were data points that were not available for us we saw success in many areas we saw that there is room for us to grow and i think that as we look forward and thinking about the world post covid that we'll be in a very different environment than we were when we developed this plan we'll be in a very different place than we were when we started to think about changes
092to the plan and we will be very happy to bring back some of those enhancements and work with the board to create a plan that's focused on the needs of our students the needs of our staff and the needs of our community thank you very much mr smith um and thank you for this presentation um just a reminder to our board i know we have a lot of questions and so we're looking forward to digging into this okay i wasn't sure what that feedback was so we're really looking forward to digging into this and having a robust conversation um just um school board members as a reminder during our retreat back in november we decided to handle these goals a little bit differently as per the discussions regarding how much of the data would be
093available at that point and so we do expect to spend some time this evening into this this discussion so please be sure to be to bring all of your concerns and questions forward we are going to start with miss denra colfax yes um uh and dr anderson i guess i do have a question because i was not seeing that we have a work session on this that's correct and that's why i wanted to remind the board when we took a look at our workload during the retreat and then the subsequent retreat follow-up we made a list of a number of items that we would either try to eliminate do differently or provide some other opportunity for presentation given the tight schedule that we had this is one of those items that the board voted to
094handle differently if you remember we had an extensive discussion with mr smith who was at that retreat to discuss that we would be able to combine them and handle them in this manner in lieu of scheduling a work session that we frankly didn't have room enough schedule to do okay thank you for that reminder was that in the january retreat or i mean not the january was that in the late fall retreat that was the late fall it was the second one the one that was done um virtually because we began on that saturday and i think we completed the following tuesday right right well thank you i i was unable to attend that retreat virtually and so maybe that's where i i had had missed that um because i am concerned that we don't
095have a work session on this and you know this is the essence of what we who we are and what we do student success and caring culture i won't belabor that now i will make a plug to reconsider having this um as a work session i would ask my colleagues to consider that um and maybe we can take a pull on that um so i will be i will be quick on some of my questions i'm going for the student success school board considerations uh when we talk about um the bridge to k um can you tell me i was involved with the child care advisory council when the bridge decay was first it was a handful maybe five to seven schools where are we right now how many schools have the bridge decay programming
096so this darren at gofax i think we'll have to kind of figure out the protocol of answering these questions between miss aruta and myself we'll figure it out um i can get you the exact number i don't know off the top of my head right now but we've expanded it immensely and we're actually planning for this coming summer to offer it in all of our schools um so that's really the goal looking forward uh to this summer well that's good news um dr presidio could you please um tell me and i know you have enhanced the the programming somewhat can you please just for the public um just talk about what that is and the length and duration of it well you know we're trying to get as much uh time in school for those
097students who didn't have preschool as as possible so we're looking at like a three week program um five weeks for all of uh our students who would participate in that program again you know it's not a substitute for a preschool experience but it does give us students a good jump start on kindergarten they get an opportunity to you know obviously learn the routines in school practice some of those executive functioning skills as well as you know get exposure to literacy and math activities as well so um you know again not a substitute i always want to make sure that people understand that but a great jumpstart program for what we can do with it yeah and and that is more than it used to be so thank you for that um also i have um
098talking about the fecep slots um i know we have worked hard to enhance them and that is one of the considerations um can you talk to us a little bit about budget considerations and how that might work and what we need to do on that well that's always um been a challenge for us during my tenure here and and the challenge with expanding um the preschool slots is really kind of two-fold one is the facility space frankly in some of the schools where we need the programs the most and we've provided in the past we didn't do it in this report but a very comprehensive heat map of where students have access to preschool in our county and where they don't and where those numbers are large and oftentimes uh where the numbers of student
099need are in schools that are overcrowded so that's one of the barriers and then the other barrier of course is just you know every program that you open we're looking at about a 18 to one student-to-teacher ratio so you know thinking about large numbers of students um it it does add up pretty quickly those additional costs of adding classrooms so you know in previous years we've been able to add new classrooms here and there but when we look at you know approximately 20 percent of our incoming kindergarten students not having preschool experience we we have a long way to go yeah and i think that number is growing i do not believe that we were at 20 percent a few years ago um i think that it am i correct on that dr presidio that
100is a that that level that percentage is growing um it's growing um again i could get you the historical data i don't know exactly you know the trend data off the top of my head but you know we do see it growing and this year i would point out that you know we actually have some obviously we're doing at this point in time virtual uh preschool we're not in person yet um but we do have some empty slots and that's concerning because we know that we're going to have kids that have you know even larger gaps as they come into the system so we've got to figure out a way moving forward how to you know make sure that not only are we expanding slot once we can return in person but that we're supporting
101some of those students that you know didn't have the opportunity to participate uh during the pandemic all right thank you um i'm going to yield my time at this point but again uh putting in a a big plug for a work session where we can really look at the data while i appreciate the presentation the data that was embedded into i believe a 91 page and 78 page report really is it's it's a disservice to all of you if we as a board don't take the time to do that and really look at it particularly when we when the mention is of the gaps um that we have seen as a result of covet and the gaps that we had prior to so i am putting in a strong plug for that and i thank
102you for your time and i will follow up if we can't immediately have a work session i will follow up with some written questions so thank you dr presidio and your team for this thank you may i jump in just for a moment because i think the information i want to add to what dr presidio has already shared is important for the board to know we use our title one dollars very strategically and one of the ways in which we do this is by supplementing um with title one friends for 12 additional visa classes every year so i just wanted the board to be aware of that thank you miss welts i think that's important to know i thank you so much thank you miss falls and just to quickly to go back to your
103requests they're not cool facts i appreciate it and certainly i think as a board we need to re-engage in that discussion but the decision to employ this method was a full board decision and i do believe you were present for that follow-up retreat because that was a virtual uh conversation it was in the in-person um part one of the retreat and so i just want to be clear that this was a full board decision to help with our workload our next speaker thank you for the reminder of course our next speaker is miss seismor heiser thank you i appreciate the um time to talk and and um well i do understand mr knight colfax's point i think we have to do work this year to decrease workload on staff and on the school board um
104i hope this these first questions first i really appreciate this information the the level of detail and data and the work we've done so i i hope these two questions don't come as any surprise but could somebody tell me when you talk about the on-time graduation rate um for students with disabilities um could you break it down by diploma type please so i have that information actually and i could provide that in writing which is probably the best way to do it because it's pretty comprehensive we have by diploma type and by student disability category so it might be best to respond to that one in writing that would be great i would just appreciate i mentioned this in the fall i mean in last spring i mentioned it really even after i was elected
105it would be really helpful to have that information in the 91 pages of data if it's not and if it's there and i missed it i apologize but and especially have it broken down in the slides because there is a huge difference between graduating with a standard diploma and an applied studies diploma and i i think it's for our public out there i think it's important when we talk about the on-time graduation rate at 95 percent to be clear just what our students with disabilities are graduating with it is a big difference so i would really ask if we could consider breaking that out and describing on-time graduation with a standard or advanced diploma on-time graduation with an applied studies diploma those are very different creatures so thank you i appreciate that um and i
106say not surprised have asked about that four times um and i appreciate you you taking that into consideration so we can really compare apples to apples here um one of the questions i had and i really appreciate the presentations of learning in portrait graduate and i completely understand due to the pandemic it's been difficult to follow up on that but when you're looking at school improvement plan goals and presentations of learning in which classes at the high school and secondary level are you looking to sort of incorporate those presentations of learning and are you looking at um measuring portrait for graduate skills especially things like teamwork leadership project-based learning you know putting on a player show in electives and arts programs as well as academics because it seems like to me some of those programs
107might be better suited for measuring those portrait or graduate skills so can you someone talk a little bit about where those skills are being measured right now or what we're looking at to gather data around those skills yeah that's an excellent question because really when we look at the development a portrait of a graduate skills we're integrating portrait of a graduate learning experiences and curriculum across the content areas and we know that for students to actually really develop these attributes at a high and meaningful level that it does have to be something that's cross-curricular so the presentations of learning again are really meant to be a reflective activity at the end of the year for students to reflect on their growth where we really encourage them to look and think across the different subject areas
108and the different content areas that they're studying have a lot of flexibility about how to work with students to do that work i will say it we're still really in the infancy stages of this work though um so i don't want to give you the impression that you know this is deeply embedded it's still under development but it's definitely a cross-curricular approach and it has to be for for it to have meaning for our students i would just encourage i appreciate that dr presidio very much and i would just encourage especially as there's still a lot of restrictions on our academic classes around sol preparation preparedness and ap preparedness to really look creatively at our electives and arts programs as real robust places and maybe even the primary places to develop and give students real
109opportunities to work on these puerto rican skills i really would encourage our leadership team to consider that option i just wanted to make one comment miss eisenbergheiser you're absolutely right we can look at extending it beyond just thinking that traditional four core five core it's also important what dr presidio said the curriculum if our metric was just our kids exposed to it yes all the curriculum we could say 100 percent but when we built the strategic plan we wanted something more we wanted a culminating activity of presentations of learning something that takes all that you've learned and it a performance assessment one thing that's happening in this pandemic down in the general assembly right now is a real reevaluation of the sols that we've been dominated by for 25 years is it time to really
110reflect on whether the standardized test at one point in time is capturing one student growth and looking at performance assessments portrait of a graduate skills in a standardized test and there's bills down in the general assembly right now that look at reducing the number of virginia sol tests and for the ones that sol tests that remain to look at a growth approach are kids gaining from the beginning of the year to the end so some of this work that dr presidio said is beginning i expect to see and be sharing with the board the acceleration of this movement and i think it's not going to be just in fairfax county but across virginia and really across the country that this pandemic has really had us pause to say how we are really going to get
111kids out of the the hole that they're going to be in and is it more and more test we're not going to test them out of the academic challenges that they face from pandemic we're going to have to have some new approaches and we're going to be proposing some of those portrait for graduate and the presentations of learning is one way and it will be expanded i appreciate that i'm very excited about that because i do think those soft skills companies have talked about for years the need for those soft skills that we talk about oh i was just getting started may i have a go back thank you absolutely you will be placed on a go back uh miss omaesh thank you and thank you to staff for all your hard work and diligence
112in putting this together um in trying to always you know keep it real and and look at what we have for what it is i i do have some questions about the data that we're relying on um particularly for the student success metrics i know there was mention of gaps being eliminated or you know mitigating gaps can you please outline specifically what has changed um from you know the way we've done this before and now and what we're looking at what we are specifically missing and in fact what we've relied on given that we don't have you know the same sol data etc to determine that we've eliminated these gaps that so um the information is actually available at the beginning of the student success report or at the beginning of the caring culture report
113there's an executive summary that highlights which specific ones we're missing so for student success we were missing the pass rates on the reading sols as well as on the mathematics sols we were missing the percent of classrooms where students receive instructional experiences using aap curriculum which is one of our opportunity metrics and that just had to do with where we were at the end of the year in terms of trying to get that kind of information back from teachers we also were missing the percent of aap students demonstrating the advanced performance in reading or math on sol tests so again that was an sol measure another one that was impacted by sols was around the percent of students who demonstrated proficiency um in passing the course and also passing the algebra 1 sol in algebra
114one one by eighth grade so again that one relied on the sols as well and then lastly um we were missing just talking about the pog metric or the portrait of the graduate metric because we did not have the opportunity for most of our students to engage in those presentations of learning at the end of last school year and then in terms of caring culture the ones that we were missing were the percent of families who report feeling respected on the family engagement survey um that was actually a survey that was not administered last year so that's why we were missing that one and then the second one we were missing for caring culture was the number of schools with low rates of students with frequent absences that information typically comes from the state and
115it last year they did not do the same kind of assessment and information that would allow us to provide that information in the same format so that was not included we do have some other information about attendance in the report itself so mr mesh if i might for the full 90 page report which she referenced are those very first pages that just summarize here's all the data metrics and i will say this is a debate we ought to have right this was a year unlike any other the the fourth quarter ended right the state gave guidance that said there's no grades but i i mean so we had an a unique moment there were no sol tests but we still thought it was better as a leadership team to bring you what we had and
116give you a snapshot but i need to be real and transparent what you talk about this is the most incomplete snapshot we've had of student success in years because we don't have all the data and we don't want to we want to give you a thumbnail sketch and in fairfax fashion we again try to give you as much as we can maybe too much and maybe this year was even less is more and this was less of an approach but we do have some data that's worth showing some emerging trends some positive and some that say the growth still hasn't happened that we need to at least be keeping our eye on and having a conversation with this board and community so that we really talk about the budget again aligning with our strategic plan
117and where our needs are you've been a champion about english language learner staffing is has other members of this board and you can see that gap is still here it's still here in the data so there's things like that it's one of my investments that i proposed in the budget so things that you can kind of connect and go yes it was still worth putting this forward even when we had limited data no i appreciate the acknowledgement of that and you know i obviously uh reviewed the reports i want to make sure we we look at this with that understanding that we're missing x y z you know a whole list of things um and therefore relying on what may be inconclusive information really right even in seeing trends that we've minimized gaps we don't
118really know that right um so i'm curious if we also included in our assessment the quarter academic report that um was you know recently presented um that we released which obviously showed some troubling trends right and so that's a great nugget and mr smith really hit the nail on the head at the beginning this was the look back and let's be honest since this report this was the year back our kids have been in the the er right through this this whole process the social emotional trauma the academic impacts so we know this is a snapshot in time of last year and what what's really going on this year we know that some of these gaps that we've already identified are only greater and we we were one of the first districts to report the
119first quarter data the second semester ends as you know on friday so we're going to continue to be aggressive and you're going to be hearing as dr presidio already talked about early next week our conceptual plan bridge to kindergarten we've had for years in a few schools we're going to propose to put them in all this coming summer you're going to hear about a robust response that we need to do for kids the fifth quarter how are we going to do school differently because kids have had a radically different experience this year and we're going to have to redesign our approach if we're going to catch kids up and be successful and dr burban i would also add that this board was able to quickly adjust and put some things in place for students even
120in the absence of data with the final reports based on what we learned last year so that we could mitigate and provide those supports for students this year without the need for that data so i think that as we progress and move forward it's really important for us to think about what we'll need to to focus on in the future and what we'll need to adjust and perhaps not have as a metric as part of our our regular reporting process no i appreciate that and and with the pool that we're looking at to clarify that's the pool that we had participating right can someone just mention again the percent participation at that point in the year the percent of student participation yeah i don't have those numbers off the top of my head but we
121know that we did have a large number of our students who were not participating but we can get those numbers for you yeah yeah this is this is really this is not meant to be a gotcha i mean i think it's important for us to just know what we're looking at and know the limitations of it uh in planning ahead i'm really concerned you know i appreciate dr rebrand you mentioned the fifth quarter being really proactive about what's coming and anticipating broadening gaps right over time um given that that's the case i i appreciated sharing the changes in the gaps can someone just delineate for us what those percent percentages are for each category so when we look at student success for students with disabilities for each of the various racial categories do we have
122that data available so that that data is available in the reports so the reports that were included and posted to board docs includes all of the breakouts for each of the groups on each of the metrics i'm sorry i'm sorry i was just going to say if you would kindly share what that is but go ahead so um there are 22 metrics in the student success area and so i don't know if reading through all of them is going to be helpful but when you look at the for example when you look at the first one that we have in the report which is on page 7 of the student success report you can see the percent of grade 3 students who read at or above grade level and you'll see that in terms of
123our performance last year we had moved to 87 percent of our students doing that um in 1920 in the 1920 school year and that was up from 85 percent at baseline um the our black students had moved to 77 which was up from 68 at baseline our hispanic students had moved up to 59 which was up from 55 at baseline our white students had actually gone down one percentage point to 87 percent um they had been at 88 at baseline our students um our economically disadvantaged students had moved up to 59 from 52 our english learner students had moved up to 53 percent from 47 and then lastly our students with disabilities had moved up to 46 percent from 41 so for most of these groups you saw that growth um or you saw that
124improvement for that particular metric and then the remaining pages go through each of the the other metrics where data were available to break it out for the different subgroups so yeah thanks ms ruta um i i know this seems pedantic again and i see exactly what you're talking about i'm following along the numbers i've obviously reviewed this the point really i'm trying you know looking at this 46 students with disabilities right 53 english learners these are numbers that i understand many people who are now working in our system and our board has have inherited but i'm really trying to push for some urgency in in doing something revolutionary something different we've got to do something that's different than business as usual uh to address these gaps and i'm particularly worried that we're now walking into
125a year where these gaps are anticipated to be worse for everyone across the board so i'm not i mean i'm not trying to continue looking at less than 50 percent you know god forbid 40 right numbers so given that that's the case um i actually wanted to ask you know dr brabrun if if in the upcoming return to school sessions um not the next one perhaps the one after we could look at a plan that is different not business as usual for how we're going to deal with this it's coming and it's already bad so thank you we're not taking a business as usual approach an rts timeline i'll show later tonight we'll have intervention start as early as next week across all of our elementary middle and high schools we know we need to
126get intervention even as we have the group's return over the next several weeks we're going to bring you a conceptual plan about how to redesign the summer experience and extended learning so we know that the gaps that are your nugget is right on board what what is a gap here in a year look back is only from everything we know right now going to be worse than it was in this past year that's what the first quarter said second quarter we may have different data if we do we'll show it again the quarter ends on friday we'll share it as soon as we have it we know and we are working to do business differently and again we'll be sharing that approach for interventions in the second semester for the summer and part of it
127is returning students to in-person learning because we know some of that uh impact but i will say this we need to be honest we're going to have a bigger hole than what we had here and it's going to take more time to get out of it than just a quarter or just this next year so i need the board and the community to truly understand this is not a snap crackle pop this is not a rice krispies easy solution that after a couple of scoops everything's just going to be fine we're going to have a long road to go to get kids out of the hole i believe our children can be resilient and maybe more than we think but we already know from the data that we've looked at that we're going to have
128significant impacts and our it's not on our it's not a blame game of our teachers they've tried the best they can under the circumstances they have but we're going to have to have different programs new programs different approaches but i will say this as we keep looking at things even things like calendar we need to i believe stop looking at just how we redesign the system but how does the system individually get tailored to the student does every kid need a year-round schooling i'm not sure certain kids need year-round experiences and how do we more target what we need to get for extended learning to the individual child and we'll be talking more about that next weekend and the weeks ahead with the board thank you dr bray brown miss keys gamora whoops as soon
129as i can get my camera on all right i appreciate the opportunity and i thank you guys for this report um i am going to weigh in with the concern that ms darnett koufax wrote raised i think that this is particularly an important topic given a that it is a highly unusual year even some of the data that we need to be able to make decisions is missing um and as we go in into in person um i think uh it would be helpful to have greater discussion as to how we're going to tackle some of the issues and concerns that we know our students are addressing just because they have not been in person and so i would certainly support any um uh adjustment we might make and i know that under robert's rules
130we do have the right to reconsider some of our decisions and so i just wanted to start with that um given that i have this particular concern because overall i'm looking at yes there are certain recommendations in here but i'm not seeing as much of the how that we're getting things done uh can i just ask for clarification on what conclusion we're looking for uh today in looking at today's report i would say that in terms of today's report it's really about providing the board information and it's another set of data and another data point another set of data points that the board can use in conjunction with school board updates uh or i'm sorry department updates around the budget around our return to school meetings and a variety of other data to make decisions
131about next year's budget process and where the board would like to spend its money and spend the the taxpayers dollars that they entrust to us that that's how i think that we look at this report and the data that we have before us and then also pair that with the data that will be coming with goals three and four to make the best decisions on how we support our students staff and families okay so i see i do see recommendations but i don't necessarily see uh the how of how we're getting that done so for example um i see there was a recommendation regarding project momentum having i'm sorry the school improvement new department expanding into all schools uh when can we get do we have information on how that has been going that department
132was established in the beginning of this year i believe and so we'll have an opportunity uh with mr greenfielder having the opportunity to share that information with the board as he provides his budget update to talk about the the department talk about the actions of the department and how that department works to support our schools and our students and so there will be that update at that time and then again at any part of the budget process questions can be asked around the efficacy of certain programs as to whether or not we should continue expand or discontinue those programs okay so one of the reports one of the points that was mentioned tonight had to do with this decreased disruptive behavior is that was for 20 20 correct correct and we had a pandemic for
133from march on to the end of that school year so i'm i'm i guess i'm questioning how we could really know are we projecting ahead based on previous reports of disruptive behavior um i'm a little concerned about that because i know that we worked hard to try to make sure we're actually making progress there i can let mr rudy talk about that particular data capture so we actually have two different ways that the goal report and its goal too looks at things related to discipline referrals in the first one we took a look at staff referrals and in that one there was not a difference once we accounted for the covid 19 closure so what we did was we looked at the first three quarters of 2019-20 and we compared it to prior years first
134three quarters since we wanted to make sure there was an apples to apples comparison so while the data showed a decrease overall in terms of staff referrals there was not a decrease when you limited it to just three months the first three quarters in the prior year as well so for staff referrals we did not see a decrease but the other way that we look at the discipline referrals also has to do with the numbers of students are being referred per 100 students in each subgroup and there we did see that decrease and that doesn't um that's not sensitive to time so it whether you're i'm sorry could you repeat that i just missed part of that sentence i'm really sorry okay so um the second way we look at it is to look at
135whether students are being disciplined at the same rate within the subgroup and it's a different way than looking at it because it's looking at students themselves how many within each subgroup how many discipline referrals are there within that subgroup and that we did see decrease and there was a decrease in particular amongst our black students and some of our other subgroups for that so that was a slightly different look at the same kind of information and that was the thing that we were able to see was consistent even with the covent closure so it depended how we wanted to look at it we didn't see changes with staff referrals but we did see changes in the numbers of referrals that were happening in some of our subgroups okay um i also had a question with
136respect to i know there was a recommendation with respect to equity leads and their effectiveness how are we is there a greater structure of accountability for there i know we've had great concerns about that being employed that program being implemented with more fidelity how are we trying to make sure that that's happening so um the equity lead program is uh fairly young and uh we are collecting data at our schools um in terms of the professional development and the coaching support that they provide it is at this point in time more anecdotal qualitative data but we will be partnering with orsi to look at more specific data points that we can use to measure the impact of the equity leads in our instructional coaching program we have a very solid way of measuring impact and
137we are considering using that same way of measuring impact with our equity leads kathleen may i also add in thank you for sharing that additionally one of the things that happened this school year um which was not necessarily reflected in this report good evening first i should say that um is that this year recognizing that um we needed to do a recalibration based on feedback we've gotten from various stakeholders we started this school year with really tight expectations and re-clarifying roles and responsibilities of equity leads as well as principles and so for the first time we brought them all together at the beginning of the school year thanking the board for those additional weeks of professional development we were able to bring them together and establish some clearly defined expectations of the role how to
138be supportive as well as clearly define expectations of equity teams which included the use of the equity audit so some of those things are reflected more in this school year than last school year oh okay my mic wasn't working i'm sorry um all right i i would just like to say overall i would like to hear while i hear some recommendations of what could be considered i'm not necessarily hearing the means by which we get there and so those are some of the things that i'm hoping to be able to discuss as we go forward um because i really i really do support um you know for example being able to support students uh getting those executive functioning skills our el learners i'm looking for our strategies as to how we're going to do that
139how we're going to monitor that how we're going to have accountability for that and i think it's important that the community have an opportunity to to hear those discussions so that will be the end of my plug and uh perhaps i'll have a go back thank you thank you miss um corbett i'm sorry miss keys gamara i will put you down for a go back and just kind of a quick reminder i i did hear your advocacy at the start and as i shared earlier this was a board decision we are certainly free to revisit it and make a different decision in terms of the presentation of this topic our next speaker is miss mclaughlin thank you uh i guess i'll start with dr brabrand i i really do appreciate that in the midst of
140all the challenges that you and your operational team have before you uh you know this best effort to try and bring data to the board on as my colleagues have said something we value deeply every year and we recognize it's really important there's simply not enough time this evening that i could even possibly in the 150 pages of actual written report to talk with you or my colleagues about where my concerns are i will say something that i know you're familiar with me saying which is there's data and then there's data in context and then there's the data analysis and i'm a little concerned just to give you an example on page 12 and 13 on the section the report for student success and it was the section that talked about the strategic action of
141continued to implement el innovation cohorts and el innovation network improvement communities and as it talks about that in the description and the costs associated and then the final section is return on investment as i read it the statement says therefore at the very end of the return investment therefore the investment of thirty six thousand one hundred and two dollars for a school to participate in the el professional development shows no return in student outcomes and and that's where the report leaves us and so i would just ask for you and your team to maybe take that as an example to look at and how does the board then make a deliberative decision with you which i think we both would agree that's actually first of all an operational decision that you and your team would
142make so then the question is what's the what's the report telling the board we're not going to do this or we've got concerns and so we're going to study why we didn't have a return on investment in this so i do again as you and i've enjoyed our time getting the you know really um partner together and and continuously proven that i would say i do like the layout of this report and it is a vast improvement from what i've had in my time under three different superintendents so kudos for you for that but i do think we need to still grow as a system we are not just trying to inform this board to to oversee the 10th largest school system but so many school systems around the country look to fairfax as a
143leader and we want to make sure that when we produce these kinds of reports that people can understand how we're actually arriving at decisions so um boy three minutes goes awfully fast um so i guess i just want my colleagues to know i hope you'll think at a macro level to the things i'm i cited no thank you mr mclaughlin if i could say one of the things we did on the summary slide 11 we said to address the performance of english learners because you're right we didn't get the return on investment and that roi is something we really added newborn members that made board members who may be new to the strategic plan process what is the return we're spending this money what are we seeing and it says we've got to go beyond
144the network innovation cohort in a networked improvement communities model right that model and again it was only in a few schools didn't drive systematic change for el and we know those kids are actually suffering now at least from first quarter data even more this year so one answer and i'm just being again this this general assembly believes it the board of education in virginia believes it is better staffing at elementary school by proficiency level for english language learners that's where the reading skill happens and if they if they're not getting the english language support then they fall farther and farther behind but they're there i certainly agree that we can get to more specifics what might the proposed model be to be honest in the middle of this we're gathering the data we know what
145we've done isn't working we've got to bring you and that's the follow-up the next thing that i guess you're really saying is what what what is the beyond look like and i don't have that for you today but i promise uh i will and one of the things i do know is just like the state we've got to get english language learner staffing by proficiency level at the elementary level it's been one of the things our principals have told us they don't have that extra support for teachers to really help them with reading proficiency and if you can't read by an early grade it really is a struggle to catch up all the way through so that's one area i know you need more detail and we'll work to provide it in the weeks ahead
146well madam chair i just want to say to that point that sentence dr bray brandon all fairness it doesn't tell us what you plan to do it just says that you didn't see the return so if it said so we're going to discontinue the program so we're going to evaluate the program i would just say to your team that is such a crucial part of the report your return on investment analysis for the board to then work with you to say what we should you know we should do next no thanks i i hear you that's fair yeah ms mclaughlin i can add you for go back if i could miss dr anderson could i also maybe briefly respond yes dr presidia go ahead thank you i appreciate it because i think you know for
147members of the public it's really important to have a little bit more context and nuance about how things are represented um in the report and miss mclaughlin asks a really good question so when we look at some of the programs that are highlighted in the report we're providing information on the cost of those programs and this particular program like most of the programs that we mentioned in this report are largely the costs are largely associated with existing salary of existing staff so this particular program that we're talking about here when we attribute that 319 thousand dollars um to the cost of l innovation that's not really accurate because that 000 is paying for those four esau specialists that we talked about earlier this week when i did the program budget review and supporting l innovation
148is one small thing that they do out of many of their job responsibilities so it's one of the improvement initiatives that we implemented to try to have more impactful professional development and more in-depth professional development operating under the theory if we could partner with schools more closely in central office that we could drive student achievement outcomes better than just doing the one-size-fits-all kind of sit-and-get type of professional development that's more division-wide we continue to offer lots of different professional development activities but this was one unique activity um that we've been implementing and testing and we do have data for a number of years and some years because we've done this for three years now some years we've seen better results than others this year we didn't see very good results you know one hypothesis i
149have about that again is that you know we didn't complete the school year we only had three fourths of the school year instead of you know an entire school year so that type of analysis about what do program staff do with this information we use this information to plan and modify how we provide our programs our supports uh for schools and students in the future um and we are as a result looking at how we can modify this program um to be more supportive and more impactful and as dr brabrand pointed out though we don't think that you know four staff members in central office providing professional development is ever going to entirely move the needle for where we want to be to close gaps for english language learners we need bolder actions as ms
150omash was talking about and one of those is providing the additional staff members at schools to be able to work with smaller case loads of students to provide them more one-on-one support to increase and accelerate their english proficiency so there's a lot behind um what you see in the report as miss mclaughlin's pointing out that's not evident here and i certainly can appreciate you know the frustration with not being able to unpack you know all of these items in the depth and level of detail that we'd really like to so thank you thank you dr presidio uh mrs smith yes i would just like to add that again we talk about workload of staff and when we talk about workload for our research and strategic improvement staff along with our department staff there will be
151opportunities for us going forward as we think about working on staff response on highlighting particular areas or we might want to go a little more in depth with staff response and again it's uh we're doing these reports at the same time that we're focused on distance learning and return to school and this was one of those years when everything just came together and uh it was yeoman's work all around to get the reports to where they are and of course looking at opportunities for improvement is always something that we do thank you mr smith and now we'll have ms corbett sanders followed by mr fresh thank you and i too will echo my colleagues suggestion that we need to do a deeper dive on this and my reasoning is that past is prologue and when
152we look at this report there's some um emerging trends that pre-date coveted 19 but have the potential of being a real impact a significant impact on gaps opportunity gaps and achievement gaps in the postcode 19 world and so we really do as a board need to unpack this data more with more um determination and uh dedication because this data really does show us where we should be looking at our budget going forward for example when i go through and i read this section of the report and the report is very well written and i do appreciate the acknowledgement in many places that there is insufficient data to make an informed decision or an informed assessment but when we look at access to uh advanced academics access to honors courses um and the that coupled where
153we actually see a lower representation are slower or non-growth for our underrepresented students that's problematic then you couple that with the discussion we had just a few moments ago um led by my colleague ms omish about um the data that's not here in being able to understand the impact of these gaps and then we look at the data associated with the um and i think my colleague ms keys gemara because i was going to raise the data regarding the disruptive behavior which is something that for those may want to remember that we got rid of the language disorderly conduct which mirrored the criminal code and replaced it with disruptive uh behavior a couple years ago and so we do want to understand what the impact of that was but going back to the gaps and
154the achievement and access you know i look at it's basically flat um or declining when we look at the number of our students participating in algebra 1 by the 8th grade when we look at access to honors courses and minimal growth in access to those honors courses for our black and hispanic students no growth for our elves and a little bit of growth versus students with disabilities and so i look at this and there's so much data here and it's so important for us to be able to understand the impact of this data as we look towards how we are going to mitigate uh the impact of covid19 and so i i do recommend that we have a more in-depth uh discussion of this miss corbett sanders your time is up i'm happy to add
155you for go back thank you did staff want to respond to any of the comments that miss corbett sanders has made okay uh mr frisch followed by miss marin thank you i want to dig in a little bit on the caring culture portion of the presentation um the the actual report as opposed to the um slides indicates that we have astronomical like uh putin election result numbers for students feeling respected um in our schools and i think that's good um they're they're pegged at 85 percent care about students these are students saying this 89 percent think that teachers in the schools want them to do well and then the numbers drop when you get specific um listen to what students want to say 64 so my question is what are we doing to measure um
156you know the concerns of marginalized communities i was reviewing the youth survey and actually in this report the numbers are noticeably lower for for black students when the issue of feeling respect in school and all of the other indicators are brought up so i was looking at the youth survey and it appears we're only asking about race or culture um can someone answer if if we're asking trans or gender expansive students about their experiences with marginalization mr smith or dr presidio i'm not sure who will want to respond to this question dr bray brown or even more broadly if students are experiencing stigmatization based on their gender or gender identity or sexual orientation so uh mr fresh i i can ask dr boyd i know she's new to the team i don't know whether the
157fairfax county youth survey has gone to that level and i think one of the things that has been discussed in the last several months is starting to look at our data from an equity lens more we've had a youth survey for many years it's asked many of the same standard questions for many years and do we need to take an equity which can be helpful right i mean like seeing data over years can be can be helpful um but i i would say in my review of it um we ask only about race or culture one in one question we don't ask any questions that probe about any other things that might be othering students and leading to these these numbers about respect and i asked that because if you look at pew pew has
158studies about the experience of black high school students where significant majorities of them experience discrimination at some point asking a student if they feel respected is just such a an open-ended question and when we get specific the numbers change example glsen found last year that 87 percent of lgbtq middle and high school students had heard negative remarks about their their status in their schools i'm not saying that that is necessarily happening to the same degree in fairfax county but if we're not asking about it are we not driving we're not driving towards the goals you know the stated goal is to get 100 percent of students to say that they feel respected i think that's a bit backwards right we should be looking to lower the percentage of students who are having adverse circumstances or
159experiences and mr frisch i i would say that that i agree with your assessment and that when we were having these conversations in february uh around where we wanted these metrics to go we acknowledged that um the our metrics were very narrow for this particular part of the strategic plan and that there are opportunities for us to bring back more robust and more relevant metrics that actually speak to the the current needs of students but but we certainly do agree that that some of these metrics can be very narrow and when you only have one or two questions to base your data on is that really enough for us to to make a decision about how to move forward so well even better if we were able to ask you know in a you know
160a digital version of a survey you can ask follow-up questions of students who answer questions a certain way it would be very interesting to find out from students who feel you know discrimination based on race or culture other things about their experience and we could do that for you know gender religious minority students etc so um i look forward to furthering the conversation about these and i will also have some written questions yeah and we clearly have opportunities to bring back some of those recommendations to the board on how we get uh better information from students and and do some of that follow-up so in agreement with you and mr frisch i'm happy to add you to we'll go back uh miss marin followed by ms pikarski yes thank you mr smith and staff so
161i i want to just share a thought that you know i don't know how much stock we can put in this i think the staff have done a good good work to make a story out of incomplete data as dr braeburn has said and you know we can all add our subjective observations and qualitative data along with that but this year is just simply an anomaly and you know if we had to bet whether students excelled or declined unfortunately we'd be betting that they declined so you know just like the conversations we had with student membership we were talking about the capital improvement plan we heard from our staff then that you know our experts in facilities planning our tried and true formulas don't work this year they're not accurately delivering the projections that we
162need them to so that doesn't ring true right now so you know i'm okay to revisit decisions that you know the board makes as needed but it's concerning that i'm hearing some want to start to really dive deeper into this data and when we agreed in november to handle it this way in this circumstance in this time um you know when we're kind of talking about reversing that that agreement you know i think we need to keep going forward this data informs the way we work but it's difficult to use this as a pure benchmark as we have in the past and so i think if there's you know questions about what these data seem to highlight that we actually pivot those conversations not so much on this data but on how do we then
163budget for that for the results that we know that our students are going to be seeking i also think about you know can we use the other avenues we have at our disposal student health advisory committee shaq i already sent them the goal report i mean this is what they're about we have other ways to do this work than just the board talking about this um you know and we just simply our agendas are so full finally one thing i'll share about these goals themselves is you know i'm eager to see how these goals can be revisited to see if we're categorizing and then measuring in sort of the correct goal i could you know looking at what counts for caring culture well if a child is feels like an outsider they're upset they're bullied
164they're not going to get to student success so actually from the start mr smith always been kind of fascinated about well how are the decisions made to place each um goal or metric with the goals and i think you know these conversations we've had during the budget too come up to how do we align the goal with the budget so i hope that we can do more of that work especially through the budget process but then as we continue with the strategic planning work as well thank you thank you very much go ahead dr braver thank you really brief because i know you have go backs and we've already been here for some time super quick this strategic plan was developed by two prior boards when i arrived we took a strategic plan focus working
165with the board to narrow down 38 desired outcomes to less than 20. it's still too big and we have to what you said is acknowledge a pandemic has washed over us we did our best to show you the data from what we had in the past but we need to reimagine what the future strategic plan looks like and i think it's going to be narrower slimmer and more high impact we have to build that we need to build that as we're building return to school i believe in the next few weeks we're going to go and and have finalized our return to school approach and then we need to talk about when they return what are we doing like miss omesh said we are going to be on a high state alert everyone is ready
166as those kids come back in to surround them flood them and give the very best social emotional and academic strategies that work we're going to bring you plans about extended learning in just next week we're going to keep redesigning but i do think it's a balance how much do we want to stay back in the snapshot of data that is passed with a pandemic that is front and center there are themes and trends we try to identify them but i think i do want to say i think we need to be as proactive about the data that's in front of us that we can affect versus spending too much time analyzing the data in the past that really is more than ever an incomplete snapshot of what the system's uh you know able to do
167and and what we were able to really share with you tonight but again transparency we wanted to show you these goals have been our foundation for years here's what we did it's important to recognize and discuss but it's also important to plan and pivot for the future and what we're going to do for those kids as they return enough in a few weeks in person thank you dr brabrand miss picarski followed by ms tolen yeah thank you dr anderson actually you know miss um maren kind of a cap encapsulated most of what i wanted to say and then dr brabrand kind of tied it with the bow and finished it off for me so you know while i do hear many of my colleagues have perhaps changed their minds um into you know doing a
168deeper dive uh with this data i think we um you know we're still in you board um this is a pandemic going forward i think we're going to have to do some um more work uh in the strategic plan in general and i hope that's something that we can actually start sooner than later with where we are in this unique time so right now i just want to thank staff for all the work you did i know it was a push to get this all together and to put um these reports uh to get them to us and they were extremely informative so thank you miss tolin yes um thank you very much for the report um i did want to just kind of reiterate some of the things that were said by um previous
169colleagues that so much of this ties together you know um strategically you know with the budget yeah i mean if you just take a very simple example um we spend a little time already talking about the portrait of a graduate presentations of learning and how important they are and how we could expand them across different subject areas um but just at our work session earlier this week you know dr presidio talked about the fact that um you know i work on a portrait of a graduate and isd is done by a very small group and we don't have the funding to expand that work right now so you know these things we're talking about here entitled the budget and then i'm just thinking about timing um you know as we're you know full into our
170budget process like now right now and just in a couple of months we're supposed to have our decisions made around that um how can we be somewhat flexible perhaps um because as we're looking at you know just bringing kids back into the schools you know over the next you know month or so and then really needing to double down and look at you know what we need to do to assess where the kids are and you know what we need to do for them how do we make sure that we have um you know some flexibility and budgeting you know into you know the next school year so that we can put it where we need it i don't know if that's common or if there's you know something that we need to do about
171that in our budget process that's a bray brand well miss tollen one thing with the stimulus money we we know we got we can actually we have flexibility through 2023 for that second round of stimulus that just passed congress in the winter break we are very very excited i was going to speak at superintendent matters that we have a new president that already talked about stimulus and support for our schools and support for helping reopen schools for in-person learning so i think that's that's left to be determined but we do have some flexibility with the stimulus to talk about money we want to spend this second semester money we want to spend the summer and money like you said miss tollen that we need to be strategic about that we may want to think about
172for next year and so we need to keep that in mind and we need to look at the potential for whether there'll be additional dollars and we want to target programs uh to expand uh into next year or to redesign for next year so it is something we're aware of in the budget process and we're going to try to bring his maximum flexibility but also maximum leverage what can we do now in the next few months that will move the needle for kids this year and prepare them to catch up as much as possible over the summer to hit the ground running next year when we hope things are much closer to normal than they are now so i guess it's something we could look at some of those one-time funds um to implement programs
173that we think we need to have in place you know as we start assessing kids as they're coming back into the buildings and then we would have clicks and then we need to look at our budget process next year to look at which of those programs we want to continue and that we would have to put into you know reoccurring funds not just these um you know one-time funds so i guess we have a little more time than i was thinking and i do think that we'll have much more information once we're able to bring you that the plan of what that looks like we'll be able to sort of take that apart for the board and for the community and then add to and see which things we'll need to keep as permanent additions
174to the work that we do and other things that might be very brief supports that we provide to students to get them to the next level so i think that it's all part of the dialogue that we're going to have and consider what we'll need to do in the short term and what we'll need to continue to do in the long term thank you um one other just worst question i was very interested in the information that you presented around student stress and you know how the stress just rises year after year and um again i know maybe this is not the report to have the you know how to how what are we doing to move forward with this but i didn't know um if maybe someone could elaborate a little bit more on
175uh what we're doing around students dress because i you know i was worried about that even before covet 19 and i think that it's certainly exacerbated dr boyd hi yes good evening one of the things that we really want to find out is to do some additional digging we have a number as you know a number of um clinicians or or folks who can support sel but it's really really imperative for us to understand the why before we begin drafting plans and so part of that piece will be engaging in two-way communication with students so that we get a better understanding that i think one of the things we learned this year from mr omabudo is that we got some very very implicit feedback from students as to what they need sometimes as adults we
176think we know what they need but we really have to take some additional time and hear directly from students as to what they need and actually engage and engage in conversation with them about how we can do things differently so that's some of our preliminary work but we want to make sure again that we're addressing what their need is uh we have to do a little bit more digging to that end got it thank you for doing that work um i will um give my the rest of my time a minute maybe to my next colleague thank you very much that's much appreciated seeing that there are no other new speakers i will take my turn and ask a number of questions but i will start with more of a statement i think the work
177that we began last february when we began to delve into the scorecard to to start that review which essentially coveted brought to a standstill that's really important work for us to get back to sooner rather than later not just to whittle down to the most essential things but to really change it to reflect the current needs that we have right now because the socio-emotional um challenges that we're facing impacts the instruction so significantly i mean we've heard mr anubuda speak about this ad nauseum but we need to make sure that we are adding that to the top of mind which is top of our scorecard which means that our resources are being put for um towards that um effort which brings me to one of my first questions on page 27 of the slide you
178talked about trauma-informed instruction to title one schools uh who manages that because as a person in a type 1 school this is not something that i'm familiar with as a parent rather in a title 1 school how does that work who can give me a little bit more detail in terms of who monitors that program who supports those schools and that effort i'd like to start there miss waltz do you want to start with title one i could sure i sure could thank you so much and i appreciate the questions so um the title one staff uh worked closely with the staff from special services to ensure that all of our title one schools had this professional development provided to them um and that was in the 1920 school year and so that prioritization we
179felt was really important especially um given some of the trauma that we were seeing in our students the other thing i would say is that in addition to the trauma-informed instruction title one has provided additional funding for additional social workers in in our title 1 schools and i think it's a total of five full-time employees and then our title one principals have also dedicated additional title one dollars for social work support i'm also wondering if um anybody else from dss might be able to talk about the other side of the trauma informed instruction if you wanted more details about what specifically that professional development looks like thank you thank you i would certainly like to have that additional information and given um the state that we're in with the trauma that all of our students
180all of our teachers all of us have encountered this year how will this be ramped up who will will that office be able to handle the deluge of of support that the schools are going to need not just our title one schools which that support's just going to need to even be greater but all throughout the rest of our schools where does this show up in our budgeting in terms of a consideration and dr anderson miss deb scott is here with us our director of intervention and prevention services and i'll ask that she share some of the work that her staff is doing but we certainly as we proceed we'll need to be looking at our budget and how it aligns with our stated priorities we do again have a number of clinicians and social
181workers and psychologists and we are certainly very appreciative of those efforts and we know those positions have increased and one of the things that we're going to continue to look at is how staff are spending their time we know that we want to make sure that the goal is that they're spending the bulk of their times directly supporting students directly supporting teachers who support students but we also know a number of those persons support other functions iep meetings eligibilities different things like that and so miss scott if you'll just explain some of the work that your your department is doing and we're happy to make sure we do our department budget review that we provide some additional information that crosswalks the spending with these priorities for anderson hi this is deb we um our social
182workers do lead the training although we do invite other clinicians into that training so it is a team effort but the social workers absolutely lead that work the title one schools came out of the discipline studies as you are aware so that is how that started and we had plans to expand uh kovit did get in the way of that expansion you've asked a very important question as do we have enough people on the ground um part of our issue is going to be we don't know what we're facing so it is a hard balance to decide if we have enough people we would always accept more staffing into social work because they do offer a depth and breadth of abilities as far as training and working with students especially in the trauma-informed practices our
183other clinicians obviously can step up and do that but your school counselors are doing other activities school psychology is mandated to evaluations so again dr boyd makes a very good point we always need to be looking at what is our very highly trained clinical clinical staff doing during the day and are they doing the right things at the right time so we look at that continuously we would accept more help the trauma-informed materials that we use are paid for by the county and we also were able to get a grant this year i do have some things forwarding to dr boyd just about the materials that has not been a line item we have supplied all of that by grant at this point so that might be an area that we need to look at
184as well thank you so much for that one of the things that you said is a good segue into one of my other questions regarding how are we going to determine a baseline when our students are returning back into the building what are the diagnostics that are going to be done at whatever that entry point is so that we can one identify the real issues while we know of them we don't have that hard data in front of us not only just to gather more information but also measure our progress how is that going to be addressed and handled in terms of determining that baseline foundation and that segues into what we're talking about tonight which is the caring culture goal i think folks have shared with you that we are concerned about our formative
185data because we have relied on the youth survey it is a great survey of our county but it is not formative and over time the school board did purchase or give us funds to purchase a wellness screener we are in the rfp process and we are just about done with that process and we will have that screener is not the answer to everything it is going to be able to inform our instruction in social emotional learning but that is another added piece that we're going to have to ask our staff to accept that screener be trained and roll that out um and that is not a small ask of our staff at this time but i think we all agreed it was important and we all are going to have to do it and it
186will be a universal screener across all of fcps and i'm sorry did you say that the screener was uh more was heavier on the instructional side in lieu of the socio-emotional component it's a social emotional wellness screener so i think it can do both but it's the first time that i believe and i have to say that i haven't been here very long but i believe it'll be the first time we have a universal a universal screener across the district so we're looking forward to that and we do think that will help us inform intervention and instruction dr brabrun did you want to speak no it's a big nugget we haven't had a universal screener for social emotional okay that's the nugget we're going to it's going to be more work but we've got to
187start to track kids social emotional state like we did their sol scores in the past in fact i believe that that's going to be the foundational thing that we're going to have to focus on most because if the kid social emotionally is not ready to learn all the additional academic interventions just aren't going to be possible and we're going to have more of those kids and i think dr scott or ms scott hit the nail on the head we don't know exactly right the virtual it's it's real but there's the unreal right the social emotional is the missing piece to virtual that until those kids come back we're not going to have a full understanding of how deep it is so the wellness screener is going to put us in position and we're going to
188need to as dr boyd said too be very targeted about what do we want school psychologists social workers and counselors doing in those first days back those first weeks back those first months back it's not going to be business as usual it's figuring out what do we got what are we going to do about it and what are the plans we're going to build based on what we find in those first few months some of it is going to pop the first day the first week some of it's going to manifest itself as we get into the uh into the fourth quarter but the end the end of the school year and one way as we talked about this fifth quarter is not going to be the end for kids that we know have needs
189that need to continue to extend into the summer and into next year and we really need to start thinking about building a two-year a three-year plan about how we get out of covet it is not going to be i need to say it again i know mr mess was asking earlier and i want to say it again for the public there is not going to be a magic wand over fairfax county or any school district that's going to erase the impact of covet in a few short weeks or months we have to brace ourselves for harder worse student data and except it's no one's fault it's not a blame game but how are we going to get that are redesigned that are different to address these kids and we have a staff that i know
190is going to do everything they can uh to put themselves in a place to have kids be successful and we're we're devoted to it and we'll we'll partner with you in the months ahead around it thank you i'm looking forward to um engaging in those conversations regarding how we are going to set our students up for success um another question that i had and i think this is for dr presidio you talked about this is very specific you talked about reading performance um increasing i guess the gap was decreasing um between some groups i think it's slide 11 but i'm not sure and you did not have um you didn't speak in terms of what data what measure you used to evaluate this can i get a little bit more detail there yeah absolutely this
191is an internal measure that we have it's not an external sol measure this is an internal measure based on teachers providing information about what grade level students are being assessed at and instructed on in their classrooms so this is based on teacher professional judgment as recorded in progress report data how does this data measure typically compare to the external measures you use on in a normal year are they usually do they track in the same direction i'm just concerned about not being too optimistic on this internal measure if it doesn't typically align with the external assessments right now that that's a great point this is a this is a board approved metric um so we collect data on this um every year at least um and report it at least as we've had the current
192version of the strategic plan typically this information in this data set is a little bit higher than sol scores but we do see a fair degree of of consistency but typically this is higher than um the standardized assessment and we would expect it to be so because when the students taking the sol that's a you know one moment in time one day in time versus what's actually happening in the classroom from the teacher's perspective and judgment on a daily basis so um we do put a lot of credibility into this particular metric thank you i'll put myself on go back massaismahizer followed by mr mesh thank you um i appreciate that so i wanted to go um first i want to thank you for all the comments and i know we could dig into this
193data um forever but i do agree with my colleagues that um things are going to be very different looking forward given what's happened this year so i think this is important data to inform our work but i think it's going to be data that may change significantly based on what goes forward so i think our focus needs to be on going forward having said that um i did want to sort of take a little attention to the um disruptive referrals data that we talked about and ms keith kumar mentioned it as well and if you look at students with disabilities they still received the most referrals for disruptive behavior in fact um previously the data i saw if i recall from last year um our african-american students were 20 out of 100 last year they're
194down to one out of 11 out of 100. our students with disabilities are 22 out of 100 the previous time this report was given now it's 16 out of 100 so the percentage difference is is still not as much i would pause it and i've had really great conversations with our equity team about this and i mentioned this last year the importance of intentionally embedding neurodiversity into our strategic plan into a welcoming culture our equity team is really open they're fantastic but if we continue to leave it out of our strategic plan and out of any words in our caring culture i think it sends a message i would posit that perhaps when we talk about studying whether we have culturally responsive teachers and culturally competent teachers it should be culturally con teachers respond to
195students in culturally competent and neurodiverse ways i would posit that words matter and so as we move forward i would really you know if we're looking at cultural responsibility responsiveness and how it creates a welcoming and caring culture and how that knowledge may re may lead to viewing students in a culturally responsive way potentially reducing discipline referrals adding neurodiversity to that for students with disabilities given the results would be very important so i i will stop there thank you thank you did anyone want to respond to that comment okay message received and just a reminder i just want to say this one last time it was early march we had a work session we had sloan one week later the pandemic hit it all went out up in the air this is just our best
196attempt to do what we've done every year for this board and the public to be transparent with the data that we have we're in a different place we're going to need a different response and we're going to need a different strategic plan and some different metrics than what we had before we had a potpourri of everything from a to z and we're going to have to narrow it down and we're going to have to have innovative ways and strategies different from what we've necessarily done before we were on the verge of that conversation if you remember the board going let it let us loose let us come the pandemic hit and and we have our work cut out for us but we'll be bringing you starting as early as next week some new conceptual approaches
197about things that we think can work and we'll be doing more in the months ahead thank you dr brabrand uh mr mesh has yielded her time so ms keys gamara followed by ms mclaughlin i'm coming i'm coming thank you i i i won't be long um i do want to just really make a statement because i think some of my colleagues that i may be talking about the same thing um but i i do want to clarify i think we would all agree that uh dealing with return to school and the pandemic has been one of the most traumatizing things that we together collectively have had to deal with and now as we are looking at these strategic uh goals particularly student success we know that we have uh students that have been having difficulty
198we know that emotional supports are necessary we know that from looking at um even the data given tonight that students even under normal circumstances are received are experiencing greater stress as they get into the later grades i think that as we are combining those two things and i understand that we may feel somewhat handicapped by the fact that we have had to deal with this pandemic i think perhaps one of the most important things we have to do is to plot out clearly as clearly as we can what our course is to try to get our students back on track i think that that's going to help the many parents who feel as though they have been handicapped by the situation i know we have a number of parents who are understanding and are not
199having as much difficulty with virtual but there are a number of students as our uh mr ann abudo has explained to us that truly feel that they are struggling and so i do think that we can use this opportunity to take the data that we have and plot out more precisely how we plan to move forward and address those concerns and so i don't think that we are so far apart um when we say we want to take a deeper dive by some of my colleagues who are saying otherwise because i do think we all have that return to school as a priority and i'd like to see how we can combine these two efforts to make sure that our community really understands what we're doing and why thank you miss mclaughlin followed by miss
200keys by ms corbett sanders thank you uh just uh briefly uh dr brabrand one other thing i was hoping you and your team might consider is on slide 13 of the powerpoint it gives it begins a lot of bullet points of different findings uh from it within the reports so it's up on the screen here on limiting elimination of gaps if you see all those bullet points they're great but for the board members and the public it's really hard to know where in the report this information might be so i was going to request that we could cite the the pages where people can find that and that really allows people to understand that there's data behind what we're saying here and then people can read it to understand how you're drawing those conclusions by
201putting that information there and then on page 18 of the student success report there's a um a topic header that says gold champion response to conclusions and i really wasn't sure what that statement means gold champion response to conclusions so if someone can look at page so i can clarify overall so the process this year was a bit different because in the past our gold champions and their respective departments uh have compiled the data and have pulled together the reports for the school board this year the office of research and strategic improvement looked at this as they might look at a program evaluation and so they reviewed the data they did work with departments to get clarification on the data but the the reports are specifically written by the office of research and strategic improvement
202they then gave those reports to the departments to the gold champions and said here are the data now what is your response much as they would for any type of program evaluation and when we brought program evaluations we always do give the staff the ability to to provide a response we look at this as a very objective look through the the orsi lens and then give staff the opportunity to to speak to those recommendations or considerations and that's what we did here okay thank you mr smith i would just again say dr brabion for your consideration that's not really intuitive to the reader or even to board members who haven't heard that terminology so i think because this is a formal report again for the board and the public i would recommend a different title
203so people understand what that reference is because without context honestly i read it and i was like this looks like a lot of words but i'm not sure uh what it's actually capturing so you did a great job explaining it but a report if it takes that kind of explaining um people are going to appreciate who's speaking and where is the you know who's the author basically of the the champion response so i i would consider regenerating that and then i just want to say to my other colleagues have championed it i absolutely know and want to review this in greater depth with my colleagues but as we know our our families at a minimum and many of our teachers are so anxious about return to school i i really hope we will be judicious
204and that we've got to get that nailed down and right and then we can do this deeper dive and i know for staff you're going to probably agree so thank you thank you miss mclaughlin miss corbett sanders followed by mr fresh thank you um so throughout the document there are a number of places where there's a recommendation for budgetary implications it's striking to me that these budgetary implications aren't in alignment with the budget that was presented just a couple of weeks ago and the one that we are um going to have to adopt the proposed budget later this month or actually in february so my question is if you look at all of the budget requests or budget um consideration how do you prioritize these considerations or have they been prioritized these considerations versus the
205ones that were put forth in the um superintendent's proposal and if not in looking at these are there certain things in there that you would recommend we invest in and what would you trade out of the um proposed budget so so i think the response to that would take more time than we have here but of course we we do look at the recommendations from these goal reports after working with departments and departments do provide that information to budget staff as we think about those recommendations that dr brabrand would want to bring forward as part of a budget process as we shared earlier when you look at some of the data around our english learners we took that into consideration as we thought about additional staffing for english learners there may be other areas that
206we would have liked to have brought forward i know that there were other recommendations and other requests the departments had but of course we know that in this very tight budget year we wanted to think about some of those recommendations where we could uh essentially make the most difference for our students and for our staff so i think that you will see a combination of uh recommendations that are those recommendations that come through that orsi program evaluation lens you'll see recommendations that have come to staff from uh or come to the superintendent from uh departments themselves and the superintendent then makes those decisions on which recommendations come to the board certainly would like to do many more things but again in these in these very tight times uh brought forward the ones that we thought
207would make the most difference so i appreciate what you just said uh mr smith but there seems to be a a little bit of a disconnect here because this goal report is also the superintendent's goal report and it has a number of budget considerations that are asked from the board so what i'm trying to understand is are those budget considerations included in the report there are some synergies with the superintendent's proposed budget that was presented in january there are some that are different so when you look at all of the budget considerations in this document is there a reprioritization or how do these recommendations how should i as a board member use these recommendations to influence any modification that this board may want to make to the superintendent's proposed budget thank you mr smith so
208so i would say that that process the great brand i will let dr raybrand answer well miss corbett sanders you know i beg to differ with your analysis of this assessment we identified clearly in the school reporting that english language staffing was a necessary enhancement it's in my identified investments the identified investments of the cis salary scale were things that i believe even you championed in the rest of the board around changing salaries to match of our teacher scale advanced academics is part of the external consultant study that the prior board did and aligns with our strategic plan goal which we have metrics and then we have the special ed review just a placeholder the truth is my identified investments only are the tip of the iceberg of additional investments that we need to make
209so i think it's more a question of what else is there that we want to include to align with strategic priorities versus that we don't have a budget aligned with strategic priorities and we are going to look at the stimulus money that we just received to help us craft uh some additional work on the budget that we know we're going to do over the next several months that budget we crafted and i presented in the first week in january those dramatically different pieces of information that we have the second stimulus the change of governor northam to looking at a salary for uh compensation instead of a bonus and the potential for a new president with an additional stimulus so the budget process is just beginning so i i agree there's more to share i agree
210with you there but i would would say respectfully that i do think what i identified in my budget began to show some of the areas that this board and the administration already agreed were strategic investments aligned with the strategic plan thank you miss kubrick sanders i'm so sorry your time has expired i can happily come back to you um i'll join the dino at colfax have her turn and then i'm happy to give you a third go round miss denver fox please go ahead and then i will put you for another go back miss carl sanderson dr brabrand misunderstood my question and so i would like my question answered miss corbett sanders i will happily come back let's give him a chance to maybe re-hear what you've just said well you will have another turn
211this is a promise to you ms denmark colfax go ahead i'd like your question answered we will come back to you to get that question answered miss denra koufax please go ahead i i do want to allow my colleague to have her question answered i feel that's proper if you want to do a go back are you are you entertaining third go back because i i want to make sure she has her question answered i know you didn't have a long first turn so i want to make sure you got in we will go back to miss corbett sanders please do not worry go ahead thank you um i do not want to be labor at this point but as dr brabrand pointed out it was two boards ago and mix mclaughlin and i were
212on that board and the reason we needed a strategic plan is a strategic plan should not be a static document um and the goal reports come out of the strategic plan right they're part and parcel of it um and that's why what we need to ensure that we do is whatever we do particularly as we move on in our budgetary process we need to ensure that we have a clear understanding i do believe that a lot of what um was recommended for school board considerations as i look at this plan are included in dr brabrandt's but there's other really needy topics that i think we could and should have the opportunity to look into before we make our final decisions on the budget particularly in these two crucial strategic plan um goals of student success
213and caring culture and for the record i was reminded by a colleague that um i was one of people that did not um maybe the only person that did not think that this the structure the way we decided to do this was the way i i i appreciate that the i within the minority opinion but um i think it's extremely important that we do parallel processing but we take the strategic plan we continue to look at it dr brabrand has a plan right now for return to school that will be implemented shortly and has dates um on it so i think there could be some parallel processing during that time and i am not going to at this point put forward emotion or anything i just ask my colleagues for us to discuss this as
214we move forward and then relay that information to the chair i don't want to get in utilize this time right now to put a motion or anything like that but i do want the respect to say this is the most important thing that we do of course return to learn and covet is the overarching thing right now and we need to get that back in order but the student success and the plan and the caring culture they all have to be intertwined as we put together our return to school plan and i again with the budget coming up there are additional budgetary items that might need to be addressed so that's why i would appreciate further conversation on this thank you very much dr brabrand did you want to respond uh i would just say
215thank you mr nack cofax i do think the budget that we developed and we worked with uh miss marin miss koufax and frankly the entire school board that i presented did align with school board priorities from our discussions this fall i also agree with miss corbett sanders that there are additional strategic priorities that we've identified here in our our goal 1 and goal 2 reports and i think we're going to have an opportunity as we move forward to talk about in the next several months as we do the budget process what else we can do we're already having mr smith and miss bird in the budget team start to look at the stimulus monies to look at strategies around compensation around additional investments beyond the identified investments i shared and i'd encourage us i think
216the board has to figure out how to strike the right balance between reviewing the data of the past year while preparing uh for our response to the pandemic and the impact of having kids uh not in in-person learning for so so long and so i think that's the balance and i think we can figure out how moving forward with the chair and vice chair's leadership how to integrate that into some of the existing meetings that we'll have coming up the program budget review our our own budget processes um our monthly return to school updates so i look forward to partnering with you all to do that do i have more time dr anderson because i do want to just tell you no ma'am do you want another um turn i can add you to the
217list yes please okay and we have three folks for another round we will start with miss seismo heiser and then miss corbett sanders and then miss dead not cofax thank you i'll be brief because i have a million more questions but i'm not going to ask them at this time of the hour um i first wanted to say that i agree with what ms keith camaro said that i do think it's very important to tie some of this work to return to school and again not spend too much time on this report because i think that things are going to be very very different moving forward um i did want to mention also that as we're looking at um moving forward and ways to change this i want to put one more plug in for
218when we're looking at college and career plans and post-secondary college and career plans i know we're um basing that i believe on a survey of our students is that correct how do we get information about college and career readiness plans where's that data coming from and i apologize if it's in the longer i think that's the senior survey but dr presidio is that correct yeah it's in your survey and then we do follow up with um a national database the national student clearinghouse that gives us information about uh student enrollment and two and four-year colleges so we do have that uh information and follow-up as well do we have any data on um sort of college retention rates you know and what i'm looking at see national data on um you know four-year and six-year
219college retention rates for you know how and i believe i'm the numbers memorized but it's around 41 of students who start college graduate in four years and 60-ish percent graduating six do we have any fairfax county specific data on that it would just be interesting to try to collect that as we're looking at long-term success thank you yeah yeah no we absolutely do um and that again is uh information that's collected as part of national student clearinghouse date so we do have that and um typically we perform slightly above the national averages but not significantly above can you share that yeah no i we definitely could share that with the board thank you um miss keys i'm sorry miss carpet sanders so dr brabrand started to answer my question in response to miss uh darren
220at kofax do i need to re-um state my question or are do you understand what i'm asking which is that in each of the sections of the report there is a section called um uh let me give you the exact title conclusions and then it says school board consideration and under school board considerations there's a budget considerations some of these have been included in your proposed budget already as you mentioned the english language learners others have not what i'm asking is of all of these budget considerations in this report knowing that we are returning to school and knowing that we're going to have certain challenges that will be exasperated that are identified here and will be exasperated as part of the return to um our physical buildings after cove at 19. what of these budget
221considerations do you believe this board needs to be a champion for you and get in modifying or the proposed budget thank you dr brabrand uh thank you i'm gonna i'm gonna share one comment and then i'm gonna let uh dr presidio or mr smith if they want to add but one area i can tell you tonight and thank you for rephrasing that i think sometimes it's it's it's having the time to just get clarity and i appreciate the clarity of the question one of the areas for example fcps expanding bridge to kindergarten to reach all students with a pre kindergarten experience without pre-kindergarten experience and then miss daryn at cofax was talking about is that number growing we need to look at bridge to kindergarten and i think you'll be interested to see what we're
222going to talk to you about next week do we need more bridge programs bridge to kindergarten perhaps bridge to first grade think about those kindergartners this year what they missed we'll have some kids that didn't participate in kindergarten who will come in next year in first grade so we'll have some of that i think under the budget as one of the first areas that i'm going to be looking at particularly for our youngest learners who really the state has said to us are our most vulnerable uh learners uh dr presidio or mr smith anything else you would add the in response to mrs corbett sanders question dr priscilla i would just yeah i would just confer with that comment and i think it's already been discussed but in addition to the academic needs that we
223know students are going to have and we do need to be thinking not just about summer programs but next year obviously as part of the budget development process but also thinking beyond academic needs uh in terms of the social emotional needs and how we can really provide supports to to students and to families as well that additional family engagement efforts that we've been undertaking we're making progress but there's a lot of additional need to work with the entire family not just the student to address some of these gaps that we that we need to be able to accelerate and close for students so that would be the other big category is around social emotional learning and family engagement activities i'm sorry dr brabrand just one final one final point i wanted to make one of
224the other strategic concerns in caring culture was the chief equity officer action plan um school's completing the equity audits i've really asked dr williams to come in and uh and and she's already hit the ground running let me tell you and brought truth to power and multiple conversations find our equity blind spots now find them in our strategic plan find them in our budget and bring them to us and so again i didn't have the benefit of her analysis and insight as i prepared the budget in december to share with you in january she started december 30th but she will be here in the months ahead between now and may when you have to adopt the budget and i want to leave room and i did in this slide 28 to let the chief equity
225officer bring an action plan and there could be some changes in the budget driven by her recommendations along with members of the leadership team uh in concert so thank you miss corbett sanders for that question thank you dr brabrand uh mr ness colfax if i your time was expired miss corbett sanders uh may i ask him is there not colfax i believe that uh mr anubudo has a question but he does have to log off because he has class tomorrow would you be amenable to me letting him share a few words on this matter absolutely thank you mr anubudo hi dr anderson um no question right now i i said i would write my thoughts down and have them sent okay sorry for the confusion thank you of course have a good night thank you
226thank you miss danica followed by miss uh mclaughlin and i'm so sorry ms keisgamar is your hand still up from last time or did you want another turn thank you and um dr bray brandt i just wanted to respond to what you you when you last um your your answer your response to to to my concerns um and i think we are saying the same thing and i love the the um the words that were just said because what i wanted to point out is this report has provided perspective on what have been some long-standing issues that will hear before coven that will be here after coven and the words that you used equity blind spots these are issues that have been highlighted for years this report continues to provide that historical perspective some will
227be greater because of where we what we have experienced the trauma the the the everything that cobit has brought to us all the difficulties that covet has brought to us so i think there it would be a lost opportunity not to have these conversations perhaps we're saying the same thing in different ways um i'm not looking this as this at all as old data because and and and the missing pieces i understand about but i think the opportunity for a broader conversation on the topics of student success on the topics of the caring culture as we move forward as we finalize our budget this year are aren't necessary and um so that's i just wanted to end my comments there and i will continue to talk to my colleagues about the best way to move
228forward to have this conversation continue thank you ms denna koufax miss mclaughlin oh i'm so sorry was there a response to her statement no i think as miss uh darnachkovak said i think we are saying the exact same thing so i appreciate that and and i look forward to finding more time moving forward to go over these things thank you miss marin you have a point of order yes uh chairman i'm just wondering what the plan is for um how many rounds of this go backs we're going to have it seems like it's a select number of people and um the utility seems to not be there for me this is the last round um miss mclaughlin is the last speaker plus i had you so miss mclaughlin will have her third round and everybody
229who wanted to would have had that and so we will be moving moving on to the next agenda item miss mclaughlin uh yes just briefly uh i i do want to say dr brabre and i look forward to you and your team bringing us uh this equity action plan from dr williams but certainly do hope that what will come with it is the the data and the metrics that show whichever programs or services you'd like to have funded that we can demonstrate the success of those whether it's bridge to k whether it's the social emotional learning doctor presidio said the family engagement work everything that the board funds in order for public confidence in our decision making and and to support you is that we we need to have those kinds of metrics that will
230say here's the success now we want to invest further in it or here's a success other school divisions have had we have not done this but we'd like to adopt it that would be my request and the other thing i'd say ms maron is i appreciate what you just asked a moment ago uh as well intentioned as this was i think it's really hard this time of night to be carrying on a in-depth essentially work session in a business meeting so we all can reflect and talk to our chair and vice chair about that and thank you dr anderson i know you followed the will of the board [Laughter] thank you okay at this time i had my cell phone go back but i will ask that question at another point we will move on
231to the next agenda item which is a 3.04 which is a mclean langley high school boundary study i now call on dr brabrand for the introduction thank you chairman anderson mr plantenberg our wonderful assistant superintendent for facilities in transportation we'll lead you through this mclean boundary uh adjustment process i know this has been something that has gone on for a couple of years working across multiple boards and we are bringing a proposal tonight for your review mr plattenberg thank you very much dr brabrand and chairman anderson tonight's meeting let's go ahead and get started in the presentation the second slide in the presentation really speaks to the purpose of the mclean high school boundary study and the recommended boundary adjustments it's really to provide the capacity relief to mclean high school by using the available
232capacity langley and high school the study also includes the middle schools to provide continuity in the school feeder pattern from elementary on to middle and high schools and any change made as we continue when we moved to page three in school year 2019 2020 mclean high school was over capacity with an enrollment of 2 350 students while the school was designed for only 1993 students this was a capacity utilization of 118 percent the installation of the modular brings the capacity of mclean to 2343 students which would be an estimated capacity of approximately 100 langley high school had a capacity surplus with 1 972 students in a design for 2 370 students this is a capacity utilization of 83 looking at the middle schools long fellow middle schools approaching a capacity deficit at 97 percent utilization
233with 1 334 students in a building designed for students and cooper middle school had a capacity surplus of 92 capacity with enrollment of 992 students a renovation of cooper middle school has just begun and the renovation is designed to provide for 1120 students page four talks about the boundary adjustment process with the beginning of the boundary scoping meetings which were held for this boundary change on december 2nd and december 4th at langley and mclean high schools respectively as a result of the community feedback the school board held a work session on march 9th 2020 where the scope of the study was discussed and amended the second step in the process is a boundary study community meeting which was held on december 7th and at that meeting staff presented four options and collected feedback from the
234community tonight we are presenting the recommendation for the boundary adjustment for consideration by the school board the school board will hold a public hearing on january 28th to hear public comments and then vote on the boundary adjustment on february 4th of this year page 5 speaks to the boundary scoping meetings and since the boundary scoping means we're held in december of 2019 staff evaluated the feedback and potential options that were compiled feedback from the community recommended that split feeders and middle schools be included and the board ended up amending the scope at a work session in march of 2020 to include longfellow middle school and cooper middle school the school board also awarded a contract to install 12 classroom modular to help alleviate the capacity deficit at mclean high school page six of the presentation
235speaks to the four options that were presented at the boundary study community meeting that was held virtually on december 7th 2020. the four options presented were option a which considers students in the colvin run elementary school split feeder area and a portion of westbrook elementary school option b consider reassigning students in the colvin run elementary school split feeder area and a portion of the spring hill elementary school split feeder area and a portion of westfire elementary school option c consider reassigning students in the spring hill elementary school split feeder area and option d which was a no change option the presentation and feedback from that meeting has been posted from the mclean boundary webpage as well as other options evaluated and data on surrounding high schools number seven speaks to the community reviewed all of
236these options right and in the virtual breakout rooms and the feedback that was documented by all the facilitators i'd like to especially thank a lot of the volunteer facilitators in the instructional service department and ms kathleen thomas for her facilitating of that process the feedback was collected via email as well after the community meeting and all feedback is posted on the mclean boundary webpage for review major feedback names for the community include concerns about the population growth and development in and around tysons the split feeders and also the socioeconomic diversity of the schools involved when we look at page eight using the feedback collected at the december 2020 community meeting option c that was presented has been modified to create a recommendation this is a pretty natural process and we usually call these the hybrid
237recommendations the revision addresses community feedback and concerns on the existing housing and population growth of planned development in tysons and allows jeffress county public schools to continue to monitor the growth at both mclean high school and langley high school the recommendation reassigned a portion of the area that currently feeds from spring hill elementary school to longfellow middle school and mclean high school with the area changing defeat to cooper middle school and langley high school page 9 provides more detail about the recommendations the data in the bottom half the table that is highlighted in various colors represents the estimated the estimate for adjusted membership and capacity utilization the top of the table shows the school year 19 and 20 condition which are from last year's cip with projections as mentioned it's a portion of the spring
238hill spring hill elementary school split peter area and identifies an estimated 159 students at the high school level from mclean high school to langley and 73 students at the middle school level from longfellow middle school to cooper middle school it should be noted that the modular addition of mclean high school is reflected in the capacity here and the future design of cooper middle school with the renovation is also reflected the next slide number 10 really just is the map that shows the current boundaries with the area highlighted in yellow reflecting the recommendation for boundary adjustment as noted this recommendation is modified from option c and includes a portion of the spring hill electric school between the route 7 and dulles toll road and a portion of the tysons urban center area page 11 really talks
239about policy 8130 which covers our local school assignments and changes includes a section of phasing about grandfathering of a boundary adjustment this policy states when possible adjustments under this policy shall be implemented through attrition and phasing the school board may approve a grade by grade phasing of adjustments for students beginning with the incoming class at the middle or high school levels when feasible the school board may adopt other phasing plans as appropriate to the individual boundary study parents of rising sixth or fifth graders eighth graders grade was affected by a boundary change may at the discretion of the school board he provided the option of having their students remain in the school they attended prior to the change we want to include this means to assist the board in determining the phasing of the adjustment
240as they consider action in this boundary adjustment on page 12 the next steps as part of this boundary study are a public hearing that's scheduled one week from the night on january 28th after the public hearing the school board will vote on the value adjustment at the regular school board meeting that's scheduled currently for february 4. i'll note that the four options presented at the december 7th 2020 community meeting are included in this presentation as additional information for your reference additionally additional information is posted on the scps website by searching the claim boundary before i conclude this presentation i really would like to thank mr smith and ms jessica gillitz and her incredible team both bernita ramanesh and also brian shuster um of the amazing dedication professionals with in the work that they've done around
241this uh dr fabio zulawaga region two uh harry's assistant superintendent and mr douglas tyson the region one area assistant superintendent and again as i mentioned before miss kathleen thomas and the host of volunteers from isd this concludes the presentation of mclean high school in langley high school boundary study this evening thank you thank you very much mr plattenberg before we head into school board member questions i would like to invite the drainsville magisterial member ms tollin to provide some additional insight to this plan and to also discuss in greater detail the next steps ms tollen thank you dr anderson thank you mr plattenberg for the presentation um we have come a long way since the specimen first began on the need for a boundary adjustment between uh mclean and langley pyramids long before i was
242the drain drill representative tonight we are seeing some of the fruits of the hard work our facility staff has done to analyze often after option after listening to and incorporating on public input um as we move forward we are still taking public input no final decisions have been made just want to make that clear um to everyone um we have a public hearing next week and then a vote on how we will move forward with the boundary adjustment on february 4th um i encourage all of you to be part of this process our schools belong to our communities and i'm committed to continue listening to you your inputs who dates has been thoughtful and extremely helpful so please continue um after talking um with maine and reading many emails from homeowners associations community organizations individuals
243um and the large set of comments on our website that have been collected as um mr plantberg pointed out there are things that have emerged i'm keeping our numbers balanced as we move forward with any uncertainties after covered and with area developments um so that we do not in the vertebral cooper middle school but still provide some relief to mclean high school and in longfellow middle school attempt to reduce the impact of two different split feeders keeping students together as they move through their elementary school pyramid up to high school and perhaps take an opportunity to diversify the housing in the langley pyramid we do not have an option uh mr plattenburg presented um you know yet another option tonight we did information on option a b c and d um on in the board
244box uh information and all of that was presented at the meeting on december 7th we do not have an option that fully balances all of the goals that people are looking for of course that would be too easy the bottom line in this case though is that all of these options can work but each has specific advantages advantages and disadvantages however this is a boundary adjustment that holds nice possibilities no matter where your family is in these geographies i really want to say we are talking about four amazing schools with amazing staff after any of the options is put in place the schools will have staff to meet the needs of our students and capacity for our students to learn comfortably more capacity in the langley pyramid and plenty of capacity in the landing pyramid
245i assure you our staff and board will continue to monitor capacity levels and needs at all these schools as we move forward i want to thank my colleagues on the board for spending time to talk through the options with me and for asking hard questions especially carl frisch from providence if he has constituents in the spring hill theater area i want to thank our assistant superintendents from region and two for gathering information from the schools and for lending your expertise and historical perspective on all of these options but most of all i want to thank the members of our community as your input has been vital we are still coordinating with the schools to reach out to additional families for input of families living in these geographic areas and thank you to those who have
246already signed up to speak at the public hearing next week and i invite those of you listening that haven't already signed up to please do so um for my colleagues please join us at the public hearing we will be continuing discussions on the options as we continue to hear from the public and move toward our vote on february 4th and again a huge thank you to um mr plattenberg jessica gillis brian schuster and our uh our staff for the incredible work that they've been doing in presenting many uh various options to our community thank you thank you mr lin for that helpful information are there any questions or statements from the board seeing not miss seismo heiser sorry i don't mean to prolong the meeting any longer i just wanted to just say thank you
247to um staff but also to miss tollen um for the process and to just say how important it is to have that public hearing and really get full public community input on all of these options as well as other thoughts the community has at the end of the day i think the community will be will be served well regardless of what we do because all of these schools and all of our schools in fairfax county are great schools but the importance of the process is really valuable for transparency and community input there are pros and cons of each option and i i appreciate miss tollen really sitting down with all of us and talking us through the pros and cons and hearing our concerns and thoughts but i most appreciate miss tolin sort of waiting
248to to share you know really weighing our thoughts but really waiting to hear from the community before um you know coming to a conclusion on our own these are the the schools that the community will be living with in these um for a long time and the changes the community living with for a long time so i just wanted to say i want to thank her for her thoughtful work on this thank you miss picarski yeah i'm going to be very quick too just following the seismo hyzer i just as i've shared with miss um tolan in our conversations i want to make sure that you know as we're putting this recommendation that um because this is about a very specific um you know neighborhood uh that we have made a concerted effort to ensure
249that those voices are being heard um and are part of this process and i know ms tolen is working very hard with staff but i would really like to ensure that we've heard from directly from people that are going to be impacted before we make this decision so thank you thank you miss picarski seeing that there are no other speakers i will take a very quick turn similarly to what miss picarsky shared that is my primary concern that we do have the opportunity to engage with all of the communities who will be impacted and i know that miss tollen is working with region leadership to ensure that they find some creative means to reaching out to all of the school communities who will be impacted by this tentative change so i will stop there miss
250tolin did you have any wrap up comments otherwise we will move on to the next agenda item um i don't have any additional comments other than to assure people that um you know i am working with um our regional assistant superintendents to um make sure that we're here we're hearing from all of the neighborhoods and i do want to again thank the um homeowners associations from many of our neighborhoods that have reached out and that you know the public that has already you know been very thoughtful and you know given us incredible information thank you at this time i will call on mr fresh for a motion from the governance committee regarding changes to policy 1802 student representative to the school board mr fresh uh thank you chairman anderson um i move that the school
251board that the board approved the recommendation the recommended changes to policy 1802 student representative to the school board emailed at me agenda item is there a second thank you mr mesh for your second mr frisch would you like to speak to your motion sure thank you thank you chairman anderson uh as the board's liaison to the city of fairfax school board i'm happy to offer these amendments to policy 1802 which broadens the eligibility of those who can serve as student representative on the fairfax county school board to include fcps students who happen to live in the city of fairfax additionally the policy is amended would bar the student representative from serving on the board on our board while concurrently serving on the city of fairfax school board the government governance committee took up the issue
252as the result of a forum topic offered offered by former school board member ill rong moon in september of 2019 in response to his form topic the board directed division council through the superintendent to review virginia code and advise if the board had any legal concerns to worry about with broadening the eligibility and also asked that the the existing policy be shared with the student advisory council to see if they agreed with the proposed changes sac delegates agreed with the proposed changes with some indicating that students should not be allowed to serve on the county and say school board at the same time so those those suggestions have been included in these amendments that we are considering tonight according to division council while current fairfax county school board policy 1802 includes residency requirements virginia code
25322.1-86.1 a simply requires that student representatives be enrolled in the public schools in the division with respect to fairfax county public schools students residing in the city of fairfax meet that standard therefore there are no legal concerns according to division council our counterparts on the city school board have been advocating for these changes for several years because it's the right thing to do there is no rule prohibiting fcps students who live in the county from serving as student representative on the city school board all of these students are fcps students they participate in extracurricular and athletic activities together they study together they grow up together rather than limiting the ability of a sizable portion of our student population to benefit from the hands-on servant leadership experience afforded by the student representative role we should be
254encouraging all of our students to take the plunge put themselves out there and get involved in their school division thank you thank you mr mesh would you like to speak to your second mr frisch captured it all i would say is you know the student voice is not something that's just cute it's extremely important for us doing our work and i'm glad that now students in the city of fairfax will have the opportunity to participate as well thank you very much are there any other board members who would like to speak to this matter ms mclaughlin and just briefly that i appreciate the work uh the governance committee had in discussing this and mr frisch picking up the mantle from our former colleague mr moon and uh certainly we felt it was really important that
255there be that equity between uh the city of fairfax students being able to be considered when they in fact consider our students for for their board representation so good work mr frisch thank you miss mclaughlin miss cohen um no i i'm fine i just wanted to give a shout out to the folks on the on our fairfax city school board um especially chair carolyn pritchett who has been working on this forever so i know this has been a priority for a long time so i'm grateful that we're getting moving on it finally thanks thank you i appreciate that miss krabit sanders yes um i wanted to thank uh carl for his work on this and the collaboration within governance i also wanted to um just send a message to any students who are considering uh
256the applying for or competing for the role of a student member on the school board that process is coming up and so our adoption tonight ensures that the fairfax city school students will be able to participate in that process for this year thank you very much seeing that there are no other members i will now ask for the vote on the following motion which is before us i move the board to approve the recommended changes to policy 1802 student representative to the school board as detailed in the agenda item all those in favor miss mclaughlin miss omega mr frisch miss corbett sanders miss picarski miss cohen miss tolin miss keys gamara miss derna koufax and myself that is unanimous motion passes at this time i will invite our vice chair miss picarski to walk us
257through the consent agenda and new business items miss picarski thank you dr anderson our adopted rules of parliamentary procedure robert's rules provide for a consent agenda listing several items for approval of the board by a single motion many items listed have gone through board review and documentation has been provided to all board members and the public in advance items may be removed from the consent agenda at the request of any board member prior to the meeting the consent agenda items are on the screen is there any objection to approving the consent agenda seeing and hearing no objection the consent agenda is approved new business the following are new business agenda items there will not be a vote tonight on these items but action is scheduled at a future meeting the new business agenda items are
258on the screen thank you miss pakarski at this time i call on dr brabrand for superintendent matters thank you chairman anderson i really only have one matter i want to share with you tonight i know we've talked a little bit this evening about returning to school in person and i want to provide an interim update around our return to in-person learning in advance of the february 2nd school board work session will have as as part of our monthly return to school work sessions since we last met the virginia department of education in partnership with the virginia department of health issued interim guidance for reopening pre-k-12 schools on january 14th this guidance includes a decision-making model that closely aligns to the model that we had presented to you at the january return to school work session
259that was developed in our partnership with the fairfax county health department so our team now is working with our health department to incorporate the vdh guidance into our own model and we look forward to sharing those updates with you and the community at our february second work session the governor had his own press conference talking about the model and and really working to support return to school for in-person learning as you also know the process for vaccinating our teachers and staff began just last week january 16th according to a statement that no anova gave me this evening i want to share with you that we have had 22 000 fcps staff members already registered to take the vaccination which is almost 90 percent of our staff registered to take the vaccination already 5 000 of
260them have been vaccinated so far i believe that is one of the most robust responses in the country to the vaccination process and i applaud our teachers and staff and our teacher associations for supporting the vaccination process and i want to also thank the fairfax county health department i want to thank dr gloria and i want to thank anova for partnering with us in an inclusive respectful process that has gotten our folks uh to step up uh and be a part of the vaccination process we hosted a town hall on january 14th to provide information to our staff who had questions about the vaccine process and i want to thank dr schwartz from the fairfax county health department he joined me along with dr williams our chief equity officer uh and mr mcdonald our assistant
261superintendent for human resources in the interim capacity and we talked about all the issues around vaccinations the equity issues the hr issues and again very very excited for that partnership finally i just want to share one other update and if uh our our clerk could put that up just for the public again we'll get a chance to talk about this on february 2nd i want to share with you the my updated timeline for return to in-person learning that i will include as part of my presentation to the board february 2nd this timeline is a measured phase-in approach that allows us to return those students who requested in-person learning during the months of february and march and i share this timeline with you tonight simply is information only and i'll be sharing and talking about it
262more at our february february 2nd work session now we're going to continue to monitor our safety and transmission data as we return students and staff to school and we'll make adjustments if needed and we recognize that our community transmission remains high when we presented in january our total number of cases per 100 000 was 510 and as of yesterday it was a little over 741. and percent positivity in january was twelve point five percent now it's a little over thirteen percent and the persistence of those high numbers do have an impact on the likelihood of school and classroom closures due to staff or student community exposure to covert nineteen we're seeing some of that impact now in our athletics programs and with staff who continue to report to buildings and we know that even as
263our staff are getting vaccinated and it's just great news that i shared with you a minute ago the response our staff has the health department has let us know that individuals who are exposed to cova even if they're vaccinated will still be asked to quarantine uh if they're exposed so there'll still be some operational challenges uh for folks that are vaccinated but then through the contact tracing determined that they are close contacts however this return to school timeline provides space between the return of student groups in each of our school settings and it will allow our students and staff to become proficient in those key mitigation strategies that we've talked about for several months so that we can bring back our students to in-person instruction this is a model and a timeline that is supported
264by our principals at all three levels and we know they will be the leaders in operationally operationalizing this timeline they have seen this timeline they are supportive of this timeline they are ready to implement this timeline this new timeline does begin to bring students back as early as next week for intervention cohorts we know some of our most vulnerable students are struggling and they will begin doing it as early as next week um and uh then it'll be followed by a return of students in groups one through four uh and then we'll start our new bell schedule for our students on the return of groups one through four on february 16th as i mentioned about the vaccination process i want to be clear that fcps does not control the vaccination timeline the current vaccination timeline
265process though is allowing almost all of our staff to receive two doses of the vaccine prior to returning in this timeline our return to in-person learning is not totally aligned to the vaccination schedule but the recommended timeline allows our teachers to return with greater confidence and a focus on teaching and learning for our students i do look forward to a more in-depth discussion and presentation on february 2nd of the new state model and interim guidance of this timeline and i'll be glad to answer questions at that time i want you to know that as we heard yesterday our new president said this is a time for unity i hope we can unify around this return to school for in-person instruction timeline and begin the process of returning kids to school in the weeks ahead thank
266you very much thank you very much dr brabrand we will now move to the board committee reports i will call under on mr frisch for an update from the governance committee followed by ms keys gemara for an update from the audit committee you very much chairman anderson the governance committee met last week and continued to chip away at its busy policy docket in addition to approving recommended amendments for policy 1802 regarding the student representative which the board approved unanimously tonight the committee also requested final changes to policy 4430 concerning conflicts of interest which have been we've been working on for many months additionally the committee requested staff analysis and additional information for policy 2501 regarding rules and procedures for school counseling services policy 2720 regarding student lists and policy 3310 regarding focused school initiatives and
267implementation our next meeting is tuesday february 9th thank you we had our audit committee meeting this past week it was actually a very short meeting we discussed our special education review which is continuing and our experts are communicating with our auditor general and they have asked to be able to complete surveys of the community and to preserve the independence of this the auditor general will be sending out surveys on behalf of the school board there were other reviews by the auditor general that would will be reported at a later date thank you thank you now we will have board board matters and i will call on members three at a time so please follow each other without any additional introduction we will begin with mr frisch then miss seismore heiser the miss denmark colfax mr
268frisch miss seismore heiser mr nachofax please go ahead i think i've thank you chairman anderson i think i've taken up enough time tonight um i'll just say that i uh we just received a preview of superintendent brabrand's updated return to school timeline and i am encouraged by what we saw tonight i look forward to discussing the issue in more detail with the superintendent and my colleagues in the days ahead and in our work session um and i will be sending an update to my constituents in providence district to gain their insights and and thoughts as well thank you thank you um it's late so i won't take up too much time i first just wanted to say that um miss uh picarsky and i are holding a town hall a virtual town hall monday night
269at seven and she has sent out an email with the information and i'll be sending an email out as well it'll be on blackboard collaborative and the link will be sent out via my email and what i'm looking forward to is hearing really any of your thoughts and concerns but in particular i know that dr brabant has revealed his draft timeline for return to school your thoughts and concerns around the return to school timeline or anything you want to share i want to say i am really glad to see a timeline that returns our students all the students to the building who chose to be in person i think as i've said before there is a need for safety but there's also a need the word safety is is complex and we need to um
270take into account our students mental health their educational well-being and the safety of our teachers staff and students and i wish we could get some of our special education students in sooner i would love to see activities at the elementary school level and i know dr bray brandt's giving this look like you always want more um and i do so i'll own that but i am thrilled to see a timeline to return our students to school and um i can't wait to see our kids in our building so thank you dr brabrand for bringing that today and thank you to anova for and dr gloria for the great work to get the vaccines out to our teachers and staff this is good news thank you and i too will be brief i do want to
271thank um several teachers at claremont elementary school where i had the privilege of doing some virtual pop-ins i learned a little bit about second grade math was refreshed on that had some music lessons um and and um also went on a virtual field trip to vietnam so i want to thank miss shot miss bake miss acosta miss kangro and principal um salada for allowing me to be part of your day that afternoon again while we all cannot wait to get the kids back in school i just want to continue to say as i do these pop-in visits for our virtual classrooms the patience and the caring that these teachers are showing and the engagement that the kids are having on this elementary school visits that i had were impressive and i i just want to
272thank them all for doing such a very very good job in this challenging environment um i also want to just share with my colleagues this legislative session and richmond is moving very very fast and and furiously michael malloy and i are talking on a daily basis if you have questions please reach out to me um and it's it's uh it's fast moving and interesting and i'll be happy to update you about what's going on but it changes from um one day to the next one hour to the next i spoke to michael one hour and then i spoke to dr bray ran another hour and uh things had changed this afternoon so thank you for that thank you dr brabrand for your um a return to school timeline um we are all encouraged by that
273and the vaccine schedule i have been hearing a little chatter and i will follow up with you um on social media about um the first session um people not being able to schedule that i that was just again social media so i would like um a check on that to ensure that everyone who wants that vaccine can register for that who are fcps staff so thank you and i will follow up with you on that tomorrow thank you the next three speakers are miss omaesh miss cohen and ms tolin thank you uh it's a thrill certainly to hear about the 90 vaccination situation and i'm really looking forward to what that means for our next return to school conversation about moving towards opening it's it's really exciting news uh i want to acknowledge uh our
274counselors our teachers and our principals given the various recognitions we had today the red for ed situation and of course uh the the commemoration of of our principles coming up um and want to also make sure i acknowledge um i don't often take personal points of privilege but given that we are in the shadow of martin luther king day and really reflecting on where our country's been and where it's headed i want to make sure it's very clear that you know two incidents that came to my attention at our schools um one uh you know racist uh comments made in a blackboard collaborate session and another where the smearing of a young woman online by adults because this child has apparently the call to prayer uh going off at her home and that one was
275particularly personal to me goes without saying um but i did i did want to take that moment in the shadow of mlk day to say we're entering a new chapter now in this country in fairfax county and and i as a board member and i'm sure some of my colleagues would agree just want to make send a very clear message to those students who've been impacted that that is not something we tolerate is not something i will ever stand for in this county and it's it's a it's a great opportunity for us to learn from one another and show compassion towards one another to stand against those kinds of behaviors uh and and with the specific incidents related to uh who i believe is a you know muslim student i know it's even amongst my
276colleagues a learning process to understand that as a muslim i am someone who has to pray five times a day and that's a way that i reflect and personally honor my spiritual practice which keeps me grounded and brings me to be here as a board member doing the right thing because that's the only thing i care to do uh so i i just i wanted to again take that point of privilege because this is not the kind of thing we accept in this county not against any group no matter what you know background you come from identity you have this is a place for everyone and i look forward to moving in the shadow of mlk day uh towards you know a new a new feeling of what we can be to one another in
277this community uh thanks i just 90 holy cow i am so encouraged and i'm so proud of our fcps team um you know it's amazing to me i think in a time where the narratives have been um that our teachers don't want to be back to school that we literally broke the system trying to register um to get vaccines to get back in buildings and every teacher i've had the opportunity to talk to or seen them on social media is just so excited about the idea of getting to be back in classrooms with their students so i just it's awesome it's it's awe-inspiring and i'm so proud of our team and so grateful to anova they're running through about 60 people every 15 minutes um and just hearing that and hearing people's excitement and enthusiasm
278so grateful to everybody i also want to say thank you to teddy geiss and the woodson leadership class for having myself and dr anderson and dr brabrand there last week it was awesome and the students asked such amazing questions really tough questions and really thought provoking and it was just a joy to get to be with them and to see some of the leaders that we're about to send out into the world it was awesome um also this weekend in the weekend of service i'm grateful as always to our friends at braddock elementary school was one of the sites where through partnership with some different faith organizations they have just continued through the pandemic since march to be able to feed the community in particular on the days the weekends when grab-and-go are not available
279so this weekend getting to be there and watching um and helping distribute about 250 bags of groceries and boxes of groceries and coats and just to let our community know that we are there and we're working together to support them um it was awesome for my family to get to be a part of that so thank you to braddock again as always um it's very exciting i think for all of us to get to get a sneak peek of dr brabrand's plan i have had many calls from principals in the last couple of days to say how grateful they are that they felt very included in the process and they felt like their um their comments and their input was really valued and was taken into account and they see that reflected in in the
280newest plan so i'm so grateful to hear that i'm so grateful our staff is going to be vaccinated and it feels like we are on track to find some bit of normal in the middle wall of this so look forward to what's ahead [Applause] dr anderson mayap no it's miss tobin um of course i'm excited about our return to school um your potential schedule and the vaccination process but i want to take a little bit of a different tactic tonight i wanted to spend some time just highlighting um you know how amazing the people that we have opportunity to parents to teach and to support through our work and just how amazing they are um i have to say yesterday i watched the young poet laureate at the inauguration i'll give a stunning performance and
281then i watched adult after adult talk about how surprised they were that she was so young i wasn't surprised i have been so fortunate to work with so many students of all ages and i've just seen incredible things done even by our youngest of students and here's what some of our fcps leaders are up to right now this week caitlin malloy from chantilly high school put on a sustainability summit as part of her girl scout gold award she hosted over 200 young people virtually still going on i think they have another session tomorrow um from around the world 28 states and three countries are represented it was the height of my week to be able to speak at this conference and to feel questions from this group and how to further their work around the
282world thank you caitlyn incredible work i want to congratulate the two drainsville nearest that were elected to the 2020 virginia music educators association senior honors choir they'll be having a concert in march of 2020. um congratulations to artist leland howe from langley high school and maggie warden from langley high school and these are just two of our talented awardees we had 24 in fcpf and then of course there's the pandemic and we've had stories of students making mess donating food writing books the list goes on the list is long but i do want to highlight one young woman from drainsville elementary school mate a third grader from drayton elementary school and her family saw that a dc pizzeria was feeding national guard troops in d.c in 24 hours she raised 1 000 which was matched
283by the restaurant to help feed the guards she was able to help distribute the pizza and to meet the national guard troops last week nathan and i met he talked a little bit about this with langley high school sac council members and student government members to discuss outreach to students and getting more student feedback to the school board and to our leadership team we had a very productive conversation and the students all expressed an interest and an opportunity to share ideas with students at the other drainsville high schools so we're going to be working on putting together a group um and i'm really excited and look forward to the discussions with the students as we work together to transition transition forward out of covet 19 and tackle other opportunities ahead of us as a team
284mclean and langley pyramid families i will see you at the public hearing next week thanks everyone again thank you miss tollin our next three speakers are miss keys gamara miss marin and miss corbett sanders again miss keys gamara miss marin and ms krubert sanders thank you uh i'd like to start off by welcoming my staff aide who i think is watching miss nelda brown who is quite experienced in educational issues and advocacy lives in fairfax county and i am so excited to work with her and partner with her and i know that she will help us all to do a great job so welcome nelda and i ask my colleagues to also welcome her um i too will be having a town hall in february focusing on mental health particularly in light of the events
285that our students have had to process um in the beginning part of this year and also well for several months actually so i will be having some special guests to help talk to parents and as well as students about having some of these difficult conversations and i thank you dr brabrand for giving us a schedule i look forward to following through and having an opportunity to ask questions i i do want to be brief because it is late so i allow my colleagues to take this any additional time thank you guys and have a good night yes i first also want to thank inova for their partnership that is really the hallmark of a true partnership thank you so much for taking the burden of scheduling all that off of us and helping our staff
286i had a very reflective week honoring martin luther king day and all of the people are part of the civil rights movement i have a video up uh somewhere online you can find it for my remarks for the reston association which was really nice to be included in that video along with other elected officials including our congressman congressman connolly um i actually am just about done finishing a book that really tied together where we're at the immortal life of henrietta lacks which is a story about a woman who is african-american whose cells were taken as a biopsy that really formed the basis for just about every kind of medical test and vaccine we have today so as i've been processing about these vaccines i'm thinking i bet those are henrietta lacks's cells so it's it's
287been a very reflective week i wanted to mention we have our public budget hearing on tuesday january 26th at 6 pm and anyone can sign up it's on the school board's website and you have three minutes so you do the hearing is about budget related items relatedly also the general assembly session i've been very busy trying to advocate for some pretty boring things that would make a big change for how we could do our work better for the public which involve being able to meet more flexibly um by some individual um virtual meetings and uh some other things so as as kind of mundane as it is it'd be really important and i think our staff michael malloy for that help and our other delegates uh kathleen murphy kathy tran david bolova lots of people
288who are helping to advocate for us in the general assembly and we really appreciate that and just in honor of national school council week i will give a shout out to mrs may and mrs johnson at my children's school who are a resource for my children and also me so thank you very much have a good evening uh before i go did i skip someone no you're up okay uh before i uh discuss the back to school i did want to give a heads up on two events that um are actually three there's the vsva capital conference which uh i know that uh both the stairnack kofax and i will be participating in on monday and then the following monday we have a federal conference to meet with legislators about the new agenda before the
289congress as everybody knows there's been a change in leadership at both the uh senate level and in the white house so that will have an impact on the legislative agenda and we did see today that the president released his plans for the covet 19 which will include more guidance for our schools increased funding for ppe for ventilation systems and for testing and so that's all positive news there um and which leads us to the exciting news that dr brabrand shared with us with the number of our staff who have already signed up for um vaccines to put that in context the average amount of uh it's about 60 to 62 percent of any group that normally signs up for vaccines so it just shows the enthusiasm and the commitment of our staff to wanting to
290get back into our buildings that um they've all signed up for the vaccines and so we very much appreciate the partnership with the county with the state and with innova and dr brabra and your leadership in setting an aggressive schedule for the vaccinations i look forward to our work session next week to talk about uh the return to school i'm glad that we had a bit of a pause because what that allowed us to do is actually have more outreach to our um our staff and uh thank you to mr plattenberg for going through a number of the buildings in the mount vernon district to help us make sure that we more effectively utilize the capacity so that we can have those uh the hybrid classrooms uh back um along the schedule that dr brabrand
291has scheduled so it is uh been a very well utilized couple of weeks for that and then my final uh mention is on february 6th we will be having the annual mount vernon town hall this is i think year uh for town halls in mount vernon and so please plan on joining us this year it will be virtual thank you very much miss corbett sanders at this time we will have miss picarski miss mclaughlin and i will end it up miss picarski yeah thank you um thank you dr dr uh bray brown for um sharing with us your return to school plan tonight um i know there were lots of anxious people who were waiting throughout this whole meeting to finally get a glimpse of this and um i i am generally very supportive and
292i look forward to the conversation um in february so we can really get this um going and i'm i'm also encouraged by the fact i think our seven day coveted transmission numbers are now also trending down coupled with the vaccinations um i just think uh things are really finally looking up for our county and for our students i would like to thank franklin middle school i attended their equity discussion this week just um you know as a listener uh to to hear the community and i really appreciate that they took the time and and parents also um came and expressed their views and their thoughts um it was very helpful to hear from people and i look forward to uh you know continuing these and going to as many um as possible um i also
293had the opportunity to go to some parent meetings for two new principals in our district so we are you know busy in that respect um and i do look forward to also attending the vsba capital conference next week and um the the town hall that i'll be having with miss seismore heiser so thank you okay quickly uh i just want to first make sure the community is aware i'll send a notice out tomorrow that i'll be holding two town halls for the braddock district community next thursday though it's open to everyone in the county uh both in the morning from 10 to 11 30 a.m and then in the evening from 7 to 8 30 p.m secondly i want to do a really special shout out to dr jake kohut who is a not only
294a dc national guardsman but he is also pulling double duty as our band teacher for both canterbury woods elementary and frost middle school and he was profiled by both nbc news and the washington post so thank you dr kohut for your dedication to our students and you make us proud and then i too want to just quickly introduce my new staff aide donna nelson schneider who's not only a woodson parent but also has decades-long career in television journalism as a producer so i'm very excited to have her partnering with me and then um finally i i would like to just say a few words about our our new president who uh spoke so eloquently um last night uh yesterday in his inaugural speech when he talked about unity being our path forward and uh when
295he um was basically uh saying to all of us how important is if we can just try to listen to one another respect one another try to hear and see one another that's where we will find the unity donation needs and so i certainly take it to heart and uh appreciate all of my colleagues dr braeburn and his team certainly in the spirit of our amazing new president i look forward to doing just that so have a great evening everybody thank you my comments will be brief because i know what it's like to stand between you and your cars and that scares me but um in keeping with what miss mclaughlin just shared regarding yesterday it was a very hopeful day um i think all of our hearts have been lifted and that continues into
296today i'll i'll i'll share with you doctor boybrand i'm quite encouraged by the schedule that you shared with us for return to school because we do know that's been the goal of um parents and and teachers and administrators and school board members across fairfax county and it seems as if we're getting a little bit closer to that particularly with the progress with the vaccinations i would be remiss if i didn't give a shout out to catherine brodish machete because she is one of those nurses who is vaccinating our teachers many many of them and she actually posted about how enthusiastic staff was about uh their inoculations so i'm very encouraged i have just two more quick things just kind of moving into a little bit lighter segue into some lighter topics i want to say
297congratulations to principal felicia usher at wayanoke she is the outstanding region 2 principal it is so well deserved i'm just very very excited for her and i want to say welcome to the newest principal at bailey's elementary miss dews very excited to have you on board in the mason district and last but not least a little bit of fun news a school a former annandale high school adam graduate of the class rachel laguna she was crowned mrs venezuela her home country and she will be participating in the miss globe contest so that's kind of very exciting one of our own here from the mason district and that is it for me and i do believe everyone is ready to call it a good night at 11 34 so our meeting is adjourned