001[Music] okay all righty good afternoon all before we start with our work session um with our work session for the day we have a couple of things to take care of um regarding our closed meeting and our forum but before we get to that i would like to take roll to ensure that we have all of the school board members with us miss cohen here welcome back miss corbett sanders ms not colfax oh thank you is there not cool facts okay we'll come back mr frisch i'm here mrs gamara miss mclaughlin here is marin here miss omega here mr carski hi i'm here please meet you mike if you're not um responding this challenge i'm here thank you besides mo heiser i'm here and miss um they're not colfax i'm here here okay wonderful thank
002you in order to comply with section 2.2-3712 um d of the code of virginia it is necessary for the board to certify that the pub that the fairfax county school board convened a close meeting on september 15 2020 to the best of each members knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements and only such public business matters as were identified and the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board during the closed meeting and we have miso mesh who has moved that motion and we have a second by miss cohen um all and favor all in support of this motion please raise your hand we have miss omega miss cohen ms sizemore heiser miss corbett sanders uh miss pokarsky miss marin ms darina colfax miss keys gamara
003miss tolin miss mclaughlin mr frisch and mccarty anderson and that is unanimous thank you all for convening close we are now going to engage in one of our forum topics our forum topics will be chaired by our vice chair miss picarski so ms picarski please go ahead and proceed i know we have one topic for this afternoon yeah thank you good afternoon everybody we are running a few minutes behind so we will only be getting to one topic um in the topic is centered around public engagement i would like to invite uh miss marin and ms sizemore heiser to go ahead and introduce their forum topic great um i can go ahead and start thank you for um keeping this on the agenda for today so members colleagues as you know in february ms seismer
004heiser and i put forth a forum topic to help advance the work of the board's public engagement committee one of the core functions of the public engagement committee is to give input and form to our advisory committees which of which we have many and we have constituents who have very generously volunteered their time on a number of topics in fact in just a few weeks we'll be hearing weekly the reports of their year-long work however due to many of us having been representatives on these committees prior to being elected and from talking with our appointees over the years it's clear that more clarity and process you know protocols be instituted so that members can really best do this work and inform our work you know their their goal is to inform the school board's work
005so we ask you to please approve and support this forum topic so that the public engagement committee can move forward with creating suggested updates to the the work to better the work of the advisory committees which we will continue the public engagement committee will continue to inform the board of what is developing and then ultimately i believe to seek board approval on changes that would be forthcoming to advisory committees but this would allow the public engagement committee to initiate that work uh ms seismer heiser did you want to add anything yeah no i that was i think that was a great explanation miss marin so i don't have too much more to add but i do want to say that the um you know we're looking really at all of our committee structures it's our
006committees our task force our councils that help inform the board's work the advisory committees and internal committees and and how do how can we best enhance those committee offerings and enhance the work of those committees the structures of working norms as part of the charge of the public engagement committee is twofold both on how do we engage and how do we communicate and really how do we um help our constituents and our own board do our work more efficiently so this is and i believe our board committees have not really been looked at holistically for a while so this is really something that could help inform the work of public engagement that fits really well with the charge of the engagement committee and then the results the findings we would bring back to the entire
007board for board discussion before we um implement anything and we'd have to work on our governance committee as well but it's really justify have a way to better engage and serve our committees through our community excuse me through our committee structures and the work and processes of our committees thank you miss um sizemore heiser i think we will go ahead now i see you have a few people who'd like to ask questions miss tolin please go ahead yes thank you um i would just like to say i've had numbers of conversations with and both ms marin and um miss seismer heiser and others around this topic and um given the uh just what i have seen the amazing representation that we have from our community on these various committees and i'm thrilled for the people
008that um i've been able to appoint to these committees uh in moving forward this year making sure that we utilize their time wisely and their expertise in the best manner possible um is imperative and i think that um this relook at the committees and how they're structured and the timing of the reports how they fit in with the budget cycle et cetera is super important so i i fully support this um i also hope that the scope of this will include um you know as as mrs seismore has said looking at you know overarching at these committees um you know there may be some committees that we don't have that we need the technology for example is such a huge issue um you know for us right now and that's not something that we have
009as a standing committee you know how would that interact with what you know what dr rayburn's doing um also i'm a huge advocate of course for you know looking comprehensively at our um county development and data around development and capacity issues so um you know how does uh you know miss uh cohen and i've been looking at uh the comprehensive planning and development committee how does that fit in as well so hopefully we can do this comprehensively and i appreciate the willingness to do the hard work that this will take thank you thank you miss still on escorted sanders please go ahead yes and thank you ladies for uh making this uh bringing this forum topic to the whole board i do think that um this board's commitment to continuous process improvement um mandates that
010we should always take a fresh look at things and so i look at this as part of that continuous process improvement but in the spirit of transparency i do ask that as we look at this this initiative that we bring in representatives from our advisory committees and that we formally survey them for their input because i know like the two ladies that made the forum topic we've all served on these advisory committees in the past however that those are anecdotal experiences of each of us individually on individual committees and so i think it is um helpful for us to make sure that we survey those that are active and then the other peer thing that i would suggest is that we might want to look at the length of time by which people are appointed
011to committees because as you know we typically appoint every year for a one-year assignment and so that appointment is made in july at the same time that we confirm the committee charges for each of the committees however to undertake much of this work it may be behooves to look at a longer period of time for making those appointments rather than just one year because one year gets them started in september and they're drafting in march so that they can have it approved by may and that means that they're only work they're actually only meeting six times before they make a recommendation and i did send a recommendation also as on the tenure to both of you ladies if there is a change in um board representation that the new board members should always have the
012opportunity to appoint their own um citizens thank you may i respond to that briefly mrs mccarskey very very weird yeah please please thank you so much those are all great suggestions and um as part of the work as if this is approved as the public engagement committee looks at it those are definitely things that we should look at in our working norms and processes as we're developing these standards and so i'm glad that you're on the committee as well because those are some great ideas that we can work on so i agree i think the things we should be looking at as we work on this charge thank you thank you excellent i think we have ms mclachlan next yes thank you um i i do want to point out for the public that um
013since ms kofax and i've served for eight years we have certainly seen the historical evolution on the board's committees and when i joined over eight half years ago um there were six brand new board members and some of us talked about the need for realigning our advisory committees to perhaps be more substantive to the day-to-day operational experiences that our families students and employees have so i wanted to make sure ms eiser heiser you made the comment it's been a long time um i would ask that our clerk of the board um gathered that historical information for the board i don't remember the exact year but i do remember being a member of governance where i spent probably more than a year with the governance committee uh looking at our existing committees advisory committees um not
014just their membership but the which ones they were would we reduce any of them it was during karen garza's tenure and in the end the board decided they wanted to just mostly maintain the status quo however in my tenure what has changed is we now have a facilities advisory committee to the board which used to be the comprehensive planning development committee and then we also added the human resources advisory committee which we'd never had one before focused on employees and human resources so some progress has been made but i fully support this i would just ask that the pec really consult the records of the governance committee work in the past so you're not necessarily losing that historical um work that was done and then finally i would just say to karen corbett sanders point
015um our advisory committees i'm continuing to know um that we aren't always appointing people with subject matter expertise and so i would ask that that be part of the conversation fpac is one of our only advisory committees where people apply they have to have that subject matter expertise it's actually a committee of subcommittee of the board that reviews applicants across the county with magister board member and at large member input ultimately recommendations are made to the full board but right now it's a lot it's pro forma we don't vet um necessarily who's on the advisory committees and i've had some appointees who choose to step off because they don't feel that it's that the committees themselves represent people with subject matter expertise and therefore they don't feel that the work is necessarily coming with a
016lens of advising the board with expertise so i think those are going to be important things to consider in this uh work going forward liz poparsky michael can i clear can i just clarify i clarified so colleagues just so you know the purpose of this forum topic is to allow the public engagement to begin the gathering of um input heard thus far that kind of input and then actually the forum topic says that we would bring it to a work session so if you could you know hold on to those great ideas please in the interest of time um the focus here is are you approving that this is something worthy of the public engagement committee's time to then support and engage you all and current members and bring it to a question for further
017conversation thank you thank you ms marin for that reminder that we do have a very lengthy afternoon with um some serious topics for discussion miss dana koufax you're next hi yes um i was on the public engagement committee with both miss marin and and rachael last year and um i do um i am glad you made the clarification miss marin about the need to um gather the data and bring the information to the full board because i i think there were conversations when we originally spoke that you know the public engagement committee would be kind of doing more substantive more more decision making which i was not which i was concerned about because the committees are all part of the board as a whole so i will support this i think as ms mclaughlin noted
018um there has been some work done so gathering that data talking to people who've been around who've done it i think that's all important and um as she said in the end we ended up kind of status quo but it's important to have that discussion particularly um with all the new members and what your thought processes are so the fact that you'll start the work that will bring to and and it may be more than one work session i would respectfully tell the chair and vice chair um when we're looking at the totality of the analysis of this so thank you mr knuckle fox mr fish thank you i want to thank rashna and melanie for bringing this forward at the last board meeting in september we approved all of my appointments to the various
019advisory committees and i'm excited that they're going to have an opportunity to serve and one of the things that i talked with them about when interviewing the various people who were interested in serving was about the prospect of you know working with everybody to reimagine what these committees look like and to think through what best practices might be able to be developed and so i'm excited that we're finally taking that step and i will be voting for this today and i look forward to getting to work on the public engagement committee as this moves forward so thanks again for bringing this forward i know it's something that many of us have been talking about for a long time thank you mr frisch i think we are ready to take a vote um on this for
020um this to to go to the pac um committee to be worked on and then um to go to a work session with some of their recommendations or to mr not go back so um i like to see who would be supportive of moving this forward and supporting performed looks like mr frisch miss keys kamara miss corbett sanders miss dr anderson miss cohen miss sizemore heiser miss baron miss tolin miss omash um miss darina koufax miss mclaughlin and myself that is unanimous um thank you everybody and i think we will slowly transition straight into the next portion thank you thank you everybody thank you miss seisma heiser and um miss marin we do have to take a short one-minute break to allow our technicians to transition from this recording to the next section um so
021mr hornick and or mrs benedicto please give up give us a thumbs up to proceed when we are ready um and then mr french will be leading us in the next section miss benedicta just give us a go ahead when he should start thank you we're good to begin all right um thank you everyone uh this is the first work session that i have uh been the meeting manager of uh same with laura jane cohen so we're excited to be here today we'll be talking about the social ju social studies and anti-racism curriculum report which is slated for two hours and we're about an hour over schedule so please keep that in mind and then the tj admissions review these documents can be found in board docs i ask that staff be mindful of our
022time crunch when answering questions um and that members are also obviously aware of the time it's also important to remember that members speak only when they are recognized so please use the raise hands feature to be recognized you do not need to raise your hand though for points of order points of parliamentary procedure or points of personal privilege their privileged motions so you can interrupt the board's business at any time all other issues must be raised when a member is recognized though so they may not interrupt the board's business with that i will turn it over to staff for the presentation regarding social studies and anti-racist curriculum thank you thank you mr frisch i am just excited to bring this presentation to you we've talked uh for multiple years through multiple boards about equity uh
023i kicked off our leadership conference this year about putting equity equity at the center of all that we do and this board has uh asked this administration to really move forward with an equity lens and put it at the center of all that we do including our curriculum so we have a lot to share around how we have worked to really advance our curriculum with an anti-racist and anti-biased uh lens and dr ivey will share some remarks and introduce you to our amazing team dr ayden thank you dr bray bran and good afternoon mr frish and miss cohen and members of the board um we are pleased to present to you today our update on anti-racism and anti-bias curriculum in response to the two forum topic requests by this board which specifically asked for a
024review of how anti-racist and anti-bias is infused into our core curriculum and how will we eliminate racism and implicit bias in fcps this presentation is across cross-department office collaborative effort which included members of the instructional services department the office of professional learning and family engagement which includes the office of equity and cultural responsiveness and the department of special services we know that fcps is a great system for some kids and not a great system for all students and that we can no longer be a world class school system until we become a responsive system where all students families and staff feel seen valued and respected in the midst of this pandemic and planning for the school year it has become evident more than ever the need to not only have difficult conversations about racism hate
025and bias but to also plan and take action reviewing and revising our curriculum is just one step in a multifaceted approach we have spent time listening to our students and families in school community and know that this work not only matters to them but is critical to our mission in maintaining a caring culture that is welcoming and inclusive and that keeps equity at the center for all that we do we're very thankful for this board and your desire to support us in this work and we look forward to sharing not only the hard work we have begun but our plans moving forward in addition to today's presentation um we will be sharing more of our equity updates in an in-depth work session in october we thank you for your time and we look forward to
026your questions and your dialogue and i'm now pleased to turn the presentation over to dr presidio who will introduce the team and get us started all right thank you very much for that introduction of this really important work dr ivey i'm also very excited to have the opportunity for our team to share all the great work that they're leading around anti-racism and anti-bias education and just as a reminder this work session was originally scheduled to occur back in july but we did have to reschedule it due to the need for board meeting time on reopening of school planning so we're very excited to have the opportunity to share the work today our main presenters and if our board clerks could actually give these folks presenter status that would be great our main presenters today are
027going to be colleen eddy who's our fcps social studies coordinator along with dr debra march who is our fcps cultural responsiveness curriculum specialist and then leona smith who's our director of equity and family engagement and i do also want to acknowledge and thank ms cohen and mr frisch who is the meeting managers really provided a lot of guidance and assistance as we prepared for the work session today so if we could go ahead and bring up the slides again and we'll go to slide two in the presentation when we get those back up you'll be able to see there that that is the outline of our work session i'm showing the main topics that we're going to be addressing today so we're going to begin with a brief review of the context for the work
028session based on community and board requests to have a public discussion on the anti-bias and anti-racism work that's underway in our school division we're also going to share some draft goals that we've developed for your consideration around anti-bias and anti-racism education and we're going to review most of the time in the work session will be spent on reviewing the curriculum revision work and professional development work that's already been started um or that is currently underway and then finally and very importantly we're going to share a recommendation for the board to consider the adoption of an explicit anti-bias and anti-racism policy so if we could go to slide three so just as a reminder we wanted just to note that a lot of today's work session is really a response to a forum topic that was
029brought by miss corbett sanders back in january which called on fcps to develop plans to expand anti-bias education into the core curriculum and we'll go to slide four and also just as a reminder today's work session also connects back to a forum sponsored by miss cullen back in june which called for not only curriculum reading but also a system-wide commitment to anti-racist and anti-biased education so with the context really in mind here i'd like to turn the presentation over to leona smith to help situate the curriculum work that we're going to spend most of our time on today into the larger context of the work that our division is doing around equity and our emerging equity plan we don't go ahead please thank you dr presidio good afternoon everyone so i know often the public
030and we all might be sitting here thinking how do we know that there is a need for anti-bias and anti-hate curriculum and i think this statement says it all we must listen to and have faith in the stories of our school community following the murder of george floyd in the midst of the pandemic and even prior to the pandemic we have heard from all types of families telling us their stories and we need to listen whether it was in town halls personal narratives letters petitions social media requests our families have shared their truth with us we know that we are an amazing system it's why i get up every day i'm so full of hope of this work but we know there are many children and families that are not feeling seen and heard we've
031heard stories about discrimination derogatory language racial slurs between students microaggressions in the classroom microaggressions towards adults and staff members you've heard about anti-semitic jokes and visuals being placed around we know that we have families and students who feel unseen and heard based off ability gender identity and more and we know that we have heard of stories of lowered expectations for some of our community and fcps that can be no more we know that this work is not in a vacuum and that this is a one-prong approach and in a moment i'll share a connection to our overall approach to equity and today we're going to focus particularly in curriculum but we know in fcps all students deserve to feel safe and valued and respected we need to say to our children i see you i
032stand with you i hear you and so this is an action towards that step this is about our caring culture and keeping this and starting with our curriculum as one action step in addition to those stories we do have data we know that data matters as well and so we have looked at our data from the fairfax county youth survey most recently in 2019 nearly half of our students almost 47 of our students reported that they have heard or something have had something bad said to them about their race or their culture and i want to clarify when we talk about culture it is any way in which a student identifies with any group culture is not just about ethnicity and race it's about any group you identify with we also look at the data
033around us through our partners the fairfax government to the fairfax county bias and crimes incident there's a report from 2013 to that says the most prevalent bias type or category represented in their collection of data represent was against anti-black representing 33.5 percent of the aggregate total and even that calling it bias crimes i would wager to say that sometimes it might have even been hate crimes we also know there are other prevalent categories such as incidents against anti-jewish anti-islam each of those also accounting for 10.9 percent of the aggregate total we know that our community is a vibrant community but we also know that it exists whether racism still exists bias continues to live and we have a responsibility to start here in fcps so given that we're excited that virginia department of education isn't
034aligned in our thinking recently they have unveiled their equity framework for all schools to consider i'm really excited about this work and i think this graphic says it all when you look at equity and you think about centering equity equity is at the heart of what we do it's no longer a lens because a lens can be taken off a lens you can make a decision whether you're thinking about equity but when it's truly at the center of your heart it's in all that we do and wrapped around it as our families and how we engage them and how we support the social emotional needs all of which is encompassed in our core mission is to creating global citizens that are ready to approach the world through rigorous academics these things are all connected they
035have presented to us and this this aligns to our work that when you approach equity you approach it in five different facets you think about compassion and student and family engagement you consider efforts to become culture responsive you dig deep into your courageous leadership you spend time reframing your curriculum and you engage in continuous reflection today we're going to spend the bulk of our time on curricular reframing please know that we are well aware that these other five things must happen and these things don't happen in isolation i wager to say you need all five of these things in anything you do but we are going to kind of zero in today on curriculum refining as we engage in this conversation we thought it would be helpful to have some terms that we are all
036familiar with so we've lifted this out for your review for our board and our public to know that our fcps staff hasn't been engaging in these conversation and professional development for a few years and recently we took the time to really unpack and define the terms bias and racism when we think about bias we talk about two types of bias there's that implicit bias where you unconsciously have attitudes and stereotypes that affect your understanding shows up in your actions and your beliefs and decisions and bias can be more than race it can be about gender ability ageism sexism you name it we all have bias we are born we are not born with bias but bias happens quickly in our brains it's how we make shortcuts what's also is prevalent is explicit bias when you
037have a conscious attitude or belief it often results in some deliberate thought or action we must be accountable to both types of bias and they lead to other types of systematic issues we also have taken the time to define racism individual racism is that pre-judgment that bias or discrimination by an individual based off their ideas that there is racial inferiority of one group or another it may be conscious or unconsciously held it includes both privately held beliefs conscious and unconscious external behaviors and actions and then there's institutional racism that occurs within institutions organizations such as ours and schools that adopt and maintain policies and practices and procedures they're often unintentionally producing inequitable outcomes for people of color and advantage of those of white of white people when we think about these terms what we know
038happens when bias exists we begin to create systems of oppression and we must take our time to dismantle these systems of oppression bias doesn't happen alone what happens is we begin to discriminate based on racism or sexism or ableism or classism or i even have more of the list goes on and on and ableism and homophobia and cysm and anti-semitism and islamophobic and xenophobic and ageism and it goes on and on but all the isms are always present and until we have conversations both as adults and begin to find developmentally appropriate ways with our students these isms will show up in our systems of oppression they'll show up in our rules they'll show up in our policies unintentionally those show up in our procedures our practices even our curriculum which is what we're here to
039talk about today and they show up in the customs and the traditions that we hold true that this is how we do things at fcps so we are excited today to share with you our thoughts around how we want to approach this from the curriculum place and know that there's many other places we plan to do this work i'm going to now turn it over to colleen eddie good afternoon everyone i'm the coordinator for social studies and i'm glad to share with you some goals for anti-racism and anti-bias education developed in response to the january forum topic and these are goals that were developed with cross-departmental dialogue grounded in our work with teachers and students at the top you'll see goals that are focused on learning outcomes for students expectations for students to examine bias
040and history in themselves and in their world to reject racism hate and prejudice to recognize injustice in systems and institutions to take action to improve their local global and digital communities which of course has a special place in my heart as social studies coordinator we want to provide curriculum that supports those learning outcomes curriculum that represents diverse perspectives with nuance and respect we want curriculum that exposes students to the history and effects of racism prejudice and discrimination curriculum that increases self-awareness and affords opportunities to take that meaningful action to improve their community and the world aligned with those expectations for students we know we need learning outcomes and expectations for staff for the adults who lead the learning so we want to empower and expect all staff to demonstrate cultural competence to create classroom and
041school environments that are inclusive and safe to activate student voice and foster empathy to challenge racism bias and exclusion and to respond to acts of hate and discrimination with appropriate action and our staff need learning to support those actions those expectations so we seek to provide professional learning that examines racism and bias and history in ourselves and in our world we seek to provide professional learning that recognizes injustice and systems institutions and we want to facilitate the kind of empowering and inclusive anti-bias and anti-heat learning experiences that we hope to see in our classrooms this diagram offers a perspective on the kind of multifaceted nature of anti-racism and anti-bias curriculum and we're going to talk about each of these aspects as we go on with a particular focus on social studies and how to change
042what the change looks like underway but you'll notice here at the center of the diagram is a an ask for a school board policy on anti-racism and anti-bias education to support the kind of learning that we know we want in our classrooms and to make those expectations that we just described on the previous slides really clear why do we need a school board policy and on anti-racism and anti-bias education well we know from working with educators across across scps that there really is a need for such clarity our currently our our teachers and staff don't necessarily feel supported to enact this change and that actually stems from existing policy and regulation the controversial issues regulation that that tells teachers to remain impartial on issues with substantial differences of opinion on the local national or international
043level when they're accompanied by intense feelings and strong emotions and we know that ultimately anti-racism and anti-bias education asks for teachers to take a clear stand a stand against racism a stand against bias on issues that some people may perceive as controversial and when we come down to it we know that changing attitudes challenging inequality and raising consciousness are not neutral matters and so this ask for a school board request would really provide a some clarity of expectations for our staff and some support for this work moving ahead i offer today we offer today some guiding documents on anti-bias education might support the development of such a policy the work of teaching tolerance which began in 1991 offers a host of resources to us for anti-bias education the one that's featured on this particular slide
044is called the social justice standard the teaching tolerance anti-bias framework and this is really relevant to to being clear and transparent about the intended learning outcomes of anti-bias education they're focused on four domains of anti-bias education identity diversity justice and action and you can see how those align with the goals that we shared earlier for anti-racism and anti-bias education ultimately teaching tolerance pursues prejudice reduction and collective action and based on their alignment of their goals with ours we recommend this guiding document for consideration by the board in addition teaching times offers a guiding document on the broader practices of anti-bias education beyond learning outcomes and this does a really great job of connecting culturally responsive pedagogy culturally responsive teaching with anti-bias education the broader practices in the school that can support those intended learning outcomes
045so while a school board policy might be needed to advance this work further i'm really excited to share with you the work that is underway um in multiple content areas but with a particular focus on social studies we know that the school board has supported this idea of equity at the center of education for some time and beginning in 2018 social studies really named this need to transform our practices we recognize the implicit bias in the curriculum we recognize the need for transformation and we committed to it so we do have some past work to share and some and some present work to share as well the board recognized the need for equity focused positions including one particular position that is near and dear to my heart and that was the multicultural studies curriculum resource
046teacher and that position was filled by dr debra march who's here with us today she's now been recently promoted to the specialist for culturally responsive pedagogy she's an amazing asset to fcps and including this work of anti-racism anti-bias and she's going to be talking about what we see at the top of this diagram at first where it says design principles and tools dr marsh has been instrumental in helping us clarify the design principles for cultural responsiveness and for what that looks like in a classroom so i'm going to turn it over to dr march thank you miss eddie um so what you see on your screen uh is a tool that we call the design principles for cultural responsiveness this is a tool we developed in fcps through a collaborative learning process across teams and
047offices back in 2018 and the purpose of this tool was to guide transformation in curriculum and instruction across all content areas not just social studies for elementary middle and high school students the big idea here in this tool is that what and how we teach directly impacts how students feel about themselves as learners and as human beings and that we educators can leverage these five design principles in the center multiple perspectives critical lens relevance rigor and relationships to make sure that we're in the green zone on the right where students feel affirmed in their identities and empowered as learners a copy of this document is probably publicly accessible i realized that the print may be small but i did want to zoom in on some of the key questions that educators who use this tool
048could reflect on as they did that as they design learning experiences for their students um so in the multiple prospectus domain at the top and this domain really is about you know this question of whose lives experiences contributions are deemed worthy of study in the classroom um educators using this row would be asking questions such as are diverse experiences and perspectives represented with respect and nuance in my curriculum in my learning experience and my assessment those perspectives include students perspective notice that third question on the right are students invited to use their voice and activate their own perspective i wanted to call attention as well to the critical lens domain um and here in the second row this is really about giving kids opportunities giving students opportunities um to think for themselves about the materials
049they're learning instead of passively accepting things the way that they are and so some reflective questions on the right include you know are students encouraged to examine materials events and institutions critically attending to power position and bias will students understand human systems as the product of choices that can be made better and of course will students construct their own understanding about enduring concepts um there are many reflective questions here across these five domains and you'll be hearing connections to these design principles and some of the curriculum work underway within and beyond social studies um in this presentation and so this slide um describes some of the places across the curriculum um across subject areas where you can see these design principles in action currently and work underway so you'll notice in language arts um the
050equity audits of book rooms looking at you know which whose perspectives experiences are represented in our texts um is there a representative diversity of authors and in the text that our students have access to um likewise the critical literacy units then the elementary planning and pacing guides i'm supported with professional learning for teachers and of course the design principles on that prior slide are prioritized in the curriculum documents um being created for the return to school resources for teachers currently in health and physical education our family life education learning experiences on identity and stereotypes support students in building this understanding as well as the anti-bias connections in middle and high school learning experiences that are offered to schools through the return to learn return to school curriculum and also in digital citizenship the lessons on
051online hate speech gender stereotypes and confirmation bias all enact these design principles um but today we're going to focus uh more specifically on social studies um and this slide really offers a kind of bird's eye view an overview of work that we're going to dig more deeply into with some concrete examples in a moment um so the work underway in social studies really falls under these four big headings the first one being looking at what we have currently auditing existing resources that we have centrally in our curriculum repository for bias using the tool you just saw as well as other tools to assess the extent to which our learning experiences are culturally responsive and we've been removing harmful resources um you know since we've been using this tool in 2018 but to eradicating harm it's
052been important to us to also create learning experiences that are transformative not enough just to delete and remove but also to create and that's what these other three bullet points speak to um you'll notice the developing partnerships um bullet point this talks about uh really our work with museum partners universities and other community partners to scale curriculum development um focus on inquiry-based learning and you'll you'll hear a bit more about that in the concrete examples we're infusing anti-bias standards into the core curriculum guidance i'm currently being offered to schools um for distance learning experiences and return to school and finally we're providing professional learning professional development for social studies educators to ensure that they have the support and the tools that they need to enact these shifts and so i'd like to uh we'd like
053to present to you one concrete example of that professional learning um that began uh last year this rethinking virginia studies was a system-wide professional learning opportunity in which two teachers from every elementary school attended a three-phase learning cohort really a massive investment in professional learning to support teachers and enacting meaningful learning experiences we decided that virginia studies which is our fourth grade social studies course was a really important place to start with this transformative work this is the first u.s history survey course that our students in fcps access so this is the first time that students are building their understanding of an overarching story of our state's past and present and really our nation's past and present unfortunately the story told by state standards was superficial it focused on the experiences and contributions of a
054select few and it erased or misrepresented the experiences and contributions of many people including specifically of people of color um and so uh you know this curriculum this narrow curriculum um resulted in instructional practices that lacked historical integrity such as colonial day which was a day of experiential learning dress-up and celebration that was formerly held at many fcps elementary schools we knew that to enact systemic change teachers deserved an opportunity to deepen their content knowledge about u.s history about culturally responsive teaching and to work alongside one another and alongside us in central office to rethink the way we teach virginia studies and this meant first a day of site-based learning and that's what you're seeing in these images um teachers joining us at museum sites you'll see on the upper left the national museum of
055the american indian um the photos on the right are actually at one of it's luther jackson middle school right here in fcps to learn from the alumni association and guest speakers about the history of segregated education right here in fairfax county public schools so this first day of site-based learning was really an opportunity to deepen our understanding of history including stories that often get marginalized or untold and this resulted as well in a day of design when teachers reflected on what they learned a lot about their students and worked together to design new learning experiences reflecting the design principles of cultural responsiveness and what they learned about our past and present and then of course in march so these days i should have said our day of site-based learning was october 2019 when these cohorts
056came together then again in november they came together to apply what they learned to design a change and then they went back to their school sites and tried those ideas out with students enacted those culturally responsive learning experiences and then in march we all came back together in our cohorts and reflected learned about what the teachers had done um they shared exhibitions of learning um two of our uh five cohorts were able to do it in person and then three of our five cohorts shared their learning digitally after school closures related to coronavirus and we do have a video um that shows a little bit about um what teachers learned experienced and the the change that impacted their students um in march and so i believe that uh we're gonna have time to show that
057but i i'll uh pause here and let it get set up if you like i do have the file downloaded on my computer here rather than from the drives i can go ahead and share bev how would you like to do that would you like them to share it i have it just the link from the drive okay go ahead and share it thank you i'm coming sorry it's all right this will be the first time i can think of that we've shared a video uh remotely like this before we have been in a social studies collaboration all year we've met three times with other fourth grade teachers to actually look at social studies in a different perspective you know whose story is not being told and how can we better address the inequity that's
058being taught in social studies for so long um it's been all about maybe covering the standards and we're rethinking the way we teach it to make it more relevant to kids and to help them think about marginalized groups that are not necessarily represented in some of our standards we don't talk about the people who did the work and were certainly undervalued and their stories are not told i think it's so important to like unlock the stories and the best of our ability or at least to let our students know that there are stories out there that are missing right now and that we can try to piece them together through primary sources artifacts today we just brought back some of the activities that we've done with our students already and we're doing a gallery walk
059to look at all of the different examples and it has opened up my eyes a lot more and it has definitely given me some material that i want to put like do within my own classroom the rest of this year or beginning of next year almost every exhibit has things from different perspectives every exhibit has more student oriented learning versus teacher-led learning so the students are the ones that are doing the research and doing the collaborating and coming to their own conclusions we have found that most of our social studies textbooks are only told from one perspective and many many students backgrounds are being left out we have the control to make our lessons more engaging for the kids and to bring in all of these hidden stories the minute that you let the children
060talk and hear their ideas and hear the other students respond you would actually be amazed at their insights and their deep thinking and once you've engaged them in the deep thinking they notice the problems and they want to come up with solutions for my students i've seen a lot more independence and a lot more standing up not only for themselves but for others and i see a lot of empathy i don't have to be the lead on every discussion that we have i can let it flow with them and that's okay but i think with me teaching this and they see an identity in themselves which is amazing for them to take it and run with it in the real world i'm excited [Music] thank you so much i'm glad we were able to figure
061out how to share that you may have noticed all five of the design principles for cultural responsiveness in play in that video and i think there's much to celebrate in the teachers accomplishments but the thing that always comes through for me is the high expectations for you know students ability to navigate the complexity of our past and present and also a high degree of faith in their ability to make a meaningful contribution to our communities and world right now um the model of change that is evident here in rethinking virginia studies in this cohort really exemplifies an approach that we in fcps social studies have found successful starting with inquiry-based learning for teachers in which they enact and reflect on a change in their classrooms and then learn from one another and really think within
062and beyond the unit that they're enacting that change in order to grow as culturally responsive educators and so now i will turn it back over to k-12 social studies coordinator colleen eddy who will share about another initiative for change underway thanks so much debra in addition to the division work that we've done within fcps focused on fourth grade social studies i'm really excited to share a larger collaboration that's focused on all of our us history courses this is a collaboration across six school divisions in virginia who are working to scale change knowing that the standards of learning provide an incomplete picture of history and an incomplete social studies education we have come together with these school divisions that you can see depicted here on the slide albemarle who's been leading a lot of this work
063virginia beach city public schools charlottesville city powerton county and also oh my gosh i'm drawing a blank madison county sorry um who have joined us in the collaborative work so over two years we have worked with over 100 educators 30 partners from historical sites institutions and museums i'll share a little bit about that in a moment to design inquiry-based learning units that focus on source analysis argumentation and an invitation to informed action to improve our world we've designed close to 40 inquiry units over the last two years and we are excited to pilot and revise those so that we can begin to scale this work in uh fcps this coming year we'll be focusing on our high school world history courses in the virginia inquiry collaborative we'll be working alongside facing history and ourselves to
064do a critical look at the history of education and then began to explore how we can provide inquiry-based learning in our world history courses here you see represented some of the institutions that have joined us in this in this large-scale work across virginia we had experts from these institutions embedded in design groups with teachers um so that we were designing units that were focused on content expertise and inquiry driven and uh it's it's exciting to share that the virginia department of education has helped to support this work through a grant to public to publish these units when they're complete on go open virginia to help scale the work across the state so we've received not only attention from a variety of media outlets but from the vdoe who is looking to adopt potentially the inquiry
065design model for assessment reform and for reform of the curriculum standards this is really exciting and powerful work of which we are very proud i want to zoom back into the work in fairfax um to kind of set a foundation for this our teachers need really in-depth opportunities to explore those design principles for cultural responsiveness that dr mark shared with us and they need help with implicit bias training so uh last school year we spent multiple days with middle school and high school social studies chairs to help prepare them to lead this work at the school level to enact change in the classroom to kind of be the lead learner in this process of change and we also led professional development system-wide for all middle school and high school social studies teachers at our division-wide
066our county-wide in-services in the winter of last year and also in the summer both of which explicitly focused on cultural responsiveness and this summer explicit focus on anti-bias and anti-racism i'd like to share a little bit about the curriculum development processes beyond these inquiry-based units that we discussed um earlier we have undertaken over two years with over 50 teachers an audit of the courses you see listed there on the left virginia studies u.s history courses world history courses civics using those design principles of cultural responsiveness and we identified implicit bias in a significant portion of our curriculum resources in our central repository and we're removing over a third of those resources as a result of that audit conducted by a diverse team of teachers in addition we are um we are making new curriculum to
067support comprehensive change in the past uh school year we did a major overhaul of the virginia studies planning and pacing guides to give you a sense of this work the civil war unit alone is 60 pages long so this is really time intensive work to over overhaul the pacing guides through and through we also worked with the smithsonian learning lab this summer on a multi-course effort so all of our u.s history courses were represented with teachers from across the division who paired up with the smithsonian learning lab to curate sources for more diverse representation of individuals groups and identities in our us history courses and paired those with thinking routines to ensure that thinking critical thinking is at the heart of of the learning process and finally we've built more robust resources for our elective
068course combating intolerance an amazing course that's currently offered in nine schools we felt we needed to provide a more robust curriculum to help advance that elective course across the division most recently as we prepare for the return to school the ask across content areas was to identify essential standards or high priority standards to help hone our attention to our our greatest priorities in the return to school in this unprecedented time while doing that work we took the direction of the school board to begin infusing the aims of anti-bias education into the core curriculum and began pairing the social justice standards that we discussed earlier with those essential standards grounded in the work of the virginia department of education grounded in the state standards so in that return to school curriculum really prioritized relevance critical thinking
069informed action we've got clear unit concepts and essential questions as well as performance assessments that really promote critical thinking application of skills argumentation to go beyond kind of that idea of um you know inculcating a narrative in students and asking them to repeat that back on standardized tests we are we are really focusing on critical thinking here is an example i don't want to get too far into the weeds i know we're a little in the weeds already but this is an example from our high school u.s history curriculum at the top you'll see an example that ties the state standard around the civil war and reconstruction era with an emphasis on connections to students identities communities in the world the relevance piece and underneath that you see two standards that come from the the
070teaching tolerance anti-bias education framework one that invites students to see unfairness at the individual level and injustice at the institutional or systemic level in addition invite students to express empathy when people are excluded or mistreated because of their identities so this is an example of how antibiotic aims are being infused into the core curriculum connected to that of course we've designed learning experiences so not just stating the learning outcomes but for the return to school curriculum we're providing streamlined curriculum resources here's one example of how students might be assessed on that civil war unit the goal is at the top students construct an argument that addresses the compelling question using specific claims and relevant evidence from sources while acknowledging competing views and here are examples of essential questions how do the u.s civil war and
071reconstruction impact our national identity and unity today and how does the past impact present understanding systems and actions regarding prejudice and social bias so this is just one example of how bringing in that focus on critical thinking pair with anti-bias education is so important so we have next steps so that is a lot of work that has happened already and that is is uh soon to take hold but we have additional next steps that we'd love to share we are moving forward with system-wide professional development for teachers of us history courses we are working to help teachers adopt the use of those inquiry design model units that we're going to pilot this school year revise and then scale in the coming year we are going to initiate a focus on world history with the virginia
072inquiry collaborative and we're going to create clear expectations and guidance around holocaust education in grades 7 10 and 11 so that teachers students in our community recognize the necessity of holocaust education we are adopting the new high school elective for american studies it's going to course review and in the coming weeks and that is a course that is currently under creation by the virginia department of education and uh we we should receive the actual curriculum sometime this winter or spring but we're moving forward with adopting it and we're also providing really strong professional development to teachers this spring through a course that dr march is working with a variety of teachers to develop we are advocating for seeking for support and funding for site-based learning for students at the national museum of the american indian
073national museum of african american history and culture and the u.s holocaust museum these amazing treasures are basically in our backyard and it would be so impactful to ensure that all students have the opportunity for such site-based learning and lastly i want to share our passion for facilitating input on the new iteration of the virginia department of education standards of learning they are scheduled to be published in and in the meantime there's a public engagement process we want to make sure that fcps our very diverse and vibrant community has a void in that process so that we see different standards the next time around so that we don't have to do as much retrofitting to to accomplish anti-bias education we're eager to do that beyond social studies which of course is my love but beyond social
074studies we know we need to expand and deepen efforts across all content areas that work is underway but we are working to hone a clear vision for this work to unfold in all content areas anti-bias education is not a a subject exclusive to social studies and to that end we would like to explore the development of topical anti-bias lessons we know that particular topics like race religion ability class immigration gender and sexuality deserve attention that bias like racism ableism homophobia sexism sexism um and more deserve uh nuance tension and topical lessons would give us the ability to support teachers in enacting such lessons we know that we may need board support explicit board support for such lessons and we look forward to discussing that so we have certainly um covered a lot i just want
075to emphasize again that anti-bias education is not one thing anti-bias education is multi-faceted and there are key topics and there is work ahead of us that we look to look forward to discussing with the board leona is going to come back and share some additional next steps to support change across fcps thanks so much for letting me share the work underway thank you colleen and i'm mindful of the time so i'll try to um get through this in a quick manner so uh we heard a lot about that curriculum reframing and we think about the five c's of equity virginia we know that this work is more than just curriculum it's about that internal work that teachers must do to be culturally responsive all teaching is culture responsive but the question is to who and
076so we know that we must work with our teachers to create that paradigm shift internally we have to listen and learn from our students and think about their cultures that they identify with whether it's race and gender ability how are we considering factors such as neurodiversity how are we thinking about how we engage in our classrooms so teachers must engage in both that cognitive shift and that behavioral shift and the resources they choose in addition to a curriculum so this is just a snapshot of some of the professional development that has been offered um just recently uh we had our equity symposium and um much of the board was there so thank you for your support and which we did a beyond words a call to action over 60 perce over 60 presentations over 300
077participants recently our instructional staff in support of returning to school engaged in social emotional modules connected to the castle framework which also have direct ties to exploring empathy and identity and cultural responsiveness and being aware of others right now we are wrapping up culture responsiveness module six this is a continuation of our of our yearly professional development provided to all fcps staff and we are just in a um time of wrapping that up where all staff was understanding what bias and hate and responding to racism is we know that our athletic coaches do spend time with students and so they are not contractual employees so they sometimes miss this professional development so we're going to spend some time also working with them to understand bias and racism so that when these conversations things happen even
078outside of our classrooms we all have common language and expectations are prepared and then in march we'll do our second module this year thinking about cultural responsiveness again and going deeper into addressing racism and bias and hate and all those different things we spoke about because again as we've shared that not only is it about the curriculum it's about the choices teachers make choice teachers are members of culture responsive professional development communities they have to explore and assess their own knowledge about diversity in the community they serve they must recognize their assumptions that they're making and they must become more informed and professional development helps them do that this is about the resources they pull whose voices are heard or not heard in the classroom we know that this also impacts our discipline you heard
079us share earlier this summer um along with uh carrie williams about our our reform students rights responsibility and we know part of that work is quality and relevant and engaging curriculum and engaging teaching in the classroom will result in less discipline so this work is is all trite is all blended together we must do this work together we have spent time in additional modules thinking about this and then finally as i as we saw in the video which is my favorite part of today is elevating teacher and student voice we have to have faith in the stories of our community so we spend some time this summer talking with our equity leads and our leadership team members to be really clear about expectations about the formation of equity teams the use of equity audits at
080the school level creating access and opportunity goals at the school level we'll have ongoing professional development for our leads and our principals this year to continue these conversations additionally our leadership team has engaged in some coaching practice around coaching for equitable practices so when we see that there are situations that need to be resolved or addressed or there's not implementation of fidelity or someone is struggling that our leaders have the words that they need to have these conversations our principals will also receive this later this year we need to elevate our students our town halls have taught us that our community has things to share so we need to continue our community town halls including student town halls and i'm really excited to share about our student ambassador leadership program these are student equity leaders
081at every high school two per high school so we want these two students to be a member of those equity teams be actively engaged we will also provide them professional learning to give them the tools and the and the words and the voice to be able to be an active member in these teams and support their schools and push their students that's where we will see this work really transform that paradigm shift when we allow our kids to lead us we know there are many student club connections going across fcps we have the anti-defamation league no place for hate in some of our schools kids for peace in some of our schools student associations and some of our schools such as black student association pride groups and we know that we need to expand those
082opportunities and provide more information to equity leads and student ambassadors about how do you ensure that the voices of your school community are being heard so this is just a snapshot of that work knowing that we're going to share more about those five c's in october with you i'm going to turn it over to dr presidio to wrap us up all right thank you so much leona and we're going to go into board discussion here in just a second but we have covered a lot of ground so we did kind of wanted to wrap up calling your attention to a few different recommendations that we would have for uh for the board and the first of course is that idea of putting in place uh an explicit policy that would reject all forms of racism
083and support anti-bias and anti-racist education and that's really important as colleen discussed because our current regulations ask staff to maintain an impartial stance on controversial issues so we think that explicit policy is really important second we are recommending that the board support the continuation of our curriculum revision work and importantly we would ask for the board's financial support as we continue to do that work as well you heard from dr march who's doing some amazing leadership work but of course that's one person in one position and we could certainly benefit from more staffing as well as additional funds to support some of the activities we described such as the site-based learning it's some field trip experiences that we could take advantage of here in our local community third we are also recommending that the board
084would support the infusion of anti-bias education standards into additional content areas so colleen talked about that work and what that looks like and with your support and encouragement we hope to continue that work and then finally we're seeking board support for the inclusion of required lessons around anti-bias to ensure that all of our students would have the opportunity to receive those types of educational experiences and we think that that's really really important so with that i'm going to turn the meeting back over to mr frisch to help us facilitate board questions and discussion thank you thank you very much and uh i want to thank all of our staff for helping us with that presentation i apologize in advance if anybody hears any weird sound that my partner's a choir director and they're doing vocal
085warm-ups in the other room which is now our his classroom our living room anyways um bev can you confirm that you're keeping time for us today i can confirm that okay good laura jane and i were wondering just wanted to make sure uh and we can get started first up we have a very eager uh miss corbett sanders who got her hand up uh right when the presentation was beginning so uh well done the pr the floor is yours miss corporate sanders well thank you mr fresh yes i am very eager since i was the maker of the motion for the forum topic that initiated this um this is something that um i have been eagerly awaiting and i'm just thrilled i want to first thank our staff i think they are more eager than
086i am and so um i just commend you on your energy and your focus on this area i wanted to um just kind of go through some of the comments of the ask obviously i fully support a um a policy on anti-racism and anti-bias i would just urge that as we look at doing such a policy which would go to the governance committee that we look at it in the context of one fairfax and not just restrict our anti-bias anti-racism policy to curriculum but broader to how we treat our students vis-a-vis the sr and r as well as in our staffing so i think that it would tie in nicely with our existing non-discrimination policy i think it would tie in nicely with one fairfax and it would tie in nicely with many of the
087improvements we've done with the srnr in the past few years i also want to commend staff for their reliance on primary resources and taking advantages taking advantage of the resources in the greater d.c area i do support our focusing on returning to a field trip experience for our students i think that is critical and it's something that we've peeled away with budget cuts over the years so i think that we do need to look at our own funding but also look at grant funding for that i do think that the strengthening of the combating intolerance is something that's really important i will disclose that my brother-in-law was the first person to teach combating intolerance in this in the fairfax county system and he actually relied went and visited with congressman lewis to get his insights
088on how to develop such a curriculum so i think this is a good year to reinforce the work of the combating intolerance curriculum next i do want to talk a little bit about the relationship of expanding this to other areas of our curriculum i think that we already gave you all the go ahead in our forum topic both forum topics in january and again in july on the importance of having this broader than just a social studies curriculum and one area that i think it is very important for us to look at is the impact of bias and racism on social emotional learning and social emotional health and so i would urge that we um infuse this into that curriculum i would also say that um it should be there should be mandatory lessons as
089you asked um in your discussion and um i do thank you very much um real quick i want to um thank you um colleen for expanding to include the holocaust studies piece as you know that's something that both ms mclaughlin and i spoke to you about so i think that's great thank you thank you miss corbett sanders um besides more heiser great thank you very much and i'm happy to follow behind that um i very much support this work i very much support having um required anti-bias in our curriculum but i wanted to bring up a few points specifically that i feel is is missing um it was mentioned once about neurodiversity but there really isn't anything else there's a one mention of ableism but so for example when we reference the teaching tolerance materials
090i read through all of the materials that was referenced in the slides and both examples about disability are very much an old-fashioned example both of them about students with physical disabilities there's really no mention of neurodiversity in any of the teaching tolerance materials that were referenced here so i really want to make sure we're intentional about including neurodiversity and children with developmental disabilities as part of the normal i know early on slide six we talked about you know um not just racism but you know that the culture is of all of who you are but we haven't traditionally talked about disability as part of culture and as part of diversity so if we're going to sort of make sure that we're talking about all of who we are we want to include disability in that
091conversation intentionally to make sure that our students and our teachers know to include that um i know we don't want to violate anyone's privacy rights but we need to reframe the conversation on disability as something that's not a bad thing and something that's part of the norm so i really i feel that that's missing here um i also wanted to bring up when we're looking at our relationships to their culture again we want to make sure we're intentional about how we define culture and the other piece that i wanted to bring up when we talk about african american studies and i know this is something coming from the state but i would love to see classes on women's studies um on latino legionic studies as well as just a class on diversity and cultural competency
092that gets to all of these pieces of it as electives and not just talking about african-american cities it's a great place to start but i'd like to see that expanded so if anyone could sort of talk about the intentional work around neurodiversity and i know i've met with our equity staff and they've been very open to the conversation i appreciate that but what has been done as we're moving forward in this work to embed that in here intentionally and have it be intentional part of the conversation yes thank you uh very much miss seismer heiser and i'm going to let leona i think she wants to to respond to this as well but i would just say first of all there's a lot of work that still needs to be done and and we understand
093that and we really appreciate you calling attention um to the special focus that we really do need to have on our special needs students and we'd be very happy to continue to work with you and um other community members uh to find the right ways to do this work because um as you said you know we we understand that the teaching tolerance standards are not the only framework that's that's a starting point that's one resource that's informing our work but we certainly want to work with you know community experts um here as well so it the work is uh i would say in its initial planning stages and and we know that we have a long way to go i'm not just in that area but in some of the other areas with respect to
094anti-bias education as well thank you thank you dr presidio i would i would wholeheartedly agree that you know we have more work to do we've had really robust conversations with you and um we know that we need to think about this idea of neurodiversity in more intentional ways many of us participated in your question it was amazing and thinking about how to potentially add that into our cohorts one of the things that we're still working around this idea of how we might even do our cohorts given that we're virtual so we're trying to be mindful around um how often you know we're not pulling teachers away from their students but also giving them the tools they need to be more effective so one of the places we have definitely we have considered as our cohorts
095and additionally module 7 when we dig deep into the different types of bias is what we also plan to embed some intentional work around all the different forms of diversity and where bias impacts us all as i think as i shared um and i think this is where you're coming from too when teachers sit down to plan they need to have all these things in mind and we know that we still have some work to do on creating robust professional learning communities where we really think about all these things like what tools do teachers really need what learning needs to happen so that they really are creating um thinking about all the types of diversity in their classroom so i look forward to continuing that conversation with you you've been such a good support of
096us in that way and sharing your knowledge but that's our original thinking right now is through our cohorts is through our work with professional learning communities and also through our module and i do appreciate the great partnership and willingness to listen and i'm happy to continue that work absolutely and i appreciate that i wanted us to bring one other thing up when we're talking about systematic racism and bias i would like us to maybe do some of the work to look at that systematic bias against students with neurodiversity in the way we've set up our programming and our class structures as well um and i think that's something just to look at as we're doing this work i really think there's room here for our school system to be a leader in this area and
097i would just encourage you to really embed that all the way across and really you know challenge our as we're doing this work to make sure that the it's intentionally included in our definitions of diversity and culture and some strength so that was my last piece and i really appreciate you guys being open to the conversation and you know if you could consider the women thank you for all your great work thank you miss eismar heiser up next we have dr anderson um thank you um i echo the sentiment shared by my colleague regarding all of this work both of my colleagues regarding all of this work so thank you for that i have a few questions that i want to speak to talking uh beginning with slide 14. um this slide talks about changing
098attitudes challenging inequity and also having the instructor not being impartial on the issues that are being presented one of the things that we have to really be clear about is that this work really involves a reflection on our own embedded values and beliefs that are deeply seated how are we ready are we ready how have we addressed uh teacher behaviors i think uh miss smith said teacher behavior is that paradigm shift that's also happening but how have or how will we address teacher behaviors that are inconsistent with these um expectations whether or not this is embedded in a policy or not yeah thank you dr anderson i guess i would just start by saying um you know first we've had a lot of teachers actually that have brought this up as an issue and a
099challenge to us um and they they feel the need to be more active and more responsive and they do feel a little bit hamstrung by the existing controversial issues regulation that we have in place so we have quite a few teachers who would like to feel empowered to act more than they they currently do so in addition you know i think kind of getting at your question how do we ensure that that folks are ready for this and how do we respond and and that's really the professional development work that we're doing and that you know leona's team is leading through the equity professional development is to ensure that our staff are ready and do understand that they have a responsibility when they see issues of bias discrimination racism in our system or in the
100classroom or in the schoolhouse that they do take an active role in addressing those issues so we definitely have more work to do to build our collective capacity to build individual capacity and build collective capacity but having the board policy not only acknowledges the urgency of that work it also empowers those that are ready to act now to be able to do so okay thank you for that i also want to share that i would be in full support of the board looking into this poli creating a policy to say that we are an organization that will not tolerate um bias and racism and so i'm happy to support that in addition i also want to be sure that i throw my support behind exploring opportunities to support some of these experiences being described because
101we need to be sure that our students have those opportunities i have a question um i think that was embedded in site 18 where we talked about the the curriculum impacts and the five areas how are we evaluating success in these areas when teams are planning uh when um work is being developed for instruction how would we know when these are met what criteria has been uh i see the criteria but what metrics have been articulated to the teachers that yes this is sufficient in terms of meeting these standards on slide 18. so that is another excellent question i'm going to certainly invite dr march or colleen eddie to to respond to that as they're the ones working most closely with the use of this particular tool go ahead debra thank you i guess i'll
102just by saying um that this tool is intended you know for self-reflection first among curriculum writers as well as teachers but um i do know that we use versions of this tool um centrally as a um essentially as a tool to evaluate basal resources um learning uh experiences instructional practices i mean we've used this tool alongside others in our curriculum evaluation that has resulted in the deletion the removal of harmful resources um i also and perhaps miss smith could speak most uh impactfully to this piece um but this tool has currently been embedded into division-wide practices one being the cultural proficiency modules um informing instructional planning and the other um that it's infused in uh collaborative learning teams uh you know planning processes so that these critical questions about cultural responsiveness um help to evaluate
103uh the practices that teachers on collaborative teams are enacting um as they serve their students i realize as i'm speaking that i'm not answering the question about concrete metrics and so i do i i'm very interested to kind of think more about what that might look like at a systemic level i know that miss eddie might have some thoughts but i i would say that we tried to be very intentional about creating a set of reflective questions and not a checklist um to try to avoid the erroneous assumption that cultural responsiveness or anti-racism is a you know a concrete kind of set of things that we can check off and do one time um that might lend itself to metrics um that appear to signify transformation but actually might restrict the transformative impact of our
104shift um so i don't know ms eddy if you'd like to expand i can just share that you know there are a number of tools that we share with you that we hold ourselves accountable with and um so each of these design principles we've developed a kind of a rubric if you will that helps us evaluate curriculum on a scale we know that it's not either red or green that there are these gradations toward transformation and so we do have those we use them in the curriculum development process and that's the process by which we audited and removed resources so some of the metrics that i shared earlier around the thousands of resources that we audited and over a third that we've removed is a product of um enacting this in curriculum work which of
105course translates in into practice into the classroom but i also think it would be really interesting to explore how these design principles in a measurable way and impact a student's classroom experience and that is another question you actually touch upon what i was trying to get to in terms of what rubrics are available for staff to be able to evaluate doing their own lesson planning you know plan do act cycles because that continuous reflection will only increase the next lessons um effectiveness and addressing these issues so having that rule break would be essential as collaborative teams are having these discussions uh ms smith i see you shaking your head did you want to add to that question yes i was just going to add that i think what they shared is that great look at
106that micro level but then at schools right we know that the school leader has a responsibility for that macro level and so i don't know if you recall when i share this year for the first time um we've um shared an expectation all schools are engaging in something we call an equity audit um in the past it would seem more of a reflective tool it was invitational it was optional and so now schools now that they have these equity teams they're taking a look at where this work exists across they're looking at things such as the learning environment the climate of the building opportunity who do we have in our courses and so every school has a responsibility to um take some time it's not a survey it's sitting through this audit and going through
107section by section um and reflecting and giving themselves a score and then choosing a goal of where they want to support and one of those areas is instruction and then that information is being shared back at the regional level i think that you bring up a very good point and it's a point that um i know myself and our team is really aware of that we hear from our community as well so we've done all this great work setting the stage we've done all this great work talking about paradigm shifts and so now how are we going to ensure that it's happened so i know that we are ready um as a division to start moving towards that next portion of accountability and measurement and those are some of the great things we hope to
108share with you in october okay um i did have one other question this goes to slide 39 and this was the virginia studies i would love to have a concrete example in terms of how any component of that virginia studies curriculum has been reimagined to include this perspective if you could provide an example like this is what it was before this work was applied to it and this is what our teachers are currently doing kind of a comparison if you may if you are able to i know i'm putting you on the spot on this one well i think i could talk to um probably the most substantial contribution is disrupting a traditional practice called colonial day that existed for you know literally generations in our schools where students were asked to dress up um
109like people who may have enslaved or oppressed their ancestors and so for schools where colonial day was still present we asked for the change idea that they enact to be to rethink that practice to retire that practice and instead focus on the design principles of culturally responsive teaching by developing inquiry-based learning experiences experiential learning where appropriate and so i know that i'm trying to think i know in one school for example um they had planned to have students um engage in a look at um civic activism across virginia's history and to they literally had like a green screen behind kids um where they name on a on a poster what they would like to advocate for in virginia today i mean that's just demonstrably different than the practice of colonial day um and so uh
110so that's a really that's a really key feature and shift in that kind of experiential learning and there are smaller examples as well um what that are maybe feel a little bit less like a major event but are true shifts in teaching and learning um widespread we saw the implementation of the use of something called thinking routines these are research-based processes developed by harvard's project zero to support thinking because learning is a consequence of thinking if there is no thinking there is no learning how do we scaffold that for students how do we help students to think empathetically how do we help them to think as global citizens how do we help them to think critically and making connections from past to present those thinking routines have really taken hold in in virginia studies courses
111and we've got lots of documentation of that a really powerful shift in a teaching and learning practice one of the thinking routines for example that we work with teachers on is called mean side and hidden or the story routine so what in an artifact is the main story what is the side story and what might be the hidden story it launches students into inquiry okay and i think with my limited time i have one question left uh there's a slide i believe it's slide 37 that speaks to um and the effort i will put i thank you i will stop right there i'll send my question elsewhere all right thank you dr anderson up next we have miss keisgamara while i turn my camera on i'll just put me on the go back list um
112okay i will start with recognizing that our strategic plan already talks about a caring culture and i think that what we're talking about with respect to developing a policy is really recognizing the essence and the the true essence of what a caring culture is um i would posit that while we have a number of people we need to include and absolutely appropriately include in addressing um the kinds of things we're talking about today i think we also need to recognize that with respect to the surveys that i read about in today's presentation that more than 30 percent of the students who provided us said that they had experienced slurs were black students i think that we also have to recognize that we have had a summer of racial unrest where the history of african americans
113has been on display and the and the inequities of that and we need to recognize that and so i'm grateful to see what we're looking at but i also want to place a level of urgency because our students are trying to figure out how to maneuver a world where all of this has bubbled up to the top and i think they need our help to do that and so i'm really glad to see that this is happening i will say um i'll start just immediately with i see this focus on on the fourth grade i would really love to see how we are addressing students as they come into kindergarten in first grade because it is true first impressions are lasting impressions so i will start there um with respect to i think one of
114the most important things that we have to look at is accountability and fidelity with respect to implementing what is being suggested here um i know i'm not probably not the only board member who has received concerns about our equity leads being able to do an excellent job but it all depends on how our principles implement their services and so let me stop there before i don't want to use up all my time um how are we making sure that our equity leads are given given the authority they need to really evoke change in their schools thank you i can share a little bit more about that so we have also heard stories of equity leads feeling that they do not have a voice and we know that that really for this work to happen it
115has to be a partnership so uh the elite initiative was new and so we took the time this year to sort of um re-center and make sure that everyone was crystal clear about the expectations so for the first time we kicked off the year thankfully that you all approved that extra three weeks we had time with our teachers so we pulled every single equity lead in principle together to be very clear dr brabrand dr ivey um becky baining all share sort of these are the expectations here's how you will work together this is what that partnership looks like how we need everyone to be in tandem with one another for the betterment and then we also made it clear that if there are situations that really that's where that conversation at that regional level is
116critical um so that we understand that we seek truth of the whole story so that we can enact action so that was the first time we've done that and we recognized and reflecting that we should have done that from day one um when this initiative was in its first inception um a year or two ago um even prior to my coming on board and so we took that time to really sit down together and we also know that that doesn't mean it's not going to continue to happen just like despite any lesson we do right there are going to be continue to be people who for whatever reason because it doesn't align with their values or they don't um see don't have the right words or whatever wherever they're stuck people continue to do other
117actions and i agree with you that's where we need to think about where that accountability comes into place and so that has to happen at the school leadership level it also has to happen at that regional level as a support to ensure that everyone is given the tools and also the leeway to do this work so where is the accountability measures now do we have that set up or is that in process that those are the things that are in the process this year that was was not in existence before and hearing from our community and hearing as we grew this program that we know we need more of that so the very first thing we did was that first meeting to be clear so we sent out what we called um this is a
118educational jargon i'll say it then i'll explain it we call it our tights and our loose tights are things that must happen loose is where you can be creative and so we were crystal clear this year around the tights and the loose of the um equity lead in a principal partnership what are the things that must happen and then here's where you get flexibility for example small things that we heard from our community and again it was a new it was a new initiative and principals were still trying to wrap their head around how to leverage this person but we heard things like the community isn't even aware of who our equity lead is so that's very we made that crystal clear in one of our tights introduce your equity lead to your community where
119we made it loose is how you might do that whether you call a town hall whether you have a pta meeting so the type is ensure that your community understands who their equity lead is we had other suggestions in there that were tightened another type was the formation of an equity team so many schools the equity team up until this year was a very robust team very diverse in its perspective and we had some schools that have not um stepped into the ring yet to be quite honest the equity team consisted of the principal in the equity league and so this year the type was you have an equity team and in addition to that type was that you need to include community representation that's never been an expectation before as well as you need
120to include a student or student voice in your equity team now the loose was frequency what's the goal using your data from your equity audit to help you think about how this group operates whether you use an existing team there are lots of teams and committees and i'll speak with my former principal hat on we don't want to create a team just to create a team right so if you have a robust team already can you shift their identity to be very crystal clear that this is now the equity team and they have a specific charge so that's just one way we increase accountability this year is with that tighten that loose and spending time we spent about we spent a whole morning with our equity leads and principles unpacking that and making sure everyone
121understood expectations now we're an implementation phase and now we need to have discussions about what that looks like to monitor that and how do we know it's being effective and that's what we are in process right now um and continuing that work as well and so those are things we hope to share soon i see uh dr ivey also has here so thank you miss peace lamar for that question and we definitely know that we need to um make sure that we have additional accountability and monitoring measures in place and so as um ms smith said the first step was identifying what the expectations are and we did that with the principals and equity leads and we've done that with our region office staff being uh we're involved in the meeting as well and then
122we'll be following up with further explanations and checks throughout the year and supports for those uh schools and teams where it's not working or they aren't meeting our expectations i think we could expound a little more on this in the presentation in october around equity and bring you some additional information and specifics i i would really appreciate that and i know in my tenure i've received a number of complaints from families or students or even staff members where they felt um a particular issue had not been handled appropriately and i think in light of the fact that we're trying to shift the culture here we really have to talk about how what that looks like and empowering the voices of those who feel that they have not been redressed yeah we agree and so that
123is something that we're working on and we're starting with just the expectations and we'll definitely bring some additional um thoughts around that in october so i'm on your go back thank you oh mr first did you call me i am can you hear me because i didn't need anything else okay miss marin you're up thank you thank you so after so many months of dealing with global pandemic and all sorts of other crises it is so refreshing to see the work done to address such a fundamental challenge in our schools for our community members i just i i'm so glad to see this work and i think it was actually supposed to come to us in june and because of our return to school planning it got bumped and bumped but um you know as
124i drive around the hundred mill district or bike or walk i see many signs about honoring lives rejecting hate and confirming the value of all human beings and i know that this work you've presented today is the bearing out of those beliefs of constituents and you know this is a human rights issue it's a civil rights issue and i liked the state's visual of the five c's but we are here to teach the curriculum and how we teach it is central so this is just i'm just thrilled and um the level of um work that has been done is astounding so um i want to say i'm i'm pleasantly um i'm glad that the context has been set so wide it's not just anti-racism it's anti-bias because that does capture leaves all that space to
125capture all of the ways in which people and stories and histories get slighted so um so thank you for doing that and you know i think mentioning as was said about ability and neurodiversity there is space here to reflect everyone in it and teach our children to be tolerant and knowledgeable um so i um just wanted to say i'm astounded that a third of the resources in fcps's curriculum had been deemed as harmful again that just underscores how critical this work is that we can't spend another day giving harmful curriculum to our students and teachers and i'm glad to see the updates about the state level but also need to point out that this work was two years in the making here in fairfax and we're seeing now from the state these calls for changes
126to standards and such which is wonderful and you know the partnerships with other organisms other school districts and such and are just the smithsonian other partners is it's exactly the kind of caliber of education that the public expects from us to prepare our students for a world where all of you know different people exist i would love to see i am eager to see the budgetary request so please do provide the full requests so we can see how to accelerate and widen this work i think it's commendable that it began in the social studies department but clearly there are implications in many disciplines so i'd like to know what it what is the menu here of what it would take to do this um as quickly as possible um you know dr march as you
127said ms eddie has been fabulous and she's one person just like every staff member what um how can the board remain updated on the progress made because this kind of works that we should know about um and i'm eager to work on the anti-racist policy and updating other related policies that hinder this work so thank you so much thank you miss marin uh miss tollen yes hello thank you um but i didn't quite mr fish i did want to know about um you know the budgetary implications will they be submitted in full and then how can we remain updated on the progress please if maybe dr presidio could speak to that sure i think probably the easiest thing to do on the budget request would be to do that as a next step so that
128we could get that in detailed information for you in writing so we'll be happy to do that and then we certainly can provide ongoing updates um on the work probably the next opportunity to do that will be the october board work session where we're going to discuss some of the additional equity work and we certainly can think about other ways to do that both in writing and in future work session opportunities for discussion as well great thank you thank you miss tollin yes um thank you for this good work and i did have a couple of questions uh well one comment actually um regarding that looking at this as an interdisciplinary look and um especially having spent years working around the science side of the uh the virginia studies in fourth grade all of that
129work is so interdisciplinary and really really really needs to be interdisciplinary so i say that as a support for um you know looking at this if we're changing what's happening in social studies we really need to look at the science curriculum as well and um the language arts curriculum since they're also intertwined and that's just one example um one question that i had i was excited to hear about the virginia inquiry collaborative and the work that's being done there and you talked a little bit about the assessment reform that is being worked on there i was wondering if you could just elaborate on that a little bit and potentially if you see any impact on sol testing as a result of that work at the state level [Music] so there's been over the course of
130the last few years um a desire at the state level to shift from standardized testing for accountability to performance assessments as accountability measures and um the things have kind of vacillated to and fro at the general assembly um on that matter but most recently um the virginia department of education is looking into is intending to pilot some performance assessments that use the inquiry design model and um once they have enough data to to calibrate rubrics and kind of go through i don't get in the weeds but to kind of prepare those performance assessments for scalability then school divisions will have the option of using performance assessment for a verified credit in u.s virginia history the high school course and there are some benefits and drawbacks to that namely that kids will have already taken most
131kids will have already taken standardized tests in world history one and two by that time but any movement toward performance assessment is a positive movement and in my opinion because the kind of learning that we're asking for inquiry-based learning that promotes critical thinking cannot be sufficiently measured by standardized tests and in order to really encourage those shifts in everyday practice in our schools we'd love to see more attention to performance assessment at the state level so i hope that answers your question but yes the virginia department of education has drafted performance assessments using the inquiry design model and they'll be piloting in order to scale that work um an opt-in um for virginia uh sorry us virginia history at high school we already have you know performance assessments we have performance assessments across grade levels
132in social studies actually we didn't showcase that work here but we have had multiple design cohorts across grade levels and i've developed dozens and dozens of performance-based assessments that are curriculum embedded and promote inquiry-based learning in the classroom that go beyond what i described with the inquiry design model there's a there there's a lot there i'm happy to share about that work if the board is interested thank you i appreciate that as a proponent of inquiry-based learning and the number of really great initiatives we already have in instructional services i'm happy to support that work um i wanted to get a little bit more information i'm happy to follow on karen keys gamara who asked questions about the equity teams and the expectations there really really excited to hear about the student ambassadors and um
133if you could share if there have been ideas of particular expectations for those students and what they'll be involved in hi sure i can answer more about the student ambassador so yes we have shared with all high school principals we met with them both um in their high school principal association meetings and then we shared information and infogram about um how to look for students not your we're not looking this is not another leadership class where we want the student that's involved in everything we're looking for students that have a perspective that may not we or may not be listening to so we gave guidance on flexion of student ambassadors and also there when that's due and then following that there'll be a series of um learning opportunities with our team and which that's when
134we will provide them additional ways to connect with one another we might we will be partnering with other organizations to bring them speakers so we're really excited but that's a brand new initiative and right now we are in the implementation stage of identifying students and we've also shared principles the expectations that these students um should have a voice and are a member of the equity team and will attend this learning with our team as well great i'd like to just stay on top of how that's working because i think that's a model that can be utilized in a number of other areas i mean get to green is a good example or um you know other important areas in the schools where we need student input so somehow we can put that as the next
135step staying on top of that that would be great um i just wanted to make one other comment and this this is back to on page 14. i of course support um having a policy that um you know where our staff can support uh rejecting racism anti-bias and exclusion um but i look forward to the conversations that we will have around um you know situations where our staff um you know need to remain impartial and i say that again with my interest in you know really cultivating students and being able to explore their own opinions and you know ideas and so i mean that's a broader topic but i just want to mention that as you know the conversations that i look forward to having around us and that is it just for my list
136right now thank you miss tolen up next we have missa mitch thank you um and i'll start by saying thank you to staff for working on this and um for this really important topic um i'm excited to see a number of the developments that have been shared i especially appreciated hearing the emphasis uh on not only removing harm but infusing narrative and sharing different experiences and stories um and and uh i'm happy to see the objectives as well in in a way that we're trying to be inclusive um i had a couple of questions and then a couple of points i'm sure i'm gonna need to go back but um the first question is regarding uh timeline this is uh related to what someone said that they'd like to follow up on the second is
137a two-part question really the first what what are the um methods or values that are guiding us in in how we prioritize what uh to what to tackle first of all so what's most important what's most pressing um and then which experiences to elevate um i and just seeing you know i um i won't comment further on why i'm asking but i'll leave that question there um and then the third question is uh our process for identifying resources or models um what considerations do we have and and if if at all what vetting processes exist or that kind of thing um so i'll pause there to hear answers mr mesh could you repeat your second question i apologize that it cut out oh um sorry about that okay so the second question had to do
138with uh how we prioritize the work and it's two parts one is the what so what's more important what's more pressing in what we tackle and the second is which experiences or narratives um do we choose to elevate or emphasize more what guides that um so i hope that captured what you guys missed there were three questions so thank you mr mesh i'm going to go ahead and start and i'll invite others to contribute their thoughts as well um i do think we can help you with the timeline and miss eddie might be able to provide some information about you know some of the work that we shared that's underway right now with respect to u.s history courses for example secondary level and what the timeline for that work is of course you know there's
139a lot of other information that we shared about work that needs to happen around anti-bias lesson development as well in a lot of the different areas that we described so we can provide you maybe as a next step with more detailed timeline information that gets into some of the broader work that we're doing in terms of you know i think the values of where where we start with the work a lot of that is informed by the use of the cultural uh responsiveness design tool that we looked at together and the five different areas really that you know that we're trying to look at our curriculum through so you know as dr march said we've used that tool very broadly um in our curriculum department and instructional services to really investigate and really take a
140look at where we might have areas that are problematic and and we certainly have identified quite a few and we believe all of our areas of curriculum certainly can you know be enhanced and improved but using that tool allowed us to really identify some of the areas that were the most problematic um such as you know virginia studies is an area where we really realized that we needed to you know expedite and focus the work on so i think that tool helps us a lot in terms of applying that tool to the areas to help us identify where to start and i think that tool also helps us really prioritize those narratives that you know that you were kind of you know asking you know you know which narratives are we choosing to to value
141part of that is making sure that we're valuing the multiple perspectives of all of our students in our classes right and you heard our teachers i think in that video talk a little bit about you know the insights that students have when they have the opportunity to stop and think critically and you know advocate for for issues that are important to them on issues that are important to them so it's really again using that that resource to help us think about you know who are the students in our classes that we're teaching every day and and what are the narratives that are important to them that need to be heard and shared across you know the entire class so again i think that tool is really powerful in helping us think through this work from
142a variety of different perspectives and i know in the interest of time we might need to move on but if any other folks have other thoughts that you want to contribute please feel free to do so if not we'll go on to your next question i i would agree with everything dr presidio um just shared and maybe to get just slightly more into the weeds um certainly we relied on our own disciplinary expertise as well as the expertise of you know museum and university stakeholders to look critically at our standards um and to identify uh the most pressing areas where our standards are either telling an incomplete or inaccurate story an example might be the way that our standards teach about the history of enslavement sometimes going so far as to appear to rationalize enslavement
143on economic grounds suggesting that virginia's agrarian economy required cheap or free labor um thus the africans quote unquote arrived um the places in our standards that erase the experiences and lives and contributions of native peoples during whole particular historical eras um suggesting that native peoples only existed in earlier pre-contact or um before the closing of the frontier in the late 19th century i would also say you know sometimes it's not just about what we teach but how we teach where we prioritize um what uh what we uh target for transformation you know i i think the the things that have made up my identity as a learner sometimes are emotionally laden experiences and i think when we talk about the practice of colonial day that was not written anywhere into our curriculum standards but that
144emotionally laid an experience of a student dressing up and appearing to celebrate a period of colonization um that can define the discipline and the students relationship to their classroom or school in ways that are high impact and so um that would be an additional um yes an additional area and just to echo what dr presidio said about our students and families um when we're thinking about what to include it's not just that question it's also how do we stop excluding and so how do we open up our curriculum not necessarily trying to tokenize and represent with some kind of approach of quotas but rather how do we ensure that our curriculum is openly inviting the experiences of our students and their families i mean the way that we frame questions and assessments in the way
145that we frame texts thank you um and then my third question i don't know if maybe it got cut out uh in terms of well i i mean i guess you guys addressed it so i can drop that question um a couple of thoughts so i i appreciate you know the points you um you brought up about uh you know the resources you use one thing that worries me is um that resources for a lot of these narratives um aren't always the ones that are gonna pop out at you right they're not necessarily backed by community advocacy groups are gonna speak to it they're not necessarily um to the level of institutional um you know uh uh development in our country you know more broadly more specifically uh to even have the resources or the
146language or the narrative to to be able to elevate those voices um and i asked myself all right who are we serving who are the students in our buildings uh and and there are a lot of intersections there with what's not necessarily the loudest push for curriculum development um but that is rep you know communities that are represented in our schools so that's something that i want to make sure we're constantly thinking about and considering um and then even in removing harm um some of my colleagues touched on how it's broader than just social studies of course and i know you guys know that and it's a matter of resources and capacity at some point um but in topic areas we might not even think about right pe music i thought pe um a number
147of other things i would add but um music and other domains that we may not have considered mr mesh did you end with a question there i'm happy to have anyone address that um yeah yeah thank you girl so i think for now i would just say you know we tried to identify and just share some of the places where we do have work underway like in language arts for example like in our library programs like in our you know digital citizenship resources family life education so we definitely agree um that these issues are need to be a part um addressing these issues need to be a part of all of our content areas so we've got a lot more work to do there um i think you captured it really well when you said
148you know it's really a capacity issue and um that's not to make an excuse um we know that we have a lot of work to do um and a lot is underway but uh there's there's still there still remains a lot for us to um to continue to focus on and continue to improve across all the content areas thank you mr presidio thank you miss amesh up next we have miss mclaughlin miss mclaughlin seems there's a reconnection issue here we'll give one second to reconnect miss mclaughlin all right we will go to mr carski and we'll pick up miss mclaughlin next as she's able to reconnect mrs pikarski thank you um i want to thank staff for all your hard work you know i i received my masters in multicultural multilingual education in 2002 um
149and and i don't take you down memory lane just just you know for the sake of it um but it just to say that these nascent ideas at the time um you know when we had just started talking about them as part of education and to see that we are now you know in 2020 and we are doing this work with intentionality um i think speaks to the urgency of what is happening um and and the need for what you all are doing and have been doing um so i i i want to thank you for your hard work um and i this was very informative and very um impressive and i know you've been all working um very hard one of you know i think somebody um you know we talked about pd and
150you know professional development around um these ideas and this curriculum and um you know i'd like to hear more a little bit about how we're also going to engage not just our staff but also our communities and our parents um about this what may seem like a shift to some and who don't understand it how will that happen and i would i would think some communities uh need this more than others so could you talk a little bit about how that is going to be incorporated and i'm sorry if you did i i had to step away for a little bit during this presentation uh no miss picarski that's a great question and um we did not speak to that and i apologize it's a little awkward in these virtual meetings to know who's going
151to speak first so it's like we're stepping on each other's toes um i certainly would invite colleen to speak a little bit about some of the work that we do and have done um in the communities where we're doing some of this curriculum revision work so part of the professional development work that we did in the rethinking virginia studies cohort for example there was information and support to schools about how to engage their community in that transformation process so that people would understand why it was important what we were doing um and how we could create better learning experiences uh by doing the work um and then certainly i would invite uh leona if she has any comments um in terms of the work that that she often um supports in terms of uh parent
152and family engagement as well so if you have any thoughts i'd certainly invite you to share those we're always communicating with community members holding meetings and engaging through emails and that kind of thing but i think you're talking about something more systemic dr presidio did talk about our real intentionality to engage school-based administrators to engage the ptsa um to engage our community and the shift around colonial day and there are many conversations of which i will never be fully aware that happened at the school-based level to make that um to make that shift but i do know that more work is necessary and in terms of community engagement and i do see this opportunity for the revision of the standards to have kind of a double track approach where the community has the opportunity to
153recommend to the state and also to us what changes need to happen at a system level for social studies education um and so we as i mentioned i think in the presentation that we would really like to help facilitate that process with the community um and of course with the idea of topical anti-bias lessons i believe some community engagement would be um really essential there as well dr bray brand did you raise your hand yes mr fritz just real briefly uh miss barski one of the things just in the last several weeks we have really come to understand is how powerful town halls are um of course a lot of it's been focused around return to school but we have just met and reviewed in cabinet the need to do more town halls first on
154more topics like this to bring the community into the conversation to hear from our fcps folks who are working in schools working directly with teachers we also talked about and leona of course can speak to it as well but i've reviewed a proposal about expanding town halls in arabic in korean and other languages to really make sure the community knows we want to hear from you we want to understand your perspective we've done a few in spanish and i i am a uh minimally proficient spanish speaker but we recognize we've got to do a lot more uh of it in more languages and on more topics and i think this is an excellent area to both build awareness and to get feedback on uh the work we're doing and to share with everybody what we
155are doing so we'll work to put some dates out and share this work in the fall yeah i think that's a very important piece of this not only to you know hear from our families and their experiences which i find very valuable especially as we are doing this work um but also to to understand our community and to do some reteaching because you know for a lot of us who who did take fourth grade yeah you know social studies this these are not the perspectives um this is not what we learned growing up so it is a learning curve for many parents as well as children another thing i want to touch upon if i have time left is you know we've got the statistics about um the experiences of our students i have students
156i hear the anecdotal um feedback from my kids about um you know how how the words we use sometimes that that students are using um the things that are happening and how how we are going to um teach maybe within our health um curriculum you know about uh bias and and anti-bias and what do you do when you if we already do let me know i i don't know that we do with intentionality but teaching kids um you know how to get help what to do what to say when to be able to to even you know pinpoint that that is happening around them i would love to know a little bit about that and what direction we'll be taking so just real briefly i would say that we do have information similar to that
157as part of our health curriculum and additionally uh one of our board members in this presentation i'm forgetting who i apologize uh mentioned the need to make sure that we're doing this work as part of our social emotional uh curriculum development and expansion of learning opportunities and we are working with the team that's leading that work to incorporate um some of this work into that curriculum as well so we have some things in place and more under development so again you know we'd be happy to share more specific examples with you if that's something you'd be interested in offline sure thank you thank you miss picarski we'll go back to miss mclaughlin am i coming through now carl you sure are go ahead hello hello um so i just want to just make a few
158comments first of all uh very much appreciate all the hard work that's gone into this for the public who's listening this is something that the prior board we worked on with intentionality um particularly miss corbett sanders and i met with ms a and several constituents in the braddock district who were concerned about some of the um ant the hate and bias anti-semitic things that were happening in our schools and the belief that so much of this comes from how do we get really engage in these important conversations and when the board the prior board created the portrait of a graduate one of the key components was the global citizen global and ethical citizen and i can't think of anything more important than having this type of anti-bias anti-racism anti-hate instruction um as well as holistic
159dialogues um what karen keys gemara said is true how do we embed this in the very beginning when children enter our doors and see the beauty and the diversity of our community and part of it is looking at the history of our nation of our global society and understanding where we've been where we've come from the progress we've made but the progress we need to continue and so for the public i wanted them to know that this wasn't just a reaction to recent events this has been something that um thankfully is coming along at a very important time but i also want to really encourage what dr presidio said this is about embedding it in social model as well we know that it takes courageous conversations and as miss picarsky stated for a lot of
160us during our younger years this isn't the kind of communication and community engagement dialogue that we would have in our formative years and now we're parents and we're looking at ways to you know not only engage in this dialogue with each other but with our children and so i see the value of public education really helping us create these holistic and important conversations so i look forward to dr brabrand and his team continuing to update the public and the board um about this continued work um i do definitely want to emphasize that this would be about elective um coursework which i think has been really emphasized here today we're looking at embedding this in a way and finally as someone with a bachelor's in history american history i want to say thank you for engaging
161the smithsonian and i would just say i think that's going to be important as we help people understand that this is uh rooted in um primary sources uh when we re uh examine and uh refocus our historical teachings so thank you everybody thank you ms mclaughlin uh miss cohen i want to say thank you to all the staff uh carl and i really enjoyed getting to work with you all on this and the work that is being done is remarkable and it's such a nice opportunity for us to get an opportunity to show off um all the work that goes behind the scenes in helping us build a real community of neighbors and i'm grateful that we aren't afraid to have these conversations i think that we long in this system for fear of not
162knowing if it was okay to talk about something made the error in deciding to silence um what was right and what was appropriate when we think about how we talk and think about one another and that has definitely been to the detriment of our kids in the system and i'm really grateful to have this opportunity to be a part of a paradigm shift in how systems can really teach their students and their staff and their administrators [Music] how we can be a really culturally responsive and again more understanding and inclusive of all of our neighbors and the backgrounds and the perspectives that everybody brings which is why i will say you know my husband and i moved here 20 years ago to have a very different experience than we did growing up in georgia and
163i'm appreciative to get to see as the parent of two fcps kids such a mindset shift and i do think that it takes a lot of courage from all of you and i'm i'm so grateful for it um you know my comments would be i agree with the accountability piece i think that there's so many staff that reach out to me that say you know i i want to be able to talk about this i don't know how i don't know what's okay and i i really see from the perspective i appreciate you all seeking a policy because i think what happens is we wind up at the discretion of administrators who are just on quicksand they feel like and it's our opportunity to give a solid floor underneath them to say this is the
164expectation this is what's reasonable and this is how we're going to support you in in doing this and i think having that work happen along with our equity leads is really key one thing though that i would really hope we can do is maybe using some of our exit ticket strategy which i love with our students when we're using new curriculum and with our staff as well what's your exit ticket after teaching this lesson what would you tweak what worked what didn't and students too because they really do feel it and i think the conversations that have happened in our house about um as as jewish kids being surprised at the way the holocaust has talked about has been eye-opening so i appreciate all the diversity um of opinions and thoughts on all of this
165and thanks for your work thank you miss cohen i will take the privilege now and speak for my bit um i want to thank everybody for their work on this um i know a lot of work has gone into it which is clear from the presentation um and i'm not going to repeat what others have said only that you know um in the months before being sworn into the board and in the few months that we had before the closure i was fortunate enough to meet with most of the um uh gsas um the gay straight alliances gender sexuality alliances throughout fairfax county public schools and in meeting after meeting with these students i heard stories about why they weren't reporting instances of anti-lgbtq bias they would see these things happening they would experience these
166these things happening in front of teachers and administrators and who wouldn't do anything and you know we know from the conversations we've been having this year um and the things that we've seen students sharing on social media but the same can be said for issues of bias and racism and so you know i think as we look at a potential policy around anti-racism anti-bias curriculum we clearly also need to address the controversial issues policy so as we discuss in the uh in the due outs from this meeting um i hope that we'll we'll include that in the conversation we'll now go to go backs um in the interest of time i'd like to try and keep them to 45 seconds if at all possible i'll give a little bit of leeway but please keep it
167to 45 seconds um and because there's a scheduling issue um we're going to go to rashna sizemore heiser first rashna this high size my eyes are fine thank you carl mr fresh thank you for being flexible with my um other leadership team meeting i have to hop off for for a few minutes um really quickly i agree with the accountability piece i've heard this from students and staff so i wanted to see if there's ways and this might be a next steps to embed some of this work in our strategic plan and the reporting around the metrics of the street plan as well as school improvement plans so in terms of both achievement goal 1 and caring culture i'm wondering if there's more ways to tie this work together to that as our anti-racist curriculum
168um the other piece i wanted to mention is i would um when we're talking about the policy change i wholeheartedly support the policy change around letting our staff feel a little more free to discuss these topics i just want to make sure that we're putting in safeguards because as like the rest of us we all have different opinions we'll make sure we keep those conversations safe thank you up next we have miss corbett sanders three points quick i'd like to put a motion on the table for us to send to governance the work on a anti-biased anti-racist uh policy secondly i would like to hear from staff about the role of the equity leads and the equity ambassadors in ensuring that we have equity in our discipline and equity and our access to opportunities and
169then the third piece i sent this to dr brabrand before but um i'd like to hear from staff the practicality of being able to offer a dual enrollment in african-american history similar to what is being talked about at the state level but a dual enrollment course makes it kind of as an incentive because it also gives our kids the opportunity to get college credit so if i could have answers to those three for those two points and then a motion on the government sending to governance the policy sure i can help speak to about the equity lead and principal role in terms of discipline procedures so as part of that equity audit that is part of that audit is looking at data across your school and creating crafting a plan with that so in addition
170to that plan it actually ties nicely into what you said around school improvement plans i believe you said that maybe someone else did around every school this year as part of their school improvement plan was expected to create an access and opportunity goal so after looking through that equity audit looking at data to ensure that there's a goal that addresses access and opportunity the srnr has changed this year and i know we talked a little bit about that when kerry williams presented so um the other role that the principal plays or the administrator in the building is um and they recently all went to professional development on that new decision-making process so there is a decision making protocol that asks the very first question that it asks is have you considered unconscious bias in this
171situation before you move forward it is the first question they must answer and the second piece that is new this year that you are aware that we're piloting in some schools is that central way of maintaining data so hopefully as we move this forward um when we scale that to the whole division having that central repository of data around teacher referrals gives schools a very clear picture of impact of this work right now schools have a lot of choice um probably a little bit too much choice around how they capture data and so moving from that pilot approach to that system-wide approach to data keeping will support that so to answer in summary to answer your questions as part of that equity team they should be looking at this audit creating access and opportunity goals
172as well as administrators have been engaged in professional development that ask the question have you considered unconscious bias and discipline i don't know if anyone else would like to add i would add this tenders and once we access our opportunity goals have been developed the regents will be reviewing the whole plan and the system as well as them specifically monitoring the practice and the next piece on dual enrollment yes uh we actually have already initiated conversations with the community college um staff on that and we actually are hoping to have a meeting set up um soon we're in the process of trying to get that scheduled for discussion on that so we'll certainly loop back with you because we know that you're very involved with the ongoing advocacy and support for expansion of dual enrollment
173which we really appreciate so stay tuned hopefully we'll have some updates on that soon thank you and if i can just ask for the board members to be updated on the opportunity goals you got all your questions answered all right um so we have a motion on the floor from miss corbin sanders to direct the governance committee to write a draft anti-bias anti-racist policy do we have a second literally everybody but melanie's picture popped up first so melanie uh did you raise your hand okay um miss uh corporate sanders do you need to speak to your motion uh yes this is a long time coming this is something that um i've been speaking to staff with for a long period of time over the past couple years and governance is the appropriate place in our
174structure to actually take this on and i have absolute confidence that we will prioritize this as a policy that needs to be developed quickly and brought to the full board in a work session so that it could be adopted by the full board and as you know equity is at the forefront of the priorities i think of every member of this board and you can't address equity unless you address anti-racist anti-bias thank you miss corbett sanders miss maron would you like to speak to your second just briefly to say i support this and um i i also want to offer a motion about the related policy that was mentioned so as a point of order mr french can you provide me with some guidance about how to best do that this was to also put
175to govern the policy on controversial issues that that policy as well we should take that as a separate motion point of order go ahead um just that is not a new policy that is within governance's role to review existing policies and so because it's an agreement from my understanding from previous conversations is that unless the policy is up for review we do need board guidance to take it from its normal calendar all i'm saying is that it can what i'm suggesting is that it's not a new policy but rather a inspiration a review i'm aware and am because i wasn't sure if it would be a follow-on motion or not to your emotion but i understand that separate and i wholeheartedly support your emotions yeah all right can i control it like we're not there
176yet that would be great uh all right we'll now take a vote everybody's hands down please all those in favor of directing the governance committee to draft a anti-bias anti-racism policy for review by the full board please signify by raising your hand we have miss mclaughlin mr mesh miss corbett sanders miss marin miss darenite cofax miss dr anderson miss uh cohen miss quiscamara miss tolan mrkarsky miss sizemore heiser and mr frisch that's unanimous thank you everyone that's great all right um next on the go back list is one second i have doctors yep dr anderson you're up next okay thank you i'm trying to get my video up one of the things that i wanted to ask um is that i noticed there was plenty of opportunity for staff development for for school staff etc
177what opportunities exist for the school board to engage in its own continuous reflection in this work that is a fantastic question and we welcome providing the board with any of our modules we think it would be a wonderful learning opportunity um for you to engage in that time um we know that your time is important you have many neat decisions to make but we agree that if we could um do some work together and have some common understanding would be a great use of time so if you'd like that to be a follow-on we would happily suggest dates and times and we can bring you any of the modules any of the cohort we think all of it would be um very you you would fall in love with the work that we're doing so
178we look forward to that i would definitely love to champion that and hopefully to get the support of the rest of the board to engage in this um really important work um but i think we'll have to get everybody else to agree to it the other quick question that i had is regarding um as we're talking about who we're talking about doing all of these slides making sure that we are addressing all of our student populations we have a very diverse population in fairfax county and i don't think i heard anything regarding our native american population our muslim population our immigrants our asian pop student population this ensuring that the curriculum changes are also encompassing those groups um not the major ones um so far the two new classes that we have that we updated
179this summer seem to be going pretty well especially the data analytics class um besides my heiser your mic is on if i could have somebody address my question um i would just say briefly um we definitely agree with you um and that is the intention of the curriculum review work and design work that we're doing um and again i think you know a lot of of what we're trying to do is make sure that we recognize and celebrate the stories of all of the students in our schools and in our classrooms and we're trying to do that through a number of different methods and certainly curriculum representation is one of those so again we have a lot more work to do but we certainly agree with you that that is a major priority for the
180curriculum revision work i'd like to make a motion mr fresh what's your motion dr anderson i wanted to be sure that we directed the governor's committee to review the controversial issues policy i think it was brought up by ms marin just a little while ago but we kind of dropped it a bit so i would like to make that motion or a second mrs marin's motion to it we'll have miss marin seconded i guess her hand is up already uh do you want to speak to your motion dr anderson um i think we've already covered it so very briefly this is important work that we just need to have done and so i'll leave it at that all right uh miss maron would you like to speak to your second nope i just second thank
181you okay uh all those in favor of directing the governance committee to review the controversial issues policy please signify by raising your hand electronically because i won't be able to see it otherwise all right we have miss marin miss cohen mr mesh miss corbett sanders dr anderson miss tollen miss bakarski miss mclaughlin miss keysgamara miss darren at kofax welcome back uh and mr frisch uh that is unanimous all right moving along um up next on our go backs is miss keys gamara 45 seconds is quite the challenge um okay um i'm going to start with uh looking at the board's opportunity to continue to have output and so i i don't know if we need a motion for that or whether it's simply a a next step to make sure that we are able to
182have continuous [Music] i'm sorry i heard somebody else speaking it didn't sound like a board member did he okay i'll just continue uh the next question i have has to do with who's doing these audits i'm in our in our um uh presentation and i talked about audits being done and i'd like to get some explanation as to how we plan to do that that was the question i'm happy to speak to the curriculum audits so we every summer advertise uh summer curriculum projects and the audits have been advertised that way and we really intentionally try to seek out teachers who represent a variety of interests and identities and cultures backgrounds so we had teachers from all from a variety of different backgrounds representative of schools across the school division working on the audit so
183like i said earlier in the presentation we had about over the course of two summers 50 teachers who did this work together um and um stayed on from one summer to the next um so yes this is a this is a really intentional um hiring for diverse perspectives okay i think i lost just a few seconds so my last point has to do with the despair impact we have to have a continuous watch on the disparate impact of any new policy that we put forward i'm a little concerned about um well i'll leave it at that thank you miss uh keith kamara up next we're going to take miss darren at kofax for her first shot at addressing this topic mr nicobax hi i'm sorry my voice is a little off today but i just
184step away um for a while but so but i did review the presentation and i don't want to repeat any questions that somebody has asked but i do want to express my appreciation to staff who has done an excellent job at this as miss mclaughlin spoke about some of these things have been a long time coming we as as a collective board have been working on these issues first with skipped uh first with portrait of a graduate i would say and then on the skipped committee and then coming to this point where we are able to um you know put into into motion um all of the things presented here i am thrilled to see this progress and i look forward to working with all of you staff will need to be instrumental in helping
185our board create policy because you have you know started with down the r down the road with this curriculum and um i think it'll be extremely important that we get your input as well as the community's input as we put forward this policy but thank you all and if i have further questions i will follow up offline thank you thank you miss uh derek kofax uh next on our go back um i have miss mclaughlin did you want to go back or was your hand up from before i'm going to assume it was up from before same with miss marin i wrote them down when they were lingering um no i'm good thank you all right thank you very much okay with that we are done with our go backs um and we can move
186into uh next steps um margie do you wanna make an announcement about that carl i did i ran out of time is there any way i can mention my last point go ahead okay so i really wanted to talk about the trauma of some of these experiences for kids and to uh make sure that that is part of our professional development oftentimes i've received reports from kids and even staff members of situations that happen in the schools and it is very clear to me that staff members do not know how to resolve those issues and so as a next step i would very much like to see uh specific information on how we're bringing our staff members up to speed uh so that kids are not re-traumatized when they have these kinds of either racist
187or other types of inappropriate encounters in our schools thank you miss kiskamara mr mesh yeah sorry i thought you took note earlier um thank you uh mr fish um so just two two points one i wanted to touch on in addition to looking at you know virginia which i know we're doing on the state level local narratives i think can also be powerful and showing our kids that these are things that are right here our neighbors right at home um so i would encourage consideration of that as we think about what to include and the second point is um with the peace on staff accountability i heard a lot of that and i was happy to because it's not enough to just teach our kids but to cultivate an environment for them um we have
188to consider and this is next step really for us beyond the curriculum conversation that structures hold people accountable right we have to have standards and um not kind i mean that's the consequences but to think about disincentivizing that kind of behavior it's not enough i think to just do professional development but we won't accept it right so i look forward to where that goes in the future all right thank you mr mitch um miss cohen did you want to say something about the next steps yes just that i'm furiously trying to type them in um and in the in the absence of our amazing um head clerk bev and ann are trying to scramble to um make it look beautiful so everyone can see it but i do have next steps from miss miran which
189were a budget request to fully implement um this policy and process i also have another one from miss mirren that's how will the school board be updated i have one from miss tolen asking about student participation and how to use it for other programs and then i have one from ms omash asking for timeline information those are the only things where somebody mentions specifically next steps is there something else that someone would like me to include in the document that i will get out in one minute miss corbett sanders yes thank you i would like to make sure that we added in my request for prioritizing this in our social emotional learning components that we have an anti-racist anti-bias piece there and also that we have um we honor the request by staff to support
190a required lessons on anti-bias and anti-racism in our curriculum is that i i guess how is that a in what way would that be a next next step like for implementing it into curriculum or what one was they asked for um the budget guidance we continue to support it they asked for us to continue to support they asked for budget guidance that we supported they asked for us to continue their work in this important area third they asked for us to extend this to other areas of our curriculum besides just um civics or social studies which by the way both that is actually part of our um of the original forum topic is that it extended beyond it and then the last piece was to get guidance on requiring so i guess this board needs
191to vote on requiring lessons on anti-bias and anti-racism as part of our curriculum those were the four that i understand was the ask did i miss anything besides the policy piece i think you got everything that you'd mentioned okay and that's really just kind of wrapping up what we've been asked for by staff thank you miss corporate sanders miss keith kamara sorry it took me a while to push the button um all of mine i think fall under the um the topic of accountability to the board as well as accountability i'm sorry it is two different ones one we need to report back to the board with respect to how the accountability measures within our schools are going to what structures are being set up for that we also need to get accountability with respect
192to how we are dealing with our principles and making sure that equity leads have the authority that they need within our schools and with respect to how we are addressing um the potential trauma of these uh in inappropriate actions and making sure that we have the appropriate professional development so that our staff members know how to resolve these issues without re-traumatizing our students thank you miss kisgamara was that it from you mrs keith camaro uh it is it's all that i was able to get in in my minute in 45 seconds okay uh dr anderson um just very quickly the one next step that i had is to ensure that opportunities were provided to the board to engage in continuous reflection just to be sure we have those provided to us thank you thank you
193dr anderson uh miss amesh thank you um my my other one was just about guidance for how staff will be handled or how we'll address situations where uh racist materials are taught or are presented in the classroom thank you mr mesh miss bakarski sorry i just wanted to see if we could add something about how we will be engaging uh parents and stakeholders um as part of this ongoing conversation and updates all right thank you miss picarski miss case camaro yes i'm sorry i um i did want to ask the board about moving forward in the explanation a lot of the focus has been on fourth grade and in my comments i mentioned that we really need to get a hold of our students as they are entering our schools i don't know whether this
194is the next step or something else but i would really like to be able to get a plan as to how we can address the issues of anti-racism and expanded expanding our curriculum to be more representative of our community uh in the earlier grade so i um turn that over to you as to the best way to get that done i'm happy with the next step and a report to the board but i think that that is really critical by the time we get to fourth grade opinions have already been formed and you're trying to correct them thank you miss keysgamara with that we have no other next steps once we figure out the issue with the technology um we'll be sure to share that and people can send them in so they can be
195added if there's something that was forgotten with that why don't we take a ten minute break to four o'clock that puts us about an hour behind and we will pick up the conversation on our next issue that gives time for people to go and rehydrate recaffinate and take care of personal business thanks everyone you