Coraggio Consulting
Albemarle County School Board Regular Meeting, Thursday, March 14, 2024

Date: Thursday, March 14, 2024
Place: Albemarle County Public Schools / School Board meeting, Virginia
Length: 2h 15m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv8e5EO785M

Machine transcript (speech-to-text) produced by Coraggio Consulting. Not an official county record. Names and numbers may be misspelled; check the video at the timestamp before quoting.
Speech-to-text: whisper.cpp, model large-v3-turbo. Produced 2026-10-13. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:03] i call back to order the march 14th uh 2024 meeting of the albemarle county school board do we have a motion we do chair lee i move that the board certified by recorded vote that to the best of each board member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the virginia freedom of information act and identified in the motion authorizing the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered in the closed meeting do we have a second okay moved by dr acuff seconded by mr page christine could we please

[00:00:43] have a roll call vote billman yes mr chuck pace yes miss osborne yes dr acuff yes dr berlin yes mr graham page yes chair lee yes so moved thank you next we'll have our roll call um we'll start

[00:01:19] with mr black good evening everyone i'm josiah black school division council matthew hawes superintendent allison spillman at large representative ellen osborne scottsville district rebecca berlin whitehall representative judy lee rivana district kate acuff jack jewett district bram page miller district chuck pace rio bernandez cacero student representative patrick mclaughlin assistant superintendent helen dunn public affairs and strategic communications officer christine thompson clerk of the board claire kaiser assistant superintendent daphne kaiser

[00:01:59] Assistant Superintendent. Rosalind Schmidt, Chief Operating Officer. Thank you. Next, we'll rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. The Republic, which has been one nation, under matter, indivisible, liberty, and justice for all.

[00:02:25] Next, we'll observe a moment of silence. Thank you. Next, we have the approval of the agenda. Do we have a motion to approve the agenda?

[00:03:04] I move we approve tonight's agenda. Second. Moved by Ms. Osborne, seconded by Ms. Spillman. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nope. Agenda is approved.

[00:03:19] Next, we have approval of the consent agenda. Do I have a motion? I move we approve tonight's consent agenda. I second. Moved by Ms. Osborne, seconded by Dr. Berlin. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Nope. All right.

[00:03:34] Consent agenda is approved. Next, we will have our announcements. We'll start with Spotlight on Education for that Fernanda Cisneros will do it. Hello and good evening. In tonight's spotlight on education, we are delighted to introduce the board to our Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, or JROTC.

[00:03:56] Established by the National Defense Act of 1916, the JROTC program is one of the largest character development programs in the world and operates in more than 1,700 public and private high schools, military institutions, and correctional centers throughout the United States and overseas.

[00:04:11] The main focus of this program is not, as many people may think, to prepare students for military careers. Instead, JROTC programs work on fostering in our students leadership and team building skills, healthy mindsets, and physical fitness, critical thinking, problem solving, and decision-making skills, and much, much more.

[00:04:33] According to JROTC website, involvement in the program can help increase student attendance, graduation rates, and GPA, while also decreasing student discipline and dropout rates. However, the most important part of GROTC to many of the students is the camaraderie the program creates.

[00:04:51] Rachel Pickens, the Cadet Bedelloyne commander of the program said, "This class is the one time that I felt like I was seen as an equal rather than just another student in class," she touts.

[00:05:07] That the skills she learned in the program not only strengthened her relationship with her peers, but also with her teachers as well. one who is joining us tonight to provide more insight into the ACPS JROTC program. Our program was founded at Monticello High School in 2020 and is led by retired Lieutenant Colonel Richard Monterio who served in the Army for 31 years, 28 of those as Army officer and retired Master Sergeant Richie Pozo who served in the Army for 26 years.

[00:05:42] Welcome Lieutenant Colonel, retired Ontario and master sergeant pozo oh can everyone hear me no could you put the microphone down yeah for people is this better perfect i apologize dr haas dr acuff dr berlin mr pace ms lee mr page ms osborne and ms spillman hello and good evening my name is lieutenant colonel retired rich montero i am albemarle county's jrtc senior army instructor i am accompanied this evening by

[00:06:20] master sergeant retired richie pozo who serves as the county's additional army instructor i am also accompanied by mrs kimberly smith who is the mother of jackson smith who is a junior from western albemarle high school going on his third year in the program and currently serving as the cavalier battalion executive officer additionally we are fortunate to be accompanied by ms faint cobra who is a junior home school student currently inlet one who serves as a class leader and and Lieutenant in the Cavalier Battalion.

[00:06:55] Finally, we also have Mr. Nate Lyons, who is also a Let One student, future member of the National Honor Society, class leader and Sergeant in the Cavalier Battalion. It is both a pleasure and honor to speak with all of you tonight about the JROTC program.

[00:07:11] My colleague will discuss his area of focus, which are physical fitness, land navigation and first aid. Mr. Smith will provide Jackson's comments and the students will share their experiences regarding the program and discuss things they're getting from JROTC. Before that, I want to take a quick moment to provide an overview of the program. What is it that we do in JROTC? You have copies of our mission statement and JROTC values as reference points. The bottom line is, our mission is to motivate young people to become productive citizens. The question should be, how do we go about doing that? Especially in an age

[00:07:51] where many students are focused on the actual grade, but not the purpose and meaning of the lessons that we teach. Additionally, they are focused on their phones, TikTok, and other distractors that appear to conflict with the purpose of educators, which is to serve them by offering mentorship, coaching, and teaching. Everything we do in JROTC is done with a military flavor. The intent is not to recruit these young people to join the service. That is not the vision of the United States Army Cadet Command for the purpose of JROTC. We provide tools and resources

[00:08:27] to help our young people develop and mature and give them the resources to be successful in the real world after high school. Many of the tools become relevant to our students when they realize there is a real world impact to what we teach when they grasp those concepts they buy into the instruction my colleague teaches a few of those concepts that he's going to share with you momentarily we achieve this intent by teaching leadership concepts where young cadets learn how to develop a plan prepare execute their plan and conduct an after-action review following their

[00:09:03] plan to learn how to receive and accept constructive criticism during their leadership lessons cadets will run the class and they will lead them through physical training they will present the plan they developed, execute their plan, and be assessed on their performance upon completion of physical training. My counterpart will elaborate a little more on this further. We also coach team building techniques where we will teach cadets how to collaborate with one another while treating each other with dignity and respect. We teach concepts from personal growth and behaviors, which emphasizes

[00:09:37] the essence of time management, organization, personal planning, management techniques, how to become a better communicator and writer, delivering a speech or presentation, and ethical concepts. We also apply heavy emphasis on decision-making concepts by teaching problem-solving techniques, critical thinking, the negative impacts of bullying, preventing violence, prejudice, and the art of negotiation. We also have blocks of instruction that cover the importance of service learning as well as citizenship and government. Students who are in JRTC have bought in. They are

[00:10:15] in the program because they want to be in the program. In fact, our room is considered a safe space for the members of JROTC. Many cadets may potentially join the military upon completion of high school and others are projecting to continue their education upon graduation. Our students have taken the ASVAC so they can learn about their skills and strengths to see if they have potential military career paths they might want to consider exploring after high school. Our current primary focus though for the program is to continue building this program. We have attended the expos at each high school to advertise the program. Additionally, we recently started a

[00:10:54] partnership with Star Hill Pathways in an effort to expand our recruiting endeavors to continue potentially growing our program. We love what we do and we are enthusiastic about JROTC. I will let my counterparts discuss the good news stories and individual experiences. Before they speak, I want to turn this over to Master Sergeant Pozo so he can discuss the importance of his focus points which incorporate life skills that the students can take away with them after high school

[00:11:23] at this point i'm going to turn it over to matt sergeant poser hey good evening everybody board members um first i'd like to start by um sharing this slide presentation with everyone so that you can see all the students and as well so that it's going to be kind of like an in brief for you guys

[00:12:02] to see when I give the briefing to new students. I retired about 18 months ago, and as I retired, I came from teaching at a university to students that were commissioning to become officers.

[00:12:20] And so all universities are connected to high schools as well, to JROTC programs. And as I met some of the staff from that school, they said, hey, man, what are you thinking about doing when you're going to retire? And I said, I don't know yet. some of the the cadre there said hey man you'd be a great addition to the jrotc component and i said you know what let me take a look at it 18 months later here i am folks um but it has been uh it has been a pleasure doing this um i i just love teaching um reaching out to the to the high school

[00:12:55] students they need coaches they need mentors um and so it's just been again it's been a pleasure okay so as one of the things that we like to do is defunct a lot of the students look at us inside the high schools they see the uniforms they see the boots they see the flags hey i don't want to i don't want to be a part of that because the first thing that comes to mind i'm going to join the military i don't want to join the military and that's when we we open with this there is no commitment to service or joining the military okay we're here to coach and mentor um and also with

[00:13:32] like the colonel said with the flavor of the military next slide i love showing this picture this was one of my last uh um the assignment at the university and as you look at these students i i tell the the high schoolers hey look one day potentially if you decide to go down that path everybody thinks that they're going to join the army and they're going to kick down doors not not everybody kicks down doors everybody that you see in this picture you have nurses uh military intelligence, JAG students that become lawyers, engineers, as well as some finance. All these

[00:14:11] students graduated in Pennsylvania, became second lieutenants at Villanova, Widener, and Westchester University of Pennsylvania. All these students are roughly five or six years older than our high schoolers. This is the category that we try to emphasize to the high schoolers. We debunk all the myths about the military. We teach military customs and courtesy, drill and ceremony. Color guard, as you see there, those cadets right there, we're training them to host events. The last great

[00:14:48] event that we did was last year at the graduation at John Paul Jones. Our cadet team was a color guard and they posted the colors at the beginning of the high school graduation. The ranger challenge Team. Faye and Mr. Nate Lyons were part of the Ranger Challenge Team. We took them last this past fall and they competed against another school at Harrisonburg and they can talk a little bit more about that. Map reading, land navigation, teach first aid, the proper wear of the uniform

[00:15:22] ACU and our biggest component is physical fitness. Personal growth and behavior and as well as the JROTC curriculum that we get from cadet command at Fort Knox. Right here I love this picture. Take a look at the picture at the top left. You see how they're all standing? That took seven months to do. Really proud of that right there. You see all of them standing at parade rest. They have their hands on hips. Everybody's paying attention to I believe that was Colonel Montero that was

[00:15:57] leading that PT formation. They're focused, they're paying attention, and they're getting ready to get after it on the PT field we try to inform and I'm gonna get to the next slide but on PT days what we'd like to emphasize is no crocs you come ready to work you come ready to get after it on the PT field okay so what what does the JROTC regular week look like day one on Monday is uniform we conduct our uniform inspections talk about current events and then we jump into whatever

[00:16:37] uh what the what class i'm going to pitch on day two is a physical fitness weight training running um and of course on on fridays it's our team building events uh all the kids that are that are part of that they come on friday mornings they come at 7 30 and we get after it on whatever event exercise that they want to partake into and then on monday mornings is ranger challenge we train we train all the cadets to prepare them for the rangers for any upcoming ranger challenge events weight training a couple weeks ago we we were doing a rope bridges and

[00:17:15] and teaching them how to do the knots and things like that what we try to instill in the cadets um character leadership development confidence critical thinking skills team building health and fitness and decision-making as you can see there we were teaching the kids how to do a fold a flag and as well as drill and ceremony with with with our rifles last thing I want to

[00:17:54] talk about is the cadet challenge in the middle of April that that's going to be a key week for the cadets they will take the cadet physical fitness challenge which consists of five five exercises this is going to be a hard grade for them we spend the whole entire year training them exercising and and the final piece will be the cadet challenge which is consists of sit-ups or curl-ups push-ups or pull-ups one mile run shuttle run and the and the V sit and reach we tally up all the points and we average it out and then we'll give them

[00:18:33] we'll give them a hard grade a lot of them a lot of them get a get a little discouraged because they don't think they're gonna make it but you'll see the vast improvement from September until until until middle April so does anybody in the board have any questions for me about the program what what grade level do students enter this program so as of right now um fresh uh sophomore freshman i'm sorry sophomore juniors

[00:19:07] and seniors but we only get freshmen from monticello pure we do not get freshmen from uh western or albumall this program launched at a very bad time it was right at the beginning of covet but in in that sort of conceptual model we were thinking about trying to attract other school divisions to come as well have we how where is that in terms of recruitment and getting the

[00:19:43] message out for the program uh we we have been working that um as far as getting other other schools we can only touch western as well as albemore and monticello um like the colonel stated before we we've been recruiting um during the mid-year um and going to those uh events where we can talk to the freshmen that are that are coming that are coming up to high school but um that that that's the only piece that we've we've been able to but i'll let colonel you're you're

[00:20:18] fine you're fine ma'am i just want to elaborate on that question so our recent partnership with star hill pathways is actually opening up that door for us so they had mentioned the possibility of integrating charlottesville high school members to the program to boost our numbers so we're going to start working with them closer and see what kind of angles we need to to work and maybe road blocks we need to knock down if you will to try to take advantage of that opportunity um but we're in a very very early infancy stages of of doing that because we just met with them earlier this week but i anticipate we're going to be moving forward here in the next few months as we continue

[00:20:53] that partnership thank you how can we support the students who are doing the cadet challenge you guys need a cheering squad or anything like that no no not at all if um we again we've been training them i'm getting after it basically once twice a week since september um so so we'll see where they're at um and we'll definitely publish the scores so that you can see how where they started and what their final score is in April. If there's no more questions, I appreciate your time.

[00:21:31] Thank you. And I'll turn it over back to Lieutenant Colonel Montero. At this point, I wanted to bring up our additional guests that are here so you can hear their good news stories. So I'd like to invite Mrs. Kimberly Smith here. She's going to speak tonight on behalf of her son, Jackson Smith, who's currently competing in a tennis event over in the Washington, D.C. area. So Mrs. Smith's going to speak so good evening ladies and gentlemen of the board I'm really honored to be here and really pleased to tell you about Jackson's experience with the JROTC he is a student of Western so he does come to Monticello for the JROTC

[00:22:10] and very thankful for that opportunity he was sad he couldn't be here tonight but as you know tons of opportunities to do things in Albemarle County so his tennis team from Western is participating in an event in DC he's He's been there for three years in the JROTC program, and from the beginning, its leadership has been strong.

[00:22:32] They are enthusiastic. They encourage them. Every day that he's in class, he loves it. I wish he were here to convey that enthusiasm, but I see it when he comes home every day. He learns leadership skills. What Master Sergeant Pozo was mentioning, how they develop a PT program and present that.

[00:22:53] When I asked him, he said, "That's one of my favorite things. I love to run PT, so he's really enjoyed that and really blossomed, I would say, from being a bit quieter, I know they might not say that, but he has a quiet side, and I've really seen his confidence grow, particularly in that arena and in the leadership arena.

[00:23:12] So from that angle, being in school, the things they do every day, the PT is one of his favorites, but the learning that they do, the team building that they do, both within the class and with their whole corp when they're out on the field, loves that.

[00:23:27] He also was able to participate in something called JCLC. It's the Junior Cadet Leadership Camp. That was during the summer. He took a week and went with other cadets from around Virginia. He said that he loved that as well. They did some competitions, some leadership training, some exercise, some challenging exercises.

[00:23:47] And when I said, "What was your favorite thing?" He said, "Being a part of that group all week long, with the same people and working with them as a team to learn and to achieve the goals that we had set for that week that experience really honed both his leadership skills and his teamwork skills i could see that in other things in his life for instance on his tennis team and even at home i have four kids and just sort of the camaraderie there the other thing that he mentioned is a real highlight and an honor was his participation in ruck the ridge i don't know if you're familiar with that but he is a member of the color guard and he takes that that responsibility very seriously and and thinks that's a very big honor to be a

[00:24:26] member of the color guard they practice on Wednesday mornings before school so he went to rock the Ridge which is a ruck run along the ridge out in the northern part of the county for military members and first responders in their family and the JROTC from Albemarle County presented the colors there and he He said that was such a big honor to be there supporting the military and the first responders.

[00:24:53] He just took that very seriously. It was really impactful to see them there with their families participating. I think that that sort of service that has been imbued by Master Sergeant and Colonel, sort of this is a way to serve, leads beyond the military into his everyday life.

[00:25:11] He's now established a club or co-established a club at Western called Homework for Heroes, where they recruit other students and recruit veterans that need assistance at their home or in their yard and they as a group go out there on the weekends and do service projects so i don't think that is something that would have necessarily been in his mind on his own before he was a participant in jrotc so i'd say the most significant thing that i see in him is just that sense of duty and service that's been installed in him i mean obviously it's camaraderie it's fun it's learning but just that sense of service is what i love the JROTC has helped him be a better student

[00:25:50] a more disciplined studier and a better citizen i think he's going to make positive contributions farther on from his participation in JROTC and i thank Master Sergeant Pozo and Colonel Montero for their leadership it's been really instrumental thank you good evening everybody my name is Faye Kubira and I'm a junior in high school and I'm a homeschooled student so this

[00:26:24] has been my first year being a part of junior ROTC so I decided to join the program because I wanted to have an extracurricular activity outside of my homeschool participation and I also wanted to learn more about the military because my dad who's actually here tonight is in the Virginia National Guard and I've had both my uncles served active duty in the army and I even have an uncle in the Marines currently right now so I wanted to learn more about the military and what lots of my family members were doing, but what I got out of the program wasn't just that. So far I've been developed both mentally through our classroom stuff and also physically through the PT exercises we do every

[00:27:02] week. So for example in the classroom one of my favorite things that I've learned so far has been land navigation and that wasn't something I thought I would enjoy. I'm terrible at directions especially maps and I usually don't have to use them. I use a GPS when I'm driving, but I actually really enjoyed learning how to plot grid points and look at how to use a compass and for our final test in the land navigation section of the program we got to go around the school and find different points based on the grid location that we were given and i really enjoyed doing that and in terms of the physical stuff we've gotten to do we get to do fun workouts every week we've done everything from

[00:27:39] weightlifting which was a new experience for me i've never done that before either we do running which is something i love and last week we actually got to play frisbee as our activity so that was super fun and additionally since I'm part of the Raider team we go out and do competitions and being a part of the Raider team means we do sort of like obstacle course kind of training and that was a neat experience because I got to meet students from other classes and we got to collaborate going through a course together and when you go through the obstacle course you have to finish as a team so everybody helps each other get over the walls you help each other carry big logs as part of the event but for me junior RTC hasn't

[00:28:18] just been beneficial for a classroom learning in a sense or for the physical activity we get to do but also because of the values it's instilled and the leadership opportunities I've gained from doing it. So I've gotten to lead and develop my own workout plan and present it to the class and lead them through it and also in terms of values both the lieutenant colonel and the master sergeant have been very clear that that's one of their main goals in the program is to instill the army values and to the students, which are leadership, honor, duty, self-sacrifice.

[00:28:48] And those are things I think all students should learn, whether or not you want to have a career in the military. And another thing junior ROTC has also helped me prep for is my future. So I've always known I want to go to college, and I still do. But now, if I desire, I can apply for an ROTC scholarship, I'll get my entire undergraduate education paid for, and I'll have a guaranteed job right after I graduate.

[00:29:11] And that's an opportunity I didn't know existed before I joined the program and we've even had recruiters come talk to us about both ROTC and also just enlisting after high school so for students who maybe don't want to go to college you can enlist join either the Army you could join the Navy or the Coast Guard Air Force the Marines and you'll have a job a steady job after you graduate with the opportunity to progress and build a career out of that so I feel like junior ROTC should be something everyone should do not just because you're interested in the but also to develop those kinds of values that the Army has and also to

[00:29:47] prepare you for your future. Thank you so much. Good evening everybody. My name is Nate Lyons. I'm a junior 11th grade at Monticello High School. I've been in the junior ROTC program for since September, since the beginning of the school year.

[00:30:08] It's just been a great experience so far. I've gotten to participate in things that I never thought I would ever participate in. I'm part of both the Raider and the color guard teams as well as serving as class leader. Back in October with the Raider team I went to an event that was obstacle course stuff and it was really fun to meet everybody and participate in that together. Additionally I did color guard at a football game which was fun

[00:30:44] and it was cool. I never thought that that would be something I would do. After that uh kind of looking into the future um i uh am going to do more more of that stuff definitely um uh but uh the leadership has been just phenomenal um it's not something that i get in any of my other classes uh it's just like its own thing and um uh my physical fitness has

[00:31:20] improved significantly since the beginning of the year and that's definitely thanks to this program Thank you for your time. Does any of the esteemed board members or staff members have any questions of me or my colleagues?

[00:31:40] I guess for the two students that spoke, I mean, how did you learn about the opportunity? I mean, I think one of the issues that you are facing is how to get the word out about what the program is all about. So how did -- I'm sorry, I don't remember your name -- the young woman and then the young man talk about how did you find your way there sure my name is Fay but I heard about it through another homeschool student another female students in the program and her mom was actually talking to my mom at one point when they were

[00:32:17] signing up for classes and she mentioned that her daughter really enjoys the program and it was something I had looked into joining civil air patrol which is sort of a similar program but it's only one night a week and I wanted something more than that and I was also more interested in the Army than the Air Force which is what Civil Air Patrol is focused on so I just decided to try it out so I visited a class and it was the first class that I've taken out of public school most of my other classes are online but I enjoyed having that in person time with students and I've enjoyed all the things I've learned and also the PT stuff that we get to do so that's how I heard about it thank you

[00:32:55] being honest I heard about RTC from the website I just saw it and I was like this looks cool. I have family in the military that are currently serving and retire, and it looks like something that I'd like to do. And I'm assuming both of you are continuing next year? Yeah. Jackson saw it in the curriculum guide as an elective, but I don't think necessarily that the guidance counselors at the sister schools were particularly aware of the opportunity for him going. Now they

[00:33:33] are. So I'm very excited about that, so I'd love to see that be more of a push to come out through guidance counselors and your son's going to continue next year as well yes yes i'm curious how does jackson i mean what is his since he's coming from a satellite school basically does he drive over this do you drive him over i do drive him over um right now he's doing um the similar schedule to what the um the mesa students do and the esa students where they swap so he goes a days to one school and b days to the other school and that seemed to work out just fine for him and it actually just sort of expands his friendship group so he's really enjoyed going back and forth a

[00:34:12] little bit more work for me but not too bad right thanks not too bad with the outcome you described no definitely not you may have asked or answered this before but how many students total sorry right here sorry that's okay um how many um students total do you have in the program right currently right now we have 26 ma'am and how many from each of the schools so when you break down to satellite schools most of them come from albemarle we have a handful from western i would say three from western albemarle we have closer to maybe 10 from albemarle and then the rest of the balance is

[00:34:48] monticello work proper with two homeschooled students in the program as well thank you you're welcome uh any other questions of myself or my colleagues thank you so much hearing none thank you very much for your time we really appreciate it thank you thank you thanks fernanda for that uh next we have school board superintendents business do we have business i'm good miss lee thank you all right any school or business you can talk about that if you like just briefly

[00:35:27] just an announcement to my colleagues on the board uh mr pace mr page uh chair lee and i attended the regional vsba meeting in culpeper tuesday night and it was really quite good for me from my perspective there's uh their cte their new career and tech building is amazing but what was even more amazing than that was their early college uh degree program uh really focusing on recruitment of teachers they had a consortium of at least six or seven

[00:36:05] counties that were participating the students were getting two years of they were duly enrolled at the Germanna junior college they graduated from high school and got an associate's degree at the same time and they had partnered with two university two colleges and I can't remember which ones J and Mary washington and mary washington thank you thank you chuck where the students were admitted not only into the university but into the department of education or the school of education in those

[00:36:41] schools and they could then they were helping to fund their education there and within two years after high school they could get their teaching degree with a commitment at the end to you know teach for two years in that county but yeah and it was elementary and special education right thank you thank you i forgot that but it was an incredibly interesting program all right thank you next we have public comment we'll start with public hearing for the redistricting recommendation because we

[00:37:17] have 10 speakers each will get two minutes and then we'll have the regular public public comment where three speakers will get three minutes each miss spilman all right uh we invite and actively seek the public's input in matters relevant to school board governance and provide time in our business meeting to hear from our residents and community members.

[00:37:36] During public comment, we expect respectful and on-topic comments. Disruptive behavior from speakers or from members of the public in attendance will not be tolerated. Anyone who willfully disrupts the meeting in a manner that prevents or interferes with the orderly conduct of the meeting may be ejected by the chair.

[00:37:52] Individuals and/or organizations wishing to speak during public comment must sign up prior to the meeting sign up is available online beginning at 9 a.m. on the Monday of the meeting week until 2 p.m. on the day of the meeting sign up is also available by contacting the clerk directly public testimony guidelines are as follows speakers should adhere to the following protocol state your name and address or voting district address address comments to the school board as a whole limit comments to those matters that are relevant to school board Governance or school division operations given give written statements and or supporting materials to the clerk

[00:38:27] If you are unable to complete the presentation in the time allotted a copy of supporting materials will be provided to school board members Given there are ten individuals signed up for public comment each speaker will be allotted two minutes to speak on the public hearing redistricting Recommendation for the three speakers who have signed up to speak under the regular public comment period on other matters will be given three minutes a color-coded light system is used to time presentations the yellow light means the speaker is two minutes or one minute if there are more than ten speakers into the presentation and the red light means that the speaker is at the three minute limit of the presentation and must wrap

[00:39:03] up in order to maintain respect for all points of view the school board requests no clapping booing or other audible form of support or non-support be used if members of the public wish to show their support for a speaker they may stand or raise their hands with multiple comments on the same topic have been presented the chair may request additional comments on the topic be limited to those who have new information to present debate and dialogue with the school board are not allowed and use of the projection system is reserved for staff scheduled agenda item presentations only all right we're gonna start with the public hearing on redistricting proposal the first person

[00:39:40] is Brad Rogers good evening everyone Brad Rogers Ravana district Holly Mead elementary i'm here tonight to ask you to vote no to the current redistricting proposal the proposed redistricting plan is harmful to four different schools collectively impacting almost 1700 students baker butler will remain overcrowded every year for the next five years even when using all six

[00:40:18] trailers as classrooms hollymead will be overcrowded every year for the next five years trailers were added to capacity calculations just before the final plan was proposed to make the enrollment numbers work in year one and with development impacts it will only get worse.

[00:40:34] Stony Point will not have enough students to have two classes per grade K through five in four of the next five years. Stone Robinson is not part of the overcrowded northern feeder pattern but this plan adds 42 kids to the northern feeder pattern that we do not have capacity for. Albemarle County has already approved the excuse me has approved the plan to build over 4,000 homes in the northern feeder pattern in coming years moving children from stony point creates an issue for four schools baker butler and hollymead will be overcrowded and stony point and stone robinson

[00:41:11] will not have the staffing levels they need to provide full student services the obvious solution is to move enough children from baker butler to stony point to fix their enrollment issues and to distribute the remaining students to broadest wood and hollymead to provide relief until a new school is constructed this will give would give all four schools the right amount of students and resources to operate effectively for the next five years this is not a short-term plan for the students whose lives this will impact i urge you to vote no to the proposed redistricting plan and find a better solution that serves the interests of all students without creating further

[00:41:48] overcrowding issues thank you for your consideration thank you um clinton key evening ladies and and gentlemen. I join you tonight to speak in favor of Dr. Haase's proposed redistricting plan.

[00:42:21] I am a parent at Stony Point Elementary, Ravana F. Voting District. We relocated to Albemarle County two years ago, specifically because of the unique rural character of the northern part of the county. And central to the Stony Point community is the health and vibrancy of its school. When we moved here, we didn't know anyone. And the generosity and inclusivity of the school's leadership its staff and its community were essential to the success and quality of the experience my children had in joining the albemoral community we're confident that stony point will be able to welcome the new families and ensure a smooth transition that allows the children to

[00:43:00] thrive in their new setting thank you and we urge you to vote yes thank you um next we have denise holman hi good good evening everyone i'm denise holman from the rivana district firstly i want to express my gratitude to the school board everyone sitting here for your unwavering commitment to our children's education and for your active involvement in this process tonight i stand before

[00:43:40] you to advocate for a crucial decision i urge you to vote no in the proposed recommendation redistricting stone robinson students as suggested falls short of fully addressing the goals outlined in this study it is not the right solution to the enrollment challenges at stony pointe moreover prioritizing the needs of a school over the needs of students is count contradictory to the mission of albemarle county schools the survey results clearly indicate that the public does not support this recommendation and a petition with 190 signatures for the further

[00:44:18] underscores the sentiment i brought two copies which i can leave with the clerk um it is imperative that we pause reassess our options and strive for an outcome that guarantees a positive educational experience for all students and schools involved thank you for your attention and your consideration and your time thank you thank you um next we have rupert egan good evening ladies and gentlemen of

[00:44:56] the board my name is rupert egan ravana district thank you for the opportunity to speak okay thank Thank you. I feel an ethical obligation to add my voice to the significant number of parents and community members who have evaluated the currently proposed redistricting plan and found it to fall short of meeting its stated goals.

[00:45:15] Within the school division goals and objectives document, one of the primary stated goals is equitable transformative resources. This proposed plan is not equitable, nor does it adequately address the phase one objectives of the redistricting initiative of rebalancing enrollment across the Northern feeder pattern.

[00:45:33] Hollymead would be over capacity on day one of the 2024-2025 school year. Adding trailers to artificially inflate enrollment capacity only masks the problem short-term and does not solve it long-term. Further, available seats are not being utilized effectively as Broaddus Wood will not add any students.

[00:45:51] Children will also be moved from Stoughton-Robinson, which is an overcapacity, to Stoney Point. These seats at Stoney Point are needed to reduce overcrowding at Baker Butler and to reduce the plan number of children that would be added to Hollymead. This proposed plan is not equitable, and none of these changes effectively address the primary overcrowding issue at Baker Butler.

[00:46:11] I understand you all often have to make decisions that are not popular, but they should be for the correct reasons. Therefore, it is my belief that there is a professional need and ethical responsibility to the children of the northern feeder pattern to readdress this redistricting plan.

[00:46:26] Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Stuart Holman. Okay. Next is Colin Thomas. Hello again. My name is Colin Thomas. I'm a Cascadia resident in the Ravonna District.

[00:46:55] As I shared last week, my daughter is a second grader at Stone Robinson Elementary. We've been told that the only solution to Stony Point's enrollment issues is adding a high-density suburban neighborhood that attracts young families. However, even if this is true, Cascadia is not a good fit for Stony Point's needs. Cascadia is a relatively young neighborhood.

[00:47:14] The last house was completed and sold in the summer of 2022, less than 22 years ago. Cascadia home to a diverse array of residents from young families to young single professionals and even a significant population of retirees this newness and diversity pose unique challenges when predicting the long-term impact of redistricting how many elementary age kids will there be on average which schooling decisions do families typically make in this neighborhood as a smaller school stony point is less able to handle enrollment unpredictability than a larger school like stone robinson even in the short term there are a number of factors that the redistricting

[00:47:51] committee didn't consider how many students will actually be moving a large percentage will be allowed to stay either because their parents teach at acps schools or under the rising fifth grade uh grandfathering rule will a shift to stony point affect the percentage of kids that require transportation how does the shift affect the composition of special education population at stony point because there are so many unknowns and the critical consequences of the wrong decision i encourage the school board to reject the committee's proposal thank you for your time

[00:48:22] thank you um next we have emily mathon mathon good evening my name is emily mathon and i live in the rio district i have two children both enrolled in acps schools one in middle and one in high school i'm here to voice my support for the proposed redistricting redistricting plan developed by the team of community volunteers and supported by the superintendent in 2018 the last time we went through redistricting both of my children were enrolled at agner hurt elementary

[00:48:59] i know how emotional stressful and personal this is i know that especially when our babies are in elementary school we struggle with the potential change especially when it comes to the central part of our community our school as a representative on family council at a recent meeting i heard from two members of the redistricting redistricting advisory committee about their experience and the proposal it struck me how important these decisions are as a manifestation of our commitment to the anti-racism policy and the stated mission of albemarle county public schools working together as a team we will end the predictive value of race class gender and special capacities

[00:49:36] of our children's success i want to emphasize one of the guiding principles that the committee was asked to uphold boundary options shall be assessed by greater demographic balance amongst impacted schools i don't have a personal stake in the decision this time around i'm here because i strongly believe in the value of public education and the power of community-based decision-making as I was practiced through the redistricting study throughout history we can see time and again how decisions to promote equity and increase access and education can face a backlash I want to uplift the importance of equitable access and how it relates to the decision you're making tonight I'll end with a quote from Justice Thurgood Marshall from the 1974 dissenting

[00:50:15] opinion the Milliken versus Bradley that perpetuated segregation in Detroit schools unless our children begin to learn together there's little hope that our people will ever learn to live together and understand each other. Thank you for your attention. And I strongly urge you to listen to the guidance from the representative team of volunteers who studied this challenge and vote for the recommended redistricting plan.

[00:50:37] Thank you. Thank you. Next is Annika Johnson.

[00:50:57] My name is Annika Johnson, and I'm a resident of the Rivanna district in the Fontana neighborhood and a proud parent of two Stony Point Elementary students, a kindergarten and a second grader. I'm coming today to speak in favor of the redistricting plan put forth. Stony Point Elementary School has a motto of Dragon Magic, and I feel it is a magical place.

[00:51:18] We enjoy being a close community. They've been very supportive to our family. Our school has wonderful teachers and staff who have made it a welcoming environment for all of our students to learn. Our school already has the support staff and space in the existing classrooms to welcome more students in.

[00:51:34] By increasing enrollment, it will allow us use our resources to the best of our ability and financially it would be more in line with the county goals it would allow the class sizes to be more consistent and ensure that we will not have grade banding in the future as well as to help increase the allocation of two teachers per grade level this proposal goes directly to the goal of the committee that families would not be redistricted now that would be impacted with the new elementary school in the future it also aligns well with transportation issues and carpooling and community I feel. We would strive to be more of a school family by adding the neighborhood of Cascadia specifically. It would be a wonderful

[00:52:13] addition because our children play at the same playgrounds, ride bikes together, our sidewalks connect to each other's neighborhoods. We are truly neighbors and yet we go to different schools and it feels an odd divide. We want to be the same and we want to have more friends and that's my kindergartner says we want to have more friends at school because more friends equals more fun and i feel that that's what a school community should provide so please vote in favor of this

[00:52:41] redistricting plan thank you uh next is erica weiler good evening my name is erica weiler i'm a parent in the rivana district thank you for the investment of your time in our schools and thank you to those who have agreed to hear our concerns over these past months the redistricting committee had a large task set before them however the proposal before you does

[00:53:19] not meet the objectives if approved both baker butler and hollymead will be overcrowded and stony point will not reach its goal enrollment or teacher allocation the consequences of this plan will persist until well after the north point school is built many years from now stony point deserves better than this short-sighted plan baker butler and hollymead deserve better and the stone robinson community should not bear the consequence of poor planning there are viable alternatives that were prematurely eliminated from consideration that would achieve all of our goals i urge you

[00:53:54] to reject this flawed proposal we can and we should find a better solution to these challenges thank you for your time thank you um next is justin weiler my name is justin weiler and i live in the rivana district i want to sincerely thank each of you for the time you have spent considering this issue, reading our emails, and talking with us as concerned

[00:54:31] parents. I think all of you are aware of the fatal flaws with the proposed plan. Nobody wants Baker Butler and Hollymead to be overcrowded until the new school at North Point can be built, and no one wants to worry every summer if Stoney Point's only going to have 11 classes the following year because too many neighbors moved away. I would like to request that you convene another committee with equal representation from Baker Butler, Hollymead, and Stoney point this committee should have a single objective to adjust the boundaries for these three schools so that none of the schools are overcrowded in the five year projections and stony point consistently has 12 classes I know

[00:55:11] another committee is a ton of work and it would take a lot of time but this is not an impossible task there are feasible and workable solutions that would accomplish this objective we owe it to all of the students at these schools to only proceed with a redistricting plan once we have a proposal that meets this objective thank you for your time thank you okay that was um all the speakers on the public hearing for redistricting we have three other speakers for public comment

[00:55:42] the first one is kathy kaufman hi um my name is kathy kaufman i live in the white hall district i also have been a admiral county public school teacher for 23 years and currently the math department chairman at admiral high school i've come to you with some concerns about some policies and approaches that ACPS is currently implementing that are negatively affecting student learning, and we are, as a division, failing to provide the lifelong learning

[00:56:20] strategies for all of our students. My first area of concern is the lack of time that ACPS is providing for the learning of mathematics. In discussion with elementary school teachers, I found that some schools have less than 40 minutes a week, while other schools have 40 minutes a day.

[00:56:38] At the middle school level, the ACPS has eliminated daily math instruction and has instead opted for more exploratory choices. Since 2009, at the high school level, there's no longer the option for students to take Algebra I every day, which has led to a decline in students thoroughly understanding algebra, which has led to an increase in failure in future math classes.

[00:57:02] We know students who pass Algebra 1 by the end of ninth grade open the door to advanced STEM courses, AP classes, are more likely to enroll in college, graduate with a bachelor's degree, and go on to well-paid, in-demand careers. Conversely, for students who fail Algebra 1, the door to opportunity often closes. By eliminating time spent learning mathematics in both in all the elementary, middle, and high school years, ACPS is hindering the timing and and passing of Algebra I for all students, and thereby negatively impacting

[00:57:39] their future opportunities and success. My second concern is the current ACPS grading policy. As a county, we have taken away every incentive for students to practice and learn academic material while it's being taught.

[00:57:55] We have communicated the message that homework is not important, that doing nothing will earn you 50%, and you do not have to pay attention in class because you get a redo for everything. I urge you three things.

[00:58:10] To allow teachers to give some incentive for practicing these basic skills as homework. We teachers need to be able to incentivize our students to practice their knowledge and skills so they may learn, grow confident, and enjoy success.

[00:58:25] I also ask that you revisit this 50% for doing nothing. This is counterproductive to learning. If, as a division, we want to eliminate this power of zero, which, as a math teacher, I totally understand, then let us consider changing our grading scale to a five-point or a four-point scale.

[00:58:43] Lastly, I ask you to reconsider this retake policy. I have students who are in this retake cycle, which causes them keen anxiety and stress. Many other school divisions have parameters in which the student can retake an assessment.

[00:58:58] I urge us to adopt some parameters. In conclusion, I strongly advocate that you take a thorough look at these grading policies and the elimination of learning mathematics. Our goal should be to adopt learning-focused policies that consider all disadvantages to help all students succeed.

[00:59:17] Thank you. - Thank you. Next is Allison Anderson.

[00:59:47] - My name is Allison Anderson. I'm in the Jewett District, and I just wanted to bring to the attention of the board a safety concern along Lambs Road near the high school. There is daily pedestrian traffic, including high school students making their way to the high school every day, and there's pretty well nowhere to get off of that road at approximately the two-tenths of a mile stretch between loaves and fishes and where the buses are parked, so it's buses, chain-linked fence.

[01:00:16] Luckily, I think there is a relatively straightforward solution to this. If you've got your hand out now, you'll see on the first side a couple of the problems there is the blind curve at one end of the section I'm talking about and at the other end we just have very steep shoulders and it's nowhere there's nowhere for the people to go if you flip the sheet over though you'll see a little map there showing where we could relatively easily put a walking path there's a good wide strip it's not even that brushy that would just need some bark chips maybe a few timbers to get up to the walking path at one end the

[01:00:55] orange section on the map is marking where the worst section of the road is I'd like to suggest the yellow section might be a nice area to continue it all the way up to the high school because you can see by picture number five that it's pretty busy down there as well but at least in that section you can don't jump into the drainage ditches if you have to you know in the other section before that there's really nowhere to go along some of there and everybody's on their devices they got their earbuds in their hoodies up you know it's just it's not good it's like a disaster waiting to happen so um this could happen relatively inexpensively

[01:01:32] i think volunteers are possible i've got a few lined up if they're needed also high school students are are an awesome workforce and thank you for your time considering this proposal thank you very much um we have one zoom participant is he um miss billman the zoom participant has not joined so okay be seen all right well then that ends public comment thank you miss billman and thanks to all who came to give public comment today next we have our school

[01:02:03] division business starting with the uh 23 24 redistricting study rosalyn smith good evening

[01:02:43] i'm rosalyn smith chief operating officer i don't have any new information tonight this was presented to you for information on february 22nd is before uh before you for action i just have a couple recap slides of how we got here to the state working left to right back in august the board approved the scope objectives and guiding principles for the study and directed the superintendent to convene advisory committee that committee was appointed and began meeting in early october in the fall and they have met seven times it was a data-rich conversation

[01:03:19] detail-oriented and a lot of collaboration amongst those committee members throughout that that process those committees meetings were open to the public and materials posted on the redistricting website an email address was maintained to collect questions and feedback throughout the process there were four community meetings held and a community survey was conducted the school board heard the recommendation from the superintendent on february 22nd and we're back tonight for action and consideration of that recommendation including the public hearing you

[01:03:54] you just had if ultimately recommended any new boundaries would go into effect for the 24/25 school year as a reminder here were the objectives for the study it was tasked to produce a recommendation that will address current and projected enrollment issues and a preliminary recommendation for a boundary for the news elementary school knowing that new elementary schools on the horizon this was a phased approach and so the the study focused on the phase one objectives which was a decrease enrollment at Baker Butler and Woodbrook

[01:04:29] increase enrollment at Stony Point impact other schools as needed to accomplish those objectives middle school boundaries were studied and then finalizing the location of the new elementary school these were the guiding principles given to the committee to evaluate the scenarios include everything from the the time length of the the boundaries the continuous nature those boundaries transportation efficiencies walk zones demographics facility utilization

[01:05:02] split feeder patterns and the impact of the phasing this is our largest redistricting committee to date it was 19 members strong with represented represent representatives from various schools that were in the study as well as two key committee members from the long-range planning advisory committee and the office of community engagement they were also supported by staff from areas of expertise in planning instruction transportation and community engagement ultimately they made a recommendation to the superintendent who accepted their recommendation and we presented

[01:05:40] at the february 22nd meeting this is a summary of that recommendation it was multi-part included a recommendation to move students from stone robinson to stony point to move students from baker butler to hollymead to move students from woodbrook to agner hurt we recommended a legacy boundary clause which would allow rising fifth graders who are current fourth graders and their siblings to remain at their current school provided they can provide transportation and identify the Crawford land and North Point development as the location of the new elementary school if the recommendation is

[01:06:17] accepted the motion language is on the slide and with that I will step back and have a discussion i'll hear a motion i move to excuse me chair lee i move to accept the superintendent's redistricting recommendation as presented to the board on february 22nd 2024 second okay moved by dr acuff seconded by ms osborne uh typically here i would open up discussion um and since i'm the chair i

[01:06:56] usually wait until the end to speak but tonight i'll be speaking out of that usual order because because I also represent the Rivanna district. And as such, I wanted to address those two parts of the recommendation before us. I want to assure everyone that I have given immense consideration to this vote, because as a parent, I understand the ramifications, both positive and potentially negative.

[01:07:20] In that consideration, I've heard all of the public comment made, read all of the emails, met with families, talked with staff, and with members of the redistricting committee. I've also spoken with people who have overseen redistrictings in the past. And more than that, I've represented all of these communities, these neighborhoods, families, schools, and staff for more than four years.

[01:07:41] And in that time, I've come to know them well. And because I don't believe in suspense, I'll say at the top that from all of that information gathering and consideration, I fully and urgently endorse the recommendation brought to us by Dr. Haas. And I want to be transparent about my reasons.

[01:07:57] All the schools that I've gotten to know so well that are involved tonight-- Baker Butler, Hollymead, Stone Robinson, Stony Point-- they are all excellent schools. I don't say that lightly. I visited Stone Robinson most recently last week, and it is a wonderful school. I get why parents would want to stay in such a community.

[01:08:17] And if for a second I believe that Stony Point was in any way inferior, I might be compelled by more of these arguments. But I spent a lot of time in Stony Point, and I know it too is a wonderful school. It is a thriving community of educators, families, and staff who care so much about their kids. It is small, and it is mighty. And to that point, I want to make clear that if any of us believes that stony point or any school for that matter is not good enough for some group of our kids then it is not good enough for any kids and in the case of stony point i know that's not true of course i'd be remiss if i didn't also state that we need to advocate for funding for

[01:08:55] renovations there which as a board we have and we will continue to do i also strongly support the hollymead component of dr haas's recommendation i understand the reasons they made the choices they did both early on and later in the process on the committee and i agree that it's the best best solution keeping in mind that we must stay on track with our new northern feeder pattern elementary school and I would also like to address that committee process we established a fair process that I both trust and verified community members staff experts and other volunteers spent

[01:09:30] upward of a hundred hours studying the goals that we as a board put before them and analyzing dozens of scenarios they came up with these best solutions and I applaud their work it's also important to note that cascadia was well represented in this process so most if not all of the arguments that we've heard in public comment in emails and in meetings with us individually were given a fair hearing in that committee first the same is true of the points we've heard from the few hollymead folks who have come and these things have been discussed at great length the committee did what we on the board must do which is to look at our schools as part of one community that's the level

[01:10:08] at which we must govern some have argued to us that we should not hurt one school or the other when they're doing just fine and that argument does not hold water with me because we are a community of schools we are one body together there's no reason that stony point should continue to have difficulty staffing because of its size there's no reason that baker butler should continue to burst at the seams and the recommendation recommendation that dr haas has made to us is the most equitable way to do the things we need to do i again want to say how much i respect the work the committee did they did not rush their work nor did they abdicate the responsibility of making

[01:10:43] these hard decisions. They did not kick the problem down the road to be solved, maybe in another year. They did not make it someone else's problem to solve. They did diligent work and they did it all in public. Again, I support the recommendation they made and that Dr. Haas made to us last month, and for all these reasons, I'll be voting yes. I'm just going to say that this is not an easy decision for any of us. I have lost sleep over it. We have met with a lot of you. Our

[01:11:22] emails have been inundated. There have been phone calls. I have met with Dr. Haas and Mishmit and Dr. Azari and talked with people on the redistricting committee. And first well I just want to say thank you to all of the parents on all sides for their passion I think it's commendable you obviously care a lot and we I know I read every single email I delved into all of the data I asked all of the

[01:11:56] questions and this is tough it's not an easy decision and so I just wanted to say thank you for all of your time and all of your dedication so I want to note how difficult this is and until you kind of sit in the seat and know that you hold the lives of all you know 14,000 kids and the families that support them you don't realize you know how stressful and how humbling that is and so I just want you to know that every member of this board takes that very seriously and

[01:12:35] and appreciate all of the outreach. And one of the things that I encourage everyone to do is to keep your voices heard. One of the reasons we're in this position is because of the lack of funding for new schools and for school improvements.

[01:12:54] A huge thank you. I mean, not to say that the Board of Supervisors has not done a lot to support the schools, but because of the immense growth that we have seen, particularly in the northern part of the county, but everywhere to keep our schools at the 21st century, we need continued investment.

[01:13:11] All of our kids deserve 21st century schools, and we need to keep our voices being heard to make sure that the funding that we need, both to support our school budget, but also to support both new build and renovations continues.

[01:13:28] So I ask that you keep your voices continued to advocate on a one-on-one basis and at Board of Supervisors meetings to help us make sure that we have the funding we need because we know that that's what we need to have the best population in our county and to serve our state in our country so thank you sorry I forgot to add one thing I don't I know you don't want me jumping back and forth but I did mean to say this um I think this process has also made it very apparent that the board needs, in some regards, needs to be involved

[01:14:05] earlier on in this process. There's a lot of information to take in, and it's very hard to get a presentation and try to make a decision that is so heavy and so impactful. And so one of my goals, I think, after this is to find a way, whether it's having a representative in the meetings or getting updates more regularly so that we have more information and along the process and feel even better prepared to make these decisions.

[01:14:39] So I just wanted to add that as well. As a parent who had kids go to Stone Robinson, I completely understand why you would never want to leave it. I have a great deal of empathy for that.

[01:14:55] It's an amazing school. And I've not visited Stony Point yet, so I can't comment on that, but I'm sure it's fine. has been a really hard decision as all of our board members have said and for a long time i've sort of been on the fence i haven't been able to quite decide how to vote but then after listening to some of the testimony from our uh some of the speakers tonight and also miss lee's statement along with speaking to some other school board members i finally did reach a decision that i

[01:15:33] think would be the best thing for all of our county students and again it's a very very tough decision okay um i i did many of the things that you've already heard the other board members um indicate that they did um i'm not sure you guys drove the roads i did that i took my daughter out and she wouldn't let me go on the third road because she was going to get sick um because it's

[01:16:07] it is rough between the two when you go down into that um routine you know between uh 29 and 20. anyways um i also remembered that someone spoke to us about having a child with autism and was going to be difficult to move schools and that struck me because i my daughter was redistricting from agner hurt to woodbrook many years ago and it was it was not easy but it did work out

[01:16:42] our job as school board members is to make decisions that impact all 14 000 of our students in our 24 schools with respect to redistricting and this is the first the third time that has come up in my tenure our job is to establish a fair process which is what ms schmidt outlined with widespread representation with a broad

[01:17:22] array of talents and skills and expertise and they and then to they submit a recommendation which as a second order our superintendent reviews and sees if there are some fundamental flaws in that process or their conclusions what we're voting on tonight is whether to accept a superintendent's recommendation.

[01:17:54] We have not inserted ourselves into the 100 hours plus of decision-making that the members of the committee and our staff did. And our job is to, I view, unless there's a fundamental flaw in the process, that choosing one community over another, we can't make that kind of granular decision.

[01:18:33] Because-- and I totally respect the parents in this room whose families are impacted. It's your job to vigorously advocate for them. And I totally respect that.

[01:18:49] But our job is the bigger picture. and I will be voting to support the superintendent's position, his recommendation. - Christine, can we have the roll call vote please?

[01:19:07] - Motion made by Dr. Acuff, seconded by Ms. Osborne. Dr. Berlin? - Yes. - Ms. Osborne? - Yes. - Ms. Spillman? - Yes. - Dr. Acuff? - Yes.

[01:19:25] - Mr. Chuck Pace? - Yes. - Mr. Graham Page? - Yes. - Chair Lee? - Yes. with the vote 7-0, so moved.

[01:19:42] Thank you. I know that everyone on the board spent a long time and a lot of heart in this decision. So I appreciate all of everyone's work. All right, next we have a break.

[01:19:55] So we will be back at 8:00 PM.

[01:30:06] Are we back?

[01:32:39] OK, great. All right, we're up to 8.3. School name review, Karen Waters.

[01:33:00] Do this every time. I should be used to it by now. Good evening, everyone. I'm Karen Waters, director of community education, in the Office of Community Engagement. And I'm here tonight in my capacity as Project Manager for School Name Reviews. - I think it's a ghost.

[01:33:22] - It is not. - Just a little specialness, okay. I'm here tonight in my capacity as Project Manager for School Name Reviews, and I'm serving as Superintendent Dr. Matthew Haas, designee, to present his recommendation for our final school named for individuals, Agner Hurt Elementary School.

[01:33:46] As you're aware, in October of 2018, Dr. Haas was directed by the school board to add our school division values to the criteria for naming school buildings and facilities, to review the names of all schools and the division name for individuals to see if they're reflective of our values, and to make recommendations to the board for changing the names of schools that are inconsistent with our values, which are family and community, excellence, wellness, and equity.

[01:34:18] Additionally, we must ensure that we have compliance with the ACPS anti-racism policy which states the Albemarle County School Board and the Albemarle County Public Schools reject all forms of racism as destructive to the division's mission, vision, values, and goals.

[01:34:35] At this point, five schools have had their names changed and eight have had their names retained. As directed by policy FA naming of school buildings and facilities, the superintendent is required to review staff research and then recommend to you whether to retain the school's name or remove the name and engage the community in renaming the building.

[01:34:56] Research into the namesakes of Agner Hurt Elementary, Guy T. Agner Jr. and Benjamin Franklin Hurt indicates that while former county executive Guy Agner Jr. has no association or oversight of public remarks or images on the record that are not reflective of ACPS values and policies, this is not the case with former ACPS administrator Benjamin Franklin Hurt, despite his many accomplishments and the community's great admiration of his work as an educator.

[01:35:26] Consequently, it is recommended that rather than engage in a complete renaming of the school, that the name of mr agner be retained as agner elementary school effective july 1st 2024. thank you for allowing me to undertake this work as this is our final school and i want to especially recognize dr haas and dr kaiser for their support as well as dr helen dunn and the albemarle county historical society as well as the many family members that i've met from the different namesakes

[01:36:00] the community members who have been so forthcoming thanks again good night thank you Karen thanks very much so just to be clear for next steps it'll be on consent for the next it will be a regular agenda item at the next meeting that will allow for public comment prior to the board's vote okay fantastic all right thanks very much next we have school board approval of the FY25

[01:36:31] funding request my kumazawa good evening I'm my kumazawa director of budget planning and this evening I'll briefly help you walk through the school board's approval of the funding request and just as a recap this is the a summary

[01:37:10] of the FY 25 funding requests which has expenditures of two hundred and seventy two million nine hundred thousand eighty five dollars and the categories shown here are state functional areas that we report to and are there's more detail on this covered in the draft funding request document when compared to the FY 24 For adopted budget, this is a summary of the changes which equal about $13 million.

[01:37:39] Included is about $10 million in proposals to maintain levels of service, and this is what we discussed during the two special budget work sessions. It includes a 3% market compensation increase, English learner growth, special education growth, social-emotional supports, and intervention services.

[01:38:00] These are the key dates that we've worked through. tonight will be the approval and then next month on april 25th the school board will need to adopt a final balanced budget with that i'll turn it over to charlie okay um do we have a motion i move to adopt the fy 24 25 funding request of 272 million nine hundred thousand and eighty dollars for the school fund and 26 million 343 thousand eight hundred and

[01:38:39] forty-one in special revenue funds. Second. Moved by Dr. Acuff, seconded by Ms. Spillman. I think we can probably just do this as a voice vote. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? So moved. Thank you very much Ms. Kumazawa. Thank you Ms.

[01:39:03] Kumazawa. Next we have using mid-year data to meet our mission. Patrick McLaughlin. Good evening board members. We are moving right along. Hopefully I can keep that pace going for us with our last item tonight. So good evening again. My name is Pat McLaughlin. I'm assistant superintendent for strategic planning and tonight I want to share with you a bit about how we use mid-year data to support our mission and really I hope that by the time we conclude tonight we'll have accomplished three things. One that you have a better understanding of the difference between our accreditation system and our assessments. The second is

[01:39:41] an understanding of where we stand with our second quarter data and the third is how we turn that data into actionable classroom impacts that will impact both our instruction and our student achievement. I'd be remiss if I didn't say that while I'm up here representing the strategic planning department what you're hearing tonight really is a culmination of a total team effort across just about every one of our departments in the in the division it includes strategic planning instruction professional learning equity and community engagement and technology and we couldn't have done it without everyone

[01:40:17] having a hand in this and I want to thank all of the members of the team who have done that I'll start tonight by reminding you of our mission in Albemarle County Schools that working together as a team we will end the predictive value of race, class, gender, and special capacities for our children's success through high quality teaching and learning for all. We seek to build relationships with families and communities to ensure that every student succeeds and we will know every student. And specifically tonight I'm going to be focusing on the first sentence of that, that we will end the predictive value of race, class, gender, and special capacities through high quality teaching

[01:40:54] and learning for all. One of the key indicators that we have for for whether or not we are meeting that mission are actually there's two one is our state assessment system and the other is school accreditation and these are separate yet distinctly different measures and i want to give a brief overview of the differences between the two so i'll start with talking about accreditation all schools are given an accreditation rating based on six indicators the first three academic achievement for all of our students in mathematics, English, and

[01:41:33] science. The next are achievement gap performance for students in our schools in mathematics and in English. And then the sixth is chronic absenteeism. Those are valid for all of our schools K-12 and then our high schools have three additional indicators that focus around graduation, dropout rates, and college career readiness for each one of these indicators students are given these indicators are evaluated using what we call growth scores for students and that's the key difference between accreditation and assessments that

[01:42:11] students can be counted as a as a pass for lack of a better word for accreditation purposes in two ways one they score above a 400 on their SOL score and that gives them a passing score or they show growth in a number of different ways from the previous year that can be just year-over-year growth if they are students who are English learners they can show growth on their on their WIDA test as well in in English so with those they use a formula to give

[01:42:47] each one of the indicators a level one which is the highest a level two which is nearing the highest and a level 3 which is generally below 65% passing rate and all of our schools if you get any combination of level 1 and level 2 indicators you are rated accredited for that year if you have one or more level 3 indicators you are labeled as accredited with conditions for that year and that means you've got some some work to do with the State Department of education around improvement plans. They have a more formal improvement process for schools that

[01:43:25] are accredited with conditions. Accreditation denied is not one that I've actually seen happen in Virginia. Basically, if you, unless you, if you just completely ignored the state's request for an improvement process, an improvement plan for your school, then you would get your accreditation denied. There's a lot more nuance to accreditation that I won't get into tonight, but just to give you an idea that the key with this is that accreditation is growth based pass rates and our assessments are just a straight pass they don't take into account any type of growth for our students it's the percentage of students

[01:44:03] who achieve a score of higher than 400 on our English our math and our science tests in the division now accreditation is is calculated at the school level but not at the division. So Albemarle County doesn't get an accreditation rating for the county as a whole but each one of our individual schools does. When we do comparisons and oftentimes you'll hear us compare our results to the state or our results to neighboring divisions or or divisions that that look very similar to us, anytime we're making that comparison we're talking about assessment data and not accreditation data because that is when we get we get state and

[01:44:43] and local comparators so we can see if we're meeting some of our goals around our assessments. So one of those key goals that we have, and I wanna make sure that we are clear that this is a goal in our State of the Division, is that we wanna close our SOL achievement gaps and we want our results to be better than the state average.

[01:45:05] This is a slide from the State of the Division presentation that we gave back in November. And you can see that while we did get a little bit better meeting that goal in the 22-23 school year we've still got a long way to go we went from 12 categories where we were above the state average to 16 but almost all of our achievement gap groups were still in the red which indicates that they are below the state average there and so to address that a couple of the key strategies that we have in place for this year are new pacing guides for

[01:45:40] all of our classes and well many more but specifically in in reading in math in science that really outline from day one till the last day of school what we should be teaching and when and how long we should be spending on that and in conjunction with those pacing guides we've developed quarterly assessments which the board has heard about a couple of times as we've given some updates on bellwether those quarterly assessments are designed to give us a gauge of how well students mastered the content that was scheduled to be taught within those quarters and so specifically tonight i want to share some results from you from our reading tests our math

[01:46:19] tests and our science tests and when you see these results up here these are the the grade levels that we are reporting out on so starting first with our reading results uh in this chart one of the things that i want to i want to again be clear on is that the results you're seeing tonight aren't predictions right this isn't saying hey this is where we're going to end the school year these tests these assessments that we're giving as quarterly assessments are too new for that we're still looking at validity for them we're still getting feedback from from staff about them as we create them and as we

[01:46:55] actually administer them but we did want to give some comparisons to our targets right this is where we ended last year with our reading scores and we want to improve those every year hopefully so that they all get higher than the state but definitely want to move in the right direction because as you can see many of them are not where we would we would want them to be so looking at our mid-year comparison in the second column now or the third column now you can see where our averages were for the reading mid-year that we gave around mid-January

[01:47:31] these are averages for the entire division and what we've put in the comparison box is the difference between our reading mid-years and where we ended the year last year an imperfect comparison I think but at least it gives us but I tell you I'd rather be looking at this and seeing this green compared to last year which indicates that we're higher than where we ended last year than the other way around one of the things that I will that I'll point out to you is that you know when we look at the comparisons across all of our different demographic groups one of the other goals that we have is closing

[01:48:08] achievement gaps and while you see that all of our students were about five percent higher if you look at our some of our groups that typically have an achievement gap our black students our Hispanic students our students with disabilities our economically disadvantaged students and our English learners you can see that for the most part those groups were greater than five increase compared to last year so if that pattern holds then we'll start to see those achievement gaps close but I also think we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that those gaps still exist and and when you look at our our overall

[01:48:44] pass rate of 79% and you see some rates down into into 50 and 48 we've clearly still got work to do it's not a problem that we're going to solve in in a year but it's one that we we think we can keep chipping away at. So there's our reading results. Our math results we can see in the same way that we have our kind of our targets to to which from which we want to get better from last year. We see our comparison results that were higher not as high not as as different as the as the reading results were but still for the most part in the

[01:49:20] green but again still having some gaps there with our our groups that have that have had some persistent gaps for quite some time and then the final set of results is our science results which we'll look at in the same way again we have pretty much all of our groups higher than where we ended last year on their second quarter assessments still have the gaps there so I guess the takeaway for me is cautious optimism that we've got some some things that are that are working for our kids this year we will be giving third quarter

[01:49:58] assessments starting tomorrow and going through the end of the the marking period your data is a little bit delayed we had this at the end of January for our principals ready to go but it took us a little bit to to get it ready for the for the board presentation so we'll have our third quarter data starting to come in with us in just the next week or so and so all of this data but all this tells us is whether kids were above the bar or below the bar it's not really actionable in this way we can't walk into a classroom now and say okay let's do this differently because we've got 20% of our kids who didn't pass and 80%

[01:50:36] of our kids who did and so one of the things that our team works on is create is making these results more actionable for folks. And that's what I really wanted to share with you tonight. So the next piece of data that we give to our schools, they can either pull from Illuminate or we pull some reports for principals that they can go out and share with their PLCs, are standard level results data.

[01:51:01] And this is an example of a third grade math standards-based results. And you can see at the top of each column there are, tells you which standard the first one is measurement and geometry 3.8 and we've got probability and statistics 3.15 and number sense 3.1 a in there and when you look at this by column here you can see how kids kind of across the board at this particular school did we can see that hey something's going on with that first one that uh measurement and geometry uh 3.8 a nobody got that

[01:51:39] now what we don't know is why that could be an issue with pacing maybe they didn't get to that particular standard that was there maybe there was an issue with instruction maybe there was a problem with the question uh that was on the test we have found that with uh with a couple of things that we that as we um pulled these tests and really start to dig into them and the results sometimes we see uh-oh we didn't ask this one in the way that that made sense for students to really um get it right uh you can see at the bottom the percentages for the whole plc uh this would be a third grade a group of third grade teachers um at an elementary school where they can look across and they can say all right are you know three out of these five standards we're we're doing pretty

[01:52:18] good on two of them we need to figure out how we circle back to that and how we repace uh for that we can look across the rows and we can see individual teacher results uh there and that's one of the keys i think to our professional learning community model uh you'll hear dr haas say all the time one of the most important questions we can ask as educators is why did your kids do better than mine on this particular assignment how can we share our results and so this allows for teachers to have that conversation to say well what was going on uh in with that uh

[01:52:54] that second standard that that in one class they didn't really get it and some other classes they did they can have some conversation around instructional strategies again this none of this indicates that we've got a good teacher a bad teacher anything along those lines but it just prompts us to start asking some questions about why so we give that level of data to to all of our principals to share with all of their plc groups around that and then what principals do is they turn that into what we call a 90-day action plan and I've included a sample

[01:53:32] plan for you all this is not a real one this is a kind of a template we created when we did a workshop with the schools where we really encourage schools while they all have year-long strategic plans it's really important to update that at the end of each quarter and really get focused in on what's important now and And so we encourage schools to come up with two to four key priorities based on their first quarter, the second quarter, the third quarter data that they wanna put some emphasis on.

[01:54:02] In this one, they saw that students learning the third grade impact standards from quarter two, while also keeping pace in quarter three was really what they wanted to focus on. How do we cover the new material that we're doing and still go back to quarter two? They put some desired outcomes in here.

[01:54:19] They think about root causes, about what might be causing that after some conversation. And then they put action steps in. Here's what we're going to do. Here's who's going to do it. When are we going to do it? How are we going to check it during quarter three? So as you're out visiting schools and talking with principals, this is a way you can -- this is a great topic of conversation you can have with them.

[01:54:40] What's your 90-day plan look like for the third quarter? How's it going? are the things that you are that you are focused on around all of this and so those kind of three key components the results from our quarterly assessments the the standards level results and our 90-day plans I think are really the keys for us to to meet that mission that we have to end the predictive value of race class gender and special capacities for all so that in a nutshell is is kind of where we are. I hope you have a better understanding of assessments and

[01:55:17] accreditation of where we stand after the second quarter and how we use that data to try to continuously improve and I'd be happy to take any questions. What kind of feedback are you getting from principals with this data? We one of the things that we did this year was a workshop model for our mid-year review.

[01:55:41] I don't know if you are familiar with what that process used to look like but We used to call in every principal for about an hour long meeting with several members of the central office staff. And they would come in and they would kind of spit their data back out to us, right? And they would say, here's where we were at mid-year and here's what we're going to do about it.

[01:55:59] What we have realized is that we know all that now. We've got it all in Power BI. We've got it all in Illuminate. We don't need them to come in and tell us that. What we really needed to focus on was giving them time and thought partners to work with to develop those 90-day plans.

[01:56:16] So instead of doing a come and show us that, we brought, we gave them, we had four three-hour workshops where multiple schools came in. We had our instruction team there. We had special educators there. We had our team from the equity office.

[01:56:34] all those teams you saw you saw in that first in one of those earlier slides sitting down to work with those teams to develop those 90-day plans to really dig deeply into their data see what it was telling them and start thinking through what that looked like we had some schools who brought teams of teachers in to to sit with them and do that work we got really positive feedback from that shift where it was we took a burden off of the principles of putting together a presentation to come in and give to us and really gave them time during the day to get away from their schools and do this work which they've consistently told us that's the hardest part of this process right is finding

[01:57:13] the time to sit down with the team and and get this knocked out so you don't do you develop 90-day plans at the very first part of school before you have data or you wait until what November that's right so at the at the beginning of the year they and what we have posted on our website are what we call the school strategic plans which is a year-long plan and then from that they say in this year-long plan I need to I need to pare this down to a couple of priorities that I really want to get focused on first and and it's really that PDSA cycle but making it manageable right because sometimes when we build our strategic

[01:57:51] plans we have a dozen things in there and we can't focus on all of those and and so really looking at what's important now uh is i think a key to this work one thing that just struck me too pat was just looking at strategic plans in the past you would actually see things like we're going to do our we're going to we're going to have pacing guides i mean so those that would be at individual schools they were saying they were making pacing guides so i it just struck me that that's another thing that we've lifted off the schools to do and also they can have fidelity

[01:58:27] across the district based on that but if there there are things that principals would they would say in the plan like we're going to disaggregate our data after the first quarter we're going to do take this step we're going to do this step and all those things now through using the power bi program and having that data analytics position and Pat staff we really can deliver for the principals the data that they need so that they can just take the next steps and make make simple plans to do it and not plan to do the kind of the grunt

[01:59:04] work to to get it done yeah I'd reiterate that we really one of the things that our department really values and really thinks about when we think about our purpose in strategic planning is to do just that - what can we take away from principals that that they don't have to do as busy work so that they can really spend their time focused on what's most important for their schools because it before we had common quarterly assessments before we had common pacing guides for the division as dr. Haas alluded to folks were doing that all on their own they were they were creating things sometimes on top of

[01:59:41] each other in the schools that would that you know it was I thought kind of a waste of work time when we could centralize that give it to them I'm not gonna pretend any of its perfect but but I think we can we can we can improve on it each year and continue to provide that service to our schools so if the I'm sorry I'm hogging at the end of the year then will they have some review of what their goals were and whether it moved anything along that's right so so usually

[02:00:18] in by the beginning of June we'll start to get some very preliminary results in that are unofficial from from the state and Chris Gilman starts to do his calculations. He's the most popular man and on the third floor come come the end of May with people knocking on his door saying what are you seeing in terms of where our kids are. And so then we do a we usually do a summer data meeting with the principals to kind of do that after action, right? Did we, what were the bets we placed this year in terms of what was going to work, what were the goals that we had how did those turn out if they worked how are we going to continue them

[02:00:55] if they didn't what's our what's our plan going into next year when you look at the teacher could you go back to the one that showed the three four individual teachers yeah when you look at teacher C what puts what will puts being done or what can be done to sort of help that teacher so I think there's a number of things I think the first I think where it would start is in the professional learning community meetings when they sit down as a group of third grade teachers and talk through what's going on. And again, it's hard to say without the real context, right? We

[02:01:35] don't know if that teacher got into a car accident and had been out of school for three or four weeks before that test was given, and we had a substitute teacher in there. So it allows us to start asking questions like that, both for the principal and the team in that third grade classroom to start to figure out the answers to that? What was it? It could be a very different makeup of a class that has some kids who are more challenging to get over that bar to begin with.

[02:02:09] And that teacher might say, "Hey, you know, based on where we started, we're making some progress here with the kids." So I don't put this up again to say that anything says, "Oh, teacher A is great and teacher B is not so good," and anything like that. It's all contextualize in the classroom but I think it gives you a place to start in a place to really focus your instruction and think about your pacing as you move forward because the principal would have their assets to the makeup or yes we we create spreadsheets for all of the tests by teacher and PLC for the

[02:02:47] principals at the standards level so that they can see they can see where the results were okay Patrick remind me how long we've had those pacing guides in place so this is really the first year we've had these pacing guides here the the pacing guides were a little bit scattered I would say prior to this year and one of the it is really I can't sing the praises enough of some of the members of our lead coach team who many of whom were new this summer who hit the

[02:03:21] ground running with Dallas HIT in the strategic planning team and said, you know, we can't have quarterly assessments if we don't have these pacing guides. And they really got moving on those and will continue to refine those, particularly as, you know, we've got math standards that are changing next year. So our assessments and our pacing guides will likely need to change with them. But I think they've kind of caught their breath a little bit around that. And I think this will um this will really be a benefit for the division and pat the um the pacing guides now are

[02:03:59] are easy easily accessed and they're all located in the same place they are i'm sure uh now that you ask me that i won't be able to point you to them but that was the other mission that they had was to they they were kind of spread it was hard to find they were fine so they got they got them all in one place and the other thing that i really appreciated that the team did was as they developed as they they've brought in teachers to work on the common assessments and so they will publish them well ahead of time to the teachers so they know what their what their targets are and what they're trying to achieve and then they

[02:04:35] also get feedback from the teachers after the assessments done to work on the content validity of it to make sure that you know well what I'll get into a lot of details they take a lot of feedback from the teachers to keep refining them okay one other question how with our policy pacing guides and the 90-day plans how do they fit into our bellwether the bellwether report those are those are direct uh recommendation from bellwether okay okay are the teachers on board with the pacing guide or do you ever have

[02:05:13] any who resist and want to do their own thing i think there is you know i i doubt we have a hundred 100% on anything that we try to do in a division this size, but I think when we, when we look at our results and we look at our participation rate on the quarterly assessments, that gives me confidence that the teachers are adhering to those pacing guides and giving our assessments.

[02:05:41] And I don't, if they weren't, I don't think we'd see some of the results that we have seen. We are well into the 90% range, above 90% range on participation on a quarterly assessments. Great. Pat, years ago I worked on some of the SOL assessments and those items would be field tested before they were actually counted, you know, so a test would be a little bit longer to accommodate that. And we had psychometricians there to help us understand how to balance the

[02:06:18] test is that the kind of thing that you guys are doing when you build an assessment yes i don't know if we've got a psychometrician is that what you is that the word you use i would so i'm not sure we've got someone with that title uh in the division but but i would say dallas hit is a is is one of i think our um uh our our strongest uh staff members when it comes to assessment along along with Chris Gilman in the strategic planning department around that.

[02:06:49] The state still does put some field test items in there. In fact, I just saw an update from the superintendent today that they're throwing some new math field test items into this year's test with pretty short notice as we get ready to go in a couple weeks.

[02:07:05] But yes, I think when we can finish these tests and we start looking at the results, Our lead coach team also is looking at them saying, let's look at this question we had that nobody got right for the most part around standard 3.8. Was that a valid question or was there some flaw with it that caused them to get it wrong?

[02:07:25] You know, if it's that low, if we could throw it out in the state process no matter what. Yeah. Okay. And so are they multiple choice assessments for the most part? There's some that have multiple choice, right, circle all the correct answers on this.

[02:07:46] There's some that the state has what they call technology-enhanced items that require a little bit more manipulation by the student on the assessment. But our assessments, do our items come from the state or do we? No, we create them, but we try to mimic the types of items that we see on the state.

[02:08:03] The science tests in particular have really taken a big shift since two years ago in terms of, you know, it used to be very much almost trivial pursuit in science, and now it's much more here's a set of data and here's some questions we want to ask you about that and tell us.

[02:08:22] And they really have developed a lot more rigor around those, and we try to mimic those the best we can. Sounds great. Thanks. communication been to families about these tests and you do have any feedback on that yeah so we sent home actually after we we came and updated the board on our quarterly assessments uh after the first quarter we didn't get into the data but we talked about what they were one of the recommendations was how are we sending this information home uh and so uh and it was really hit or miss uh school by school and so based on that feedback that we got uh and we developed a

[02:09:00] report that comes from illuminate which is our platform that uh that houses our assessment um for each quarterly assessment and we and we said we're going to send this home to every student who takes one and so that um report i believe we came and showed you a copy of a few um uh meetings ago but it basically says here's the 10 standards uh that we that this assessment covered here's the seven that your child did really well on uh and showed mastery of here's three that they need some additional work on and then points them back to the classroom teacher if they need to get more

[02:09:34] information on that so that along with you may remember that Eric Irizarry and Jamie Gellner have worked on some some materials to help parents better understand how to know how their kids are doing one was around report cards one was around the winter growth this is the fall and winter growth assessments that the state has us give and then the other was around our our quarterly assessments and so they've done some nice work creating some documents and some videos to help parents understand what all this stuff means because it is confusing when we send home you know the the growth assessment test that the state gives we give one at the beginning of the year

[02:10:13] one around december and then we have our sol test all that information is mandated to go home around the same time we're sending home our quarterly assessments and so people are looking at these two different things and and and saying you know what is what's the difference between these but I think Eric and Jamie have done a really nice job of of trying to make that understandable for our families which again was a was another to Mr. Page's comment a direct recommendation of Bellwether that we develop some family-friendly materials like that Dr. McLaughlin one one last

[02:10:52] question about um so this this data is is in our uh student information system is that right and then so elite coach and central office could look at the data and see where he or she needs to put their time in in terms of school locations and that's right we have a we have a couple of um different platforms for that one is called power bi uh and that is a data disaggregation and data visualization platform that is that is teachers can manipulate and principals can manipulate and they can go in and they can look at this pass/fail data and

[02:11:32] they can say well show me my fifth grade science and now show me my fifth grade science just for my special education students or just for this class that was here let me see if there's any difference between those illuminate is is our platform where we house our assessments, and that has reporting functionality too.

[02:11:53] We try to pull -- we try to make it as much one-stop shopping and power BI as we can, but illuminates one other source of that. One of the things that, again, I'll sing the praises of our lead coaches, that they have done is when we saw our results, they started to jump in there and do just what you said, right?

[02:12:13] Say, all right, where are our areas of strength? where areas where we need to get improvement and started to put together resource materials around that for our principals and I would add that you know in the patent and before we had this capability those same people in central office would be responding after the SOL results came out which means basically too late that's right and so and so this what we what we hope is this gets us not quite real-time but but as close as we can get to um uh to real-time actionable uh data that's

[02:12:48] great so will we be hearing from you in june ish yes uh we will uh again the state gets a little uh bit tight with um with what they want us to uh to release uh before they do um uh but we can certainly uh have some preliminary uh uh looks at that thank you patrick and uh miss lee i mean i just want to add i really want to thank patrick um this is heavy lifting it's it's a big culture shift for for the school system uh to really monitor and keep an eye on how the students are

[02:13:25] doing and how how the teachers are doing what resources they need and what kind of support they need and one thing i just would say is that i think we all agree that it's not about just passing the test it's about having a guaranteed and viable curriculum for all of our children regardless of what they what they bring with them and so by having pacing guides by having assessments that you can monitor throughout the year and provide by providing professional development and resources to the teachers you expand opportunities for students to learn

[02:13:59] and the assessments are then a byproduct of that they can show mastery on power standards things that we would all agree that are going to help them be successful later on in academics and in life on these assessments at the same time they're just learning more and building their confidence and they can see that they can succeed so Patrick I just really want to thank you it's a big change that you've made here again it was a it's a total team effort this is this is not as dr. Hassett this is a heavy lift and and we've had many hands making light work of it thank you very

[02:14:38] much Patrick thank you thank you is there any other business by school board her superintendent. No ma'am. I know I usually try to gavel us out immediately but I do want to say that the past month or so has been a bit grueling for us and it's been a lot of work I know for staff and the board and I just wanted to thank everyone for their diligence during this time and I don't want to see you all for another week. Thank you very much. All right meeting adjourned.

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