Coraggio Consulting
Albemarle County School Board Regular Meeting, Thursday, September 26, 2024

Date: Thursday, September 26, 2024
Place: Albemarle County Public Schools / School Board meeting, Virginia
Length: 2h 50m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7j0IakekfM

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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[00:00:02] That was the best pre-meeting we've ever had. That's amazing. I call this meeting back to order, and I believe Dama's going to introduce our musicians, perhaps, and then we'll close out a closed session.

[00:00:19] Ms. Schneider. Oh, thank you. There we go. Good evening, board. I'd like to introduce our student musicians that have joined us this evening. Let's come up here first. We have Xander Chang on violin.

[00:00:37] He goes to Marcello High School. These are all seniors. adrian park who is a senior at albemarle sean fu senior at albemarle and eric chen who is a senior at albemarle thank you very much and we have a motion out of closed yes i move that the board certify 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

[00:01:16] in the closed meeting. Second. Moved by Ms. Osborne, seconded by Ms. Spillman. Could we please have a roll call vote on that? Dr. Bertrand is absent this evening. Ms. Osborne? Yes. Mr. Pace? Yes.

[00:01:34] Ms. Spillman? Yes. Dr. Acuff? Yes. Mr. Page? Yes. And Shirley? Yes. So moved. All right, so moved. Next we have our roll call. We'll start with Josh Black. Good evening everyone. I'm Josiah Black, School Division Council. Matthew Hawes, Superintendent. Chandra Hayes, Assistant Superintendent of Instruction. Ellen Osborne, Scottsville District. Allison Spillman, At-Large Representative. Judy Lee, Rivanna District. Kate Acuff, Jack Jewett District. Brian Paige, Middle District. Chuck Pace, Ryo District.

[00:02:12] Isabel Wong, Albemarle High School. Pat McLaughlin, Assistant Superintendent for Strategic Planning. Claire Kaiser, Assistant Superintendent for Organizational Development. Christine Thompson, Clerk of the Board. All right. That's who we have tonight. Next, we'll stand for the pledge.

[00:02:49] Next, we'll observe a moment of silence. Next, we have item 3.0, approval of the agenda. Do I hear a motion?

[00:03:24] I move. We approve tonight's agenda. Second. Moved by Dr. Acuff, seconded by Mr. Page. All those in favor? All right. Agenda is approved. Next, we have 4.0 approval of consent agenda. Do I have a motion?

[00:03:43] I move to approve the consent agenda. Second. Moved by Ms. Spillman, seconded by Dr. Acuff. Is there any discussion on that? All those in favor? Aye. All right. Consent is passed. Next, we have announcements, and we are going to start with Isabel Wong, who is our student representative from Albemarle High School. Good evening everyone. My name is Isabel Wong and I'm a senior at Albemarle

[00:04:17] High School. I'm here today representing YAPIC, the Young Asian and Pacific Islanders of Charlottesville Organization, where I serve as president. Our mission is to strengthen the Young Asian American and Pacific Islander community in the Charlottesville area. We propagate positivity regarding our heritage, provide support to ourselves and other disadvantaged minorities, and dismantle the societal generalizations that suppress our identities.

[00:04:44] I'm personally passionate about student involvement in shaping our educational policy, as well as advocating for equitable opportunities for all students. In addition to that, I'm involved in various extracurriculars, so here's some background info about me.

[00:05:00] I play on the Admiral Varsity Volleyball Team, serve as Vice President of the Society of Women Engineers, and am an active student in MESA, Amaral's math, engineering, and science academy. In the future, I'd like to pursue a double major in the visual arts and applied mathematics.

[00:05:18] I want to utilize my interdisciplinary interests to integrate diverse fields of study and provide creative problem-solving tactics. I also participate in my school's student equity and advisory team, where we work to foster inclusivity and equity in our school community.

[00:05:36] I've been a representative on Amaral's student equity team since its founding year and i'm so happy to have witnessed it grow and develop across the county thank you for your time thanks so much isabel and we're very excited to have you on the board and as i tell all of our student reps please feel free to speak up ask questions and represent the students so thank you very much next we have school board and superintendent business do we have any i just have a couple of things first i want to welcome isabel it's wonderful to have you

[00:06:07] here i i do want to say a big congratulations to monticello high school this week on tuesday they had 100 staff attendance so for a school that size to be able to have all of their employees in attendance on the same day is an accomplishment and i think it reflects the efforts of our entire school community i want to just note that i on monday i had the opportunity and privilege to to visit Blue Ridge Detention Home School, where right now there are 37 students enrolled.

[00:06:44] And so that's a regional detention center, so it's students from all over the region, and some from Albemarle. The atmosphere was calm and productive, and it reflected the dedication of the school staff to providing a supportive instruction environment for learning.

[00:07:01] The director, Tanner Boyle, shared insights into the school's unique approach. And one of the things that they have that's used throughout Virginia is a program called Sidnet. And basically it's a closed circuit telephone and texting information system.

[00:07:18] And he brought that, the whole reason it came up was because once students get used to using it, they're constantly communicating with him, asking for more books to read. Because for many students, when they're attending there, it will be the first time that they finish a book from cover to cover.

[00:07:36] And then they get addicted to that they want to keep keep reading. Mr. Boyle explained that once they get used to using it they do build stronger relationships with the staff and as I mentioned earlier they really want to get after reading books. They do require a silent sustained reading periods and that leads to their first finished book.

[00:07:59] I got to observe the PE class with Ahmad Hawkins. Mr. Hawkins is a former NFL football player and he has a high energy class and they were meeting in the gym on Monday and practicing layups with a lot of feedback from him and Mr. Boyle told me it's not uncommon for when a student resides at Blue Ridge that within a month or so many students lose between 50 and 70

[00:08:31] pounds because of their following fda guidelines and nutrition and also the portions sizes which they often complain about initially but then as they watch their fitness increase they they appreciate that i was able to observe mr allen's english class where students were reading out loud the odyssey through a graphic novel and he was using the promethean board for kahoot quizzes and deepening the students understanding and mr. hill science class students were making

[00:09:07] intro just as they do in other traditional earth science classes the traditional baking soda volcanoes which were going off as i was visiting i did have a chance to meet with one of our albemarle students who thanks to the consistent support of its high school his high school teacher mary kelly who is a teacher at monticello high school as well as his teachers at blue ridge he's making remarkable academic progress and one of the things that mr. Boyle wanted to point out to me was that of all the counties Albemarle County's teachers are

[00:09:42] the most likely to follow up with a student who becomes incarcerated there and it's not just because they're trying to check in on academics he said that he will immediately get emails from teachers asking could they please visit the student because they're concerned about them and want to make sure they're okay also there's a dedicated security team cameron mccain josh linkus alan watson and donnell miller and they play an essential role in ensuring a safe welcoming environment and i really appreciate their assistance with my visit the work happening at blue ridge is mission critical it proves that

[00:10:21] no matter the circumstances every student has the potential to thrive with the proper support and care and i really appreciate the visit um i do want to just a quick announcement we will have a two-hour delay tomorrow due to the impending hurricane and also some of the critical conditions we we saw today and then are extending into this evening uh what we'll do is have a two-hour delay and then we'll reassess to see what we're going to do with the uh with the whole school day so we'll make a second announcement tomorrow morning but right now the announcements will be going out

[00:10:57] and you'll be hearing everyone's phones pinging and ringing while the board meeting's going on so thank you very much i appreciate your time thanks dr haas remind me the age range of the students at blue ridge they will they will be ranging from um late elementary school all the way up through uh post high school and i got to visit with several post high school students that were there thank you um i also just wanted to mention that this week i was able to um meet and speak with

[00:11:35] the uh building services pre-service which was it was really nice and i know that everyone has been working very hard we know we got the um presentation from matt workman last time but it was just nice to be able to come and say thank you so that was good all right um i believe we do not have any public comments still is that true christine okay public comment oh i'm sorry i apologize no it's not okay i was waiting for dr mclaughlin thank you and next we have dr mclaughlin 8.1 assessment accreditation update all right good evening board members i'm pat mclaughlin assistant superintendent

[00:12:13] for strategic planning and i'm here tonight to give you an update on our accreditation and accountability results from the 23-24 school year tonight's presentation is going to be relatively high level but more detailed information about everything that you are going to hear is attached to electronic school board you have three items in there one is the accreditation detail report which goes school by school and assessment by assessment and gives you information on on how our kids did for each of the schools the other is a unadjusted pass rates for our students in

[00:12:52] reading writing math and science and the final piece that's in there is growth adjusted pass rates for our achievement gap groups if you have any questions about the specifics of those i'll be happy to take them tonight. So just as a quick reminder, the current assessment system and accreditation system that we're under uses uses two primary methods of gauging school's progress.

[00:13:16] The first is what we call our assessment results. Those are unadjusted results. Just the number of students who took an SOL test divided by the, I'm sorry, the number of students who passed an SOL test divided by the number of students who took an SOL test. That's where you see any comparisons to to the division as a whole from a school that's where you see comparisons to the state the other factor that we'll discuss tonight is accreditation that is where we adjust student scores for growth so if a student doesn't pass a reading test but they showed growth from uh the previous year to the um to the next year they count as a pass for purposes of accreditation

[00:13:56] that's a very simplified way to uh to uh describe it and if you have any questions i'll be happy to provide more details about those. So I'd like to start tonight with our assessment results. These are unadjusted for growth. These are where we can get a comparison to the state. In reading we are up 1% from last year to 75% of our students passing their reading tests and all of our achievement gap groups with the exception of Hispanic students and students with disabilities showed improvements from the previous year. In writing we are up 5% to 78% and we had improved performance for all achievement gap groups with the exception of our

[00:14:34] Hispanic students. In math we are up 3% to 72% overall and it improved in all achievement gap groups and in science we are up 1% from last year to 68% and improved in all of our achievement gap groups except for Asian students. Despite those improvements significant achievement gaps remain and if you look at our our unadjusted scores and you look at our overall results compared to just about any of our achievement gap groups our Hispanic students our students with disabilities our economically disadvantaged students our black students there's a gap and in some time usually a double-digit gap that's there

[00:15:13] so we're that's a continued area of focus for us to try to close those gaps with our assessment results the second piece in accreditation and accountability are our accreditation results in English are in the only places you see growth adjusted results are in English and in math. Science doesn't have growth adjustments, it's just a straight pass rate there. But in English we improve performances for our achievement gap, all of our achievement gap groups except for Asian students who came down from 95 to 93 percent and our English learners who held steady at 93 percent. In math we improved performance for all achievement

[00:15:53] gap groups and saw some double-digit growth for our black students and our economically disadvantaged students. And those scores ultimately lead to accreditation ratings for each one of our schools. Each of those categories, there's six categories for our elementary and middle schools. There's nine categories for our high schools that they are judged on. Each one of those gets a level one, a level two, or a level three. Level one's the highest level of performance, as you you probably knew. And any schools with all greens are considered level one. Any number of level twos, the whole school goes to a level two, and any number

[00:16:32] of level threes, the whole school goes to a level three. You can be a level one school or a level two school, and you're accredited with the state. If you have any level three indicators, you are what we call accredited with conditions, which means you have to do some more targeted improvement with the Department of Education. Our level one schools, we improved from four schools being at level 1, meaning every single category was green for them, to 12 this past year. Level 2, we went down from 12 to 4. And level 3, we went down from 8 to 7 schools that were there. 10 schools improved

[00:17:08] their ratings compared to the 22-23 school year. Three schools had a rating decrease and two schools jumped from level 3 to level 1. That was Henley Middle School and Monticello High School. And so this is where our schools are landing technically this is still preliminary results the state just announced today that they're going to release these officially on Monday September 30th we don't anticipate any changes to these that we've got 16 schools that are accredited three schools that are accredited using a three-year waiver and what that means is that they have at

[00:17:45] least one level three category which would normally put them into accredited with conditions, but the state, if you have hit all of your achievement targets for three years in a row, the state then gives you a three-year waiver, where even if you drop in a category to a level three, you remain accredited for accreditation purposes.

[00:18:06] So those three schools are Journey, Walton, and Scottsville, and then we have four schools that are accredited with conditions that do not have a three-year waiver, and those are agner burleigh mountain view and scottsville and that's where we are uh at the start of the presentation i said that's where we are for this year uh next year this accreditation system is getting totally redesigned uh by the state uh we are just starting to get the details of what that is going to look like uh instead of hearing schools are accredited or non-accredited in the future you're going to see these four categories that we're going to have schools that are distinguished

[00:18:43] that are on track that are off track or that need intensive support uh it is a uh more complicated perhaps than uh than our current uh system uh i would be happy to um to come back at some point i think we'd probably need more time than we have tonight to explain all the details about it in fact we don't quite know all of them for our middle and high schools uh we know them for our elementary schools yet and hopefully within the next two weeks we're going to get all the details for how our middle and high schools uh will be um evaluated on this system we are however uh starting last

[00:19:16] week we're able to uh predict where our elementary schools would have been if they if we were on this model for last year's tests and we would have had one school that was in the distinguished category that would have been murray elementary school we'd have eight schools that were on track and and we would have six schools that were off track.

[00:19:38] And one of the things that is interesting about this new model is that every one of our off track schools is a Title I school. And that worries me that we've got a model that's set up to make it even more challenging for some of our most challenged students in schools to be in one of those top tier categories.

[00:20:01] I will say that one thing we don't know is some of these schools are right on the cusp between on track and off track. The state hasn't set their rounding protocols yet, so while this is our best guess right now, they may come out at some point and say, "No, it's actually a little bit different than what we heard."

[00:20:20] But our best guess is that, and hopefully in a couple of weeks we will be able to tell you where our middle schools and our high schools would have landed. And so that's the overview of accreditation and accountability tonight. I'd be happy to take any questions.

[00:20:36] I noticed that both the off-track and the needs intensive support claim that the state's going to provide more support. Have they talked about that element of the new system? Not with significant detail.

[00:20:52] I saw something earlier this week about a specific amount of funding that was going to go toward those schools but we don't know um we are unaware of the details right now of what that might look like a follow-up to that um so what does the state do now when they go in to support a school so we so like we have uh any school that has a level three indicator uh goes into what we call state monitoring which means we have a liaison with the office of school quality and they take us through in the school through a protocol of doing a needs assessment at

[00:21:29] the school doing a performance improvement plan or doing a school improvement plan for the school and then we the schools collect artifacts and meet with the state at the end of the year to say hey here's what we were doing and it actually is a it used to be a really uncomfortable process in the past couple of years it's turned into a very supportive one in my experience where the the folks from the office of school quality really do want to be helpful to the schools we have modified our school strategic planning process to mirror a lot of the things that we would expect the state to ask of us if we

[00:22:05] have when we have schools in with a level three indicator so so we've tried to design it so our schools are already doing that kind of work we think it's good work for all the schools to be doing and they don't have to repeat it for the for the DOE yeah because with a new system I'm a little dubious that they can support the number of schools that are going to end up being categorized in one in it in that category that that will need intensive support so okay i was just wondering uh what

[00:22:39] necessarily like defines like meeting the state's expectation is this purely sol and like testing based or are there other components so are you talking about a current system that we just the new system is going to be based on primarily on SOL scores some things like chronic absenteeism are going to factor into that things like the growth of our English language learners acquisition of English language skills is going to factor into that and then they also factor in what they're defining as growth which means something very different than what we're used to with growth in our current accreditation model currently students

[00:23:18] get what's called a vertical scale score on their SOL assessments, and the state puts out bands. And if you move from one band to another between, say, your sixth grade and your seventh grade reading test, you've shown growth in that. There is a new system called the VVAS system that sets a different target for kids based on their -- a longer history of their SOL testing and says that I think this student should based on everything else we've seen this student should score a 430 on their sol test to be able to show growth uh next year one of the things that is going to be different about this

[00:23:56] system is that growth used to only help us uh in accreditation now growth is every single student is judged whether they grow uh to the expected rate or not and growth can actually have a negative impact on on which category you land in in the new accreditation model okay uh i have a question about the adjusted pass rate how exactly is that determined is growth sort of factored in yeah so let me um i'll put up an example for you graham i think it might be easier to i'm sorry mr page

[00:24:31] it might be easier to uh to see here so this is um the accreditation detail report that is in your packet and on this first page this is for Agner Elementary School and this first page is all of their English data their reading tests that they took last year and if you look in this top box here under the where it says all students so that's every kid in the school who took a test third fourth and fifth graders under the passing column there were 115 kids who passed their reading SOL test got a score of 400 or above that year the next column shows

[00:25:09] recovery and what that means is the state gives you um extra uh points in your accreditation model if you have a student who failed the previous year but passed the current year uh after receiving remediation so those kids count twice uh for you so of those 115 seven of them uh received uh were recovery students who failed the year before past this year so they count two times for the state the next column is growth 30 students at agner did not pass their sol test but based on their scores from the previous year they showed growth they got better at that even though they still

[00:25:48] didn't hit the target of a 400 or above and so they count for what they call a growth pass just in that pass counts just the same as a student who passed an sol test with 400 or above and then the And the final category that's only in reading is EL progress.

[00:26:05] So there were nine students at Agner last year who didn't pass their SOL test, who didn't show growth, but were English language learners and showed growth on their WIDA test. They moved enough from the start of the year to the end of the year on their WIDA test that they count that for a growth in reading.

[00:26:23] And so if you add all of those up, the 115 passers, the seven recovery, the 30 growth, 9 EL progress and you divide it by 184 which is their total number of tests that gives you your rate of 87.5 anything above 75 is a level 1 65 to 75 is a level 2 below 65 is a level 3 generally there's a lot of other ways there's all these other things called like you can reduce your failure rate and not hit 65 but still be at one of these levels but for the most part that's how they they calculate the accreditation score to include growth.

[00:26:58] Has there been any response from the state that we know of to VASA's email or the various school boards, including ours, that have reached out with criticism or asking for more transparency on this? Do we know if they have acknowledged it or if there's been any response?

[00:27:16] I am unaware of that. I don't, yeah, I'm unaware of that. Okay, thanks. Patrick, one thing that stood out to me was when we had the academic achievement, we're seeing levels other than one often it was in science and i was just wondering if you had any idea of where we stand with the rest of the state with that and um just anything that you can tell me absolutely so with uh science overall we're i believe a point higher uh than the state um one thing i neglected to mention the virginia school quality profiles are where you can go in

[00:27:56] and you can see all of this you can go in as a division or by the school and you're correct there There are five schools, five elementary schools that had a level three indicator for science. One of the things, one of the parts of the story that doesn't necessarily tell, though, is that many of those schools were actually improving in science, but didn't improve enough to get out of level three.

[00:28:19] Some of them, and we're talking about some razor thin margins. One of the big frustrations, I know Mike Gairani had at Agner this year, is that he had, he was one test away from being a level two in science and he had two students who had scores of 399 which is one question away from passing their science test and so and so sometimes these you know you see that big red indicator there and it doesn't necessarily tell the complete story the accreditation detail report helps to get into that a little bit more and then we work with our principals to get even more detailed with that we do some reporting in power bi that breaks

[00:28:57] it out by grade level so they can see what's going on in third, fourth, and fifth and how their folks are doing. So not to say that science doesn't continue to be a focus for us. It certainly does. But we -- many of our schools were getting stronger in science last year compared to two years ago.

[00:29:15] And last year, if you recall, is the -- was the first year of the significantly more rigorous assessment in fifth grade science. And so I was kind of proud we even held steady and went up a little bit with that.

[00:29:36] Just a follow up probably for Dr. Hayes then. Do you think that the improved literacy curriculum and the coming improved math curriculum are going to help with those science scores, ultimately? One of the things that the team has tried to do is create some alignment between other content areas with science, literacy, social studies, so that they can either kind of introduce some concepts through other content or support concepts in other content areas.

[00:30:08] So we're hoping to see, we're excited about what we have, we're hoping to see some growth. Of course this is a new product and people have to get, you know, acclimated with it, but you know, we're at the point where we're getting ready to do some of the first assessments. But there is alignment in the pacing guides between different content areas and then once Once we get a look at the curriculums that are available for math, we can start to kind of work out.

[00:30:32] But right now we just don't know what the state is going to offer up for options. Thank you. Very much along the lines of what Chair Lee just asked. What does our science curriculum look like in the elementary and middle schools?

[00:30:49] And when's the last time it's been, I don't know, reviewed? So we just adopted Five Ponds Press in our schools, and one of our goals this year is to provide hands-on learning experiences for all of our students, and so Ms. Katina Dudley has been working diligently to make sure that the schools have materials so that when the students take the assessment, they've actually had some practice and hands-on, and as they're working with the technology-enhanced items, they're familiar with it.

[00:31:24] So we are making some adjustments and some changes to support teachers in the classroom so that when students see the new materials and curriculum, they can connect it to what they see when they take the test in the spring. I mean, I know that the state led the charge on the literacy materials, and now they're doing with the math.

[00:31:44] Is there any mumblings at the state level about science curriculum, or is that down the road? I haven't heard anything. Okay. But, you know, sometimes they surprise us. Are we adopting a new science curriculum next year, or science textbooks, anyway?

[00:32:03] We still have to do some work around adopting more additional science textbooks. But those are for some of our upper level classes, like our AP classes and things like that. But for our elementary or our grades, we've already just done the adoption with Fireponds Press.

[00:32:25] Oh, I will also mention that at the ACES meeting, the last ACES meeting I attended, Katina did show us some of the test questions, and I found them to be quite elliptical. And it's not one of those things like, are you smarter than a fifth grader? Like, I could understand, but it was just written in a really, you know, hard to understand way. So I do understand that, you know, some of the test questions are just hard, harder than they need to be, not really testing the knowledge, but just testing like can you read backwards sort of so in your test taking skills exactly

[00:32:59] testing so anyway I just want to mention that I just wanted to know if some of those materials that you guys are purchasing for the elementary sciences and social studies too for that matter is is a content trade books things stuff that kids can read during literacy period that could support their science instruction absolutely our team works pretty really closely together our elementary curriculum coordinator for ELA for science math they have meetings every week to work together to make sure that what students are seeing is

[00:33:39] consistent across all of the subject areas and that teachers feel supported in all of the areas because they're elementary so they're teaching you know of course multiple multiple subjects there but they work together to make sure that there's alignment and that students can see similar themes throughout different content areas.

[00:33:55] Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Just one more for you, Patrick. Other than having different, more proactive names for these categories, you know, off track and need support, what do you see as the practical value of this new evaluation system?

[00:34:21] The advice I -- each year we go and we meet with every school about accreditation and just kind of run through the accreditation detail report and make sure we're all on the same page with that and talk about planning for this year. And the advice I give everyone is keep doing what you're doing. Keep focusing on getting kids more literate.

[00:34:38] Keep focusing on getting kids more adept in math and science. Getting kids into school so that they're not chronically absent. And let's not worry about labels right now, you know, because we're -- I think, as you all alluded to, some of the things we're hearing from the state is it's up to 60% of the schools in Virginia are going to be in the off track or the needs intensive support category.

[00:35:01] And something just doesn't ring true to me with that. And so I'm encouraging everyone, keep your eyes on the goal of increased student achievement. And if we do that, then we're doing the good work that we should be doing. Thank you.

[00:35:19] Any other questions or comments? All right. Thanks very much, Patrick. Thank you. - Thanks, Patrick. - Thank you. - We are scheduled, I know it's early, but we are scheduled for a break because we have a meaty student pathway exploration after that, so it's 7:06, so I'll see everyone at 7:16.

[00:36:03] - I do not ask-- - I wasn't expecting any questions. - Judy turned toward you.

[00:36:18] - Just kind of put some pressure on it. You know what, I'm looking for it tonight at home when I go to bed, I did the same thing last night, I had my ice pack in the freezer, and I just laid, I laid on my, this side, and just lay it right there, and I was like, ah, this is heaven.

[00:36:45] Well, he said these, I don't know, I don't trust it, I don't trust it, because it's my mom. Yeah, it's supposed to be, but I know it's supposed to be.

[00:36:53] i call this meeting back to order next we have mr domer with our student pathway exploration part

[00:45:42] one good evening school board my name is craig domer i'm the executive director of curriculum assessment and instruction and it's my pleasure this evening to introduce our two-meeting pathway exploration work session we're going to give an overview of pathways high school redesign it will also include an overview of cte programming as well as k-12 arts programming and how we advise students and families and making decisions around career and academic advising and pathways before going further just highlighting our division's vision and mission

[00:46:20] of course working together as a team to end the predictive value of race class gender and special capacities for our students with our goals of thriving students affirming and empowering communities and equitable transformative resources high school redesign and pathways have some very explicit strategic plan connections particularly in objective 2 strategy 2 that acps will ensure academic requirements allow students time to pursue interests in and outside of school and for objective three strategy one that acps will develop learning pathways that align with

[00:46:55] virginia's career clusters with exposure to career pathways beginning in elementary school because we do a lot of this work in the department of instruction and out in all the schools we kind of have four questions that keep kind of going through our minds how do we leverage student interests and personal vision for their future to improve their engagement with school how do we prepare students for multiple launching points after high school college and career how do we prepare students who don't earn a post-secondary degree for successful outcomes and how do we partner with families and community partners through the pathway exploration journey with

[00:47:33] intentional touch points to support students to meet their goals at this point i just like to pause and really highlight all the educators that are both here tonight and work on these questions every day in the schools they they bring these questions and our strategic plan to life with their care and concern for students and we really couldn't do any of this work without them tonight's For tonight's agenda, we're going to start with an overview of pathway exploration, college and career readiness data, which will highlight the why of all of this work, and then we'll have smaller kind of rotations that will allow you to interact with the educators and teachers

[00:48:09] around K-12 arts and secondary pathway exploration. We'll wrap up briefly at the end of tonight with emerging themes and next steps and also to hear any questions or comments you have in preparation for our second work session in October. Right now, though flexible, our second work session will focus on high school redesign, the scholar studios, industry credential, and work-based learning opportunities.

[00:48:34] And then we'll wrap up the two sessions as a whole. We started with just some objectives about what we were hoping to accomplish in these two sessions. I wanted to share them with you. We're hoping that the board and the teachers and the educators and all of us together will be able to know, understand, and do these bullet points.

[00:48:59] some feedback along the way about how we're doing would be great and we'll try and achieve these goals and without taking any more time I'm going to turn it over to miss Megan Maynard who is our coordinator of CTE and really coordinator of all things college and career readiness so miss Maynard and good evening to get us started I want to talk a little bit about what we know about how young people view pathways and over the next few sessions as we talk about both current state and future direction we've been trying to follow

[00:49:38] the research about what our current students are saying about how they see pathways. When students talk about the future, they're most likely to describe how they want to live versus what they want to be. They imagine themselves thriving in the future but have different levels of confidence with regards to knowing which pathways will help them to meet their aspirations. They seek to experiment and try on different pathways. Traditionally, we have looked at careers as linear paths within industry sectors but in today's global economy more people are

[00:50:15] picking and moving across pathways that allow them to use their diverse skills and talents to tackle the problems that they want to solve the issues they care about and the way that they want to make the world a better place pathway exploration overlaps multiple areas and so you'll hear over the next two sessions from lots of different educators across the spectrum of content and support areas all pathways both in CTE and arts fit into the national career cluster model you can see on the screen the most recent released national career cluster model which is slightly different

[00:50:55] than the model that we've used for the past couple decades which was previously just a list of 17 different career clusters the middle school programs within the CTE and arts offer exploratories in high school we offer sequences of courses and these individual course sequences are also wrapped throughout our k-tech offerings and our scholars scholar studio model so that students who want to be a part of a small group of peers pursuing similar interests can learn and explore their pathway together all of our k-tech programs have at least a two-course sequence

[00:51:32] of cte classes and all of the scholar studios have elements of cte and or the arts infused throughout them they include pathway sequences industry credentials and work and community-based learning videoe offers almost 600 different cte courses and here in acps we offer over a hundred this year we had almost 5 000 middle school and high school enrollments in cte classes cte is unique in that in addition to being tied to student interests we have an expectation that our courses are also preparing students for life beyond high school in order to provide high quality

[00:52:12] experiences for students, we look annually at student interest data to determine which programs and courses our students are most passionate about. With this at the foreground, we analyze regional labor market data, and we look at high-skill, high-wage, and high-demand careers.

[00:52:31] The UVA's Weldon Cooper Center provides data for us around that, and you can see links to that information here in the slides. With regards to what high-skill, high-wage, and high-demand refer to, high-skill refers to anything in addition to a high school diploma.

[00:52:48] So that could be work experience, a credential, but beyond a high school diploma, it might be an associate's degree, a graduate degree, a bachelor's degree. High wage means above the average wage for Virginia, and high demand means above average demand in Virginia.

[00:53:06] Career and technical education includes more than just coursework. It includes career exploration, industry credentialing, and work-based learning as well. Tonight we're going to be focused on pathway exploration, and in our next session we'll go into some of the other aspects.

[00:53:21] ACPS students have multiple touch points with pathway exploration over the course of their student experience. Career development starts in preschool and elementary school classrooms through career awareness via counseling lessons and guaranteed field trips.

[00:53:38] In middle schools, all ACPS students take a career investigations course in sixth grade in which they explore all of the various career clusters and reflect on their personal interests. Additionally, exploratories in art, STEM, and entrepreneurship are available to middle school students.

[00:53:55] Through advisory and seminar in our middle schools and high schools, students draft their personalized academic and career plans and curate artifacts for their portfolio. In high school, every student takes an economics and personal finance course as well as two sequential electives in either CTE or Fine Arts as a graduation requirement.

[00:54:14] All Virginia graduates are also required to meet at least one college and career readiness indicator for graduation which can include college coursework industry credentials or work-based learning pathway exploration is a key element supporting our vision that our learners are engaged in authentic challenging and relevant learning experiences becoming lifelong contributors and leaders in our diverse and dynamic society next i'm going to introduce rusty carlock who's going to talk a little bit about our college and career readiness data thank you megan and thanks

[00:54:49] to all of you. So I want to frame this conversation a little bit with data and how we're doing with regard to preparing students for life after high school in Albemarle County Public Schools. So our goal is to think a little bit about what the historical trends tell us in our community, what we're doing well, and what we can do to improve the opportunities our programming is providing students as they transition into adulthood. It's going to consist of both quantitative metrics so we can look at what the the numbers say but we also want to hear from the voices of our students so we'll be presenting a little bit of that qualitative data as well so at the top level the college career and civic

[00:55:28] readiness indicator is something that the state provides and so this is a metric for evaluating how we're doing in terms of preparing students for that transition to post-secondary life to meet this metric prior to graduation from high school our students have to do one of the following pass a college level course which could be a dual enrollment or advanced placement course or an actual college course, participate in a work-based learning program or complete what the state considers an industry credential. You can see at this table that we're doing quite well on this metric with over 90 percent of last year's cohort meeting it and that was also an improvement

[00:56:04] over the previous year. However, we do want to make a distinction between the state's metrics around this and what we consider internally as important metrics for preparing students for life after high school and we want to make one important distinction between an occupational competency assessment which is our workplace readiness and wise financial literacy assessments and licensure and industry credentials while the occupational competency assessments they're useful assessments for evaluating general student competencies most of our industry partners do not hold these as indicators of success in the workforce and they prefer industry standard

[00:56:42] credentials or licensure tailored to their specific industries such as emt serve safe nurses aid comptia plus and information technology etc so when we look at our students earning credentials as the state defines it you can see that the vast majority of our students are earning those credentials through the the wise assessment and through those you know occupational competency assessments much fewer are earning those industry standard credentials and about the vast majority of those are um earning them in k-tech not in our our site-based schools this is important and this

[00:57:21] is just a few graphs from a national study and looking at the relationship between students participating in a college and career experiences in high school and then later outcomes around career and college and you can see that students who participated in those kinds of career experiencing and exploring activities both of those had high correlations to students both being employed later as a young adult and also attending college.

[00:57:49] And so that's something that we really wanted to highlight as well as historically there's sort of an old model where people think of, oh, you either go into career tech or you go to college preparation. That's not how it works anymore. It's really can be both. And oftentimes they work in conjunction with each other. We have students who earn industry standard credentials and then use those to get high paying jobs to help them pay for their college so they can actually attend college.

[00:58:14] Now I'm going to pass it over a little bit to Emily to talk about our students with disabilities and how we support students to prepare for life after high school. And good evening. My name is Emily Skelton, and I am a special education coordinator for the county.

[00:58:34] The last slide talked about how important those career experience-- or career experiencing activities were important for students to be to connect just with the outcome of having a career and being prepared for that after high school and for this particular group of students students with disabilities it's incredibly important that we're offering targeted and high-quality opportunities for these students because as you can see by the data for both the country and the state and then the county outcomes for students

[00:59:13] with disabilities in terms of college enrollment, overall lower levels of college enrollment for students with disabilities across the board, overall lower levels of employment, and then overall higher levels of poverty for students with disabilities. So just to highlight that providing early and often opportunities for students to be able to figure out what they need to do to get to where they want to be is extremely important.

[00:59:41] Some of the ways that we are currently working to offer these opportunities to students in Albemarle County are through our partnership with DARS, which is the Department of Aging and Rehabilitative Services. This can occur through pre-employment transition services, which abbreviated as pre-ETS or vocational rehab.

[01:00:03] And these are opportunities for students to work with job coaches or job shadowing so that students can practice and do assessments to what skills they have and what skills they need to gain to be able to gain employment. And a big thing that we do is partner with DARS to refer families to these services so that they have a counselor and case manager to help them navigate these resources.

[01:00:28] For our population of students who require additional supports, I'm sure that you all have heard of our CBASE program, which is our students who-- most of them are working on applied studies diplomas, and they require the most amount of supports for our students who are in our elementary through high schools.

[01:00:46] Many of these students have access to the CTE courses that are offered to all students with additional adult support through CBASE. But a lot of these classrooms are also offering their own specially designed instruction in career readiness, including through coffee carts, student enterprise for that, community trips and volunteering.

[01:01:07] And this is all guided by the student transition plan their IEP. At Post High also, which is our program for adults 18 to 22, and I know many of you attended our graduation last year, these are our C-based students after they exit from high school.

[01:01:23] We partner through DARS for these students for individual referrals, but we also provide a community-based curriculum and coursework, like that is the core of what Post High does. and in addition to that this fall we have invested in a curriculum called project life at post high which we learned about through a butler tech site visit this past spring and staff are going through implementation training for that this coming month and there's just an overview of the curriculum that the project life program will provide to our students at post high

[01:02:02] And next, I'm going to pass it back to Rusty to continue to talk about broader data on student outcomes. Thank you, Emily. And I want to note that I did a really poor job of introducing Emily. Emily Skelton is our special education coordinator, and she does a fantastic job.

[01:02:20] Also wanted to note prior to getting into this that another group that often is asked about is our English learners. And we work really hard to also support that group of students for a positive transition into adulthood. However, I want to note that the state funding and the federal laws around supporting English learners are not nearly as robust for English learners as they are for our special education population.

[01:02:43] So some of the programs that exist for our special education students don't exist for our English learners. So we want to look not just at how students are doing now with us, but we want to look at how students have done after they leave Albemarle County Public Schools. And so to do that, we use the National Student Clearinghouse data set, which captures around 90 percent of all students post-secondary outcomes in the united states or anyone who enrolls in an institution of higher education and that's defined as a two or four-year institution it's a data system it's not perfect it doesn't capture everyone but it is the one that the state uses and most states use to track their post-secondary outcomes when we look at the data from our 2015

[01:03:23] cohort of graduates from albermouth county public schools we find that about 22 never enrolled in in an institution of higher education and around half of our students enrolled in an institution of higher education and completed a degree, but there's around one in three students who enrolled in an institution of higher education but did not earn a degree.

[01:03:43] And so that's something that is concerning because in some cases these students may be worse off than students who did not enroll in an institution of higher education because they may have incurred college debt without the benefit of a degree. I want to note that this is not just an Albemarle County issue. This is a national issue that many high schools are beginning to wrestle with to try to understand how they can do a better job of supporting students to transition into adulthood more smoothly and to do more on the front end to support that process.

[01:04:13] We also know that college attendance rates are declining nationally. When we look at data from more recent cohorts of students, we see that these trends have stayed fairly consistent with more than half or around half of our graduates either not enrolling in an institution of higher education or enrolling and not earning a degree. This one is based on a four-year time scale so that we can look a little bit more recent in terms of our cohorts. The bottom line of this analysis is that more than half of our students are entering adult life without a post-secondary degree or certification. So that means it's all the more important for those first two groups that we see there that we are

[01:04:51] doing everything in our power to make sure that they're either earning those industry standard certifications when they're still with us or getting as much of a head start to be successful once they enroll in a college to get there. It's important for us not just to look at these quantitative metrics but also to consider what are our students telling us about their experience in our current pathways for college and career readiness. So we can look at our panorama survey data and the particular scale that we see here is valuing of school and that's an important scale to answer this question because it looks at how students feel

[01:05:26] that school connects to what they care about what their future goals are and what their interests are and what they do on a day-to-day basis and you can see that third graders are really excited about school they they love it they feel like it connects to what they care about what they're interested in and and what they're going to be interested in the future but then as kids get older through the process they begin to value school less and less until we have less of less than half of our secondary students are saying that you know school connects to what they care about and what they're interested in part of this is developmental so if we look at the national average that's happening across the board as kids get older they're less finding school to be less

[01:06:03] valuable for them but you can see that our data starts to trend negatively relative to the national data in middle and high school so that does show that we have an opportunity to add value to that experience for our secondary students when we look at it across our schools this is something that sort of binds our schools together that we are all below the national average there so it's something that we can all work together on so all of our three comprehensive high schools as well as community laboratory school has that as a place that we could add value so we wanted to learn more about well why are students saying this like why are you saying that

[01:06:39] you don't value school so we went to our students at Monticello High School and conducted some youth participatory action research, which they were super excited about. There was actually two students who led it, Duran Buluma and Kimi de la Cruz and Monticello High School. They were already interested in looking at some of these things around, you know, how can we make school more interesting for students. And so we worked with them and they did a fantastic job of interviewing 25 of their peers. They followed great protocol in stratifying their sampling. They used EMIC coding to identify themes in the data. And then they went back to the students afterwards and said, "Hey, I just want to make sure is this what you're telling us and this is what they found

[01:07:17] they found that the students at Monticello High School were saying that some of the reasons they didn't value school was there was too much lecture there's not enough activities and too much free time and there was a lot of busy work and fill in the blank packets from their perspective but they also asked them what are ideas for how to make school more valuable and some of this came from what are teachers doing that that does you know respond to to what you're interested in and they said you know hands-on learning relevant topics and lessons, and many spoke of their career interests and goals for the future, and they wanted their high school classes to be more connected to those, not just in career and technical education, but across their courses. They wanted to

[01:07:53] be more connected to what they plan on doing after they graduate. They felt that they were not always prepared for the real world after graduation, and they wanted more opportunities to practice the skills they would need in career and in college in their classes. So I'm going to pass this on to Emily, who will share some of the voices of our students in the special education program and how they've experienced that transition to life outside of high school. So when we talk about data on post-secondary outcomes for our students with disabilities, the biggest data point that we get every year is indicator 14, which is school divisions are responsible for conducting phone

[01:08:31] interviews to survey a former student. So this past year we called over the summer students who graduated in 2023 and ask them questions about their employment status about their higher education status what they were pursuing and also what barriers they had to access we're still waiting for the state to get back to us with like our numbers for this past year because they're just just due at the beginning of this past month but for me the most powerful piece of this was actually the conversations that we have with families i got the opportunity to actually conduct many of

[01:09:06] of these phone calls myself this summer, and it really was powerful to hear about some of the amazing success stories that our students with disabilities are experiencing. I heard from a lot of really proud families of students with learning disabilities who are succeeding in college. I heard one student started his own business right out of high school, and his family was so proud of him for that. On the opposite side of that, I heard from a lot of families that they needed help figuring out how to get their student with a disability a job or how to get them resources

[01:09:42] to access college. So for me, that is our charge and that is why we want to be providing these opportunities for students to experience and grow in these areas before they leave us after graduation. So some opportunities for growth for students with special education, really just continuing to collaborate with DARS and support for teachers and families in navigating that process to make sure that families have the tools they need to access those resources and understand what's available to them before they exit.

[01:10:15] Also, continued investment in high-quality programs, such as Project Life, that provide that systematic curriculum for students with more significant disabilities. And then increased collaboration between CTE and special education to enhance opportunities for our students with IEPs, just because there's lot of expertise there I think that we could benefit from further collaboration and then also continuing to support students with IEPs in our CTE courses and at this point I'm going to pass it off to Jill Dahl assistant principal at Albemarle High School to provide more information about that hi good evening

[01:10:50] everyone thank you so I'm just gonna offer a little a close like zoom in a little bit on what classes look like at the high school setting and I'm speaking solely for Albemarle High School. So when we look at what our percentage of students with IEPs or that are identified as Ls, our school average is 11 percent based on our 23-24 data, and our L average is 14 percent. In our collaborative classes, the way the model currently works, which is pretty common across, you know, across the nation, is that SPED and L support is pushed into core classes,

[01:11:29] your math science social studies and language arts or English and I think there's always been an emphasis around you know that the requirements of SOL graduation requirements and so I would like for us to look a little differently that CTE is a graduation requirement first and foremost but these are also areas where the industry credentials that these students could earn would also provide them with job opportunities after they leave high school.

[01:12:01] So I just wanted to offer a few scenarios of what those classes look like. In our, I'll pick a few CTE courses where we have both SPED and L, whereas in typically in our core classes, it's a SPED collaboration or a L collaboration.

[01:12:23] seldom do you have both unless you have dually identified students. In our CTE courses, teachers may have both students, and they do not have a collaborative partner. And often our CTE teachers are career switchers and are still working on the teaching pedagogy, but they have the expertise that we need for these spaces.

[01:12:46] So in an engineering course where you have a lot of tools and equipment, we are average in our CTE-1 engineering materials and processes, which is, you know, there's saws and, what are the tools?

[01:13:07] Drills, like things that can cause harm, right? Safety. There's a lot of safety practice and measures that go into it before kids are allowed to use those. But in our average is for SPED enrollment in those courses is 18.5%, where our school average is 11.

[01:13:24] So we're almost double over-representation in a course where there is no support. For ELLs, it's 25.9% with no collaborative support. And so that's a narrative that's played out. And we are always working to support the teachers in those classroom spaces.

[01:13:44] But I think that it's a real, it's really important to put some emphasis there to see how we can do better so that students are able to obtain and get the experience they need to do well in those industry credentials.

[01:14:02] Another piece that we looked at was that, what that enrollment looks like from a level one course to level two you see the drop off of sped and l students and that go on to take that level two course um because the accessibility of it um which impacts us when it comes time for graduation so that's just like a close lens look at what it might look like in the classroom space at a high school so i hope that's helpful thank you turn it over back over to megan maynor

[01:14:37] So you heard a little bit of an overview on pathway exploration as well as a little bit about where we stand currently with our college and career readiness data.

[01:14:57] It's really great to have a student school board member here with us today. And I was in both Western Albemarle High School today. And this week is homecoming week for a few of our schools. So there's a lot of spirit. There's a lot of engagement. are, I don't want us to be confused when we say our data shows that students aren't necessarily valuing the learning in the middle school and high school. It doesn't mean they're not engaged, that they're not passionate about life, that there's not issues that they care about. They certainly do. I was an Albemarle High School graduate, so when I was thinking about Spirit Week this week, it brought me back to that moment in time for myself. My husband graduated from our

[01:15:35] schools as well as all of our siblings. My kids went through our schools, and now I have a granddaughter who's on her way through our schools and so I'm deeply passionate about this work yes I know yeah another one on the way in November and so I'm deeply passionate about this work about the legacy of what we've done in Albemarle County and what we've done around current technical education I recognize where we are in terms of current state but our data says that while it may have worked for me it's not working for all students yet and we've got work to do and I'm really committed to improving in the future so as we looked at our data and we listened to our students and families we see

[01:16:11] opportunities for growth and improvement many of the challenges that we face are shared in divisions across the state they're shared across the country some of our focus areas are around engagement at the secondary level additionally with video ease newly adopted framework as Patrick was mentioning earlier an aspect of that is the ready for life framework which focuses on enrollment engagement in employment and enlistment and that is aligned with our efforts at increasing access to industry credentials, work-based learning experiences, and high-skill, high-demand, high-wage pathways. We'll share more about each of these in our October work session. We also know that

[01:16:51] we can do better in supporting our students with IEPs and our English learners in preparing for post-secondary outcomes, and we're looking at programming, professional development, and instructional strategies to mitigate some of these challenges. We're going to pause at this point to take some questions for myself or any of us on the team for Rusty Karlock I mean the data that showed that over half of our students don't go on to secondary or

[01:17:27] don't finish or don't even go have you stratified I'm sure you have stratified the data by demographic so for our more recent cohorts we're able to do that we're able to match our students with the older data from some of the cohorts we were looking at we don't have that capability to match it with the the national data set however in looking at some of the more recent cohorts and then it our data is not different from the national data in the sense that the students who are most likely to enroll in an institution of higher education and not finish are also our students who are most marginalized within our community

[01:18:05] I have a question and a comment mostly pertaining to the sped stuff what kind of jobs are these students getting specifically the c-base and the post high students who obviously need the most support while they're in acps what sort of jobs are they are we seeing when they come out i think it depends on the student i know a big part of the dars process for our c-base and post high students actually involves some really in-depth job assessments so we partner dars

[01:18:43] partners with vendors who are workplace coaches who will take students out at post high last year we had students who worked at local restaurants before like setting up the well they did assessments and some of them sustained employment at a local restaurant setting up the eating space before customers started to come in and cleaning and wiping menus we had some students who did assessments bagging groceries at grocery stores we've had students work doing like clerical work and shredding at a veterinary office i know this year post high is working with the department of

[01:19:23] transportation actually to partner with the shop to help with detailing buses and stuff between having groups of students on them but i think the biggest part here is trying to find employers that that are open and willing to have students with disabilities experience having a job and are willing to be flexible and offer accommodations.

[01:19:47] And in my experience, it really is about finding the best match for employer to student because those are the jobs that stick. And students are able to sustain employment there for a long time. Yeah, I think it was really indicative with the assessment and accreditation information we got from mr mclaughlin and then um the sped and the cte correlation you know it really is becoming apparent that we need more funding in our sped programs because a lot of these students do need more of that um hand-holding for lack of a better word um and and giving them access to these

[01:20:25] ctes i think is a great idea but if we can't help them succeed in those then we're really doing a disservice to those students. So that was more my comment that, you know, our demand is high and we're not meeting the needs. So that's something we really need to consider when we're looking at our budget for the next year. Thank you. Thank you. I had a question. I'm so sorry. I forgot who made this point. But it was about how it's like we have really robust support for like SPED students, but not as much for EL students. But my question was, I don't know how prominent this is in other

[01:21:04] schools but I see this because I'm a peer tutor at my school we work with like the newcomer center that has a lot of like life students which is like students with limited and or interrupted formal education and I was wondering if any of these policies and like CTE is also expanded to that or what you guys have in mind for those students Lauren McLean is also here and can speak best to that but I know that our peer tutors especially at Albemarle High School I heard the statistic that they supported 6,000 sessions last year alone and I think they our peer tutors supported around 68 different languages as well so

[01:21:43] it's a great opportunity to partner. Hello everyone I'll also add we love having the peer tutors at the newcomer learning community and so when we think about our students with limited or interrupted formal education one thing we have to recognize as we're looking at some of these credentials is that some Some of them actually aren't accessible to students because of their immigration status as well.

[01:22:08] That's something that we can't ask about. We're legally prohibited from doing so. But it's something that we know is coming up, right? And so that's something that we're trying to balance as we think about CTE access. But the other thing that we know is when we look at post-secondary readiness, it's so important for students to have full English language acquisition.

[01:22:28] And so our focus really from the English learner perspective is how are we encouraging our students to acquire english and use cte to invest them in getting the language skills that they want to get the job they want so that they're also growing their english and then can exit el status so there's kind of those two complicating factors did that answer your question thank you i i was uh i i like the idea of this eight week workplace skills course and i was kind of

[01:22:59] hoping you would be able to tell me more at ahs yeah the dars connected uh program the the project life curriculum yes and that's something that um i know a group of cte teachers and then some special education people went out to to butler tech um to just see a site replication of that and i there was a slot i have to go back to see um but there is a robust um site replication training

[01:23:38] that actually happens to be able to train the teachers and the staff in being able to implement this curriculum um to fidelity and i also know that there's a partner program associated with it called project search that i think replicates like work sites um with community partners to be able to pair students who have gone through the project life program and worked on work life and work home and community skills to be able to match them with that high quality and trained employer

[01:24:12] that would then be able to help them build further skills does that answer your question yeah i just wanted to know more when did when did the eight week course take place or is it going to take place so i think that this course is meant to be implemented through a whole school year um okay um so there's project search and project life project search is a program that's been in the state of virginia for quite a while and it helps as you mentioned connect students with workplace opportunities and project life was piloted by butler tech which is a cte national host site in

[01:24:51] Ohio that we went and kind of learned from they have found higher they found higher percentage of students success in their project search employment by providing students first with project life before they go into project search so the project life curriculum helps students to kind of gain some practice and some confidence in a supported environment through some of these skills that are listed here and then that helps them be able to have find more success in the project search where they're going out into the work site so we just started learning about this and are getting trained on it and so I think it

[01:25:27] hasn't been implemented yet okay yeah it sounds it sounds interesting for sure and I can follow up with more information if you'd like more yeah and once it's implemented I'm sure it could be a great opportunity to come come see what the students are doing with the curriculum too I had a question about the let's come up a couple times the sped and e-health support in the CTE courses is that funded differently from other types of courses? So it comes down to the FTEs

[01:26:03] that a school is allocated and so the priority goes towards the core content classes and then we I know at Albemarle we also are able to hire some TAs but they're not certified teachers that are able to provide some support but right now those are currently all being utilized in core content classes and so there just isn't enough FTEs enough people to go around I have a question

[01:26:38] about the lack of interest and how that appears to be falling in high schools and I think worksheets free time and not relevant where the three things mentioned in the data. Does that appear to be true in Albemarle County too with those answers from our county or were they from the nation or what? So the national data shows that students value school less as they get older. Those three themes that you mentioned were found by student researchers here in Albemarle County by talking to their peers. Do we have data to compare that to

[01:27:18] pre-COVID? Do we know if that was the same? We started doing our panorama data around the time of COVID, so we don't have that comparison data prior to that. My guess is it's increased since COVID, for sure. But we are aware of those things, so I guess we are thinking about something that could be done to sort of alleviate some of them in a way, right? I mean, miracles, yeah. Okay. Yes, our leadership team was very interested in this and was already starting to work on some things

[01:27:57] to talk about it. Okay. Thanks. Any other questions or comments? Nope. Mr. Normer. Thank you. I neglected to tell you before we started, we did include just a note catcher if you wanted to use it with the four questions at the top and then for each section of the presentation.

[01:28:19] We're already through the first two, so I have to do those from memory. But something for you to carry from this month to the next as well as we try and find some themes. At this point, we were going to break up into two kind of rotations so that you could interact of the teachers around k-12 arts and some of the counselors and teachers around how we advise students and families about pathways i think we're going to start with arts in 241 and with the pathways and advisory kind of group up here in the dais um if you guys want to split yourselves in half um and then we will switch at about 25 minutes so that the public can hear both presentations

[01:28:54] and it would be our slight preference for three board members to be up here and four to be in 241 but um i will leave it to yourself so uh three and three it's three and three and the student rep plus two oh i'm sorry so that would that would be our site preference but we'll leave it up to you we can do it yeah awesome thank you are we going to get three in here and four okay are we going down the hall 241. all right i'm staying here I just leave it here.

[01:30:07] We didn't achieve it.

[01:31:11] We're estimating it would be better.

[01:31:42] They didn't know the person. They don't know that.

[01:32:08] We still lie, so we need it. Bring down the gavel, Judy.

[01:32:28] I'm burdened.

[01:32:47] The fact that you're having a grandchild, because I thought you were, like, just out of college, literally.

[01:33:37] So I want whatever beauty, whatever, like, separate from this. All of us were like, I'm sorry, what did you say? We have five daughters, and our oldest daughter just had a baby. So you're a mom of five kids, too.

[01:33:52] And they're both. So it's like... All girls. wow yeah well alison has five five yeah i couldn't see and i look much older than her and hers are she's got grandkids good lord now you tell me oh man i feel like they age me 10 years every day we are waiting right yeah i think rosalyn's in the other person our way but what's

[01:34:21] happening in the other room is not being NS3 members this one's the one that's still being the enforcer I think that Rosalind's being the enforcer I think we're waiting on what school board number oh here we go

[01:34:56] sorry it's a song I don't feel bad about having to pee you could pee again? I could pee again I love it. Awesome.

[01:35:26] As I shared earlier, pathway exploration has touch points throughout our K-12 scope and sequence. Today, in this particular work session, we're going to be focusing on the secondary components of that.

[01:35:45] We'll start out looking at what pathway exploration touch points we have with a STEM teacher from Journey Middle School who's also one of our advisory teachers and has taught the career investigations class. Erin Percival, who is our instructional specialist, who will share a little bit about our guaranteed field experiences, and then we'll move into talking with our school counselors, McKenzie Crawford from Walton Middle School, Amy Wright from Western Alabama High School, and then I will finish this out in looking at our academic and career planning platform, which is great.

[01:36:24] Thank you. Love it. It's a very pathway that's going to be focused on careers.

[01:36:45] I hope as you kind of hear each of these, you'll be thinking about kind of our goals for our increasing awareness of students, their own assets, their skills, interests, talents, engaging them in an iterative cycle of career exploration and reflection around the pathways, and then opportunities for students to design plans that help them achieve goals that they imagine themselves.

[01:37:11] So the first touch point that we're actually going to talk about is advisory and seminar. So during middle school and high school advisory, students participate in activities and discussions about their futures. They use school links to help them identify strengths, skills, interests, and explore related career opportunities.

[01:37:30] This culminates in students setting SMART goals that they review and adjust annually. Advisory is really designed to drive students with opportunities to iterate their plans as their priorities and goals change. The second touch point is our guaranteed field experiences.

[01:37:45] All of our guaranteed field experiences provide opportunities for pathway exploration and include opportunities for students to consider the different occupations and careers of those working at the site and the different roles that they play. Additionally, we offer several career-centered trips.

[01:38:02] On October 15th, all freshmen will participate in Pathway Day, where they visit a local industry partner and experience the workplace. Beginning this fall, our 8th graders will visit both KTAC and Center One as they start making decisions about their high school academic plan. And in the spring, we host Senior Day, an annual event featuring local employers hiring for positions, offering opportunities for career workshops to help students navigate post-graduation options and information sessions about financial planning and job skills.

[01:38:34] And then the final touch point I want to talk about is Career Investigations. Career Investigations is a sixth-grade exploratory course offered at all middle schools. Sixth grade is a time when many students are just starting to consider their own strengths, interests, and futures. This allows them to flexibly imagine their future without being locked in on one specific occupation or pathway.

[01:38:57] And while students investigate a variety of career clusters, this is not a course where they're simply researching careers. Instead, cross-cutting skills such as communication collaboration, problem solving, and creativity are explored through the lens of different careers.

[01:39:12] Students select occupations and complete projects which they take on the role of someone in the field through project-based experiences. This provides students with a background for a culminating portfolio project. Lewis Griffin, I'm gonna introduce him, is a teacher at Journey Middle School who's taught this course and has a little bit more to share for you.

[01:39:30] Yes, so I've taught the course two years in a row. and one thing I really like about it, and I think it's unique, we split the course into three different units, and there are about six workplace readiness skills. So the first unit is communication and collaboration, second is creativity and innovation, and the third is critical thinking and problem solving.

[01:39:49] And why I personally like it as much is before I went into teaching, I actually had a career in each of those different fields, so I get to share my own personal experiences with that too. But like Erin said, it's a unique course because it's not just your typical career research, out what they do with the average salary growth in that industry you get to play the role in that career so an example would be you can play the role as a software developer and make a scratch game with block coding you can also play the role as an educator as an elementary educator make a lesson plan with actual real virginia standards of learning and they have a little template they can make a lesson plan um so not only do they get the hands-on part right there but they are going to

[01:40:29] be reflecting it in their portfolio so they reflect on it if it matches their interests matches their strengths and in the beginning of the course they do a little workplace personality assessment and they'll see if that matches that now sometimes they don't agree with what they're told their workplace personality type is and that's totally fine but they are going to reflect on that in each stage in each unit as we go through the portfolio and then we finish up where they get to imagine themselves in the future and they share it with some peers family and a teacher so that's an elective offering for sixth grade only is that correct correct and it's a nine-week course so we throw in a lot in a short amount of time but they get to cycle through and play

[01:41:09] different roles of different are there many nine-week like yeah so sixth grade they have like at least at journey middle school i know some other schools it's like a nine-week wheel they call it the wheel where every nine weeks they shift it gets them to expose them to different electives and have an opportunity to do a deeper dive and is that the same in all the middle schools?

[01:41:30] But yeah, yeah, the culminating project is the portfolio and then the real nice thing is that they get to share with family Share with friends and then they get this bring it back to the teacher and show with what everyone has said Yes Yeah, I think we didn't my oldest we moved here after sixth grade and then the twins were COVID year was sixth grade, so I don't think we actually experienced it.

[01:41:56] That's why I was curious. What percentage of the students take that class? So students that are taking like band or orchestra, that's those will be all year long exploratory and then AVID would be the same. So I want to say it's at least a good two thirds of the grade that will be in the wheel and take that, yeah.

[01:42:16] It's a big portion. Have you introduced, are you a counselor? I mean, who are you? I am a teacher at Journey Middle School. I just actually switched roles. I'm a CTE.

[01:42:32] I'm a STEM teacher. If you guys like to learn more about career pathways at middle school, Mackenzie can tell you a little bit more about that. So I have a lot of handouts. Hi, my name is Mackenzie Crawford.

[01:42:48] I'm a school counselor at Walton Middle School. And I'm going to talk to you guys about some of the goals that we have in the secondary level for academic and career planning. And you'll get to hear about the high school as well. but I'm gonna talk a little bit about what it looks like in middle school.

[01:43:05] So our first goal, as you can see, we want to support students in identifying their interests and abilities to encourage self-discovery and academic engagement. A key aspect of career development is assisting students in discovering their talents and connecting them with potential career activities or opportunities.

[01:43:23] During middle school, students are having some of their first chances to select their own courses. They're selecting electives. being exposed to extracurricular activities and we are a big part of that and helping them figure out what is out there for them and what they might enjoy doing they're also getting some increased feedback on their academic performance and so there's a lot of times where we are talking to them in middle school about their grades and feedback they're getting from their teachers and trying to help them through that process and also we spend a lot of time talking to kids about their careers or their career interests and their goals their academic goals

[01:43:58] it doesn't have to be about that in an individual counseling session but it's we often do we talk about well you know what are your goals and how does that relate what's going on now to where you want to be whether it's high school or later in life and i do want to add that we use information that we learn in the school links activities that you talked about we learn a lot about the students and their interests you heard about career investigations and then counselors are also very involved in the avid programs and most of the middle schools do have avid in sixth seventh and eighth grades goal number two for us is to equip students and families with the knowledge

[01:44:33] and resources needed to understand various academic pathways and their career options i'm going to hand you all i have copies of the middle school transition timelines what's really unique about middle school is we have three transitions we have an eight nine transition and that's what the high school sets we have our own students in sixth grade and seventh grade and they're transitioning within middle school but then we have fifth graders transitioning to sixth grade so let me hand you those thank you just a little book and they're all a little bit different because each level has a little bit different needs depending on where they are developmentally

[01:45:11] but some things that you will note in these in the notes and what's consistent throughout all of the timelines is communication and partnership with families and making sure that families and students have all the information they need so that they can make the right decision for them so we have extensive websites with all the information we go into classrooms and do lessons we are sending information electronically we have parent nights and family nights where students and families can come in we do individual course registration meetings

[01:45:48] so there's a number of things and this goes on for months and there's so many opportunities to make adjustments as well as we learn more about the kids or if you want to make changes we're available um i want to note that i already had a fifth grade family come in and meet with me a few weeks ago about next year so they think about it early they want to know what their options are and finally the third goal is to provide comprehensive support that combines academic guidance with social emotional development to prepare students for future challenges a lot of this can be stressful for students for families it can be overwhelming it can bring up a lot of

[01:46:26] feelings so we think about the social emotional part of all of this development again one of the big things for us is that those transitions into middle school and then into high school so we have a lot of activities and i highlight for sixth grade the fifth graders visit us in middle school and they do tours with students and they eat in the cafeteria and they learn from students and so we get them in the building we have an evening orientation where families come again there's information and tours we have a panel we have a social and then we also take the we have

[01:47:01] student ambassadors at walt and we take them to the elementary schools at the end of the year to answer their important questions like you know is middle school food good in the cafeteria so we answer all of those questions for them as well but all of these activities are to help them feel prepared feel comfortable and to give them all the information that they need and i have for you guys finally just a few um a few handouts of some activities that we have and some of the different middle schools that everybody's really proud of at journey they have a number of activities they

[01:47:35] have a career night that they're especially proud of and so here's a flyer that they created of just some of the unique things that they provide um additionally at lakeside they have career cafes that they have parents come in and they use information they learn from school links to get speakers that are related to the interest that they're learning from their students and then at wall and we have a student ambassador program that we're very proud of we have 70 students in it this year um i think we might even have a few more than 70 but these students are involved in our transition process a lot like i said when we have students

[01:48:14] giving tours and visiting the um the students in fifth grade and we go to their schools they're the ones giving the answers they're hearing it from their peers and not from the adults so much and i think next is amy so amy's going to talk about those same goals but what that looks like at the high school level hello so yeah the goals are the same what we're trying to do is prepare students for when they leave us and it's the same things and so what we do is we start by going into

[01:48:51] classrooms and letting students know what their opportunities are both at our school and across the county and um we talk about how they choose their electives and how they choose their courses so of course first they have to meet graduation requirements because now we're in high school and credits count but we talk with them about what are they interested in and what are their dreams and what are things that we offer that they might aspire to as they continue on in their life

[01:49:25] journey and we also want them to think about trying something new so we're lucky that we have a lot of opportunities for that and it's sometimes it's overwhelming because there's so many choices so we have those classroom meetings and i think at western that's probably about 42 classrooms that we go into and all the high schools do this but we all do it a little bit differently i'll just put that out there um we go over to henley on the day of our curriculum fair

[01:49:59] so that's like a big huge day in the world of course registration so counselors go over with a group of students and counselors will talk about the same things we do with the high school student with the high school students and we have two sessions just like you have tonight and then we so students will be talking to one group counselors talk to a group and then we we switch and it's great for the students in henley to learn about from the student perspective what happens and hopefully it matches what we're telling them happens at the high school

[01:50:35] so we have that opportunity that evening we have our curriculum fair but i forgot to tell you that we also have the curriculum fair during the day and that's an opportunity for the high school students even though you're in the high school you probably don't know every single course that's available to you so um we we use our nice long lunch and we make a big perimeter around the cafeteria and kids have the opportunity to talk with teachers and students of those courses to find out more about them. That same setup stays in the

[01:51:11] evening so that parents can come in and do the same thing. We also, Ms. Subla and I will do a little discussion that's very similar to what we've talked with the kids about but more parent-oriented. So it's a two-pronged event. After that we meet individually with every student and I love these meetings because that's when you get to really know your students as a school counselor for ninth graders the time is usually between 15 and 20 minutes and as we get older

[01:51:49] there's more things to talk about juniors who are rising seniors tend to take between 30 and 45 minutes and you may think in those meetings the first thing we say is so what do you want to take next year that's not how it goes because we want to find out what's going on in their life what things have changed what experiences have they had and we fill out these um conference sheets as we have our meetings and we fill them out in pencil because

[01:52:23] a lot of times things change um when we have those meetings we typically start with how's your year going what are things that are going well what are classes that you're enjoying what are clubs that you're getting involved in and it leads into what are you doing outside of school what are things that bring you joy do you have a job now do you enjoy it which then leads to the class discussion of what's going to be appropriate for them to take and at western we do those individual meetings

[01:52:59] typically from the day we get back from winter break until the middle of February and then we invite parents in if they want to you know if they want to have that discussion we don't exclude the parents we want to have their input but we have found when we meet with the students separately we might get some more information out of them and they get they have that agency to speak for themselves so we really like that process and just like middle school we have until the end of April for them to make changes so as they're talking with teachers they're talking with peers they may make some other decisions and that's fine but we do cut

[01:53:39] it off in April because we somehow have to start writing that master schedule so there is a stopping point so that's what we do at the high school and I think Megan's gonna finish up a little bit about a program called school links as everyone has talked throughout the night and school links is our college and career management platform we've actually only had school links for about two years before that we had a platform called Naviant so you may have heard that prior we've been really excited about school links mainly because we find the kids like it that it's it's what's considered sticky which means

[01:54:17] once you get in it you want to keep using it it's really exciting whenever I open it you can see oh a student did this two minutes ago and this it's like a data feed so I can see all the engagement that the students are doing and you can see some of the different aspects of the college of career management platform students work to discover their interests they can explore college and careers they actually use school links to apply to colleges through the common apps when they become seniors they can create digital portfolios and resumes but all of the all of the different exploration that they do between 6th and 12th grade actually goes together into what's called a comprehensive academic and career plan and so I wanted to kind of

[01:54:56] show you what what the platform looked like a little bit as well as how you you can see how it combines into a plan for students so academic and career plans are an expectation from videoe they're expected to be started in seventh grade and students should

[01:55:33] update them over the course of their years with us it there's some overlap between transition planning and so i wanted emily to share a little bit about how the overlap works with our students who also write transition goals great i have a handout for you just with an example of a transition plan that would appear in a student's IEP goals in the areas of education employment training and independent living are required to be a part of the IEP when the student by the time

[01:56:10] the student turns 14. so that is facilitated through the IEP process but because there's also this other plan that is required by the state in terms of career planning we just wanted to show you kind of the interactions between like both of these required documents and how school links has really helped iep teams to be having more robust conversations about career planning for students with disabilities yes so all students kind of go through the different aspects of academic and

[01:56:47] career planning you can see some of those listed here and we're going to walk through a few screenshots about what that looks like so students start with interest in skills exploration there are several different assessments that students can take to learn about themselves and their skills and their talents and it will then match them with their personality with character traits cluster matches top skills and careers as someone was mentioning earlier Lewis was mentioning earlier it doesn't always they don't always connect with what it matches and I think one of the things that

[01:57:23] we really emphasize is to take these several times not to just take them once and one of the things I like about this particular platform is it will actually show the students trend data and so they can look over time and even though maybe in sixth grade they had chosen a career that wasn't really an interest over time maybe by the time they get to ninth grade they can see oh you know what arts has always been there every year though my interests have changed that one has kind of stayed the same so it's neat to be able to see those results and with this platform regardless of which school students transfer to they can kind of carry that data with them it also gives

[01:58:02] them an opportunity to explore the different pathways they can look at careers and whether that be hot careers which are considered really in demand careers careers based on particular clusters that they're interested in they can look specifically at military careers and within each of those careers of course the typical information about salaries and education but there's also a day in the life videos and mentor videos so students can kind of experience what it would be like to participate in one of these careers. Are the higher careers regional at all or is it just from national?

[01:58:39] So in this they're all Virginia based so it specifically looks at Virginia but students could turn off the Virginia filter and look nationally instead additionally all of the kind of like all the process that they go through allows them to choose their goals and of course update their goals you can see here these particular goals a student had last updated on 7:15 this is a sample demo student not a real student but if a counselor or a transition and a case worker was working with a student they could kind of look at this and say are these goals still relevant you know what are you thinking now how have those changed and you can kind of change them in the moment so there's really an

[01:59:18] emphasis on what are you thinking right now what's relevant to you right now students also do their course planning aligned to their goal setting and so starting in seventh grade and all the way through 11th grade they start to look at how the different courses will map out and align to their goals and interests and in the end all of that information gets combined into one nice little PDF that's called your academic and career plan and so this is a really nice snapshot of a student and again this is a demo student but you can see what this would look like for a student or for a family member for a counselor

[01:59:57] to kind of have a glance what a student is interested in and I know as Amy was mentioning when they have those one-on-one meetings sometimes I know for my own kids they're a little bit shy in talking to an adult when they're like what do you want to do and sometimes there's some academic risk to say I want to do something that maybe they aren't sure about and so when the academic and career plan is available counselors can look at this and ask some questions based on the student's interest that they've already selected so it's a really nice launching point to have that conversation you've had that for two years now you said yes um i i have a kid who's in

[02:00:34] the ninth grade and i've never seen that so i just so all he would have had something so we have had schoolings for two years we're still working on every student using the academic career plan in those conversations but they're there they're available so definitely ask them about it and i think that's a great question because a lot of times families say how can i support my children around pathway exploration so some tips that we have of course is to talk to your child about it about their strengths interests and the results my kids want me to stop talking to them about it because like every time we're alone in the car like mom stop but it is important to have those

[02:01:10] conversations over time with students because they do change so frequently do all the high school kids they all have access to this and they all know about it yes and i just looked at the data yesterday i think we're around 85 of all our students just this year who have logged in and so that means they may have logged in previous years it would be different data but that's already in the first few weeks of school did we go up naviance full turkey or phase it out it was a clean switch so we were able to export data from Naviance into school links which gives us a lot of that rich data that you saw from Rusty earlier that connects to National School Clearinghouse.

[02:01:50] So talk to students about their academic and career plans, encourage them to really reflect on the different things that they're exploring throughout middle school and high school. Of course always you can partner with your child school counselor for personalized support and help them to make decisions around college and careers that align with their strengths.

[02:02:09] there is a link in here for how you can find out more information about school links it's also available on the student and family pages on our websites so that is everything that we wanted to be sure to share with you around secondary touch points if you had any questions anyone on this panel come on up guys real quick for anybody i didn't hear or even see anything about scholar studios in the plan in this planning process and i'm assuming that you guys are pushing

[02:02:44] that pretty hard yeah actually in schools when they do their academic career plan the very first question that's the very first question they're asked is um do you want to do a sequential elective or do you want to do a learning community like a scholar's studio. So all students to graduate do have to do a sequential elective. They don't have to do a studio, but the studios accomplish their sequential electives. And so that's actually one of the first questions that they're asked when they get to course planning. And that kind of comes after they've done some of their career interests.

[02:03:15] So you can see it if you look in the sample. I think it might have been the second to last page in my handout if you look in the sample for that student it says my studios or my studios and pathways and you can see what that particular student selected what year would you start that starts in seventh grade so i think um it's important to note that judy has one that was in middle school is not in high school i've had three over the last two years in middle school and high school and i've never heard of this of schoolings no so and judy said she hadn't either

[02:03:52] so i think that that's something to note is that if even your school board members have never heard about this and we are super active in our kids then what can we do to get this out to the parents because i think this is something that would one be very welcomed from our parents but also would probably alleviate a lot of questions and concerns that get sent to administration and guidance counselors and school board and central office if that information is there and parents have access to it i think um we may have there may be a lack of communication with that and so i would really encourage you to find a way to get that out again to all parents and like highlight it because i

[02:04:31] think it would be really well received that's that's really good feedback and i can work with our counselors and our school administrators on making sure that that's better communicated how many counselors do we have per student i mean how well i can tell you what is the stand what is a professional recommended ratio um in albemore county our numbers are very good i'm looking to miles nelson i know i have um 175 which is a wonderful number to have um where i think i believe the commit the county is committed to follow the american school counselor association

[02:05:11] that's our standard 250. and we're pretty close with west i know at my school western's grown ridiculously over in the past five minutes um and we're really close to 250 right now but we feel like i can tell you i came from a school from 380. i came from 500. and when i came to albemarle i remember being at graduation and going who is that student i can tell you every life story of every kid who goes through that stage now so i appreciate that the county does have those those

[02:05:47] reasonable numbers for us. And I think Amy is underselling it. We also had data from part of the knowing every student and looking at faces and childhood trauma and one of the best protective factors of someone knowing you and Western Alamar was second in the state for in the DCJS climate survey of people identifying counselors as their trusted adult.

[02:06:17] we actually and walton also was in that data we were had two of the top five students in the state for that data of counselors knowing their kids and they identified them as a trusted adult and so i really think that speaks to having that 250 to one ratio and the things that our counselors are doing to support our students that's amazing i guess i would ask any of you what you thought of the data about more than half of our students not finishing school or not having a certificate.

[02:06:53] yeah i get lots of opportunities to speak so i want to make sure you guys can help with that. well i guess my initial feeling is sad because i wondered did i do something wrong. that's sort of what i'm wondering yeah as a school board member like you know what how can we address that.

[02:07:12] but we could also think of it as that maybe those kids need to be doing something besides the four a year or even the two schools. Right, but that was in there too. There was like 30% of the students who didn't get a certification. There's 30% that didn't go. All we know is that they didn't go before your college. That they didn't finish the 30. The 23 didn't go at all. 23 didn't go at all. And then 30 went. Right. Yeah, that's. I was going to say, I would say as school counselors, one thing that we always talk about, and I think you probably addressed this at one point, but making sure that kids

[02:07:51] our developing skills and employable skills and things like that and so I know even I've been at national trainings and stuff like that where that is something that we talk about as counselors there's how can we connect students with opportunities to get specialized training not it doesn't necessarily need to be college but that is something that we think about and so I often talk to kids when I'm counseling with them they may not love school but you know what if there may be a program at K-Tech or and stuff like that so we're I'm having these conversations in middle school to see if there's something they can connect with and get some specialized training

[02:08:25] the studios are important in that regard too because they uh they provide a gamut now instead of having three specialty academies that are very high academic we have i think it's 14 right 14 different types of programs some of it mirroring what we had before and some of it very close to to CTE or down toward the CTE part of the continuum.

[02:08:53] - Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think that kind of helps us transition because that is gonna be the focus of our session the next time, right? We were paying attention to the data and it's helping us to design programming that we think can address some of the concerns that we're seeing. So we're hoping to share some of that with you in the October session.

[02:09:11] And I think arts is ready for us to swap. - Yeah, great. - Thank you very much. - Thank you. that early exposure you guys actually we say thank you thank you thank you so much I think I'm like my career thing said I think I think journalists came

[02:09:43] of like right away for mine last year um chris and i got it super weird never met him before and he goes i'm going to guess what you two do there were a lot of snow dates where we were supposed to be weird vibes from him and like just a super politician from her and i was like

[02:10:20] I know I was like I do like Tyler Henry or something like what he's on Netflix creeped me out oh my gosh maybe he didn't look it didn't so weird we want to hear you yeah not just your beautiful music I thought that was impressive.

[02:10:55] That was amazing. Thank you. Yeah, the orange stands out from the sea of black cases. So-- Where am I headed?

[02:11:11] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Good evening. You're going to drive slides for us.

[02:11:30] I don't need them. Fantastic. What's missing from the pack is all of the wonderful cute slides of all the kids that are the best part.

[02:11:48] That is the best part. Thank you. I heard you if you haven't heard those too. Damien Schneider, I'm the Chanting Coordinator for the Fine Arts.

[02:12:04] These are mine. Yes. I'm Alexander Chang. I'm a junior at Monticello. I'm Levine Hirnadani. I'm a senior at Albemarle High School. Bobby Gregg, I teach band and chorus at Lakeside Middle School.

[02:12:24] I'm Kate. You guys know that? Probably you said no you don't know us. I'm Allison Spillman. Nice to meet you. I'm Julie. Nice to meet you. Chuck Pace. Nice to meet you. I'm Kate Acuff. I represent the Jack Dewey District. Thank you. So this presentation was as a request because we haven't had a comprehensive fine arts update in a very long time.

[02:12:55] And we kind of got added to this Pathways program work session because there is some alignment between CTE programming and also Fine Arts Pathway programming as students move through.

[02:13:15] But I wanted to make sure to point out that our programming for the Fine Arts isn't just in order for students to pursue the Fine Arts after they graduate. I mean, we really do have a very comprehensive pre-K through eighth grade program and opportunities, and that the pursuit of personal interest in the arts in and of itself is a valuable experience.

[02:13:44] Of course, you've seen a little bit of the overlap from our earlier slide presentation, and you'll hear a little bit more about it in a month when we come back to our focus on our scholars programming. And there's a little bit of a preview of that in here.

[02:14:01] I was informed, or I was advised in our last group that I should do less talking and let these folks do more of the talking. Oh, they were gentle. Oh, they were great. But the stories from the students are really the most powerful.

[02:14:18] There's a lot of data in here. There's some interesting trends. It does, just in general, it looks as though we are doing a pretty good job of bringing our enrollment back to pre-pandemic numbers.

[02:14:36] Our programs are looking pretty solid. And actually, in the middle school, there's some really interesting numbers on a percentage of the student body that are able to take these fine arts courses.

[02:14:55] Some of these numbers are a little bit difficult to ascertain, though, even though these are unique students, not individual course enrollments. How those things are arrived at is different from school to school, depending on staffing, teacher licensure, schedule availability, things like that.

[02:15:17] One of the things, Dave and I talked about a month ago, six months ago, I guess, about the fact that as a school division, we did not slash our arts programming like a lot of school divisions did, but in the time that I've been on the school board, we've not really got a deep dive into what we're actually doing, so this is perfect.

[02:15:38] Yeah, that's great. Thank you. It's a great opportunity to, it was a really good opportunity, believe it or not, even though I'm a visual artist, I love data, and so this was a fun deep dive. dive for me to look at these and it got a lot more granular than this so you're welcome I spared you all of that very specific stuff but what questions do you have and let's see how we can answer them

[02:16:04] I'll just make a comment that that our sister school division often touts their fine arts program we hear a lot about that and I think we compare pretty favorably since the years that I've an association with associated with the division yeah I mean I'm grateful that we kept our fine arts during the budget process I grew up in Virginia Beach in my high school cut choir this year to make room further yeah yeah which is appalling it's really so and my kids experience

[02:16:43] in our kind of so I I'm interested to hear kind of what your ideas are on the connection between our CTEs and art and like what we're doing to foster that and what we could do more you know not just get kids into fine arts programs after high school if that's where they want to go but how it aligns with you know kind of this goal that we have of preparedness for after high school in general um gee are you inquiring about um like middle school exploratory choices well I think

[02:17:20] both I think you know what are we doing in middle school to like get these kids excited about it I mean our elementary school arts are amazing and I know my kids have just loved it but then you know it sometimes can be intimidating to be like I don't want to play in the band or whatever but because they don't know much about it so like yes middle school and then also just in high school how we're kind of tweaking that to help these kids so I'll say I mean if you look at the enrollment data um there's a couple things happening um there definitely was a dip from covid yeah

[02:17:56] and there's a little bit of a recovery process from that and part of that is the students not knowing about it like you said um we're the directors and the teachers are trying to work together to get into the schools to get you know to expose the fifth graders to see what they can be expecting in middle school um sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't but we're doing that and the students can probably speak to this because these guys are old enough that when when covet happened they were in middle school so they had had the opportunity to see what was out there in elementary school yeah but we are like back up actually almost at a high

[02:18:36] in middle school enrollment um for arts program um but what that means for the 2024-25 school year is probably different than what that meant in the when was the year that we changed the 2018-19 school year which was the last school year before the student load cap was enacted which precipitated a change in the schedule at the middle school level and sort of altered i mean there was like this sort of shift there's a little bit of a blip actually before covid you could see that because

[02:19:15] of um yeah because the student yeah the teacher teachers had a cap on students well i think you know then what we need to look at is like how do we you know the numbers in middle school are high and then there's the drop off to like 50 so how do we engage the kids from middle school to high school to keep them interested in fine arts that's that's uh been very true yeah i mean

[02:19:40] Henley, Henley, back in the early 2000s, they had almost everybody doing the band, a huge number of kids doing band, and it did not translate to the band at Western Highland Club, and we lost quite a few.

[02:19:59] Would you like to speak to that, sort of the natural attrition from middle to high school? I think to some extent, and that's really hot, I think to some extent, to some extent in middle school, kids are trying things out to see what they like, and then when they go to high school, they may not want to be a part of it the time period you're talking about was a really strong time there's always a Henley always has had a strong band program but in in that time I think you have this experience of doing something really really great and you spend all this time and you commit to it and then you get to high school and you think you want to try something new and I think that's normal for a kid

[02:20:36] and I did that when I was a kid yeah I would just I would suggest that didn't maybe is is more attributed to there being so many more options in high school more robust robust film and audio design classes that kids can be involved in and not necessarily it's almost like you know you have general music in elementary school and then you go to middle school and you have these four different options then you go to high school and expands even more I I would say it's more that necessarily the kids not being excited except you can't look at that number and see it's lower

[02:21:14] That's right. Yeah, well a lot of the CT options I think Megan Mayer said there are 100 CTE courses offered a lot of those are high school courses and that are not from the middle school That that's the first opportunity to get to do them

[02:21:39] One thing I really like about the fine arts program is the type of community that it brings to the school. So when going into freshman year, I was coming out of COVID year and I had a lot of anxiety. And I also didn't know anyone because I was in the Mesa pathway. So I was coming out of Burley, not knowing anyone coming to Albemarle High School.

[02:21:56] And joining marching band, which is one of the options over at Albemarle High School for electives, Joining that helped me kind of cut down that class of 200 freshmen into just 10 freshmen. And it really just created an inclusive, a fostered inclusive environment where I could really thrive and figure out what I like to do and not really worry about the peer pressure and having such a big class size.

[02:22:21] I feel like a lot of people who don't participate in fine arts don't really get to experience that because they have to deal with such a big class size. Yeah, and the string ensemble class at Monticello, which Mr. Escobar, Marco Escobar, teaches, we have very small amounts of people enrolled in that class, but it, like you said, it fosters a really strong connection between the people that are in that class, and I'm glad to have that experience.

[02:22:54] I was a student at Albemarle County Schools. I was class 2004 Albemarle High School and middle school I was totally lost and then yeah I joined the marching band at Albemarle and then like I found my family and my home for the next four years and still here and can't get rid of me. So I have a question about the enrollment in high school and individual performance courses. I'm not sure about audio recording but my understanding would be, my guess would be that the guitar and piano people all gain those skills outside of Albemarle County.

[02:23:26] No, those were intro courses. These are intro courses, so you learn guitar as a high school person. That's right. My granddaughter took my first year in COVID. You don't learn guitar remotely.

[02:23:41] I mean, it was terrible. She didn't want to keep it up. And there are mixes. It is multi-level. It is multi-level. You'll have Guitar 2, and you will have I'm Shredding, and this is the Espring. The kid that had the guitar since he was three years old.

[02:23:57] just just to point out the audio production i'm sorry that's a typo it should say production that recording but that program is that was a cte program until the 2021 school year um so that's why it just appears out of nowhere um one of the one of the many things we're trying to clean up with coding and licensure but it was i went and looked today the numbers uh were 180 in the 1920

[02:24:29] school year 217 and the 1819 and 195 and the 1718 school year so that program was was very strong and continued to be pretty strong and now seems to be it looks like you know guitars increased and then there's some other you know just students students make different choices our photography programs are exploding that's one of those things that is wild to see change

[02:25:00] That was really cool. One of my twins took photography in middle school and was so excited to get to high school to be able to take digital imaging because they fostered this love in middle school and now it's something they're really interested in. So I do love that there's such a wide variety of options.

[02:25:18] I think it's great. I will say it does make things sort of difficult for staffing because you have to have teachers that are capable of teaching multiple different fine arts courses. I know Bobby can speak to that with middle school in the last three years he's taught.

[02:25:39] Before I mean, before COVID, I thought maybe every middle school course that existed under the sun. A few we invented. I love humanities. Humanities is great. But yeah, no, band, chorus, orchestra, I've been through the ringer. This is my first year teaching chorus.

[02:25:57] Two years ago, I started teaching chorus, taught that for two years, and I said, yeah, orchestra yeah i know all the things and uh you know i'll say just frankly it's fun it's nice to meet all these different kids who have all these different interests and they share their passions with me and i can share my passion with them but it is hard finding people with all these specific skill sets that are needed for them it's hard to maintain programs for that reason digital imaging what's the difference digital imaging is more of uh it sort of leans towards graphic arts graphic

[02:26:32] design um i am one of our uh one of our newest programs that we tried to do a uh what were they called career learning community um in the visual arts because that was a high demand field we started the graphic arts program last year at monteschel high school we only had four students actually sign up for that gateway course in order to make that course work the principal put those students into the she merged with another just an art one class and so the teacher taught it

[02:27:10] more as a an art one class with additional graphic design elements to it um did a really great job actually it's a fantastic course um but then they didn't continue it this year into the first level of the course because there were only a handful of kids that were interested and so you know that's just one of those choices that the principals have to make and what i'm hoping to do actually i didn't have to work with the with the teachers and the principals but i think we need to merge

[02:27:44] them into the graphic design curriculum and push that forward instead of the digital imaging just just because it's a more it's a more what's the word sorry let me look at my slide here where is it high demand it's a high demand occupation that's why i have something career pathways it's in here yeah i will tell you that's yeah filmmaking and film production stuff that i've seen so far has been just yeah this is a fantastic program yeah i really it's

[02:28:22] just super impressive did i put the i put some highlight highlight dates for events in here they are having a spooky film fest at albemore high school um sometime soon i missed craig's final concert last year because i've already given my promise to ahs for the film festival yeah i had to choose that too i went to craig's oh yeah and you know i kind of watched the one youtube later so maybe i should just because craig did a long time so it was really

[02:28:58] fun it was um i have been uh asked and have been trying to do this for two years now um build this division-wide arts calendar so that you all have access to all of the different things all of us have access to all the different things that happen um this is still under construction some of there's a handful of schools that still haven't given me have landed on their dates yet but um right one of our oas is working on an outlook calendar that she's going to share

[02:29:33] and if you didn't have a chance to look through the slides with the kids yeah what other questions

[02:29:51] yeah funding for the arts um do you want to share your story again so uh i'm part of the marching band like i said and being my going into my freshman year our sax i play saxophone for context uh the saxophone section was two people and obviously we had enough saxophones at our school to provide for those two people but just coming since i was right out of covid we've grown a lot in the past four years senior year we have 17 saxophones and we don't have enough saxophones to provide for everyone which puts some members of our band at a disadvantage because they can't play they can't learn the

[02:30:29] music and when we have nine hour rehearsal days they're just quiddling their thumbs i guess like they just they can't they can't learn music and it's it puts them at disadvantage um so going to specifics we have one member of our band who hasn't had a saxophone for the past month because our school just doesn't have the resources to provide a saxophone for her and that's put her at a real disadvantage because she just hasn't been able to play she's been kind of just i guess if you had a skill level it just starts going down every single day you don't play that's how

[02:31:05] i see it and she just her skill level has been going down every single day um the solution for this that we found was just borrowing a saxophone from other schools in our area so we borrowed a tenor saxophone from burleigh middle school but it would be nice to have a little more funding so we could provide for the students in our school just to give a little a little context to that from from the no fees policy we went to a no fees policy and personally that no fees policy was magic in middle school i used to have kids that came to me and said the reason that that

[02:31:44] said they really wanted to play in band but the reason they didn't is they knew they wouldn't be able to afford one and we would have gotten them one but they had um yeah they had canceled themselves from being able to do it without ever asking um and when they didn't have to ask that barrier was gone uh we're in year six of that now and so now there's a you know if you're a sixth grader you got a school from your instrument for your middle school you got that in seventh grade grade and eighth grade and then you went to the high school the middle school teacher took it back to give it to a sixth grader and then the high school supposed to provide it and some of these instruments they did not have because they were they weren't hit with it the year the no fees policy started there

[02:32:22] the third year now we're in year six and so it's six generations six years I guess cohorts of kids and so you know where the funding is a little lacking now in terms of making that work so that's part of the context of that she she had a saxophone right yeah it was not entirely functional or fixable I mean I guess the other conversation the no fees policy but individual schools would

[02:33:01] use those fees and from what I understand I haven't looked at it but from what I understand, there was some budget initiative to replace them to a certain degree to go back into the school operating budget.

[02:33:26] But I don't know the details of that. We-- yeah, that's true. Do you want to-- if I came over to Albemarle one day, would you show me? Yeah. Like the Bergen saxophone or-- Just how you all-- where the instruments were kept and how many you have, have you mentioned all that?

[02:33:49] I mean, it would be interesting to know-- you obviously have a lot of instruments, because the school's providing them. Do kids bring their own stuff, though, a lot? Kids who can afford it do buy their own instruments.

[02:34:07] And it was like, if you played the tuba, the school had the tuba. If you had the barisax, the school had the barisax. If you had-- the school didn't have alto saxes, because everyone always brought their own alto sax, those are smaller and rentable but now that schools are providing them in higher numbers I'd say at Lakeside I'm before the no fees policy I provided instruments to I'm guessing right now 20% of kids and now I'm providing them to 70% of kids and I think at other schools it is went from you know again I'm making these numbers up to an extent but I know it I think a journey

[02:34:43] it's a hundred percent of kids basically are using school instruments um no yeah we also have to like borrow from middle schools and stuff like that mr. Escobar works at Berkeley and Walton middle school and Monticello high school so he has like access to all those instruments strings makes a little more issue because when you're a tiny sixth grader you need a tiny tiny violin and then your violin just has to keep getting bigger until it's full size yeah there's usually I think most of the

[02:35:18] kids I've had it was three-quarters to full size but cello I had a kid go through three sizes of cellos yeah I play the cello that didn't even know it's like a one-tenth cello I gave up on it in the sixth grade well I mean I know like Western theater pattern has the arts and Western you know they established a foundation that raises money to these things the goal is to be able to do that across the division but they're having to make up the differences

[02:35:55] by raising money and doing fundraisers, and things like that. - For purchase and maintenance of the institution. - Yeah, and also like buying speaker systems or stages, or, you know, not just-- - Fire uniforms, we've done a lot of them.

[02:36:10] - Marching band uniforms. - Yeah. - Every year now. - So, you know, they put on like a festival, and they do things to raise money for it, but that's, you know, not division-wide, of course. - I don't know what we can do in the budget process. - Maybe it won't be next year.

[02:36:27] Well, and I, you know, we always try to, I think, put things on hand, but it seems like that would be a natural risk. I did meet with Tessa very early on to talk to her about just this very issue, because I'm just now in my third month of my third year.

[02:36:53] So basically for the last two years, I've just sort of been gathering information, like, where do we need to go here? And that was, I honestly, I think somebody called me on the third day in this job. We have to do something about instruments. And so I've done a lot of research on maintenance and repair and replacement.

[02:37:16] And just anecdotally, we have an instrument in this division that has been used every year for 50 years. It will continue to be repaired. the woman that owns the company now inherited the company from her father and her father sold that instrument to this division 50 years ago and i was like okay i mean that's a cool story

[02:37:52] can we get a report then i think it would be helpful as a school board for us to see like what the needs are yeah so i would love to band directors and middle school band directors are going to be doing an inventory of instruments in an ideal world like what would make it so that you're not borrowing so that in any given year almost all of your students if not all have their instruments and then maybe scale back what could what would it look like to get by but still have more than you have now to maybe build up slowly yeah and maybe a plan of like you know maybe we

[02:38:27] can't fund it all in one year but maybe in the next three to five years we have a goal of completely having a fully funded music program with instruments and whatever what does that look like i have no idea like that you're making the case to the public yeah valuable um that music that the arts in and of themselves is value but if we have that data and we have those numbers as well yeah and if we have all that information i think that it's a lot more powerful for us to be able to go out and say whether it's in the budget process or through foundations or you know petitioning the

[02:39:03] public let's see what that means so so you're a curriculum coordinator now right and do you have a budget i have a small budget that mostly pays for we hire outside clinicians and conductors and composer for various events but that's one place we could look at putting repair money for instance like in the science budget in the in the days of yore um we repaired the microscopes right centrally we didn't start off that way we didn't start off that way we were it was school by school

[02:39:44] yeah well just buy new ones those things are worth it if you've got a bad one just toss it but is it i wonder if there's something akin to what we had to do with blessing which is that we absolutely could not like we could not meet all of the need if we just had a no like whether or not you can take your own kids to school we're going to take the kids to school so you're talking about 20 to 70 right and obviously socioeconomic situations change so maybe it's 50 percent you really need it now right i don't know you're making numbers

[02:40:24] yeah and I think that those things those programs are awesome but I think that sometimes people who truly need them don't have as much benefit from them as people who don't know I think that is the case with no AP fees I mean so it's a little bit similar to that so I wonder if there's something akin to that that does not take that's continues to remove the barrier for students who feel that barrier and need you know the ensure and then I know that in strings you said

[02:41:03] some people bring their own if they can I don't know I just feel like tension between free to reduce lunch the stigma attached to meeting the help right right we move it for everybody then you don't have that stigma but and then but this thing yeah yeah the other thing I throw just for band and orchestra is it's a pretty big financial commitment at the beginning too and there are some things that are cheaper and easier to rent but I think the alto saxophone is the one I point to where I've had many families say you know $120 a month is a lot for someone pay for rent and that's a lot that's what we were asking before the

[02:41:40] no fees policy yeah for people that one point saxophone and then so I I know exactly where you're coming from I would say at my school I think the population of that school has changed at Lakeside has changed over the last since I started working there 17 years ago getting old and it does feel like that that 20% to 70% also coincides with that with the the change and the population and you know I can tell you this the no fees policy has made those kids super happy like there are kids that would never have done music and now

[02:42:18] they're in the marching band out tomorrow and they're seniors and graduate and you know not would be living with identity so that I mean I understand I'm just saying like I don't know what the need is and we're on a a two-year by any I mean it's it's not in right so when I'm thinking about all

[02:42:57] these things arts is very important to us and I just want to know that we're using the things that we have yeah how can we get creative to make sure that we're meeting all those needs one of the challenges about is how when the when the money was reallocated to the schools for distribution to programs I don't know how much that was and so I'm curious about how that went out but I think one of the other problems like I mean we've highlighted the instrumental needs but

[02:43:30] art materials are expensive too and things have just gotten more and more and more expensive um in the last five years just all the things you need to put on theaters yeah yeah yeah this is an area yeah but it's so important yeah i would love that information i think that will really help us figure out how to create do we charge uh for i know we charge for

[02:44:07] theater performances what about we don't always charge for theater performances that's uh that's It's on a school-by-school basis. Yeah, based on the school and everything. Yeah. They definitely did it. They definitely did it.

[02:44:22] It's actually Barbara Faye. One of the issues that we have is how we can take money also. And that's something that's way out of my scope. Legally? No, I just-- yeah, how are we allowed to take money?

[02:44:41] We're not allowed to take that or credit card payments. And so they buy a ticket in advance. The programs have been told that they're not allowed to-- unless it's a non-profit, you know, .

[02:44:58] That's been a huge problem for us. Josh, is that something you can look into for us? They're saying that, like, the programs, the art programs, aren't allowed to take Venmo or things like that. It's just cash and check. But that's also a barrier for them.

[02:45:13] What about athletic programs? What are they doing? can't imagine why that would be the case that's what i thought it seems weird to me but they're talking about i'll time in um platforms like venmo and paypal we do not utilize as a school division there's many reasons why i can elaborate on that what we have started to set up is through my school bucks um and just this year field trips can do electronic payments so i think the the opportunities will expand we got our toe in the water on it we know that's a barrier so we think we have a solution and we're slowly expanding it but venmo and paypal are not an option

[02:46:14] thank you this was great thank you all very much thank you for having us

[02:46:29] about about doing the arts yes yes yes okay sounds good will i be able to

[02:46:46] i heard it oh the salary there was it you brought it that is i'm proud of you all right thank you i do want to take a moment just to thank um all the teachers and counselors

[02:47:24] and students who are able to join us tonight i think they brought a richness and depth to the conversation um that we can do in just presenting to you so thank you everyone they go two hour delay yeah sleep in sleep in in putting the presentation together i know that you're probably starting to think of some themes um it was a lot of information tonight it'll be a

[02:47:58] lot of information it's a lot of information um as we have it was hard to plan and to think about what to include and what not to include but these are some of the themes that we were starting to take away and looking at the information that we were putting together and just about refining our narratives around greater understanding around multiple pathways designing programs that allow students their own sense of what a good life is and ensuring the broadest access through in-person and online tools and acknowledging the multiple relationships and influences that inform young

[02:48:34] people's behaviors and decision-making and working together to support that attainment of their goals. These are questions that we posed at the beginning. I'll remind you and we'll go back for questions if you have any at the end of this evening, but when we come back in October we will cover more in depth information around scholars, studios, industry credentials, and work-based learning opportunities. I know there are some questions already coming up about those we will go into detail on those three programs in October but are there

[02:49:13] any questions for the group this evening I know lots of questions were asked in the breakout rooms but are there any questions or thoughts now that you're all back together I would encourage my board mates to send you any questions that we have for the October work session before that perfect yeah this is yeah it was super helpful thank you thank you thank you Craig thank you thanks everyone all right is there any other business by the board members and superintendent i don't see

[02:49:49] anything all right class dismissed but wait no i was teasing nice job craig

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