Coraggio Consulting
Chesterfield County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Date: Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Place: Chesterfield County School Board, Virginia
Length: 2h 11m (video)
Official meeting video (Swagit): https://chesterfieldschoolsva.new.swagit.com/videos/395899
Official minutes (BoardDocs, on the Sep 8, 2026 agenda for approval): https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/chesterfield/Board.nsf/pfiles/DXHNQ860FF92/$file/DRAFT%20MINUTES%20-%202026.08.11%20Work%20Session.pdf

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 2026-10-23. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:08] Good afternoon. I'd like to call the August 11, 2026 School Board Work Session to order. First, we have an update on the capital improvement plan and facility condition assessment from Dr. Wodica. Good afternoon. I'm so glad to be with you to give you an update on our ongoing capital improvement program, as well as our project to complete a facility condition update, excuse me, facility condition assessment update for Chesterfield County Public Schools.

[00:00:37] So I'd like to start all of these conversations off with a bit of a conversation about policy and about how we approach some of this work. We think about our capital improvement projects, and I just wanted to talk through how we do this in the sense of policy.

[00:00:53] We don't make capital project decisions and make construction decisions based on just sort of what we want to do. We do that in a policy environment that gives us guidance for how we make the progress we do throughout the county. So there's a couple of points that I always like to make when we do these presentations.

[00:01:11] I know the board has seen this slide a number of times, but I think it's important to reiterate what we're trying to achieve in our capital improvement program. And a couple of points here in the long-range educational facilities planning stated goals that the school board has adopted. And that is, number one, we want to eliminate as many trailer classrooms as we possibly can, have students in permanent classrooms.

[00:01:31] That's a huge part of what we're doing. We want to make sure that our existing space and new spaces meet the educational needs of our students for now and for the long run. You know, those designs may be a little bit different now than they were maybe 40 or 50 or 70 years ago when some of our schools were built.

[00:01:47] But very importantly, the last highlighted bullet that I have there is that we need to recognize that many of our school facilities need to be renovated for them to have the ability to extend their useful life and to be able to continue to serve our students long into the future.

[00:02:02] And so really what all of this is about is how we think about how the work that we do in our capital improvement program and our construction work and our renovation work, how we are being good stewards of the taxpayers' assets that they've entrusted to us and making sure that we are caring for the facilities that we have so they can continue to serve our students long into the future.

[00:02:22] So that's a really important sort of way to frame the conversation is anytime we talk about capital improvement planning, it's not it's great to go to ribbon cuttings and great to do all the work. But again, this is really about a policy driven conversation that helps us make the decisions that we do.

[00:02:38] I also like to show this slide, which demonstrates some of the recent and planned capital improvement projects throughout Chesterfield County. As you can see, we are we have done projects throughout the county. We have plans to do future projects throughout the county, and so we're really thinking about how it is that we are serving every section of the county and serving every part of our community in a way that really meets the needs of our students in the long run.

[00:03:04] We've also had a lot of success, and we're going to continue to have a lot of success in the next couple of years, but we have a lot of work to do in terms of developing an idea of how we are going to fund certain projects going forward. So as you know, we have happily engaged in ribbon cuttings the last couple of weeks at Bensley and Deep Creek Elementary Schools.

[00:03:22] I think the invitations will go out later this week for ribbon cutting at CTC Hall renovation. So we have expanded our CTE environment considerably, and so we're going to do all that work. We're going to ribbon cut next year at our new high school and lots of other great projects that we're going to come along well down the next couple of years.

[00:03:42] But we do have a number of projects that are going to continue to be an important part of our conversation that have been on the agenda for a number of years. You see in our future projects that we need to think about how we are going to fund those projects, how we are going to do those things as a community and as we come together.

[00:04:00] So that's the primary part of this conversation that I want to focus on to begin with. But I want to give an update on a very important part of where we some decisions that the community has made over the last couple of years. So in 2022, as you know, the community overwhelmingly approved the community facilities bond referendum that was designed to address a number of facilities issues throughout the county.

[00:04:23] And I want to kind of give you an update on where we are with those projects, what we've completed, what we're going to complete, and kind of where we are in some projects that maybe haven't been completed yet or we don't necessarily have funding available for them just as of yet. So we, again, have been really happy to cut the ribbon at A.M. Davis last year with a couple of projects that we did this year.

[00:04:42] We'll have more projects opening up in the next couple of years. But there are two projects on here that are identified as awaiting funding. And so there's a couple of reasons for that, that result from that 2022 bond referendum. And that is that we need additional funding for Midlothian Middle School's replacement, as well as the Thomas Dale High School addition.

[00:05:03] Again, both of those are projects that were authorized in the bond referendum. But we do need additional funding for these projects in order for them to take off. So a couple of reasons. First is that there is a reality that post-COVID, there was a strong inflationary environment for school construction nationwide.

[00:05:25] So projects simply were just much more expensive post-COVID than they were before COVID. And so I'll talk in a few minutes a little bit more about what the scale of that change has been. But essentially, these projects were scoped for the 2022 referendum. In 2021, the referendum occurred, and then inflation really took off.

[00:05:44] So many of these projects were more expensive than was anticipated down the road from 2021. The other issue is that when Midlothian Middle was funded as a part of the referendum discussion, it was only funded at 50% of the estimate in 2021.

[00:06:04] So it was always going to need more money in order to be able to take off and actually be adopted. So I think that's really important to say, hey, yes, we have some additional costs that have been realized as a result of this work. But we also have had changes in policy that have affected this work.

[00:06:22] So I won't go through all of this detail, but what this slide shows is the original estimate of these projects, What they were budgeted at in the referendum, which is slightly different, again, for Midlothian Middle School, and then what the actual project costs were, which were, in some cases, significantly more expensive than the original estimate, which is kind of how we got to where we are.

[00:06:42] So nationwide, we have had, we've seen in the last five or six years, very significant increases in costs for construction for new school construction. So what this chart shows is a nationwide perspective of the price index for new school building construction.

[00:06:58] So as you see that orange box there pointing to when in the history of time we estimated those bond referendum projects, and you see immediately after, there's this very steep increase in the cost of doing construction. And so in that time period, we're building schools, we're bidding schools and building schools and designing them.

[00:07:18] And so ultimately now, there just is more cost than there were anticipated in 2021. So that's kind of where we are. We also have a number of projects that have been on the capital improvement plan list for a number of years. These are very important community projects that will serve our community for the next generations.

[00:07:37] That is the Dale Elementary, a new elementary school. That's a plus one school in the pre-K center there. We have a project we've previously called the Old Hundred, a new Old Hundred Hundred area. That got a little confusing for folks because we already have an Old Hundred elementary school. So this project we're calling the Midlothian-Clover Hill Area New Elementary School.

[00:07:56] This is a plus one school. Both of those two projects are related to capacity concerns, trying to basically get rid of trailers where we have them. We also have the Matoka Middle School replacement completion. In 2019, about a third of that school was built as a replacement project.

[00:08:13] So this project would complete that process. And then, of course, the Byrd High School Gym Edition, which would complete a third phase of a similar prototype building with the Lothian and the Monacan high schools that received gyms a number of years ago. And so this would complete that project.

[00:08:28] So these are all very important projects for our community. These have been a part of the capital improvement plan for a number of years. They, I think, are all agreed upon as being important projects. But we just want to point out that there does need to be a funding stream of some sort in order to achieve these projects.

[00:08:44] So that is our conversation regarding new capital projects or major CIP projects. And so I want to focus a little bit here for the rest of this conversation to give you an update on our facility condition assessment project that you know I've been talking about now for quite a while to you in several presentations.

[00:09:08] And so for many years, major maintenance funding has been a challenge in Chesterfield County, but also in probably every county in the United States for buildings. And so when we have buildings, it's really fun to build new buildings and do ribbon cuttings and open them.

[00:09:23] And it's really a great part of what we do. But you also have to maintain those buildings. We have to replace HVAC systems. We have to replace electric systems. We have to make sure the plumbing continues to work. And this work in major maintenance is what happens when those components break or they need to be replaced or repaired.

[00:09:41] And so for many, many years, and this is not one board, this is not one group of administrators, this is not one part of a community, But for many years, simply, this work has been underfunded in Chesterfield and in many other localities throughout the United States. And so for many decades, this has led to significant underfunding of maintenance, and so a significant deferral of really critical maintenance and repair projects that really do negatively impact the quality of learning environments for our students.

[00:10:09] So it does that, but it also, remember, creates this environment where we have very expensive emergency repairs to our facilities when it does occur. And so, again, this is not a Chesterfield-only kind of thing. This is a nationwide challenge in schools. And ultimately, our goal has been to say, hey, let's have a conversation about what funding needs to look like.

[00:10:30] This is not a conversation that started in the last year. For many years, this has been something that we've been talking about as a community and will continue to talk about. But the big part of that conversation has been, okay, so we know that what we're spending at this point is insufficient to keep up with demand for maintenance.

[00:10:47] But what was the right amount to come up with? What is the budget amount we should have? And so in December, we presented to you a couple of different ways that we proposed to come up with those numbers so we could develop a financial plan that would allow us to understand what kind of budgetary environment we should have.

[00:11:02] And so in December of 2025, we presented a plan to complete a comprehensive facility condition assessment to inform that major maintenance funding plan. We said that was going to be done by June. I'm proud to tell you that that project was completed. We have assessed every single school.

[00:11:20] Facility staff has identified the replacement needs, the appropriate cycles, the funding requirements that we'll need for the next 10 years to keep buildings in the position that they need to be in. We also originally said at that time that we were going to spend the summer really working through developing a financial plan for how we would implement that program because of the changing environment and different options that have been provided legislatively.

[00:11:44] We've kind of taken a pause on that to see where that referendum goes in November so we can develop that plan going forward. But that is the process of where we've been. So once that ultimately is decided, we'll continue to work with our friends of the county and in school finance to develop that phasing plan to ensure that whatever work we do is financially feasible, but also meets the needs of our students and staff going forward.

[00:12:08] I just want to remind everyone that we went through this again in December, but what is a facility condition assessment? And really, we don't go out and decide on which air conditioner projects to replace or roofs to replace just without any kind of structure. So a facility condition assessment is a professionally evaluated evaluation of existing systems like HVACs, electric system, plumbing, roof.

[00:12:34] And we're looking at existing conditions, what a replacement cycle should be. We don't want to wait until everything fails before we replace it if we possibly can because you end up with lots and lots of work to do. But where we do have needed replacements, we have identified them as well. And the rest of the component of a facility condition assessment is how we develop that systematic plan, develop that funding plan, and develop an implementation plan that we can actually do.

[00:12:57] So that's the work that our team has been doing over the last, you know, now seven or eight months and really spent a lot of time getting that in a good position, and we're very proud of the work that we've done. I certainly don't expect you to read this slide, this identity, this picture of where we've identified one school, but this is just an example of how the level of detail that our staff has been in where we've assessed every single school.

[00:13:22] We've gone through every single HVAC system. We've gone through every single roof, every electrical system, every plumbing system, the architectural components, and the site improvements that are needed, and we've broken them down by system and components within each of those trades. So as we get to the end of the presentation, you'll see a link to where you can see all that information.

[00:13:41] So not only do I say, hey, we need to do HVAC work, we also say, hey, it needs to be a chiller and a boiler and a fan or whatever the case may be for each school and when it needs to be done on that. What's critically important about this is that these are not numbers that are made up. These are not cycles that are made up.

[00:13:58] Our staff has worked with our preventative maintenance contractors to identify potential costs, when things need to be done, how much those projects will cost the county when we do them, and really spending time working with qualified contractors to help us understand in a professional way, in a very detailed, systematic, and professional way, how we need to develop our plan for the future.

[00:14:23] So that's the down and dirty of each individual school. And so each individual school then rolls up to a division-wide facility condition assessment that provides a lot of numbers. So this is probably a terrible slide in terms of presentations, but I think it shows the level of detail that our staff has gone into to say, hey, over the next decade, by trade, how much have we identified as needed investment in order to get our buildings where they need to be, where they should be.

[00:14:55] So overall, we've identified about $850 million for the work over the next decade. That's a lot of money. And each one of those years, we've identified what that total amount. So as an example, that fiscal year 27 number, we read this in the roof line, there's about $9 million of work that should be done this fiscal year, right?

[00:15:14] We're doing some of that amount as well. In total, we've identified about $150 million presently that needs to be done. We have budgeted $30 million, right? Great, great progress. You know, when we got into budget, we were talking about how great that is. It certainly very much is a great step forward.

[00:15:31] But, again, there's a significant impact and a significant gap to where we need to be in order to meet the needs. We also recognize that we're not going to get there overnight. There's going to be a significant time period where we spend time getting back to even. And we're dedicated to working with our team to do that.

[00:15:49] So there's a couple of key takeaways. If you didn't pick them up from that big slide of data there that I just wanted to take a moment to point out. And as I said, we've had deferred and delayed maintenance that have caused two major concerns. So we have, frankly, frequent system breakdowns that for no less than we disrupt instruction as a result.

[00:16:14] We have system breakdowns that cause discomfort for students and staff. We have frequent breakdowns that are very costly to repair on an emergency basis. We do it all the time. We've also identified that there's a very large deferred maintenance financial liability, really just even in the first year.

[00:16:33] So you saw that $150 million number. That's all the things that should have been done over a number of years. Again, that's not one person. That's not one group. It is just a simple fact that there's a lot of deferred maintenance that's out there that we need to address in the time period that's coming forward.

[00:16:49] I think the big thing here that we have to grapple with is that this lack of dedicated maintenance funding over the number of years has prevented this consistent replacement cycle. So it's going to be necessary to smooth those investments over the next number of years and recognize that it's going to take some time to recover from those deferral practices.

[00:17:09] I'll note that by far the largest concern is our heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. I think that's very consistent with our experiences that our students and staff have every single day. You might go from classroom to classroom. One classroom is too cold. One classroom is too warm.

[00:17:26] Air might not be working throughout the division. And that's coupled with some recent legislation regarding indoor air quality in schools in Virginia that will require investment in HVAC systems throughout the Commonwealth. And so that is really our major sort of financial concern related to our school building position.

[00:17:45] But I want to make sure that we don't lose sight of the really other critically important other trades that are related to this work. So we could spend all the money we generate, we could spend all the capital money on HVAC all day long. But if we don't repair the roofs, if we don't repair the plumbing system, that will have really basically no impact.

[00:18:05] And so our goal is to find a way to prioritize major maintenance and do it in a way that is strategically coupled where we need to do some school replacements here and there, but also do it in a way that meets our critical maintenance needs down the road. And so certainly that would be the case.

[00:18:20] Just two more points I'll note is that our future improvements really must take advantage of changing and evolving technology and not just be like-for-like replacements. And so that's been some of the work that's been done. We've done some work where we've replaced sort of the old technology with the old technology, and we need to really think about how we're designing our systems in a way that's modern and meets the needs of our students now.

[00:18:45] And so all of this comes down to the fact that, yes, we need a dedicated and consistent funding source for school maintenance in Chesterfield County. Again, just like every other school division in Virginia and probably in the United States, but this is an opportunity to talk about that and be a part of that conversation.

[00:19:01] Again, lots of really incredible work. For the very first time that I stood before you, there's so much to be proud of that's been accomplished in Chesterfield County. But there is a reality that we do have a pretty significant deferred maintenance liability that we do need to think about and to address.

[00:19:17] And I'll just end with an opportunity for the board and for the community to take a look at that facility condition assessment, where you can go through and say in each one of your schools that you're interested in, hey, what is the HVAC work that needs to be done? Which sections of roof are going to be replaced and when should they be done and which year?

[00:19:36] And so our goal here is to be as transparent as we possibly can. Again, these are not projects that really make the news, right? We are proud of those projects, but they're very, very important for us as a community to invest in our spaces, to invest and care for the assets that the taxpayers have asked us to take care of.

[00:19:57] And so that is available to the public, to you, to go through and to read. We also, as you can imagine, there's a lot of technical terms in this. There's lots of acronyms. So in that document, there's also a glossary available so that if anybody doesn't understand something, it should be there and available to you as well.

[00:20:14] So with that, I'm happy to take any questions and excited about this board. Thank you, Dr. Wodekop. Board members, is there any discussion? Ms. Chatters. I just wanted to say that to thank your team for this document, it is, like you said, I couldn't look at it on the phone, so I didn't.

[00:20:33] So I had to pull up on desktop, but it's very user-friendly. I appreciate all the work that went into it, and it's very comprehensive. So I appreciate us getting ahead of it, and thank you for all the work that your team did on this product. Thank you. Mr. Pronto.

[00:20:50] Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Wattica, thank you for that presentation. The deficit that you had listed, $846 million, is that? I would call that the needed funding. It's about $850 million, we'll say. Okay, $850 million.

[00:21:06] Okay. What is being, your predecessor would use red, green, yellow, right? When you're budgeting, I think it was for 27, it was $30 million next year.

[00:21:22] It looks like it's $10 million. That red, green, yellow out of the list that you have put in that hyperlink, how are we able to match up the priorities of the division for that particular year's budget? Yeah, great, great question. So using that red, yellow, and green, we continue to use that.

[00:21:41] That's an important part of how we categorize all this work because there's probably 10,000 components that we're looking at. So all of the work that we've budgeted for fiscal year 27 is related to, for those systems, related to those red identities, right?

[00:21:56] So we looked at roofs. We looked at HVACs in particular. Those are the primary, I think probably $25 of the $30 million is HVAC roof and electrical, and all of that is just red. scoring work that needs to be done, it is an imminent potential failure, we'll say.

[00:22:15] And if things should remain status quo, when would CCPS break even on that $850 million? I don't think I'll be working here then. I will be well-retired in a long time.

[00:22:31] Yeah. The reason I ask the question is, right, and I know Mr. Harris is about to present with the 1% opportunity for the voters to vote on. Having all this information up front, knowing that this is what this will directly impact, I think is extremely important for everyone, all of our constituents in each district, to see that comprehensive list and to know what is needed at their schools.

[00:22:56] They know what their complaints are, right? Whether the rooms are too hot, the systems aren't working, whatever it might be, and to know that there's opportunity to be able to address that sooner rather than later, which is why I asked.

[00:23:12] I really didn't expect you to give me an answer. But I do appreciate the presentation, and we'll see how this moves forward. So thank you. Thanks a lot. Okay, thank you so much. Next, we have a county budget update from Mr. Harris.

[00:23:38] Good afternoon, Chair, members of the school board.

[00:24:00] It's a good companion topic. Read the setup pretty well, I think. We'll run through this. I think it will tell a pretty good story. happy to take any questions at any point as we go through this or wait till the end whatever you want to do so this is an overview this is generally the community presentation that we'll use as we're heading out we started off last week I guess it was with the media briefing so starting to roll this out we've got the requester coming in on a daily basis to go out and talk to community

[00:24:35] groups and the like to share this information. But this is an overview of the sales tax referendum that the board of supervisors has set into motion at their July meeting. There's a little bit of miscommunication or misunderstanding about what a referendum is and isn't. And so I think there's not, I know you guys are experts in this, but anyone who might be listening anywhere, I think it's worth noting. Referendum just refers to kind of the process end of it, that it's put on the ballot for the voters to decide what the outcome is going to be. This is actually a revenue

[00:25:13] referendum. A bond referendum in itself doesn't actually, it doesn't have any money associated with it. All that is doing is giving us the ability to access general obligation debt. So So we can borrow at the lowest rate possible.

[00:25:30] So it's not that a project is funded or isn't funded. We just go out and receive a, you know, it's kind of like you're going to buy a house and you go to the bank and they say, all right, you're approved up until, you know, whatever number it is. But they don't necessarily, you know, it's not necessarily a funding source per se.

[00:25:49] It's a little bit different, but this particular referendum that's before you today is the possibility of a 1% local option sales tax. We have 1% local option sales tax in place today. It's one of our three biggest revenue sources that funds everything we do as Chesterfield County.

[00:26:10] So this would be building onto that. And what the board has done this far again, they haven't approved anything other than petitioning the circuit court to put this on the ballot. And we'll see the questions actually included in the presentation. We can take a look at that. But they voted 5-0 at their July meeting to send it on to the certain court, just like they would with the actual bond referendum.

[00:26:31] So the issue lays before the voters. And we are, as I mentioned already, we are in that process. We're going out and talking to anybody that wants to hear us to kind of walk you through what the actual proposal is.

[00:26:46] So again, 1%, it applies to all retail categories. This one is set aside by state code, exempts, groceries, and sort of personal care through basic hygiene type items. So it's not the full base of what the 1% is.

[00:27:04] Today, if you go to your grocery store on the way home, you'll pay that 1%. This particular program that the state has designed exempts some of those basic items. So I think that's a plus. And I should mention that the rule book that we're walking through here has all been defined by the state.

[00:27:23] There's eight, maybe nine localities that have had this power for some number of years. So it's been out there, which is helpful for us. We're trying to model what revenue this might generate, those types of things. So, you know, there are some examples to follow.

[00:27:42] But what they did in the most recent General Assembly is they expanded this opportunity to all localities in the state. So I think as of this morning, I saw maybe 30-plus localities in the Commonwealth are pursuing this in one way or another.

[00:27:58] July was the key for us because there are certain milestones you have to hit in order to make it on the November ballot. The board thought it was important enough, as you've already heard today, and as you well know, to have this considered. So that's why it was sort of a quick turnaround from the approval of state budget, and they took this issue up in July.

[00:28:20] Estimated revenue generation between 65 and 70. Again, we know how much today we take in on the full, but some of these breaks on the categories are a little bit, you know, difficult to follow in terms of there's even within the grocery store, there's sort of ins and outs.

[00:28:36] So we're using some of the modeling from the other localities in the state to come up with a general percentage. So we've just, as we tend to do, to just be safe, we've put a range on a lot of things in the year. We believe it's $65 to $70 million per year that we'd be dedicated to this.

[00:28:52] It has to be used for school capital improvements, and there are two real categories there, new construction or major maintenance, and you've just gotten a good sense of that. And then on the new construction piece, it has to be projects that really aren't out of the ground yet.

[00:29:07] So you could have designed something or purchased land for a project, but they're trying to induce additional construction. So like the high school, for example, we couldn't come in if this was approved and pay for the balance of that project.

[00:29:22] They want things that are truly not started. We do have some good candidates. We'll walk through what those are in just a second. The board, it does have a 20-year sunset, again, built into the state code provision, so that's not an option. So in 20 years, this would expire by state code.

[00:29:41] The board, this is sort of gets into the local components of it. They have seen fit to say, OK, if this is approved, it's part of their sort of ongoing effort to sort of shift the tax burden from the residential payer, which shoulders the majority of that in Chesterfield, a lot of suburban localities.

[00:29:59] That's not anything new necessarily. But by offering a $0.02 reduction in the real estate rate and a $0.10 reduction in the personal property, it's still a revenue generator for sure. But it helps to balance that out a little bit.

[00:30:16] One of the benefits of this and one of the reasons that I think they wanted to consider it is that $65 to $70 million, we estimate that between 25% and 30% is paid for by those that are traveling to or through the county. We've made a lot of inroads in the last few years in our tourism space, whether it be sports tourism or just other categories.

[00:30:37] So, you know, we know that those folks are coming here, they're spending money. And so this sort of latches on to that and takes advantage of that energy that's out there in the county. And we're able to shift, again, a significant portion of this to folks that do not live in Chesterfield.

[00:30:55] They come here spending money. They don't demand a lot of services. so that's a from a fiscal perspective that that's a winner uh mentioned the categories already and the non-resident piece and we'll touch on the projects as as we go through you know pause for any questions i know that's a dense slide but uh it's a good sometimes these community groups you get about one slide attention span so i figured i'd pack as much as i could into one um i think we've touched on this one uh generally again the board has not done anything other than set this into motion. The circuit court has taken that up. And actually, there's another step. If it were to

[00:31:32] be approved in November, the board would have to come back and actually pass an ordinance to put this into motion. So it's a lengthy process, multi-step, lots of opportunity for community input as you go through. We've talked about this in the built-in sunset, which, you know, having been around for a few minutes, that was one of the challenges, I think, from when we looked at the meals tax many years ago, didn't have that sunset in it, wasn't necessarily as restricted in some of these ways. I think this is, state has done a solid job of sort of designing

[00:32:11] the overall package that is before you this afternoon, before the voters as well. So again, we talked about the tax rate offsets. Again, you see the rates, what that would go down to.

[00:32:26] A penny on the real estate right now is between $6.8 to $7 million per penny, and then about $300,000 per personal property tax penny. So, again, from a major maintenance perspective, and this is day one, you know, coming out of the gates.

[00:32:43] It's still a plus to the bottom line for the school capital budget, has a little give back, but there would be certainly growth over time as we move forward in this revenue source. uh 22 referendum you guys know this story very well it helps to feed into uh sort of the project selection piece as as dr wotoka pointed out you know going in we knew mid low middle wasn't covered by that full authorization doesn't mean in any way that you couldn't go out and borrow those

[00:33:17] additional dollars it's just what you had authorized with uh with the geo label on it is and that's really what we're talking about. So that's a, I won't go back through and tell you what progress you've done on the 22 referendum, really amazing progress, but that does leave a couple projects that are still sitting out there and that fit the program criteria here, which are Midlow Middle and the Thomas Dale Campus Improvements.

[00:33:43] So those are two of the six that would be considered here. You see the full list of the projects have been identified. And again, the nice thing is a really good collaborative, long-range capital planning process in Chesterfield between both organizations, both boards.

[00:34:02] So coming up with this list of projects was a very natural one. They're already sitting out there. Really what you're talking about here is when do these projects get done? Are you able to accelerate them? And are you able to at the same time add in that sustainable revenue source on the major maintenance front?

[00:34:20] So we talked about these are shown in no particular order necessarily, but Midlow Middle, Thomas Dale, the New Dale Elementary School project that has been identified. These are also approximate locations. We try to make them as big and blurry as possible, so you can't tell exactly where they are.

[00:34:38] Full build out of the Tollica Middle, the plus one school around Old 100, as well as the gymnasium and other improvements at L.C. Bird, similar to what's been done at Midlow and Monaco. So those are the six sort of named projects. The balance of the funding here would go towards the cause that Dr. Guilherme could just talk to you about.

[00:35:00] I think if approved, you know, my recommendation would be to go out and sell as much of this day one, essentially, as we possibly could. I think we can, from a policy perspective, there's a lot of tests that you have to put on it in terms of, you know, even if we have the authority from the public via a bond referendum, doesn't necessarily mean it from a financial policy perspective.

[00:35:23] So all of those things line up pretty well. We could go out and sell the full range to have all these projects move really into day one. I know it's not that simple. There's planning and land acquisition, all of those types of things.

[00:35:38] But in a theoretical context, you could do them all next July 1st. You could go out there and sell and have these accelerated just that much. won't happen that way. I understand that, but that is the power of what we're looking at in terms of the sales tax referendum. Talk to you about, you guys know this story, I'll save you this one, but I think it does give you that, you know, we're looking, it's going to depend on a lot of other inputs, but I think you're talking about, you know, $35 to $40 million a year, recurring major

[00:36:14] maintenance fund that comes out of this with, again, this is going to grow over time. The sales tax itself, it has grown consistently for us. So you're going to see additional dollars are able to go into this, as well as if we sold everything day one, the way we do our debt service, it falls off every single year. So that decreasing debt service also provides some capacity to deal with the major maintenance challenges. Mr. Pronto, to your question, I wouldn't hazard a guess on the 800 either. But I do think that this is a very, very most meaningful program. It would yield the

[00:36:51] most meaningful program that we've ever had by far with the chance to grow. And it doesn't preclude you from bonding against this in some other way down the line. We are closing on a major maintenance package for you all this week. We could do that. That's been a way that leveraging our credit rating has been a way that we've really been able to keep up with the major maintenance program so it doesn't have to be all cash can be some blend of that so yeah it's very flexible we have a lot of options particularly on the major maintenance front as we move forward if if it were to be approved how are projects selected you all know this but again this is

[00:37:30] geared really to the community groups when we go out there that you know we didn't throw these into a hat and pick them out these have been pre-identified and really fit nicely into the pro forma for this referendum. There's the actual question that has been submitted as part of this.

[00:37:49] You don't have a whole lot of flexibility as far as that goes. I won't read it to you, but it is out there. I should mention we have a full county website that is available with all these materials, any meeting dates that come up, the facility condition assessment summary materials that Dr. Wilka talked about.

[00:38:08] We've got a number of sort of one-off PDFs that go through how do we get the $65 million estimate, how do we come up with the 25% to 30% export of the sales tax burden. All of that math, all that homework, if you will, is displayed on the website.

[00:38:27] We will continue to update as long as we're going out there and sharing things with the public. Community engagement, we're actually going to do a community partners meeting in this room next Monday evening. We did that in 22 for the bond referendum. It brings all community groups.

[00:38:43] If you have somebody that you know about that has someone in their leadership or multiple folks that want to come in and kind of hear a summary of this overall package, that's fantastic. Please invite them. Come see me or send me an email. Get them the information.

[00:38:59] But that's been a way for us to, I think we probably had 30 plus groups in 22, and we're getting some people already signed up for this. So we can talk to a lot of them, and then that usually results in a number of spinoff meetings as well. We're doing an employee town hall that same day.

[00:39:17] We have 3,000-plus county employees on the government side. They need to know this information as well. Most of them are voters. We've got the dates set for your joint meetings. Those have been out there as well. I mentioned we've got the county website.

[00:39:35] We've got Dr. Murray and I are recording a podcast, probably going to be the top 10 on Apple by the end of the week. But that is getting recorded here in the next couple of days. And then lots of digital and print materials. We've got sort of little handout cards if you're interested, if you're out walking around or talking to your neighbors or whatever.

[00:39:54] We're going to have to get you some of those as well. It's a nice summary of the sales tax as well. Voting information, we're getting started on this going pretty hard because of the early voting. sort of backs up the process a little bit so that does begin September the 18th so we've got over a month to get out there before even that first ballot gets cast and you can see some of the other deadlines on the screen so back to my my key fact slide and I will pause there see if there's any questions or comments okay thank you Mr. Harris board members is there any discussion

[00:40:31] Mr. Pronto thank you madam chair thank you for that presentation Mr. Harris so early voting In-person early voting starts September 18th, and the last town hall, if you will, is September 17th, Matovica at Manchester High School.

[00:40:51] One of the complaints that I have received during budget season is because Matovica is so big that we have it in two different locations rather than asking people in the southern part of the county to come up to Manchester High School.

[00:41:06] So I understand this is running right up to the day before, but in the interest of the vote and people being able to attend a town hall in which they're going to potentially vote yes or no and be informed, I'd like to see if we could entertain having something down at Matolica High School prior to the 18th so that we're reaching everyone equally.

[00:41:33] So I just want to throw that out there as an opportunity to make sure we're getting the word out and meeting with as many people and informing them and answering their questions. We typically do that when the full budget is proposed. We're trying to meet in a couple of corners of Matoga, just given the size of the district.

[00:41:50] So we're happy. I know these dates have been a challenge to pull together, but we certainly look for another opportunity earlier in the calendar. And even if we can't get the full team together, we can certainly offer that out there. So we'll work our staffs together and see what we can find.

[00:42:08] We greatly appreciate that. Sure thing. Thank you. No problem. Mr. Hatters. Thank you, Mr. Harris. I had two questions. On the slide, it says this one, the last one, and the first one. It says it expires in 20 years. What about the funds collected?

[00:42:25] We don't have to spend all of the money in 20 years, correct? No, ma'am. I don't believe that you do. You just have to spend it according to the rules. Okay. So all the, in this simple model that I've laid out, all the debt proceeds would be fully exhausted by then, and you would be sort of into that PAYGO program.

[00:42:44] And if you have something that's in flight, you know, I've seen nothing that suggests it has to be spent by midnight on whatever that day is. Correct. I just want to make sure. Great question, though. And then the definition of renovation, you had mentioned that it has to be new, but a renovation wouldn't be necessarily, like, can you elaborate a little bit on it?

[00:43:05] Yes, I think the new piece is more on the new construction side. They're just trying to, I think, guard against someone coming in and finishing up a bunch of things you have in flight versus, you know, again, inducing something that may be sitting on the sidelines a little bit, which, you know, you all have some great candidate projects for that.

[00:43:25] The major maintenance is all going to be, you know, sort of standalone efforts year by year. And you've got the benefit of having a wonderful granular plan that you've just, you know, got to take a look at that's already sitting out there. So the voters can understand what would be paid for.

[00:43:40] And then, you know, if anyone ever questioned it, you've got it laid out well in advance of when this would be approved. So I think you check all the boxes on both those categories. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Ms. Coker. Thank you, Mr. Harris, for that presentation.

[00:43:56] I'm glad to see that we're taking it on the road and educating our constituents on what all of this means. Quick question. So I know the expiration date is in 2046. When, if this gets approved and then the county does the ordinance afterwards, when would this 1% take effect?

[00:44:19] I think we talked just generally that July 1st would be the day. that would give you know plenty of time for get the word out you know there's got to get with the merchants and those types of things the nice thing there is this is already set up in their system and i'm oversimplifying i'm sure but basically they're just inputting one percent to two percent it's not creating a whole additional administrative process for them or for us to to collect the funds so it'd be july of 27th yes ma'am okay thank you all righty thank you we really appreciate you

[00:44:53] come in and share in with us and we fingers crossed thank you so much yes thank you all right appreciate it next we have an update on the fy 2027 budget from mr meister thank you madam chair other members of the board uh dr murray here to talk to you a little bit about the fy 27 budget revisions uh the last time we were talking about the budget a few months back we were excited that

[00:45:31] the state was getting close. They finished their job. We got some new numbers in here. We had a little bit of a break over the summer, but we're able to come here and talk to you a little bit about what the state delivered, what that means for Chesterfield County Schools, and what our proposal here is for your consideration this evening for the budget revisions. So with that, the final state numbers came in, and we were crossing our fingers that our budget that we had adopted would be not impacted negatively by this. You can see on the slide that it definitely wasn't. 15.9 million of new additional funds were made available through the final budget process

[00:46:10] closing right around the end of June. You can see here the compensation supplement, special ed, pre-K, and a few other important items were also included. I'll walk through each of those individually but this is a good news story and helps lead us into FY27 and beyond in a good fiscal state.

[00:46:31] You can see here the $15.9 million and where that came from, from a revenue side. The first thing to talk about is the state salary supplement of $7.1 million. I'll talk about what we're going to do with that on the next slide, but this is moving the previously proposed 2% increase that the then-Governor Youngkin put in place to 4%, which results in an additional $7.1 million of funding to Chesterfield County.

[00:46:57] And the other items look more as sort of adjustments to plan special education. They increased some of the rates related to special education funding, so about $3.9 million additional we can contribute towards those students. Virginia Preschool Initiative, VPI, wasn't necessarily a change in the state budget per se, but it was an adjustment to the number of slots Chesterfield County received.

[00:47:22] which is only good news for us. So it didn't impact the overall state number. We just got allocated all the slots we had asked for. That's about $2.4 million. And the remaining $2.5 million is a handful of other adjustments made throughout the budget process that will look to you as more flexible funding. And we'll talk about what we'll plan to do with those. You put it all together, $15.9 million of additional funding. The first and most significant piece of that was a $7.1 million or so of state salary supplement. First and foremost, the state salary supplement funds the state share of a four percent raise at the state level. And keep in mind state share

[00:47:59] means it's significantly discounted for things like SOQ positions that the state recognizes as well as our local match to that. What we are planning on doing, if you recall, we have provided a five percent increase in your budget that went live July 1. So that extra 7.1 million will be used to help fund that 5% raise that you've already provided in funding and funded. What that does is free up $7.1 million of local funds that we can address other needs with. Now I'll shift to the

[00:48:34] right side of the screen here. You can see using those now freed up $7.1 million of local funds, I propose doing two things with that. The first and foremost is to fund the remaining local match portion of the state $1,500 SOQ bonus that was talked about in the FY26 budget to put the total budget for that bonus funding at just under $13 million. I'll talk a little bit about the criteria for that as we go forward. The good news here is I'm going to use this, if approved, this money to essentially pay a one-time item, which means that money will be available for other uses

[00:49:11] in following years, so I can use that to offset things like one-time money that we had in the budget in FY28 and beyond, so while this meets the need of solving the budget for the bonus question, it also significantly improves our long-term stability in terms of our revenue projection by using that to offset that one-time funding.

[00:49:32] And the last thing here on this page, just under a million dollars, it's labeled here, Utilities Deficit Buffer. We've got a nice, friendly little email the other day from our electricity and gas suppliers, you can see pretty significant increases are projected in FY27.

[00:49:48] The good news is we had anticipated most of that, but not all of that. So we had a plan for about $3 million of utility inflation in our budget. This is about $4 million, so I need to allocate that other $1 million of local funding to close that utility funding gap.

[00:50:05] So that first $7.1 million, just to summarize, first and foremost, It goes to offset our local contribution to the already existing 5% raise. I'm going to take that then local money to pay for that one-time bonus in FY27 and offset longer-term issues in 28 and beyond and meet the utility need.

[00:50:24] Talking again about that bonus, a little bit on the criteria. You can see that listed here. This is meant to be a broad-based bonus applying to permanent employees, so it does not include things like TWAs and substitutes. And it also, I'll read the third bullet as written, So non-instructional staff who already receive dedicated retention programs like transportation and custodial are excluded because they already receive a bonus otherwise, but all non-instructional employees that don't receive a bonus will receive this $1,500.

[00:50:58] Timing is still a little bit pending. This particular amendment would need to go through the Board of Supervisors for approval, so we can't necessarily commit to a timing, but we're targeting October or November pending on the timing of the Board of Supervisors' approval of the $6.1 million of funding here.

[00:51:18] The next main piece of the state adjustment is about $3.9 million dedicated towards special education. We've gone through, as we always do over the course of the summer, and look at needs and address individual changes in enrollment, changes in expectations at the various schools.

[00:51:33] That would have resulted in a need for 27 additional positions. With this funding, we're able to fund those without going back to you and asking to change other allocations etc so 27 staff positions including four teachers can be funded directly out of this 3.9 million special ed is always a one of the areas we monitor closely over the course of the year there's always a surprise that comes at us from some way shape or form this actually more intentionally builds in about a million and a half dollars in our existing budget to cover whatever that surprise may be an example from a couple years ago good news is we haven't had this

[00:52:10] problem expected. This year, things like speech pathologists, we had a hard time hiring them. We had to go outsource for those. That created a budget strain a few years ago. For an event like that, should it arise in FY27, we have a few dollars to cover said event. The next item, pre-K slots, I gave you a little bit of the summary of this one, $2.4 million. What this does is it fully funds all of our pre-K slots that we have requested from the state. They have been a little bit under what we've requested the last year or so since we unwound from the head start this fully funds all those classrooms including title one classrooms which is great news because that also frees up

[00:52:49] as a result of this about eight hundred thousand dollars left in title one that we can reallocate to title one schools and uh shila and team are looking at how to best allocate that funding so just a tack on uh good news from this funding that we're able to uh continue to invest in those title one schools as well as fully fund our pre-k as a result of this particular item the last two and a half million here is a little bit more flexible I'll talk a little bit about where I propose these monies get directed capital and debt another million dollars here as I've talked in the past

[00:53:24] we continue to need to invest in our debt service burden as we build to elementary schools a high school etc etc this has an increasing debt burden that will go down eventually but we're still on that climb up ramp for that. So allocating another million dollars helps soften that debt bubble a little bit on the expense side. Technology replacement. Ernie's come to you and talked about what we need to do in terms of technology replacement cycles, whether they be classroom instruction material, intercoms, et cetera. Putting another $600,000 or so towards

[00:54:01] that effort is money well spent. And lastly, FY28 sustainability. If you recall in our budget, We had a $7 million one-time funding line item as a revenue source. This generally comes out of previous year's savings.

[00:54:18] I want to allocate $900,000 of this towards reducing that $7 million down to $6.1 million. If I flash back to about five or ten minutes ago, I talked about $6.1 million of funding that would be freed up as a result of that ability to use that local funding for that one-time bonus.

[00:54:36] You couple that 6-1 with this 0.9 here, I'm able to get rid of that entire $7 million of one-time funding and won't have that as a line item when I come back to you in your budget presentations in January of 28. That's a huge long-term win, and I'm excited to be able to leverage this, not to meet just local needs or near-term needs, but also solve a longer-term structural problem as a result of that.

[00:55:04] Last thing that I'm not coming to you with a budget adjustment this evening for, but I wanted to put on your radar, is an increase in the governor's budget and what was signed into law about increase in the breakfast reimbursement incentive rate from $0.28 to $0.50.

[00:55:21] This would result in about half a million dollars of additional funding to food service if ultimately put forward by VDOE. Part of this was hindered a little bit in our ability to bake into this because of some up to language that was included in the state budget so before we're totally comfortable building in this 560 000 or so into our food service budget and be able to reinvest that in that program we're anxiously awaiting what that reimbursement rate memo is from vdoe and once that's made forward we'll come back to you but because the change from 28 cents to 50 cents was part of the state budget i wanted to at least mention it here as a bit of a precursor to

[00:56:00] we hope to see in coming months so that is a bit of a preview of what will come to you this evening with the memo that will outline all of this uh keep in mind that especially when you think about the bonus uh and all these monies do require board of supervisor approval on any amendment to this size so we'll work closely with mr harris's team our friends at the county to push all this through after your approval tonight should you choose to vote for those resolutions so with that i'll I'll pause for any questions, Madam Chair.

[00:56:31] All right. Thank you, Mr. Meister. Board members, is there any discussion? Mr. Pronto? Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Bob. I have always been frustrated when I'm tasked with a project and I'm not given all the tools to complete it, and then I have to wait, which is essentially what you and your team have had to do as we were waiting for the governor and the General Assembly and all of that that happened over the past few months.

[00:56:58] So I still have to say I want to thank you and your team for the hours and moving some money around here and there to make things work and then try to speculate and guess. And then it's always good to find out that we have a bit of a surplus. And then the fun part is, OK, well, where do we apply that versus where do we have to take away from?

[00:57:18] which, you know, unfortunately some of the districts around us are having to have that very difficult conversation of where are they taking money from versus where are we getting to apply that to. So very fortunate here in Chesterfield County. And thank you for leading the team to map this out with that additional revenue.

[00:57:37] Obviously, I saw special education, so I lit up like a Christmas tree, but understanding that we could put that anywhere and still benefit whatever department that might go towards. So thank you for the endless work in that, and I don't know, I'm not going to speak for the board, but of course it's a yes for me when that time comes, so thank you.

[00:57:56] Dr. Darby. I will echo what Mr. Perranto shared, that I don't think I've ever heard the word good news so many times in a budget presentation, so I say that to say thank you for the years of good stewardship and thoughtful leadership of your team and the planning that has taken up time from years past and then even in this presentation continuing to look ahead and plan for the future and so i just appreciate your leadership and the team thank you we pride

[00:58:26] ourselves on being uh prudently conservative okay thank you so much we appreciate it all right next we have a presentation from dr murray on the 2025 26 successes and the school year ahead Madam Chair, members of the board, thank you for allowing myself and our chiefs to present to you this afternoon.

[00:58:57] But foremost, I want to begin by saying happy belated birthday, Mr. Paranto. I understand there was like a resolution that was getting adopted, and that's why none of us said happy birthday. And whereas none of us recognize Stephen Paranto's birthday.

[00:59:17] Oh, well done, Jenna. Well, this afternoon, the Chiefs primarily will provide highlights from the 25-26 school year and a look ahead to our focuses for the coming year as we continue to imagine beyond tomorrow.

[00:59:35] So what I'm going to share is nothing new to the board, but just for the general public, kind of a peek at Chesterfield by the numbers, just to kind of maybe paint with a broad brushstroke who we are as a district.

[00:59:51] So we are a district that serves over 64,000 or around 64,000 students in what is the region's largest school division. All of our schools, all 69, are accredited.

[01:00:09] We're very pleased that that is a year-over-year accomplishment for our staff. We employ over 13,500 staff, making us one of the region's largest employers. And we are a diverse community, a profile that we celebrate far and wide, both economically and ethnically.

[01:00:32] And within that breakdown, we have represented over 100 languages in our homes. CCPS graduates more than 4,200 students each year.

[01:00:48] And I'm pleased to share that we graduated just about 90 more during our summer school graduation a few weeks back. So compliments to the efforts to get those young people across the stage, whether it was an early graduation or they just needed a little extra push and shove and prayer to get them there.

[01:01:08] But we know that however they got across that finish line, they all accomplished the same goal of achieving their high school diploma. and they leave our high schools prepared for life, whether that's enrolled in college, whether that's enlistment in the military, or employed gainfully paying taxes in our community.

[01:01:27] We are proud of our students and what they bring to our classrooms each and every day. To kind of break down that profile a bit more, we serve our students in special education, which represents about 14% of our 64,000, 13% of our students receive gifted education services.

[01:01:48] And I'll pause there just to give a shout out to Calvin and his team for solving an age-old issue in our division where now we have successfully removed the CBG middle school hubs, and they will be taken from and deposited back to their neighborhoods.

[01:02:10] So job well done to our transportation team. Our CCPS high schools students earned over 10,000 career credentials last year, and on average, just under 94.5% of our students attend school each and every day.

[01:02:28] As you are aware, Chesterfield has always been a fast-growing county. County, we've been kind of gifted, if you will, in an odd way of remaining somewhat stagnant over the past few years, and that's allowed us to play catch up with some of our infrastructure and overcrowding issues, and we're popping schools out of the ground, and that allows us to reconcile a lot of that, but we are pleased that just the other week, we opened

[01:02:59] our 69th school. Of those 69, we have one pre-kindergarten, our CECLA, now 41 elementary schools, one virtual school, 13 middle schools, 11 high schools. And at those high schools, we have 13 specialty centers represented, as well as two career and technical centers.

[01:03:21] One that we will have a renovation ribbon cutting on next Friday morning to celebrate the new conference center and new classrooms where office spaces once were and are now going to be home to 650 more students receiving CTE pathway and credentialing opportunities.

[01:03:45] Chesterfield, oh and I should mention that 23 of our schools are also Title I. Chesterfield County Public Schools is continually building new schools and replacing older so that our students can learn in high quality environments and we will have a new West Ridge High School ribbon cutting around this time next year so very excited about bringing our 70th school online it's coming along incredibly well looks very beautiful and the road is open Mr. Paranto if you want to go by and sneak a peek after work one day and CECLA is our pre-kindergarten school that serves

[01:04:24] around 370 students from 12 of our elementary schools, but certainly many of our other elementary schools also offer early childhood or pre-K services. If we were a business, and I would contend that we are, we're in the business of teaching and learning, we are one of the largest in central Virginia. We adopted, or you all adopted, a $1.2 billion budget earlier this year.

[01:04:54] Our famous nine slide, as you're most familiar, we drive nine million miles each year, ensuring that our students are traveling to and from school each day safely. And last year, our food and nutrition services team served nearly or a little more than eight and a half million meals.

[01:05:12] And Bob would offer that that number would be nine or higher if we didn't have all of the snow and ice. So we hope that that number will be above nine next year. This is a breakdown of those 13,500 employee groups.

[01:05:30] I'll save you the exercise of me reading it off to you, but certainly we have basically a bunch of people doing incredible things to have us ready each and every day. And many of those employees were working over the summer to make sure that not just this week with new teachers and next week with the rest of our instructional staff, but that big week following on August the 24th, we are ready to welcome all of those 64,000 kids back to our home in our classrooms where the magic happens.

[01:06:11] I apologize. I thought, did I already do this one? No, just some more by the numbers, but I kind of want to highlight how special many of our schools are. The eight national ESEA, which is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act designation of distinguished schools, Those are essentially eight Title IX, or Title I schools, excuse me, seven Blue Ribbon schools, seven middle schools to watch, and then one national AMLE school of distinction.

[01:06:40] So our kids are going to great places. And I would also assert that if we were willing to put in the effort to apply for these designations, more of our schools would be there. So that is a low-key challenge to apply.

[01:06:58] to our principals to get out there and celebrate forward the great work that they and their staff are doing each and every day. And then I'm going to turn it over to our chiefs, beginning with Dr. Pope, with teaching and learning. Good afternoon, board chair, vice chair, members. Following Dr.

[01:07:20] Murray, it's my privilege to present to you in just a few short slides some of the amazing big work that the Division of Teaching and Learning accomplished in 2025-26. Not on my script here, but I will say this is one of the hardest activities my team members do each year because they would like about six slides and a font of like eight.

[01:07:39] And I was like, no, we don't have time for that. So I do try to focus them on the things that present big numbers because I think numbers speak to those big things that we're so proud of. Not going to read each of these to you. You have the numbers in front of you, but just categorically, the first two items show the professional learning supports offered to our teachers, our new teachers, and those new to CCPS.

[01:08:02] The third and fourth item celebrate the successes of implementing new assessments at the state and division level, including VALS, and in case people need to know the acronyms, Virginia Language and Literacy Screening Systems, and that was extended through eighth grade this past year, and it's very important because what it does is it helps us find those students who still in those middle school years need that targeted reading support.

[01:08:28] We also took away the Virginia growth assessment at the middle school level and introduced the NWEA MAPS assessment. It is an absolutely amazing predictor of student needs for support when it's given in the fall, winter, and spring, and it's an absolutely amazing predictor of SOL success, not just in reading and math, the two areas where we administer the MAP NWEA, but across science and social studies as well.

[01:08:56] Yes, we want to be able to predict which students are going to succeed on the SOLs, but more importantly, we want to predict early the students who need that extra support so that they can also pass. We want every student to be successful. Amazing tool. Item five recognizes every year the state gifts us some new standards of learning, and our teachers always need a little extra support in those years where they're tackling those new SOLs.

[01:09:20] Items six through eight, we try to highlight here some of our behind-the-scenes support in order to address those non-traditional learning needs through our CCPS online PACE programs. We know that not every student fits in that school setting, and we love that we can offer that variety to our students.

[01:09:39] We also highlight here that beginning each October, as we've done since the pandemic, we offer that free tutoring for our families. And you can see the number is huge with over 22,000 students participating in those sessions. So happy to be able to continue offering that as well.

[01:09:55] We close out on this slide, items 9 and 10, recognizing our central staff who meet the school's requests for added support with individual students in classrooms and through specialized training, as well as working to establish that pipeline of future special education leaders who wish to serve our students beyond that classroom setting.

[01:10:17] So, to the pleasure of my team, we do get a second highlight slide. Continuing on, first three items we've given to Mr. Macklin, where we celebrate those industry-recognized credentials and those experiences of work-based learning that our students so appreciate, and they would not be possible without the tremendous support of our business partners.

[01:10:38] As you know, industry-recognized credentials build resumes, meet graduation requirements, and earn high school credits in areas like industry, trade, health, human sciences, agriculture, culinary. I added all of that just so Mr. Macklin would be extra happy tomorrow morning.

[01:10:55] I'm giving him a few extra seconds of my minutes. We close out the highlights here by recognizing the work of a very small team that we often don't think of. we have three full-time employees for a very large school division that manage and support our schools through all of that standardized testing. Not a popular topic, but three employees, and look at what they do. 36 trainings with 610 participants. This is how we support schools in administering those important required assessments without irregularities. And what

[01:11:28] is that total? It is over 300,000 assessments a year. So it's amazing behind the scenes work. No one loves to talk about or think about testing, but somebody's got to do it. We've got an amazing team that does it well for us. We end this little bit of real estate on our slide two by just always pausing to look back at the awards and recognitions that our students, our teachers, and our programs have accumulated in the last year. And as you can see there, we're very proud. We have regional state and national winners so always worth putting them forward as we move in to imagining beyond

[01:12:08] tomorrow we're going to start with this coming school year in 2026-27 i've challenged my team to think about us as a system a well-working system that is coherent with a focus on making the work of the staff in our schools easier making hard things easier to understand and making the daily work easier if we can do that we are winning some of the things that we've already said as our work priorities number one we'd like to refine our professional learning model we have an amazing model you saw those numbers on the first slide we offer amazing experiences

[01:12:44] and opportunities but we'd like to tier that support so that our schools that have more need have more opportunities to have teachers in investing in those trainings throughout the year and we're calling it a cohort model where people will be invited in.

[01:13:00] Also, we understand that generative AI is part of our world. You can feel any way you want about that, but our secondary students have to be prepared to work in that world, and our teachers need to also... My husband's calling me. He knows better. Okay. We know that not only do our secondary students need to be prepared for that world, but our teachers can truly leverage some efficiencies if we can help them with those tools.

[01:13:25] so that will continue to be a focus. We have a new instructional best practices guide. It's been revised. It's better than ever, and just helping our teachers get comfortable and really understand those strategies, super important to improve classroom instruction. We are expanding the NWEA map assessment, third through fifth. Two bonuses in that beyond its amazing predictive powers and its way of helping us support. It will eliminate many of our benchmarks that we give throughout the year as tethered to our imagine math and imagine language and literacy products because

[01:13:58] nwea results magically flow into those digital resources and directly dial those personal learning paths based on the students results teachers can always override adjust adapt but that is an amazing decrease in assessments for our elementary students it also eliminates the virginia growth assessment in those grades three through five so we've kind have gotten a double win there with removing assessment minutes lost by just replacing with the third through fifth NWEA math assessment. We also have added intervention products in

[01:14:36] mathematics with math bridges and math space that will help our teachers have more tools when we need to intervene with math skills. We also feel it's important to get better at what we do. And the only way we know how to get better at what we do is to ask our consumers, our teachers, are we giving you what you need from an instructional resource lens we give that through the portal so we're going to begin something called cyclic curricular resource reviews and it's where we're going to actually pull pieces from our portal and look at a variety of aspects related to those pieces to see if they measure up to our expectations a little spot

[01:15:13] checking never hurts anyone and then having conversations with those teachers we serve to say is this what you need what do you need more of what do you need less of I just feel it's time for us to do that and I feel it's time for us to align that work with the new SOL standards as they come out so we're in a cyclic pattern that mirrors the state we also have not had career and technical education PLC so you could be that one engineering teacher that's all alone in your school how do we connect you with others who teach like subject areas so that you can get better so we're hoping those PLCs will mean a lot to those teachers. We know they want that. We're hoping we can

[01:15:50] tether that to improve numbers in industry-recognized credentials, which means something to our students. Also focusing on expanding our inclusive practices in PK-2 and in service of autism. And then finally, we really do want to help when we devote instructional minutes to assessments. We need people to understand what did we learn? What do we do next in the classroom based on what we learn we're calling them snapshots we typically prepare snapshots that kind of zoom out and look at what we learned as a result after sol testing but it's going to be

[01:16:25] important we feel to do that in the fall winter and spring after these division-wide assessments it's just something we haven't done before and i feel like it would be really helpful as we all become a little bit more able to speak the same language of what did we learn where are we going next based on those big division assessments. So stay tuned for those. And our final slide, imagining beyond tomorrow. Obviously, what I have listed here are year twos of the work that I just talked about that we're going to embark on this coming year. So increasing that professional learning model, still continuing to tackle generative AI, looking at those math assessments,

[01:17:04] getting our teachers super comfortable with the reports and how to use that information optimally, and then, again, engaging in those review cycles that we hope to have fully up and running by the year after this coming year. I'm going to hand off now. I think communications and community engagement is up next with Chief Sean Smith.

[01:17:23] Thank you. Madam Chair, board members, thank you for the opportunity to present on behalf of the work that our team has been doing each and every day. As we kind of kick off here, talk about successes, I'll lead off with the Department of Creative and Media Services, led by Jeanne O'Quinn.

[01:17:45] A couple things from that team this past year. We launched an employee communications survey, which is really providing us feedback, which you'll see throughout some of our work this upcoming school year to improve our internal communication channels and practices. We've also enhanced our support for schools and departments through communications and branding guidance, storytelling and communication resources that promote consistency.

[01:18:06] Our printing services team, led by Brian Morris, I would note this is the only shared service that the school division runs for the county government, and we feel like we do it very well with some incredible customer service. That team has upgraded to a new flatbed printer that really is improving the quality and efficiency of our sign production.

[01:18:25] We've also developed a simplified business card ordering process that decreases the print ordering errors, as well as continue to enhance printing technologies and efficiencies. Communities in schools, led by Ashley Hall and certainly by their governing board, we've expanded our services to Hopkins Elementary, reaching an additional 800 students, providing school-wide supports to almost 15,000 students and intensive case management for almost 1,000 students across academics, behavior attendance, social-emotional learning, and career readiness.

[01:19:00] Kitchin's services and student leadership, led by Dr. John Phillips, overhauled the Title IX resources and processes from intake through resolution, including reporting, investigations, documentation, communication, training, supportive measures, and student and family resources. Our Office of Family Community Engagement, led by Amy Bartolotti, they've really worked to expand our family engagement programming through use of participation data. I talked with you in this presentation in years past about how that team worked to put in place some measurables to which they're now adapting obviously the offerings they have for families. The coming school year, a couple of selective priorities. Communities and schools, as you know well,

[01:19:39] we expanded services to Buell Elementary. They'll include reaching an additional 900 students and growing our community partnerships. Different services, strengthen our consistency in Title on response practices and builds sustainable systems to improve our school family communication and trust creative media services strengthen our division-wide communications through central office communications representative network in order to have our school-based pr network enhanced strategic storytelling from family community engagement we're going to embed our family engagement process within the mtss framework and expand those partnerships that support student

[01:20:15] success and printing services continue to modernize the printing operations with new equipment and really begin to implement a leadership transition plan. I would note Brian Morris, who's led that shop for well over 40 years, has done a phenomenal job.

[01:20:32] He is going to be pursuing in this next year a retirement, which we're thankful for him for his service. We're not thankful for him leaving us, but we're appreciative of the work he's done. We do know that, obviously, we have a strong team that's in place under his leadership right now.

[01:20:51] Let's look at some of the selective priorities, imagining beyond tomorrow. Communities in schools, the work that Ashley Hall is doing, obviously, with their board, is launching a new five-year strategic plan. Obviously, they continue to look at the sites where we're currently based and constantly assessing, are we at the right places we need to be and where are additional places that they should be.

[01:21:10] Conditioning services, expand our proactive family engagement and strengthen the partnerships that support our students in schools. Creative media services, we're going to expand strategic communication support for schools and departments. and increase storytelling that highlights students' success.

[01:21:25] Family community engagement, we're using that scale data-informed family engagement practices and leverage the community partnerships to expand those partnership opportunities for students and families, not just the division level, but across feeder patterns. And then printing services, strengthen our operational resilience through cross-training and innovative services that will support instruction and communication.

[01:21:47] Turn this over to Mr. Meister. Thank you, Sean, Madam Chair. Quick highlights on the finance piece. I have to start with Workday.

[01:22:04] Workday was a massive lift for not only my team, Dr. Huff's team, professional learning, the county. This was a big deal. We got off of our previous antiquated systems. We're all live on Workday now. You can see the dates where that went live.

[01:22:21] Bit of an exhale on that. We are going through a year of firsts, so we're not done by any stretch. So we still have a lot of work to do, but definitely need to celebrate being able to go live on work day. I promise I'll move quicker on the rest of these. The budget process and capital improvement, we spent a lot of time talking about both of these already today.

[01:22:41] The budget process, you heard me talk about an update a few minutes ago, but really proud of the fact that we're one step away from that $60,000 threshold for teachers getting there in a sustainable way. Capital improvement, fleet financing, you heard Dr. Wattica talk a bit about the sustainability of the major maintenance plan.

[01:22:58] And we also are really proud of being able to put into place the sustainable bus replacement program this past year. Really big, really important moves on the budget side on both the operating and capital side. And hopefully we like to think we did this all with an equity lens, so we'll keep that front and center as we go as well.

[01:23:17] A few other items on the highlight side. Food service warehouse, Berkeley Dunbrack came and talked to you a few months ago. One of the most sort of big sigh, again, this thing works on the warehouse is we're able to basically self-fund the warehouse through one pizza bid.

[01:23:35] So we sold it on the idea of efficiency and effectiveness within that shop, and we're able to more or less make our money back on one pizza bid this year. We're going to continue to grow and evolve that process as well. We've chosen a new budget software to make some of our internal processes easier.

[01:23:53] Yes, we are on LLVU 1.0, but we believe 2.0 will further that along. And all of this continues to be with the eye of fiscal governance and audit readiness as we look forward, especially on the audit readiness, just being able to say we're on work day and all the functionality that that has should clear 15 to 30 audit recs off the list.

[01:24:16] We're working with Karin, getting those checked off. I look forward to coming back and celebrating that with you shortly. As we look forward in this coming year, yes, Workday, we're in a year of firsts. We're still rolling through this. It's about optimization. It's about user support, really trying to figure out not just that we're on it, but how are we going to use this?

[01:24:35] How are we going to be more efficient overall? I'm sure my team, I'm sure Dr. Huff's team as well are looking forward to finding those efficiencies. We'll find them. They're going to take some time to work out some kinks as we go forward. As we think forward, LLVU 2.0 will implement that.

[01:24:53] SAF sits kind of next to Workday, but it's all sort of still financial governance. We need to continue to look at our SAF student activity funds, the dollars that sit at schools, that process to make sure it aligns with what we're doing now on Workday. Keep those documentations updated with that.

[01:25:10] That's something that was largely worked in parallel, but definitely a step behind. So we're going to continue to keep our eye on what's happening in the schools. Major maintenance capital planning, you heard a lot of discussion already on that. There's a lot of work to be done on those areas. We're going to continue to focus on that.

[01:25:27] But I'll end on the Imagine Beyond Tomorrow piece. There's a lot of words here, but they really boil down to two, resilience and sustainability across all aspects of the group. Sustainable, resilient financials, does our long-term plan equal what we need to do to be successful as an organization both on the operating side as well as the capital side a lot of interesting opportunities that are presenting themselves there and on the software and operational side getting to resilient getting to sustainable getting to plans that work not just in the moment

[01:26:02] but moving forward as we go so with that I will turn it over to Dr. Huff and her presentation thank Good afternoon, Madam Chair, Mr. Pronto, Dr. Murray, members of the board.

[01:26:26] Pleased to be able to share with you some highlights from the 25-26 school year for human resources and talent management. The first celebration that we have is our substitute fill rate. And I'm pleased to report that last year we achieved an average fill rate of 93%.

[01:26:44] And we're really excited about that, both because it exceeds the pre-pandemic gold standard nationally of 90%, but it's also the celebration that we got applause from principals on at the principals' meeting.

[01:27:00] So that is meaningful to us because that lets us know that that's having an impact in the schools. And I've shared before about the number of substitutes who go on to accept full-time employment opportunities with us. I want to give a special shout-out to Byrd High School, Meadowbrook High School, Thomasdale High School, and Carver Career Academy, who all exceeded our district average 93% fill rate, as well as Ettrick Elementary hit the 90% gold standard.

[01:27:32] So I'm really excited because we've also seen this success expand geographically in our county. Recruiting events, we completed 70 events last year. was a 6% increase over the prior year. And we had decreased teacher vacancy rates. In elementary core content, we went from 4.9% vacancy rate to 3.7% last fall. Our secondary content went to 0.7% last fall. And in September, in the staffing report, when we have a little more time, I have a lot more good news to share from this year. So we'll be capturing that early September

[01:28:12] data and we're expecting improvements in all areas we also won a national association of counties award for 2026 for employee wellness we had our first employee wellness fair we had over 300 people attending we focused on the eight dimensions of wellness there was you could learn to play pickleball you could learn healthy cooking you could line dance we had a therapy dog relaxation techniques so just employee medical center gave flu shots so all aspects of wellness

[01:28:45] were really emphasized we have a monthly wellness newsletter now and we had over 5,000 employees participate in the anthem wellness incentives so we're really excited about that and the next fair is coming up on October 27th our regionalized efforts for recruiting substitutes were successful And we continued those and plan to continue them this year.

[01:29:12] We also piloted a school spotlight event at Bensley Elementary School. We had our substitute fairs at Meadowbrook High and Carver Middle. And we also did a bus tour for a small group of teaching candidates that featured Falling Creek Elementary, Falling Creek Middle, and Meadowbrook High School.

[01:29:34] and we found that some of those boutique and on-location events were more successful, and we plan to continue that this year. Our international exchange program has expanded. We now have 138 international exchange teachers, 27 of our schools participate, and we have teachers from 19 countries.

[01:29:58] We've digitized all of the school personnel files. We have 98% of the digitization of personnel file project complete. We're still finishing up a few area transportation offices, and we expect to have that complete well in advance of the strategic plan deadline.

[01:30:17] And we have a career switcher focus. We had the second highest completion rate in the state of Virginia for the iTeach program. We had 339 aspiring teachers enrolled and 143 completers, and we continue to have folks enrolled this year as well.

[01:30:38] The coming school year, of course, Mr. Meister mentioned, we're really spending a lot of time with the ERP and the ERP implementation. We want to continue to train and iterate and update the implementation of that new software to focus on maximizing functionality.

[01:30:54] We want to evaluate small grant projects. These are public, state, and federal grants for small numbers of people, like, for example, the instructional assistant to teacher preparation programs to see, you know, what were the outcomes, like follow those participants, what happened a year later, two years later, three years later, and which ones might deserve more attention or what might be scalable.

[01:31:21] We also are focused on competitive compensation with the previously stated goals of a pathway to a $60,000 minimum starting salary for teachers and $16 per hour minimum for classified positions.

[01:31:38] Beyond tomorrow, we want to focus on retention. They say recruiting and retention are like dating and marriage. We've been doing a lot of first dates with a lot of job fairs, But we may be entering a time where we're a little bit more full and we want to focus on what makes that employment relationship strong.

[01:31:58] How can we continue to explore opportunities and pathways for employee career lattices and kind of match people's professional interests and development with our organizational needs? And we also want to launch a substitute recognition program.

[01:32:14] We have 3,400 substitutes. They're performing important roles, and many times they're becoming full-time employees, and we want to recognize and honor their work as well as strengthen that pathway.

[01:32:30] And I will turn it over to my colleague, Dr. Wodica. Good afternoon again. The Operations Division has had a wonderful year full of accomplishments, and we're looking forward to continuing on into the future.

[01:32:50] As you know, and I hate to skip over this quickly, but we've talked about it a lot tonight. We've delivered on a number of major capital improvement projects that have been, I think each one of their own could be their own presentation. So we're really thrilled with these five huge things that we've done over the last year to finish up over the last year and moving forward.

[01:33:10] A couple other points we'll note in the strategic planning and asset management group. The school planning office has developed the school capacity utilization dashboard. So that is a link that if you'd like to follow that, It's an opportunity for members of the community and for school principals and other folks to be able to take a look at how their school is being utilized in terms of numbers.

[01:33:30] We have a lot of conversation about different capacities. This provides a graphical representation really better on a laptop or on a computer than on a phone, but it does provide a lot of information to you as well. So that's a tool that's available that our school planning office has done a great job. Mr. Meister mentioned our sustainable 15-year school bus replacement program.

[01:33:50] We're really thrilled that we've received the first 25 of those buses. In October, we'll receive another 22, so that will put us at 47. My goal is to be at 45, and we're able to eke out a couple more because of favorable bids for this year. So we'll continue to work through that. That's a great opportunity to move forward.

[01:34:07] We've established the Department of Safety and Security. That's an advancement from a small office that was in the operations division of the Office of Safety and Security. established it as a true department as is outlined in the strategic plan. We worked with our friends in the school leadership department division to implement weapons detection in middle and high schools. We have launched the traffic safety officer program which has saved a ton of money and kept students safe and we have deployed the school bus bus arm cameras. We're driving operational excellence through our custodial robotics program. We started that out at Tomahawk

[01:34:45] Creek Middle School this year. We're going to expand that into two more elementary schools, excuse me, middle schools in the coming year. And very exciting, we've launched an English language learning program for facilities employees. So we have a number of employees who have a lot of skills that could be very valuable to the school division and to our students, but may not have English skills, English language skills that they need in order to advance in their position. So Assistant Director Dawson Ray has done a great job of implementing this program with our ELL program and our adult learning program to help build skills among our adult learners that can help our staff continue to grow and develop and serve

[01:35:24] our students. In the coming year, we will, again, complete major capital projects. Our Westridge high school project will be completed, and we'll complete the student assignment planning. That will be our topic of conversation over the next couple of months. We'll also break ground on the replacement Grange Hall Elementary School, and we'll complete programming and design for the Dale Area Elementary and Pre-K Center for future years.

[01:35:50] We'll also continue to work through our major maintenance investment plan. We are working with Dr. Pope's office and Dr. Booth's office to develop a division-wide arts and athletics learning environment standard. So we're thinking about how should our auditoriums, how should our band rooms, how should they be set up and designed to meet the needs not only now but in the future for our students that participate in those programs, and certainly on the athletic side as well.

[01:36:17] We'll also continue to execute on the first phase of the Department of Safety and Security plan that we've developed, and we really have two big wins that we'll execute in this coming year in transportation. That's the replacement of the school bus radio system. So this is a tool or a project that Dr. Fry has really won a great success in, where we have transformed a multi-figure seven-digit capital project to replace the school bus radio system with a program that is more of a subscription-based model.

[01:36:50] And so it wipes out that big capital cost and saves us money in the long run, so we'll be replacing school bus radios with that program. So a huge win for Dr. Fry and his team, as well as Dr. Murray mentioned our middle school center-based gifted program as well. So huge advancements in our transportation team, among others, and operations.

[01:37:09] And thinking about, in the long run, you've heard me talk a lot tonight about expanding replacement cycles. I know everybody likes to talk about the HVACs, right? But we also need to talk about furniture, and we talked about other vehicles and those sorts of work to really make sure that we're replacing those items that are student-facing in a way that is predictable and thoughtful and financially feasible.

[01:37:28] We'll also continue to work towards advancing our transportation operations through replacing of our outdated, our soon-to-be-outdated routing system. We're also working with VDOT to develop and implement weather operations service restoration plans. We're thinking about snow routes for when we have major events of snow like we did this year.

[01:37:46] Certainly that first and second day of snow, that's certainly not where we implement that. But if we've been out of school for many, many days, it's hopefully find a way to get back to school a little bit faster. In that vein, we're going to build a best-in-class school safety program. We're starting down that road now and have great leadership there, and we'll continue to build that exceptional learning environment for our students.

[01:38:07] And then we're thinking also about the future of our future master facilities plan that align our instructional practices to our facilities. With that, I'll turn it over to my friend, Dr. Booth, who will talk to you about school leadership. Good afternoon, members of the board.

[01:38:27] Dr. Mary, I'm excited to share just a few highlights from this past school year from the Department of School Leadership and Support Services and share future priorities. I want to first start by thanking my team and just saying they are hardworking and dedicated to the work. So I just want to thank them and shout them out. We know students thrive academically.

[01:38:45] Oh, I might want to advance. There we go. We know students thrive academically when they are healthy, supported, and safe. This year, we made major strides in expanded physical and mental health resources. We launched our partnership with Hazel Health, bringing vital telehealth mental health support directly to our middle and high school students.

[01:39:04] In collaboration with the Virginia Department of Health, we implemented preventative dental clinics across 14 of our elementary schools, meeting students right where they are. We also expanded our life-saving readiness by increasing the number of schools earning the Project ADAM Heart Safe School designation. To support the whole student, we must also support the systems and leaders around them. We provided division-wide professional learning designed to build leadership capacity around equity, focusing specifically on access, belonging, and connection in every building. To keep students in school and engaged, we launched the division-wide attendance hub.

[01:39:40] This provides our schools with consistent real-time data and early intervention strategies to address chronic absenteeism proactively. We also took important steps to make our schools more accessible and welcoming for our culturally and linguistically diverse families. We expanded our capacity to serve English learners by increasing the number of bilingual members on our school psychology teams.

[01:40:03] We implemented official international transcript evaluation guidelines at the high school level, ensuring our arriving international students receive fair credit and a smooth transition into our academic pathways. None of this work happens without the extraordinary dedication of our staff.

[01:40:22] This year, we were thrilled to establish and celebrate our very first inaugural School Social Worker of the Year Award, honoring the incredible frontline professionals who support our students and families every day. Moving to our school improvement efforts, we have prioritized stability and proactive adjustment during the transition to Virginia's revised accountability system.

[01:40:43] Our team ensured that every single school will receive dedicated, individualized support from their school quality support specialists. These specialists work directly with school leadership to analyze data, build robust improvement plans, and refine instructional practices in real time.

[01:40:59] Additionally, we provided focused, evidence-based support to ensure our identified schools, including 13 federal participation, 17 targeted school improvement, and 3 comprehensive support and improvement schools, work to meet state compliance and improve expectation.

[01:41:15] our goal remains clear. Consistent growth and instructional excellence across every grade level, regardless of the school's designation. Supporting these environments effectively requires strong leadership at the helm, which leads us directly into our next set of highlights regarding school leadership. Turning to our school leadership highlights, this past year was defined by both significant operational growth and a renewed focus on the classroom. We achieved significant operational milestones this year, including the successful opening of the new Davis Elementary and the inaugural year of Deep Creek Middle School. Simultaneously, we reinforced our

[01:41:53] commitment to student and staff safety by fully implementing weapons detection across all middle and high schools. Regarding academic growth, we have broadened access to rigorous coursework, including honors, AP, dual enrollment, and IB opportunities, ensuring that all students are challenged and prepared for the future. We also opened new pre-k inclusion classrooms, strengthening our early learning foundation. To better support student well-being, we expanded our comprehensive pre-k social-emotional learning curriculum to all high schools. This ensures a consistent framework for support across every grade level. Operationally, we transitioned to site-based

[01:42:33] principals meetings, which were led by our leadership directors. This change was intentional. It keeps the focus squarely on instruction and supports our school leaders more effectively. To conclude, we have a wealth of incredible achievements to celebrate across the division. Our students and staff continue to excel at the highest levels, earning honors such as the Elsie Byrd Speech and Debate State Title, the official accreditation of the Chesterfield Recovery Academy, Matuika High School State Softball Championship.

[01:43:03] These milestones, along with the recognition of Manchester Middle School cheerleading team at the Virginia State Capitol, the Clover Hill High, National Guard Champs, and the Schools to Watch redesignation for Tomahawk Creek, Midlothian, and Swift Creek Middle Schools illustrate the vibrant excellence found in every corner of our community. While we take immense pride in these successes, we are equally committed to our strategic roadmap as we look toward the future. Let's take a look ahead. This coming school year, in school leadership and support services, we have several major strategic initiatives to maintain our momentum. Building on our strategic roadmap,

[01:43:41] we are fully engaged in the critical readiness and operational planning for the inaugural opening of Westridge High School in August 2027, ensuring long-term capacity for our division. Furthermore, we are excited to advance our early learning foundation through the launch of the new Deep Creek Elementary, featuring a brand new pre-K inclusion classroom and the significant rebuild of Bensley Elementary, reinforcing our steadfast commitment to providing high-quality environments for our youngest learners. To ensure we have the strongest possible leaders in our schools, we are maintaining a deep focus on leadership development and the professional pipeline in partnership with our Office of Professional Learning. Regarding student health

[01:44:20] and safety, we are expanding our preventative dental services to more school sites and strengthening our culture through expansion of training and restorative practices. Finally, we are enhancing our safety tools by launching Stop It for digital bully reporting and replacing Gaggle with Lightspeed alert. Lightspeed will monitor CCPS student accounts to instantly flag concerns like self-harm or violence so our team can intervene quickly. As we look toward our long-range vision for the division, our Imagine Beyond Tomorrow strategy serves as the blueprint for securing sustainable, high-impact success. Building on our previous updates, we are fully engaged in the critical

[01:45:00] readiness and operational planning for the opening of Westridge High and the replacement of Grange Hall Elementary School in 2029. To ensure our buildings are led with excellence, we are maintaining a steadfast commitment to leadership development and professional pipelines through a vital partnership with the Office of Professional Learning. This collaborative work ensures that visionary, well-prepared leaders guide our schools well into the future. At the core of our efforts is a deep-seated commitment to constant school improvement, a drive to innovate and refine our systems to provide the highest quality educational experiences for every student. Thank you for your

[01:45:34] time today next up you'll hear from mr ernie longworth our chief of technology good afternoon madam chair vice chair and members of the board i appreciate this opportunity to talk about some of the work we're proud of in the division of technology services this year and some of the work ahead we started the year we were 70 percent of staff laptops were at or beyond end of life

[01:46:07] We piloted, identified, piloted, and deployed 3,200 new staff devices at a significant unit cost savings, and were able to accelerate getting staff new devices. We acquired 75,000 new Chromebooks and started the first year of a new lease.

[01:46:29] With that new lease, we reevaluated all of our practices, introduced accountability at the school level, and we've got much greater insight into where our inventory is and the ability to plan. We closed 25 of 40 outstanding internal audit findings.

[01:46:50] We collaborated closely with the internal audit department throughout the year and were able to close a significant number of those and continue that work in the upcoming year. You've heard artificial intelligence referenced a lot of places. It's taking an increased interest in operations and instruction.

[01:47:07] And as such, we've done two things. We've started to introduce students to artificial intelligence through our digital citizenship curriculum because it's going to be a part of their world. And we've also included it in our application approval process.

[01:47:23] So we're looking at artificial intelligence through the same lens. We look at all the applications we provide students and staff. We engaged with the Virginia Department of Education and Project Tomorrow in some research to gain some insight into educational technology.

[01:47:40] We'll hear more about that in a moment. We made some improvements to our cybersecurity posture by introducing MFA, multi-factor authentication, to students. And we also acquired a managed detection and response system.

[01:47:57] Spent the majority of last year purchasing it, so we're excited to grow into it in the upcoming year. We installed 100 edge switches and replaced just over 1,100 wireless access points to increase wireless access across our middle and high schools.

[01:48:17] We were able to install whole school replacements of Usonic panels in a number of schools as well as intercom systems and additionally the new construction. And we purchased Synergy Analytics, which is an add-on to our student information system that our teaching and learning and our school leadership are going to benefit from.

[01:48:41] It's a data warehouse where we'll get greater insight into student performance. Looking ahead to the upcoming school year, as I mentioned, we're going to begin growing into and reaping benefits from our recently acquired MDR solution.

[01:48:58] We added some additional technology support positions to our team, first time in a long time, and much needed and appreciated. Rather than just add them to our existing teams, we looked at tickets, ticket use, and how we could best serve those that we serve.

[01:49:16] And we're standing up a central help desk, because what we learned by analyzing our data was that we can do a lot of what we need to do remotely without sending people to the buildings. We're modernizing our asset management.

[01:49:33] We're accelerating, upgrading analog, old-dated telephone systems to digital, and we're continuing to provide guidance around artificial intelligence, learning management system, and instructional applications.

[01:49:49] On the much broader horizon, the multi-year things, You heard a lot about sustainable, transparent, understood replacement cycles, and that's multi-year, and we're working in that direction.

[01:50:05] Started with student Chromebooks, moved to staff laptops, and we're continuing to work with projection and intercoms. We want a future ready, our WAN, so that any increase in Internet needs isn't trenching, digging, adding hardware, it's styling up services.

[01:50:23] so we want to future-ready our network. Again, we're going to need to accelerate the replacement of analog phone systems and engage with the rest of the divisions within CCPS around disaster recovery. I think I'm the last one, so I'm not passing this off to anybody, but I guess we're going to questions at this time.

[01:50:47] Wow. Thank you, everyone. That was a lot. That was impressive. Board members, is there any discussion? Mr. Pronto. Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a lot of questions. I'm just going to email you all individually in the sake of time. Dr. Pope gave me the thumbs up. So yeah, absolutely. But I do appreciate everyone's time and going over. That was a lot of information. So thank you.

[01:51:15] Yeah, thank you. That was incredible. And similar to Mr. Pronto, I had every time somebody spoke, there was more and more and more. So, yeah, I'll be sending some emails. But thank you all so much. So next, we have a presentation. Again, welcome back, Mr. Longworth, on the intentional technology use in CCPS.

[01:51:42] Yes, great. Good afternoon again. Appreciate this opportunity as well to talk about intentional technology use, our existing practices in CCPS. Instructional technology changes quickly and regularly, and as such, as a regular part of our practice, we have to be reflecting, paying attention, looking at our practices, the resources we provide teachers and students, our safeguards, and our implementation.

[01:52:14] It's a regular part of what we do. Near the end of last year, there was some recent public commentary around instructional technology of a general nature, and we thought that a great opportunity to, again, reflect as we do and share some of our current practices, what we do, opportunities to better communicate, opportunities to improve, make changes.

[01:52:40] But, again, it's a regular part of our ongoing work. Worth mentioning is instructional technology is intentionally built into Imagine Beyond Tomorrow and the past few division strategic plans. It's thought out in terms of what we want the classroom to look like, what we want students doing on a daily basis.

[01:53:02] And these are some of the items that are addressed through instructional technology in the division strategic plan. We looked at the public comment, but also the write-in comment, and there was some themes that emerged.

[01:53:20] And a lot of the themes were around early education, like our youngest learners. There were also themes around what we do as a division to protect students and their data and their access. And then there were some broader themes that were around just social-emotional development, that sort of thing.

[01:53:41] So these were the themes that came out of the public comment and the speakers. We looked at those themes and those topics through a number of lenses, and each one of these is its own slide, so I won't read through these here, but we'll talk through in a little more detail.

[01:54:00] So each of the slides has a tag on it, like you see practice there or implementation or resource, because I referenced early on that that's a regular part of what we do. So what we looked at was existing practice with our youngest learners and the devices that we sent home.

[01:54:21] The new Chromebook lease was an opportunity that we don't often get because we were sitting on 70,000 devices already. We were purchasing 70,000 new devices. So we had options like send them home, never to come back, so that we're not worried about transporting them.

[01:54:39] Keep them in carts. Provide each student with a device. And we had a lot of those conversations with teaching and learning, with our school leadership, and we asked our principals as well, what are you doing now and what would you like to do, given that we have a lot of latitude now?

[01:54:55] We're also a big division, so we trust principals to know their communities, to interact with their communities, and gain that feedback. What we found out from some surveys that we conducted with our schools and principals around take-home practices.

[01:55:15] In red are schools where devices were not sent home at the given grade level. So here we're looking at kindergarten students. In school year 24, 25, we didn't have any elementary schools where devices went home with students.

[01:55:34] Moving to school year 25, 26 at the kindergarten grade level, that blue sliver there represents one elementary school. Going on to first grade, school year 24-25, roughly 60% of schools elected not to send devices home, 40 did, and in the 25-26 school year, you can see it changed as well.

[01:55:58] 81% of schools did not send devices home with grade one students. This is what it looks like for grade two, and we only asked about K-1 and K-2 in this particular survey. School year 24, 25, and 25, 26.

[01:56:19] Keeping with the theme of practices, and you heard Dr. Pope reference our instructional best practices and our instructional best practice guides, this is the common thing, the common document that we all look to, whether it's the different divisions or teachers or principals that evaluate teachers or staff for what we want teaching and learning to look like in the classroom.

[01:56:42] It's the design themes, and it's also the practices that are embedded in daily instruction. So this guides a lot of what's done generally in education and teaching and includes instructional technology guidance as well.

[01:56:59] I referenced that we partnered with the VDOE and Project Tomorrow, and so this is planning work that began in December of 2025. We issued surveys to families, to school administrators, and to teachers, and the survey questions dealt with perceptions about instructional technology, practices in instructional technology, and this survey was conducted across the state as well.

[01:57:27] So we got our local data and the ability to compare it to statewide data. Some themes emerged from this data and from this project.

[01:57:39] There were areas of agreement across families, across educators, and across administrators that are listed here that technology adds value but only when it's intentionally and purposefully designed, that student distraction, misuse, screen time, and balance are all real concerns shared across groups, that teachers need support, examples of professional learning, that safeguards and accountability around those safeguards are important, and that the findings supported balance and not overcorrection.

[01:58:12] Shifting from practices to resources, we maintain a division app hub for staff and teachers to make it dead easy for them to understand what applications can they use.

[01:58:27] There's a process for requesting applications for review, applications that are supported. We give them the ability to unblock or request unblocking or blocking of sites for instructional purposes and to check which resources are going to be available to students and access through our filter. Probably one of our best, not probably, definitely one of our best resources is our human resources. Our instructional designers are the SOQ state-funded position for instructional technology

[01:59:05] and intentional instructional technology use. About five years ago, we made a significant investment in Chesterfield to staff from going from 30 to 64-1 per school. They engage in coaching and instructional technology, you know, working with teachers, helping to establish norms across the school and across the division, and they have a dotted line to central office in the curriculum department and the technology department as well. An opportunity that, you know, that we discussed as a part of this work was there's a lot of them. There's 64 of them, and having them

[01:59:44] work towards consistency in how they're used and how they apply is an opportunity that we can grow into. In terms of safeguards, we'd switch to safeguards here. We have a robust application approval process. We undergo an instructional, technological, and legal review. The instructional is working with curriculum around does this application align with your instructional model do we have better things that do this already do we need more things in this area technical is it going to work on our chromebook in our environment and then legal is around contracts and student data

[02:00:23] privacy we have partnerships that have improved the efficiency with which we can evaluate these apps over time and we've continued to make that process easier for teachers. We do a substantial amount in internet safety filtering and student safeguards as bulleted on this screen. One of the most important things we do is we educate students starting in grade K. Kindergarten through 12th grade, it's a required part of instruction. It happens at every school. It's our digital

[02:00:57] citizenship curriculum where we educate students about safety online, managing passwords, all the things they're going to need to know as they grow in adults and at an age-appropriate level. But we filter differently at elementary, secondary, and we filter off campus. We centrally manage Chromebooks. I mentioned the application approval process and Google workplace restrictions.

[02:01:22] We eliminate the ability for students to delete their browsing history, so parents have insight into the browsing history on the devices. An A disappeared out of Hapara, but Hapara is a classroom tool we use 2 through 12 where teachers have focused browsing where they can say, hey, these are the only websites you can go to while you're in our class, or they can block specific websites as well.

[02:01:53] YouTube is a little bit of a whack-a-mole, but we stay on top of the changes, the ever-growing changes to YouTube. Currently, teachers provide YouTube access through Canvas, the learning management system, and this is how students access YouTube videos.

[02:02:10] In terms of implementation, implementation isn't a single event or a day. It's what happens in schools all day, every day. I mentioned coaching, the instructional designers. They provide teachers with feedback.

[02:02:27] There's formal annual observations, informal classroom walkthroughs, the principal and school leadership supervision, school improvement process. These are all ways where we look into what we expect to see how it's being implemented across schools and classrooms. In terms of the current work and the next steps, as I said on the onset, there's areas where we think it's important that we communicate better what we're already doing.

[02:02:54] Those are the things on the left of the screen. We also identified areas where we could have additional conversations and make some decisions and implement some changes. So on the left here is the things we're already doing and needing to clearly communicate more.

[02:03:11] And on the right are our next steps. One of them I want to bring attention to is much of what we can talk about or ask for feedback on is kind of within our ability to access our stakeholders in the division. But there's also things that were of a broader conversation around social-emotional development, social-emotional impact that will require partnering with entities outside of CCPS to further that conversation as well.

[02:03:45] Moving forward, it's not simply more technology or less technology. As always, it's a matter of we define our instructional goals through the Division Strategic Plan, And as a Department of Instructional Technology or Technology Services, we provide the support, the hardware, the software, to recognize those instructional goals.

[02:04:09] Thank you for your time, and I welcome any questions. All right. Thank you, Mr. Longworth. Board members, is there any discussion? Hey. All right. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. All right. So next, we have announcements, communications, and school board comments.

[02:04:34] None? Okay. So, next school board business meeting will be held this evening, August 11th, 2026, at 6.30 p.m. here in the public meeting room. If there's no further public business, we will enter into closed session, which will be held in the public meeting room's conference room.

[02:04:52] Madam Clerk, please announce the items for today's closed session. It is my understanding that the school board desires to enter into a closed session in accordance with Section 2.2-3711.A of the Code of Virginia. the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, and specifically under subsection 1, the discussion and consideration of personnel disciplinary matters, 2, the discussion and consideration of matters that would involve the disclosure of student records, 7, consultation with legal counsel pertaining to actual or probable litigation, and 8, consultation with legal counsel regarding

[02:05:31] specific legal matters requiring the provision of legal advice by such counsel. Okay, members of the board, you've just heard the items requested to be discussed in closed session. Do I have a motion in that regard? So moved.

[02:05:47] Is there a second? Second. Madam Clerk, would you please call roll on the motion? Ann Coker. Aye. Jennifer Darby. Aye. Dominique Chatters. Aye. Stephen Pronto. Aye. Lisa Hudgens. Aye. We are now in closed session. Okay.

[02:06:05] Do I have a motion to reconvene in open session? So moved. Is there a second? Second. The board is now an open session. Madam Clerk, would you please read the resolution certifying the closed session?

[02:06:22] Now, therefore, be it resolved that the school board hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge, one, only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements by Virginia law were discussed in the closed meeting to which this certification resolution applies.

[02:06:38] And two, only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the school board is there a motion to adopt the resolution i make a motion to adopt the resolution is there a second second madam clerk would you please call roll on the motion and coker aye um jennifer darby aye dominique chatters aye steven pronto aye lisa hudges aye the motion carries is there a motion regarding the student matters

[02:07:12] In case number 2026-27-RE1, 2026-27-RE2, 2026-27-RE3, 2026-27-RE4, 2026-27-RE5,

[02:07:33] 2026-27 slash RE6, 2026-27 slash RE7, 2026-27 slash RE8, 2026-27 slash RE9, 2026-27 slash RE10, 2026-27 slash RE11, 2026-27 slash RE12, and 2026-27 slash RE13.

[02:08:04] It is recommended that the superintendent's recommendation be upheld. Is there a second? Second. Madam Cook, would you please call roll on the motion? Ann Coker? Aye. Jennifer Darby? Aye. Dominique Chatters? Aye. Steven Pronto?

[02:08:20] Aye. Lisa Hudgens? Aye. The motion carries. Is there a motion regarding the first personnel matter? In case number 2026-27-01-HR, it is recommended that the superintendent's recommendation be upheld.

[02:08:35] Is there a second? Second. Madam Clerk, would you please call roll on the motion? Anne Coker. Aye. Jennifer Darby. Aye. Dominique Chatters. Aye. Stephen Pronto. Aye. Lisa Hudgens. Aye. The motion carries. Is there a motion regarding the next personnel matter? In case number 2026-27-02-HR, it is recommended that the superintendent's recommendation be upheld. Is there a second? I second. Madam Clerk, would you please call roll on the motion? Anne Coker. Aye.

[02:09:08] Jennifer Darby? Aye. Dominique Chatters? Aye. Stephen Pronto? Aye. Lisa Hudgens? Aye. The motion carries. Is there a motion regarding the next personnel matter? In case number 2026-27-03-HR, it is recommended that the superintendent's recommendation be upheld.

[02:09:29] Is there a second? Second. Madam Clerk, would you please call roll on the motion? Ann Coker? Aye. Jennifer Darby? Aye. Dominique Chatters? Aye. Stephen Pronto? Aye. Lisa Hudgens? Aye. The motion carries. Is there a motion regarding the next personnel matter?

[02:09:45] In case number 2026-27-04-HR, it is recommended that the superintendent's recommendation be upheld. Is there a second? Second. Madam Clerk, would you please call roll on the motion?

[02:10:00] Ann Coker? Aye. Jennifer Darby? Aye. Dominique Chatters? Aye. Stephen Pronto? Aye. Lisa Hudgens? Aye. The motion carries. Is there a motion regarding the next personnel matter? In case number 2026-27 forward slash 01-PH, it is recommended that the hearing officer's recommendation be upheld.

[02:10:22] Is there a second? Second. Madam Clerk, would you please call roll on the motion? Ann Coker? Aye. Jennifer Darby? Aye. Dominique Chatters? Aye. Stephen Proctor? Aye. Lisa Hudgens? Aye. The motion carries. Is there a motion regarding the next personnel matter?

[02:10:39] In case number 2026-27-02-PH, it is recommended that the hearing officer's recommendation be upheld. Is there a second? Second. Madam Clerk, would you please call roll on the motion? Anne Coker. Aye. Jennifer Darby.

[02:10:55] Aye. Dominique Chatters. Aye. Stephen Pronto. Aye. Lisa Hutchins. Aye. The motion carries.

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