Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Date: Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 4h 58m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJOIi24g1nk
Official School Board page (FCPS): https://www.fcps.edu/about-fcps/leadership/school-board

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 2026-11-02. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:50] I know at least one board member is on the way, so we'll go ahead and start. All right, so this morning we have dedicated a good amount of time to discuss something really important. This is going to be basically the kickoff for the strategic plan work in our academic area.

[00:01:11] Just one second, let me pull up something. So just to remind ourselves, because we've been through a lot, and let's just check where we're at. We have our new strategic plan, five goals. The span of this plan is seven years from this year through 2020.

[00:01:29] And to implement this plan each year there's a focus on selected priorities in each of the five goals. So since we're at the beginning of the plan, we want to know where we're starting. So we're going to receive baseline reports for these priorities so we know where we're starting, and the work being proposed to meet the goal.

[00:01:46] So today we're going to look at goal three, which is our academic growth goal. And the three priorities we're looking at are reading by third grade, algebra one by eighth grade, and advanced coursework in high school, which also includes CTE. So today the focus is to really ask, are the things that the staff have proposed to look at, the data, are they all inclusive of the things we might want to know so that we can measure this growth?

[00:02:19] So I will leave it at that for now. I hope everyone had time to read this very detailed report and I think especially helpful was the intersectionality data piece at the end because that's something that the board frequently asks for.

[00:02:36] So with that I will turn it over to Marcy. Good morning. Good morning board members and thank you Ms. Marin for setting the table well for us today. If we could go ahead and pull up the presentation and while that's being pulled up I do want to make sure that board members are aware we did post an additional attachment to board docs that you have a hard copy of sitting in front of you with some information about vap and sol divisions we apologize for that oversight the reading vap information was disaggregated by sol but these additional pieces of information are being posted now and will be added to the final

[00:03:12] report for the monday vote in addition you do have a copy of all the goal three metrics based on the measures that the board approved that are sitting in front of you so good morning everyone. As Ms. Marin said, today is the first of five goal report presentations that we'll be making to the board this school year. The purpose of these baseline goal reports are to let the board and the public know where we're starting with our new strategic plan and how we're going to make our plan a reality to accomplish our goals for each and every one of our students.

[00:03:42] It's important, I think, to note for the public that the data that's being presented today is on areas where the division is trying to improve and it doesn't represent the totality of FCPS data by design. We report our accomplishments in lots of different ways and other presentations and publications including our sharing our success report that's available online. So what we're going to look at today is really that strategic data that we're trying to move for the division.

[00:04:07] So our objectives for today, today's baseline report as Miss Marin shared is for goal three academic growth and excellence and our focus for today's presentation is going to be on those three areas of students reading on grade level by the end of third grade, successful completion of algebra 1 by 8th grade, and successful completion of advanced coursework in high school. The full report is posted on board docs. We're going to share a brief update on the work that's taken place since the board adopted the strategic plan in June and then we're going to discuss the baseline for each of those areas. Within the presentation we're going to share some information about what the division

[00:04:47] is currently doing to meet these goals, and then discuss additional work that's either under consideration or development in order to meet these goals. The board's going to vote on the baseline report on November 20th, and what we're presenting today really represents our framework and our approach for moving forward.

[00:05:06] And we're seeking board feedback as we start this journey to make sure we're headed in the right direction. We're looking forward to hearing feedback from the board and answering any questions that you may have prior to the November 20th action. So as a reminder to our public, the board adopted the 2023-2030 strategic plan in June of this year.

[00:05:26] The adopted plan has those five student-centered goals, each with our equity commitments that are the support for each and every student in attaining our goals. There are measures for each of the five goals that share our progress, and there are four pillars that serve as the foundation for our division work towards those goals.

[00:05:43] Immediately following the adoption of the new strategic plan, staff began work to set plan in motion and in the subsequent slides i'm going to briefly touch on that strategic plan work to date the adoption of the strategic plan set a vision for the division for the next seven years and to make that vision a reality the divisions identify data that's needed to measure our progress towards our goals and our 31 measures that the board approved those data are called our metrics and it's possible for each of the board approved measures we're going to need more than one data point or metric to understand our progress and you'll see that in today's report as dr reed previously shared those metrics may change over time as we find better ways

[00:06:23] to measure our progress towards meeting our goals. In the full report appendix and as well as on the copies you received today you've got all the initial metrics for the goal three. In addition we've identified priorities for our first year of implementation as Miss Marin shared along this seven-year journey and we're going to share that. So this slide shows our division priorities that we've selected for our strategic plan work in year one. The year one priorities represent a mix of work that the division's been focused on as well as some new work for our division. They include data that's going to help us improve student access and opportunity, as well as performance on key success indicators for our

[00:07:01] students. As we present the data today for Goal 3, we're also going to share why Goal 3 selections for reading by third grade, Algebra 1, and advanced coursework are an important focus for our division. As Ms. Marin shared, this strategic plan is a seven-year journey, and it was designed that way to help us attain all of our goals no later than 2030. Prior to the adoption of the new strategic plan, FCPS was in various stages of addressing the goals and measures that are outlined in the plan. In some cases, we were already implementing strategies to improve the measures the board adopted. And in some cases, these measures are new work for the division. Our strategic

[00:07:40] work to accomplish these outcomes is going to go through a cycle of development, implementation, and monitoring. And on the slide, you can see an example of the visual representation of what this might look like. So the D's represent work that we would be developing. The I's and sort of the bold blue represent as we would implement new strategies in the division. And then as things are successful we would move on to a monitoring stage to make sure that our work was staying on course and our measures were moving in the right direction. Once we've this staggered approach helps our division to be successful with a key set of priorities each year and make sure that the system

[00:08:18] does not get overwhelmed with multiple initiatives in any one year. Attaining our goals by 2030 is going to look different for each of our measures and for each individual student group so the baseline data you're going to hear today represents the starting point for the work for all of our goals our 2030 target for is for overall student and student subgroup data to be at or above the 90 level so for some of our metrics we're going to be close or at or above that 90 level and for some of our metrics we're going to be further away so in the example on this slide you can see that that middle this would be like an example metric that middle line would

[00:08:57] represent all students so a 70 starting point the highest performing student group on this measure on this example is that 80 starting point and the lowest performing student group on this sample measure would be at 35 so you can see those lines are going to look different as we try to get to that end seven year point of getting all students at or above that 90 our annual targets for our goals are going to look different depending on our starting points and we'll continue to monitor and adjust those each year. The year one, Dr. Eden. Thanks Marci, would you go back to that slide just

[00:09:37] for a minute because I think we're kind of zipping through some of these and I want to make sure we understand why this slide is important and there was a slide before too but in this case what I think what the team is sharing is that depending on the goal or depending on the starting point of a particular goal to reach the closing of achievement gaps you're gonna have different slopes to those lines and I was just in a math class at Irving Middle School this morning and our students are studying slope right now rise over run the why that's important to remember and they were doing a very good job of it but why that's important is for a you know a more steep slope

[00:10:16] that's a different type of acceleration so when we think about that and we think about the tolerance range for where we need to be each year so we actually reach the goal right we can't do it in one year but that tolerance we can't be outside of that standard deviation but we may need to apply more resources to a goal that has a steeper slope because we have to move more quickly to close the gap so i think there's an intersectionality and again we're really working to make this visual and transparent for our community there are some slopes that may not be quite as steep which may require less resources and by that we're not just talking about money

[00:10:55] we're also i think our most important resource is staff time so when we think about it on any given year how much time how many resources what can we do to actually support that data point moving so this slide really captures that we're going to have to differentiate our approach year over year and strategy over strategy as we look at this so this I just want to make sure I draw our attention to that so thank you so our year one strategies are being

[00:11:33] used to align the division work we talked a lot in that planning process about the importance of alignment to accomplish our goals for our schools the strategic priorities run through their annual school improvement plan so for each of the three goals we're going to talk about today the reading by third grade algebra 1 and advanced high school coursework those were required components as a part of our school's school improvement plans this year and we're going to provide an update to the board at the November 20th board meeting on our SIP work. At the department level we've introduced department improvement plans this year and that those plans are aligned with our strategic plan work

[00:12:08] specifically with our pillars as we work our our plan being to our plan being deeply embedded in the organizational work and then finally the strategic plan priorities become the focus work of our cross departmental goal teams that will drive the strategies to address the achievement opportunity and access gaps that exist within these schools so using these existing structures and some new structures we ensure that this work is deeply embedded in our organization to help us move forward towards our goals and then as we begin to implement this new strategic plan we're using data to inform both the implementation and

[00:12:46] the monitoring progress monitoring for our plan so we've built a number of data dashboards for schools and division leaders and we're continuing to build out those dashboards to monitor key performance indicators and to monitor student progress outcomes so that we have the ability to address any things that we're seeing along the way that might need to make adjustments to achieve our goals we're also developing an annual evaluation and research plan to help us better understand what's working well in the organization with relation to these strategic priorities and what adjustments are needed to make sure all of our students are able to successfully meet these goals

[00:13:22] and then finally we'll be using data to identify promising practices we know some schools are doing a great job with some of these things already to figure out what's going well in those schools how we can pilot those activities at other schools and really bring those effective strategies to scale we're now going to share our focus baseline data within goal three and so just briefly to give the board and the public some information about baseline data the baseline data included in this report, whenever possible, provides three years worth of data to provide that stable base that accounts for any anomalies in the data, things like changes to SOLs, standards, assessments.

[00:14:02] The baseline report is going to provide information for all of our students on each of the metrics and also additional disaggregated data within student groups. In the English learner section and the students with disabilities section, you'll also see additional disaggregations around English language proficiency and whether or not students with disabilities are spending the majority of their instructional time in an inclusive or special education setting. There's also intersectionality data included in portions of the report that focus on our economically disadvantaged English learners and student disability groups. So at this point I'm going to turn the presentation over to Dr. Presidio. All right well thank you very much Marci and good morning everybody.

[00:14:41] I'm happy to be here with you and have this opportunity to talk about where we're at with respect to our performance around these key priority measures and then of course the work work that we're doing to support increases to student performance in these areas. So the very first priority measure that we're going to look at in goal three is reading on grade level by third grade.

[00:15:01] And I think as we all know, third grade literacy obviously is a key milestone for student success. It really marks that time in a student's educational experience when they move from learning to read to reading to learn. And we also know from research that students that aren't reading on grade level by the end of third grade have a lot of difficulty comprehending content that's going to be taught in subsequent years not just in language arts but in other subjects as well in fact we've got some recent research that really indicates that third graders who are not reading on grade level by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school and research has also

[00:15:38] found that students who are reading on grade level by third grade attend college at significantly higher rates than their peers so this is a really really important metric and measure for us as a system. So you'll see a series of slides like this for each of the priority measures, and I just kind of wanted to explain a little bit about what's going on here. So we're looking right now at our third grade reading measure, and for that measure, which is really the outcome that we want to achieve, all students reading on grade level by the end of third grade, we have two key accountability metrics. And in simple terms, the metrics are basically just a way to kind of tell us where we're at in terms of progressing towards that outcome of that key

[00:16:17] measured that we're looking at of reading on grade level by third grade. So we've got two key performance metrics for this third grade reading measure. The first is the pass rate on the third grade SOL or the VAP test. And then the second is the percent of schools that increase their student percentage of students reading on grade level by third grade by more than five percent over that baseline data. So you can see that there is represented by 36 percent currently for our baseline data. So in an FCPS right now currently we have 69 percent of our current third graders reading on grade level and this is above the state

[00:16:54] average of 65 percent so we continue to be above the state average but we also of course have significant reading gaps that are continuing to persist but we do have data that's indicating that we're making good progress beyond just that SOL measure. For example last year we saw in our iReady data that we had a 12 percent increase in students making that grade level reading progress. And in Lexi, which is another support intervention program, the percentage of third grade students that were performing significantly below grade level decreased to only 18 percent. So that was really good news as well. So I think these are promising data indicators that are telling us that we're on

[00:17:32] the right track. We obviously have a lot of work to continue to do, but we are seeing some good initial results of our work. Now on this slide you'll see a couple of these as well so I think we need to explain this a little bit too there's a lot kind of going on on this slide. Basically what you're seeing is the current performance of our FCPS students overall and by subgroup on that third grade reading measure. So you can see from the kind of the blue student icons for each of those groups all students and the student subgroups so if you just look at the all students at the top, that's representing the 69% of our students reading on grade level

[00:18:10] currently. You don't actually see the number on that slide because there's really not a lot of room to put the number values on there, but the number values are in the associated narrative and we've got charts for all of this in the narrative and for this particular measure it's on page 13, but you can see the approximation there of 69% of students reading on grade level from that first bar at the top so to reach our target for next year basically that means that our results are going to need to increase to 74 percent so you can see the target that illustrates where we are trying to get to for next year and the reason it's 74 is because we've set a five

[00:18:46] percent increase target for school year 23 24 and then ultimately you can see in the far right hand side of that chart our final target would exceed 90 percent for each student subgroup by 2030 so So that basically just means that, again, we continue to have similar expectations for all of our students.

[00:19:06] Now, of course, as both Dr. Reed and Marcy talked about, it is gonna take multiple years for us to reach these targets, and some groups have farther to go than others. And also it's important, I think, when we look at the third grade reading to understand this isn't just a third grade measure, right?

[00:19:21] We're not just doing work at third grade. Student reading gaps actually form even before kindergarten. So this is gonna be work that we're doing all of our primary grades. So that just gives you a sense of how to read kind of our current performance levels. What I want to do next is talk just a little bit about some, well, maybe not a little bit, maybe a lot, about some of the work that we're doing to improve our students' literacy skills. And first, I think you'll certainly remember back in 2021, we made the really important decision as a school division to implement new literacy practices grounded in science-based reading research. And that was really a transformational change that began with

[00:19:59] adoption of our equitable access to literacy plan and that's really resulted in a significant shift in our curriculum our instruction our assessment practices and our professional development that we offer so last school year we did make some significant implementation progress we adopted new universal screening practices to make sure that we're identifying students with reading difficulties as early as possible and we actually saw that with some of the work that we were doing to provide systematic and explicit instruction with our new curriculum guides that we've been

[00:20:34] making some good progress so students have made gains of over 14 percent in the phonics domain when we look at our assessment information that's really important and some of the student subgroup scores are even higher than that 14 so taking some of those early actions is paying off but this is work that's going to have to be ongoing and part of what we need to do on an ongoing basis is make sure that we're really training our teachers and providing them with the highest quality professional development.

[00:21:01] So last year, we started to implement some evidence-based professional development programs. The first is called LETRS, and that's just an acronym that stands for Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, and it's a program that really provides evidence-based reading instructional practices to teachers.

[00:21:20] And last year, all of our central office staff members and literacy leaders that work in supporting literacy in the schools completed that training and this year we've got 1500 teachers who are going to complete the letters training so that's really a significant increase additionally we've been providing orton gillingham training through the institute of multi-sensory education and that sometimes is referred to as og so the og is really an approach for teaching the structure and the code of the english language and it's recognized really worldwide as you know being highly effective for teaching students with persistent reading

[00:21:54] difficulties particularly students that might be manifesting issues and characteristics of dyslexia so i'm excited to be able to say that by the end of this year we will have trained 2 000 teachers across the division in orton gillingham so again that's a lot of work that folks have been doing in our schools and then the other thing that's really i think exciting news here is the adoption of a new basal resource for our elementary language arts program we haven't done an adoption for 20 years in elementary language arts and that's really led to a lot of inconsistencies across schools as well as some of the inequitable

[00:22:32] outcomes that we're seeing for students but as everybody knows we're very very excited to be adopting a new resource this school year for all of our elementary classrooms so in case six we'll have a brand new tier one core curriculum for all schools that will be implemented at the beginning of next school year we're being very intentional about the adoption process and we'll be selecting a set of materials that have been approved by the virginia department of education so we'll know for sure that those materials have been vetted and that they'll really be aligned to science-based literacy instruction we're also going to have to do a lot of training of our elementary language arts teachers though

[00:23:12] because this is going to be a really heavy lift for them to implement these materials so we're going to start with professional development this spring continue that in the summer and then continue to support teachers next school year but again we're very excited because this is going to mean that all of our classrooms are going to have the highest quality instructional materials and all of our students will be receiving evidence-based literacy instruction so the next priority measure that we want to talk about is successful completion of algebra one by eighth grade and again algebra one completion by eighth grade is another one of those key

[00:23:49] milestones that is really important for students success. We know that students who take Algebra 1 by 8th grade can access advanced math courses later in middle school and high school. Students can take courses like AP, IB courses, dual enrollment courses, and other advanced classes that are really going to prepare them for success in fields like science, math, technology, engineering. And research really supports the importance of taking Algebra 1 by 8th grade as well.

[00:24:17] There's a recent study that found that after taking Algebra I in the 8th grade, that student enrollment in advanced courses in high school, particularly in 9th grade, increases significantly by 30% in 9th grade and continues throughout that trajectory all the way through the 12th grade.

[00:24:36] So it's really kind of the on-ramp for students to be able to take advanced courses throughout their high school experience. Research also found that scores increase for students. So overall math scores in 10th grade rise as a result of having more students enrolled in completing Algebra I in 8th grade.

[00:24:53] And then research has indicated that certain subgroups like English language learners, girls, and students of color really benefit most significantly from taking Algebra I earlier in their experiences when you look at the subsequent courses that those student groups enroll in.

[00:25:11] So this is a really important metric for us. And I want to share a little bit about where we currently are on this metric. Again, we have two accountability metrics associated with Algebra I by 8th grade. The first is looking at the percent of our students who receive a verified credit in Algebra I at the end of 8th grade, and that just basically means that the student passed both the course and the associated SOL at the end of that course.

[00:25:37] And then second, our second metric here is the percent of schools, again, that are making that expected progress towards having increased enrollment and successful completion in Algebra 1 by 8th grade for the students in their school. So our current data indicate that 51% of our current students are successfully completing Algebra 1 by the end of 8th grade.

[00:26:01] That's significantly higher than the national average of 24%. And that 24% actually just represents students being enrolled in Algebra 1. We don't have data to know how many of those students that are enrolled nationally actually pass the class and then pass any end of course tests.

[00:26:17] So we are quite a ways further than national averages, however, we're not where we need to be on this important metric. We've got really significant persistent gaps for some of our student subgroups and we've got a lot of work to do here in this particular goal area.

[00:26:33] So with respect to where our students and student subgroups are currently at, you can You can see on this slide that the current performance of FCPS students is represented again on that top bar, so the overall performance for all students at FCPS is currently at 51%.

[00:26:52] And again, if we apply that 5% performance target increase, we're going to hope to reach 56% of our students successfully completing Algebra I by 8th grade during this school year. You can see our final target would exceed 90% for all student subgroups.

[00:27:10] And just like we described with reading, we do expect that this measure is going to take several years and certain subgroups are going to need more support, obviously, than others to achieve this benchmark. So what are we doing when it comes to supporting Algebra I success? Well, we do have a lot of great things happening in this area as well.

[00:27:29] You might recall at the October 26th board meeting, we discussed the work of the Algebra access network improvement community and basically that's just a fancy name for the group of schools that are working we've got about 15 middle schools that group of schools is working with central office staff to really understand the root causes of why students aren't successful and enrolling in an algebra one earlier and developing strategies and actions that we can take to increase that enrollment so we've already seen some really positive results from the work of the schools that are participating in this network. For example, schools in the network have been focusing on the

[00:28:08] academic advising process. And with just a subset of schools focusing on academic advising, our overall enrollment for this school year in Algebra 1 by 8th grade has increased to 64%. So that's promising for work that's just really at the initial stages. And of course, all of our schools are going to have the opportunity to participate in this work in the coming years. Another thing to note here is the idea of making sure that we have targeted professional development for everyone in the schools that are involved in the academic

[00:28:45] advising process. It's not just counselors, it's teachers who make recommendations and provide advice to students and other staff members that might be working with students as well. And we've had an open enrollment policy in in FCPS since 2011. Basically what that means is that students don't have any prerequisites to enroll in particular classes like Algebra 1 by eighth grade. It's open for them to enroll in it if they choose to do so.

[00:29:12] However, we've had that policy in place for almost 15 years now really, right? And our enrollment rates have really been relatively flat and we've really not seen that the types of increases and gains for particular student subgroups that are really disproportionately low as well so we know that we've got more work to do here so one of the big things that we're doing is providing a lot of professional development to our schools to really support students and families in the academic advising process and we're working with staff members to make sure that they have best practices and are using best practices and academic advising and working to really promote students

[00:29:52] self-efficacy when it comes to algebra readiness. So we're excited about that work that's happening as well. And then another big thing that we need to do is focus on curriculum revisions. So we're adding algebraic content into our curriculum in fifth grade, sixth grade, and seventh grade so that all of our eighth graders are going to feel more prepared for the abstract concepts that will be taught in algebra. So hopefully by, you know, having success, early success, starting as early as fifth grade with some of this content, student self-efficacy again will increase and students will feel more comfortable enrolling in Algebra I.

[00:30:31] Another thing that we're doing is embedding computer science and STEAM into the math curriculum in our early elementary grades. And again, that provides additional opportunities for students to develop those skills and understandings that are gonna prepare them for success with those kind of abstract algebraic concepts.

[00:30:48] And again, continuing that professional development is going to be really, really important. We're doing PD this year, but it's gonna have to be a multi-year initiative of professional development if we're gonna be able to achieve our performance targets. And then the third and final priority measure in goal three is around the successful completion of algebra, or excuse me, completion of advanced coursework in high school.

[00:31:14] So again, we know from the national research that students who have experience with completing and participating college level coursework while in high school are going to be a lot more likely to enroll in, persist, and actually graduate from college and graduate on time.

[00:31:32] So this is another one of these really significant outcome measures when we think about student opportunities and future opportunities. And the research, again, supports this really well. So the National Association for College Admissions Counseling has really identified the top three factors in college admissions decisions are the grades that students receive in college preparation courses, the student's total GPA, and then the strength of the high school curriculum.

[00:31:57] So getting students enrolled in advanced courses, again, has a strong correlation with their future success in college and beyond. The research also points to additional benefits of taking advanced coursework in high school, like improvements in student self-esteem, higher engagement in the learning process, and even fewer absences and fewer suspensions in school.

[00:32:20] And then of course you think about the benefits to students and families in terms of cost savings because lots of times students can get college credit for the courses they complete in high school, which helps them really from a financial standpoint and a time standpoint in terms of even being able to leave college earlier.

[00:32:37] And then another big thing in this area is the important work around our career pathways courses in high school and making sure that students have the opportunities to really explore and prepare for potential future career opportunities, have the opportunity to earn CTE certificates, as well as participate in work-based learning. So that's all part of the work that we hope to do in our advanced coursework measure. So again, where are we kind of currently at now? Well, first, there's two different metrics that we're using for this accountability measure,

[00:33:12] and the first is the percent of students in the senior cohort who earn a grade of a C minus or higher in at least one ap ib or dual enrollment course or students who complete a cte program before graduation so that's our first metric to measure our success and then second again is that look at what's happening in schools so increasing the percent of schools that increase their percentage of students who are taking advanced coursework or cte coursework by five percentage points over the baseline data so when you look at our current performance here you can see that

[00:33:46] 85 percent of our students overall are successfully completing cte or advanced coursework prior to graduation now that's pretty good it's better than the previous two measures that we looked at but there's still a lot of work to do here and you might recall from late spring and summer that the state actually put in place a new accountability measure that really aligns to our strategic plan measure here as well and that's the college career and civic readiness index or what we call the cccri eye and that's related to high school accreditation now in the state of Virginia and if we're

[00:34:23] able to focus on this work here in terms of our strategic plan measure that's going to help us it's going to help our students and it's going to help our accreditation as well because it will drive up our accreditation rankings on that new indicator so we're excited to continue to partner with our high schools that already are doing some great things to strengthen that work over the coming years and then we want to show you again just kind of the current performance not just of all of our students but where our students subgroups are so you can see that represented on this slide and again you can see our overall performance at the top at 85% and again if we apply that 5%

[00:35:00] increase for the school year overall we would hope to be at 90% so there you can see that target already reaching over into the final target and that's what Marcy alluded to so on some of these measures were close or for some students subgroups were already there but for others we obviously have a really long way to go and as Dr. Reed mentioned that will allow us to really focus our efforts and supports to some of those particular student subgroups. So just a few things that I'd like to mention about the work that's happening in advanced coursework and the first is academic and career planning and that's really the probably the most essential strategy to support student enrollment

[00:35:40] in advanced courses. We actually begin academic and career planning in the elementary grades with career interest inventories and goal setting activities and then when students matriculate to middle and high school they have opportunities to deepen their career exploration by enrolling in courses and career pathways and advanced courses like AP and IB and dual enrollment and additionally all of our middle schools and high schools our students participate in advisory or what's sometimes called learning seminar just depending on the school that the student is in and that's an opportunity for students to work with a faculty member once a week.

[00:36:17] And we embed a lot of the work around academic and career planning into the advisory or the learning seminar session. And there's also some strategies here that we're looking to expand, which you can see on the right-hand side of the slide. And the first is our AVID program.

[00:36:35] And we currently have AVID in 28 of our middle and high schools. And AVID is, I think as you know, provides students with a lot of strategies and supports to really be successful in the most rigorous classes in FCPS, and our data is really showing that students that are participating in AVID are having really good outcomes.

[00:36:53] So just a couple data points I'd like to share with you, and the first is 62% of students who are classified as free and reduced meals and who participate in AVID are successful in Algebra I by eighth grade. So 62% of AVID FRM students are successful in Algebra I by eighth grade.

[00:37:12] That compares with only 37% of similar FRM students who do not participate in AVID. Similarly, at the high school level, 85% of our FRM students who participate in AVID are successful in completing AP, IB, or dual enrollment courses, compared with only 49% of FRM non-AVID students.

[00:37:35] So you can see, and we have other data points as well, but you can see there's a tremendous impact of supporting students in that targeted in an intentional way through the AVID program. So we're hoping over the coming years to be able to expand AVID into additional schools, but also to be able to really spread those AVID strategies school-wide, not just have them contained in a particular AVID course, but use some of the strategies with students in all of their courses.

[00:38:01] So we're gonna be offering expanded professional learning opportunities for teachers to learn about those strategies and apply them in their own courses. And hopefully that's gonna support even more students enrolling in advanced courses and completing them successfully another thing that you may remember from last year is we had a career pathways study that we presented to the board and it talked about different opportunities for expanding some of our career pathway programs to more schools that's something that's tricky because it is funding related but that's something that we hope to do over the coming years there's a number of programs like our

[00:38:36] trades programs, health occupation programs, JROTC programs that are really strong in some schools but students in many of our other schools could benefit from participating in as well. And then finally we're continuing to focus at the elementary grade levels to create greater access to STEAM and computer science and again there's strong research to support that. Research has shown that STEAM and computer science can really positively influence students preparation for in-demand career pathways so you know there's a lot of great opportunities for employment even in the northern Virginia region around

[00:39:13] really important fields like artificial intelligence cyber quantum information sciences quantum computing and getting more opportunities for students to develop again their interest in those areas early is really going to support us in helping students develop skills that would allow them to be successful of those in-demand career pathways in the future so just one more section that I'd like to mention if I could get the slide to advance and of course I can't maybe they maybe the clerks could help me just advance the slide to the next

[00:39:46] slide there are you able to advance the slides no he can't do it all right well we'll work on that and I'll tell you about it and and what I want to talk to you about is you know what are we doing for some of our students subgroups who need the most support namely our English language learners students on IEPs and 504s and then our students that are economically disadvantaged so those students subgroups when we were looking at the data continue to have some of the

[00:40:23] more challenging performance gaps that we really are trying to help them close so we're doing a lot of work in this area and the first area that I would mention there are things that our ESOL office is leading to really make sure that all of our schools are implementing our English language programming with fidelity in all of our schools that's really really important we have a strong program model it's evidence-based supported by research but we need to make sure it's implemented with fidelity so one of the things that we've done is this summer all of our school-based administrators principals assistant principals deans all participated in required training to ensure that the

[00:41:00] divisions programming expectations for English language learners was clearly understood to start with and we covered strategies and provided resources to support students access to English language development so one of the things that we have created is a new L verification dashboard which we're using to be able to track centrally how much English language development instruction students and all of our schools are actually receiving and that's really really important and we'll be on slide 28 when when we can get that working

[00:41:34] again another big thing that the ESOL office is doing is school visits that we're calling programming consultations. So multi-day visits in schools with the leadership teams in schools. We've done 20 of these already so far to really make sure that the schools, again, have the information that they need to implement our L program model with fidelity.

[00:41:56] Thank you very much. One of the things that we're really working on with those schools is making sure, again, that students are scheduled appropriately, have the additional supports and resources that they need to be successful, and that they really understand students' testing data.

[00:42:11] So the WIDA testing data provides a lot of really actionable information for classroom teachers about the strengths that students have, as well as the skills that students are developing. And it can allow teachers to really modify and support their instruction when they understand that data well.

[00:42:27] So the team is gonna be meeting with all 200 of our schools to do those in-depth consultations. Another big thing that we're doing is a new partnership with Project GLAAD. And the GLAAD is just an acronym for Guided Language Acquisition Design. And basically it's just a model of teaching English language learners in general education classrooms in particular.

[00:42:46] So how do we differentiate for English learners? How do we scaffold? How do we support them with key strategies to help them access content that's not in their native language? So we've already had 300 teachers complete the two-day GLAD training workshop and we're seeing some really good results when we look at the data.

[00:43:04] Even this year from teachers who participated in that training, they're often achieving better results with their English learners than teachers who've not participated in that training. And then another really important aspect is the work that we're doing around engagement with our English learner families.

[00:43:21] So I think you know we've provided some tools and resources to schools like the Talking Points app, which allows teachers and families to exchange information in their native language and it translates everything for them, so that really supports that two-way communication.

[00:43:37] And we also have a contract with the United Language Group which provides licensed interpreters via telephone or Zoom to facilitate conversations between parents and school-based staff. So those are two things that we're continuing to do. But a new thing that we're expanding and piloting this year and will be expanding in future years is our Title I office is collaborating with family and school partnerships and the ESOL office to implement a new family partnership symposium series.

[00:44:06] It's gonna be at least a quarterly series to really focus on providing parents with the key information that they need to support their students' success. We're gonna be focusing on things, of course, like literacy and math. But there's gonna be a whole component to the program to really hear from the parents.

[00:44:22] What do they want to learn more about and what do they really need help with? And we will tailor the symposium series to really be based on what it is that our families are telling us that they need. And then another thing that we're doing, again, when resources are tight, we have to be real strategic about the decisions that we make.

[00:44:42] So we're really prioritizing teachers who work in Title I schools. We're prioritizing their access to a lot of our professional development and support that they're getting from central offices. And again, I think that's really important because they're working with some of our most vulnerable students and they need to really be at the front of the line to get that additional support.

[00:45:02] And then lastly in this section of cross-cutting strategies, I think the board is very familiar with the work that we're doing around our special education enhancement plan. We've continued to partner with our stakeholders, teachers and community members to refine that plan this fall.

[00:45:19] And we're very excited to start implementation of a lot of the strategies that we have in the plan. And one big strategy is around professional development and high leverage practices. So what are the key practices that we want all of our teachers to understand as they work with special populations in the general education setting.

[00:45:36] So one big thing that we're focused on is access to universal design for learning or UDL PD. And UDL is, again, it's just a teaching approach that works to accommodate the needs of students with different ability levels and create environments where all of our students can feel included and achieve success through different ways to access content and materials, different supports and resources, and different ways to demonstrate their learning.

[00:46:02] So we're looking forward to continuing the implementation of that work. And that was a lot of information, I apologize for that, but we wanted to give you at least a high enough level, but also some details about some of the existing work, and I'll turn it back over to Marcy for some conclusions.

[00:46:18] - So as we wrap up today's presentation, we just wanna offer some high level conclusions and a few implications for awareness. FCPS has a foundation of success for us to build on to achieve our goals. And we have patterns of inequity that exist as students begin kindergarten with us that we're going to need to address to meet or exceed our goals.

[00:46:38] The next goal report is pre-K. So it's a good sort of foreshadowing to where we're going with this. Our work is gonna take place over several years and it's gonna require a lot of new learnings. You heard Dr. Presidio talk about some of the work we're already doing that's required teachers to learn new things and schools to learn new things and apply those new learnings.

[00:46:56] And so as Dr. Reed said, our use of time going to become very important as we move towards our strategic goals. We also need to think about, as a system, how we make sure those professional investments stay around. So thinking about the recruitment or retention of our teaching force and making sure that we're making good professional investments in their learning. And then finally, as a division, we'll be continuing to assess the resources and direct them to the strategies that are most effective in meeting our goals.

[00:47:23] So two next steps just for awareness. On November 20th, as I shared earlier, the board's going to vote on the at the regular meeting on the baseline report and Dr. Reed will present an abbreviated presentation from today's work session and then Dr. Ponce and the chief of schools office is going to be scheduling meetings or has been scheduling meetings with board members to go through more a deeper dive into individual school and region specific data so at this time I'll turn it back over to our meeting managers all right thank you so much we will start off with three minutes per

[00:48:02] board member we will reduce it for the second round but i know this is the meat of what we do so um wanted to give people as much an opportunity at least in the first go-round we assume you will want a go back so um number one we have dr anderson thank you for already putting me down for a go back because there's a lot to digest here um thank you uh one of the things that i kind of wanted to orient myself is this is not as much as a goal report as it is as a current status report because

[00:48:37] I had envisioned something different than what is provided here so I will work under that premise but before I go there I'd like to ask Leidy to speak to the data that can be found on the page that I showed you earlier that showed the number of schools that have met the percentage points over the last three years because it is not what I anticipated it was and maybe others are having the same misunderstanding yeah so thank you Dr. Anderson stop my time stop my time okay not you come on okay I want to squeeze all those three minutes so I want those five seconds back um

[00:49:15] you were here first this morning so you probably get extra time anyway right thank you so um thank you Dr. Anderson this the question that you have is about a metric that's quite different from any that we've used before but it's really critical to what we're trying to do and it's because we are asking our schools to make five percentage point increases this year in where they started and where they're going to be by the end of the year so that baseline about schools is trying to gauge how often were we able to do that in the recent past and so it's looking if we look at the three years there were roughly 200 schools roughly 600 times we're looking at from

[00:49:53] year to year were our schools able to raise what we're looking at so reading by third grade or algebra one any of those things were they able to raise that by five percentage points within a year because that's what we're asking our schools to do this year and so it gives us a baseline number of how often we were able to do it and our schools were able to do it 36 percent of the time in the recent past and that will help us next year as we look to see whether we really could expand that because we want 100% of our schools being able to do this every year for us to make the kind of progress that we're hoping to make on all of these metrics. Thank you. Just a

[00:50:33] quick follow-up to that. Why did we decide to use the three years that included the COVID year where a lot of schools didn't see that increase or were missing that data? Right, so all of our all of the schools that are included in this would have had some data in those years. Part of the look at the baseline is to try to get as stable a look as we can across the time period. And lots of things often change. So yes, the COVID year here, we know that we had lower performance and maybe it was easier to make that 5 percentage point increase from year to year there. But we also know with some of our other metrics, it actually worked in the reverse. So we want

[00:51:10] it to be as stable as we could be. And also because over time, the kind of ramifications of that and what has stayed with our students continues to be something that we have to work within and try to help push our students along in terms of what might have happened during the COVID year so we were just including it as what we're currently dealing with that schools have to help make that kind of progress even with the COVID year so it was just kind of included in it to try to be as stable as possible across that time period. I think I don't agree that it is as stable as possible i would have loved the opportunity to see some of the pre-covid years

[00:51:50] be included because that would have provided what the how our division historically performs but i will leave that there um one of the other things that you have well there's a lot here but there's a lot that talked about how some of the strategies is being embedded in the sip plans etc i had the opportunity to review some of the sip plans with both regions two and six one of the things that i noticed and how they were articulated there seems to be a misunderstanding over percentage points versus percentage so for example some of the sip plans reflected i was at 10 and now i'm at 15

[00:52:28] so that's the five percent percentage points that you all are talking about but some of them were i'm at 10 and they took five percent of that 10 so the increase is 10.5 so that was kind of all over the place so I'm wondering in terms of the guidance to the development of the plants in which we are putting a lot of eggs in that basket in order to articulate at least correctly across the division because I did not see that in my two regions yes absolutely that's why we have been working with with the

[00:53:02] races very specific in the language in common language this is what we spent last week sometime and we have a sometimes tomorrow as well some meetings has been actually scheduled just for the RASs and EPs to work in common language when we see the SIPs because we know that this is very important. Right but some of these were already posted. I mean for me that plan is just like a template. You drop in your kind of kids, you drop in your timeline, you drop in the number. It's kind of all over the place and it's hard I think

[00:53:37] for the general public to really come to consensus in terms of what does it mean without going under in unpacking all of the other layers. It's there. It's just not convenient. But I don't want to waste a lot of my time on that because I want to jump into some other things. One of the things that I would like to see in terms of the data, because I'm really looking into, you're looking for feedback from school board members, is how the data is presented.

[00:54:04] I appreciate a lot of the intersectionality. I appreciate the comparison to the state. I would love to see a comparison to our neighboring schools because we do this in budget. We do this for salaries. We do this in many other areas where we look at the Wavy schools because that's our closest competition.

[00:54:23] I would like to have that information to see how do we compare in these categories with Loudon, Arlington, et cetera. Similarly, I didn't see any information here that talked about how our students were performing by gender. You mentioned about girls in math, but that was not here, if I can get a response to that.

[00:54:43] So the gender data is not included in this report. gender data is going to be included in some of our upcoming reports so it's not specifically disaggregated in here but if that's something the board has an interest in well it gives us a chance to see how our kids are in all the ways that they present i've run out of time but i have lots more we assume so thank you thank you dr anderson i did want to just interject because you made a statement about what you expected so i just want to remind everybody that can may perhaps be in your

[00:55:17] next steps. So just be mindful of that so that we can talk about that moving forward. Okay. Number two is Ms. Tolan. Thank you. Thanks for the reports. Lots and lots of information. Dr. Reed, this is probably a question for you and it's a little bit off this topic but not really. As I read through this report, what kept hitting me over and over and over again is if we don't have

[00:55:47] the right teachers, enough teachers, trained teachers. We can't do it. So can you tell us a little bit about strategies just to make sure we get the best and the brightest teachers in our classrooms and that we keep our experienced teachers there? So great question. I think that we, our HR department is working on their recruiting and hiring plans. Like right now, we're hiring people already this fall. Really, we used to have a hiring season. I don't think that is the case any longer we're hiring year-round at this point and i think that the work of our

[00:56:27] strategic plan is work that educators want to be engaged in so i think that the mission-driven content of that work is critical i know that dr wilson shared that we actually had quite a large number of applicants last year and our ability to process them in a timely fashion i think contributed to at times not being able to complete the hiring cycle with eligible staff so we're really working on that as a key performance indicator a kpi is that time from interview and application to the time of hiring because we know hiring is different today than it was

[00:57:05] 10 years ago 10 years ago i think here in fairfax county we probably had 50 candidates for every position and now we've got you know 50 positions and few candidates so we're really going to have to modify both our hiring timelines our hiring speed and making sure that we are providing the supports once we have recruited staff so that we retain the staff that we do have so i think all of those are very important and i would ask mr smith if you have anything you want to add on that about our work because that's probably our highest priority we're a people business and we want

[00:57:42] the absolute best educators for our students yeah i would agree and and you're spot on when you're talking about that hiring timeline when we hire earlier we can start that process earlier what we found in the past is that we've had a condensed window so when all of the requests come in at one time it can be difficult for hr to process those so as we get our our our culture acculturated to hiring earlier we can process those more quickly. I also believe that there is on the back end once we have those teachers here that professional development is a very important part of that

[00:58:16] process. So ensuring that our teachers have the time to actually learn how to support our students differently and have the resources to do that will be very important for us moving forward. Okay I'm just happy to hear you say it's the number one priority because I have to tell you every principal that I've talked to and have visited recently, that's their biggest issue.

[00:58:41] It's the middle, we're in the second quarter, and I think especially some of the populations that we're looking at in here are schools that have higher percentages of L's or, you know, students in poverty. Those are some of our most transient populations. You know, some schools are burgeoning, and they just need to get the right people in there, or we're not going to be able to do this. That gets me to another question. We've done a pretty good job of like breaking out the the students but what about the schools you know and looking at are our schools hitting a hundred percent? Will we look at things

[00:59:19] like you know schools that have higher lower percentages of English learners, schools that have higher migration, you know schools of course we title one schools, non-Title I schools, schools in those network improvement communities. I know across Herndon we've had with the language work on network improvement community that people are raving about and raving about the results. I think Claire Silva and you know Ray Lent were working on that. You know are we comparing schools that have those networks and don't have those networks? Those

[00:59:56] kinds of things. Good morning and thank you for that question. I think that's definitely something that is a really critical piece to addressing a lot of the key questions that are coming up from this data.

[01:00:21] Moving forward as through some of the data tools that are being developed that are aligned with the strategic plan, thinking about how we can identify those schools easily and quickly that are either performing above where we're expecting them to perform or below and then trying to learn what is happening at those schools is something that is definitely going to be occurring there that'll be happening in a couple different ways our senior leadership team will be looking at kind of on a division-wide what is happening with our school improvement plans and analyzing some of the things on on some of our quarterly monitoring with them as our

[01:00:57] schools get to the end of quarter one or end of quarter two and complete their reflections show some of the interim data that'll give us some good indications as to how we're doing across schools and then we need to be able to identify, we used to have these compression and elevation charts that allow us to kind of see where the strengths are and where the places where we wanna investigate a little bit more.

[01:01:20] So all those are being, the data tools and the dashboards that are being developed with the strategic plan, they're not there yet, but it'll allow us to have that type of analysis as we look at this information. - Okay, great. I was very excited to see Avid mentioned in here.

[01:01:39] You know, Longfellow Middle School is an example of a school, you know, in Drainsville that I don't think is a school that you normally would think of as being an AVID user because it has a relatively small percentage of free and reduced meals. But they are, you know, using the AVID concept across the school and with very good success.

[01:02:00] They're super excited about it. So I am not as familiar with AVID being used for students with disabilities. is that an area where we could have some additional help for those students?

[01:02:16] - So we use the AVID strategies and make those available to any teacher who's working with any student population in the schools right now. Some schools have more deeply embedded some of those school-wide practices, of course, than others. But the strategies are helpful for any student population.

[01:02:35] We have really tried to partner with some of our special education teachers have been teaching courses like our strategies for success course for students with disabilities to make sure that those strategies can be used in that course or could be accessed by students outside of that course so students might not actually have to take that course but could get access to the strategies through advisory through learning seminar through support in their other you know courses that they're taking which would free up a course for students to take another elective or another course so you know that's work that is happening but it's work obviously that we need to expand more systematically okay good to hear I

[01:03:15] would like to see that expansion another quick question on the math in particular with the curriculum changes are you do we have to work with VDOE on some of that and I noted that we talked about if kids are meeting their foundational skills by grade level they should be able to accomplish algebra in eighth grade. But those grade level things point toward algebra in ninth grade. So how does that fit together? And that's really the resequencing of the curriculum. As I was trying to mention in

[01:03:53] taking some of the concepts and making sure that they're embedded at earlier grade levels in a way that, you know, can be scaffolded over time. We don't really need to work with the state. Obviously the state has new math standards and our standards are driven by state standards. But pretty much in all instances the FCPS curriculum standards are slightly you know more than what is you know required at the state level so we don't need state permission or anything for that we just need the time for our curriculum teams to do that curriculum resequencing and writing and so you know we typically try to do that work and over the summer and summer curriculum projects so you know we

[01:04:30] won't get all of that done this year but you know we'll get large chunks of that started this year Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Toland. Ms. Corbett-Sanders? Yes, thank you. And thank you for the presentation, but more importantly for the report, because I think there's a lot of data in the report that got masked by not being in the presentation.

[01:04:53] And so, Dr. Reed, I know you're going to be presenting this before we vote, and I would urge you that you take the chart on page four of the actual report and put it into the document for presentation because that really does show quite a bit of where we are as a county and then where there are deltas in individual groups, and I think that's a powerful chart.

[01:05:24] Similarly, page charts, tables 15, 18, 19, those are the charts that are actually in the report that shows the intersectionality that you highlighted in your presentation, but they actually, the actual data is important to present.

[01:05:44] um a particular i would also say and i would i welcomed miss toland's comments about the disaggregation by school um and the intersectionality of that disaggregated data by school because i think that too is something that is just critical for the public to understand and for each of us to understand because that will keep the focus on the real thing which is the focus on the success of our children um and so i i think that that's really important the other

[01:06:17] thing that's missing here is the um you talk about and that's what the tables 15 18 19 and i think there are a couple more where it shows what how we perform versus the state um and the nation and so i would suggest that it is critical for us to actually present that data um because that's what people when they look at us want to see where we compare and we are very happy to compare on our sat scores about that well we should also be doing that as well in this area and there are some areas that we are not performing as well at the state level and we have to be willing to accept and

[01:06:57] own that because that will then direct our resources and so i would suggest that you know especially where it says that the FRM and the English language learner data is where we fall behind the state, and I think we need to be very intentional about making sure people understand that. I also want to offer a couple of suggestions. My daughter at Bellevue, which certainly was not a Title I school at the time, nor is it now, but all fifth and sixth graders were taught the AVID strategies and they were reinforced. So it really is something we should be doing at every one of our

[01:07:35] elementary schools and at a minimum every one of our elementary schools should have AVID for the Title I schools. I would also suggest as you're building out your and I'm going to need to go back but I'll just finish my statement here. You're building out your family partnership symposium.

[01:07:52] I actually think that you should include AVID strategies as part of that symposium because if were to do that then it gets reinforced at home which is exactly what many of us do with our kids but we were taught those strategies early on so doing that in that format would be helpful please put me on and go back i have some more if i could just make one brief comment because i think those are some great suggestions i did want folks to know on your suggestion about avid and elementary and title one in particular that we did get some supplemental funding in our title one budget this year and we will be expanding AVID to all of our Title I elementary schools. I

[01:08:30] didn't mention that in the report because when I mentioned AVID we were focused on advanced coursework in secondary schools but we are excited about that so I think that's going to give us a real boost to get those strategies really kind of implemented school-wide but you know a lot of work still to do on it so thank you for that suggestion. Would you suggest doing it for the parents, teaching the parents? Oh absolutely yeah. Thank you Ms. Colbert Sanders at this point we have everybody down for go back so just tell me if you don't want to go back okay. Ms. Sizemore Heiser. Thank you and Dr. Pasey I have a

[01:09:09] question for you. Do you know what it takes to pass a third grade VAP? Like what's the criteria to pass the third grade VAP? I don't know that off the top of my head but I could see if any of our subject matter experts do. Anybody know the criteria to pass a third grade reading VAP? What is required? I'm on a quiz show well you are because I'll have the answer for you in a second excellent I like that I like to phone a friend but I figure says I figure as a chief academic officer that's something you should know well I don't know I mean there's an awful lot of assessments that we give I don't know that off the

[01:09:46] top of my head I would know exactly the criteria for that one but anyone else know are we we're talking about the VAP reading mm-hmm it's I think it's on the video website it is on the video website right so there's three levels of the VAP right advanced intermediate maybe developing anyhow only because you shared with me recently this morning yes you did share with me this morning but

[01:10:20] it's not really in the reading anyhow the even at the advanced level for reading it's being able to identify certain characters words and so forth but it wouldn't necessarily be reading advanced given sentences read to the student or that the student reads the student correctly identifies and understands the meaning of most words not sentences words so can you ask me how combining the data for reading in every single table for SOL VAP gives an

[01:10:57] accurate picture of students being able to read by themselves by third grade I don't know if anybody else from the team wants to talk about how the decision was made to include those two and aggregate them together, a very small percentage of our students, around 1% of our students, are accessing the VAP.

[01:11:20] So I wasn't part of the conversation to make the decision to include those together. But I'm assuming, unless anybody else wants to speak to that, that the decision was to try to be as inclusive as possible with the student testing results. Then I think you would separate the data out, which I know after I made a phone call last night, we got this morning.

[01:11:40] and I know it's a small percentage but you hide the growth in that percentage by subsuming them in the same number and we don't have an accurate picture 1% of not who are actually reading by third grade if we subsume a test together it's like putting the AP test and the SAT together and saying look at our AP pass rate it's not the same test it's not doesn't demonstrate reading by third grade and what's disappointing to me is I've mentioned this for four years I've I've described what the VAP is for four years.

[01:12:12] I'm looking at the VDOE website, and I would think somebody would know what the VAP actually tests. I think it's important to show growth for VAP students. I absolutely, we should include that data as separate, and it's a small number. It may not change the number, but by subsuming it within that number, you don't really have a separate data point for growth on the VAP, which may or may not indicate reading by third grade, which is a civil right data point you're looking for.

[01:12:40] - So Ms. Sizemore-Heiser, I will own this because I know you have mentioned this for the last, at least since I've been here. So we do as a team need to be more attentive to when we talk about each and every student, that's each and every student. And clearly we didn't hit the mark here, so my apologies.

[01:12:56] And the team will work on that prior to our presentation at the board meeting. Thank you. And I'll just say, look, I know we want all of our, the goal is to figure out which kids are reading by third grade because it's an important data point. The goal is to figure out which students are ready for algebra by eighth grade.

[01:13:13] We need to use our metrics that actually demonstrate whether we're meeting that goal or not. So I'll just leave it at that. Another question about the algebra by eighth grade. One of the things for math, I'm sure you all know this better than I do, right, is to make sure the students have all of the foundational skills, right, to be successful in algebra by eighth grade.

[01:13:33] However, the metric seems to be a C minus to be success. And I worry that a C minus might mean that there's some foundational skills missing that may or may not set students up for success in eighth grade so just out of curiosity how a C minus selected as that metric as a successful metric so the C minus it's actually in the past so a very the verified credit actually a student would get the verified credit even without a C minus so what we're basically doing is students below that who could still get a verified credit

[01:14:11] we're not counting so it's more stringent than actually getting the verified credit and we were trying to respond to what we have heard in the past about when we went with just anything above an F was considered success we were trying to get to a different point with it while simultaneously counting students who in general get the verified credit and not removing too many of them from it but simultaneously very few of our students who are getting that verified credit are getting the C minus especially in eighth grade very often students expunge if they're getting a low grade and

[01:14:48] those students when they're expunging are not counted in this percentage and so they're actually being removed from it as well so we could get you a breakdown of exactly what the grades were but there are very few that are getting a C or C minus and being counted in this group. I appreciate that I guess my question is more towards the grades before they get into seventh or eighth grade right when you're building those foundational skills in elementary school right when we're looking at data you know math by third grade we need to look at beyond a C minus to make sure they have all those foundational skills to be successful and then the last question I know is when we look at advanced

[01:15:25] coursework you talk about CT and IBAP but I believe our conversations also included advanced arts in that and that doesn't I don't know why that wasn't in that metric about advanced arts as part of advanced coursework I know my time's up if anyone wants to comment on that I appreciate it I know that we tackle our arts coursework in goal 4 so I know that that metric is forthcoming as well I guess I just would want to know why it's not included in advanced coursework thank you miss so miss Corbett or miss Sizemore-heiser right I'm not entirely

[01:16:05] sure why but we certainly can include it because it is we can include it in both reports because I think we did actually adjust transcript waiting also for the advanced courses in the arts. So is that correct Sloan? Yeah that that's correct and again I mean these are all good comments and suggestions this is the first baseline report so you know we can adjust any of the things that the body of the board would like us to do. I think the thinking on the advanced coursework again I'm you know was not involved in a lot of conversation around this

[01:16:42] was courses that are equivalent of college credit, right, so a student could earn college credit for AP, IB, or dual enrollment. I think that was the thinking with the advanced coursework. So not necessarily courses, not saying that's the right decision. Ms. Seismarheiser, did you want to discuss that on your go back?

[01:16:57] We don't get college credit for CTE. Okay. All right. Thank you, Ms. Seismarheiser. May I suggest, with respect to the definition, perhaps include some of that in the next steps i i think i saw a number of nods in the room um miss pokarski okay um good morning afternoon thank you almost afternoon thank you um for the report i along the lines of what miss tollen brought up um with the teachers that that was what struck me as well and in particular how often we saw

[01:17:31] professional development professional development which obviously is necessary um but at the same time we have a lot of professional development so are we restructuring some when are we going to fit all of this in and I so I'm what is your thinking around that when is this going to happen so it's effective not overwhelming miss Bukarski thanks for the question because I think as we look at our calendar and our opportunities for how we're pulling for teachers for professional learning that those are limited times and opportunities we are in the process of pulling together a committee that's going to be looking at

[01:18:08] strategic professional development and how we align and use our time we have a number of ways of how we deliver professional learning we have models where we pull teachers out to provide that professional learning we have a job embedded professional learning that we provide turnaround training so we're going to have to as we think about these priorities think about that that commodity of time and what we're what is most important and what is what we're going to be able to accomplish during the school day and summer professional learning those types of things so we have a team that's going to be coming together to look at that.

[01:18:39] Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that's important because something is going to have to be changed. I don't know how people can do all the things. Ms. Bukarsky? Dr. Reid would like to say. Oh, sorry, Dr. Reid. Thanks, Ms. Keesomara. Yeah. No, I just -- I want to remind us when we went back to that chart that said we're only really focused on three pieces right now of goal three, to your question, that's why, right?

[01:19:04] Because if you think of all the things we can develop, implement, and monitor in any given year everyone only has a finite capacity it's not even you know i'm saying like it's time so i think there were some questions about why did we pick just those few things when there's so many measurements partly um this is that phasing chart on the screen but partly because we cannot provide professional development for all those things at the same time with the same people it's just not that's not possible it's like throwing 10 life rings to someone who's drowning right like it's not gonna be helpful so thanks I agree and I had another question regarding why we

[01:19:40] picked some of those but I'll save that for a minute but I guess my point was more towards we have to look at everything holistically something's got to fall off the plate because we can't and there's the requ anyone okay I think you get the point where are we in terms of professional development in particular for our early literacy practices I know we were slowly rolling those out yeah so the and i'll see if noel wants to add anything on this but the main things that we were highlighting were around the letters training the orton gillingham training and again we've done a lot of training in those two areas and then with targeted professional development

[01:20:18] around our new basal resource that we're going to adopt this year so that's really kind of been the focus of centralized professional development there's a lot of additional professional development that you know leaders literacy leaders in the building instructional coaches that provide support to classroom teachers but i don't know if you want to add anything to that no okay so my question was specifically where are we in that in terms of the school like across the schools are we halfway to getting we have 1500 teachers training letters 2000 in orton gillingham so you can kind of do the map on that yep that was my question 10 000 elementary teachers right and we're kind of

[01:20:55] That's the question. Okay, yeah, thank you. That answers my question. Jumping to Algebra 1, I think we talked a little bit about open enrollment and how that was hopefully, you know, taking a barrier out for folks, but then we haven't seen that increase of kids enrolling, and I have, I'm sure you do, and I do have some educated guesses as to why that is, but personal experience and whatever I've heard from parents is that kids want to take these courses they go into these courses they are not

[01:21:31] then getting that support they need and they are encouraged to drop that class and try something that's a little bit easier so I think that needs to be considered in in this because we are not going to see kids successful if we don't change I think mindset provide support because the teachers need it too they can't do all the things. So I guess I don't know if you have any comments around that or how you you see that factoring into this because it's I mean this is going to be a big lift. Yeah I mean

[01:22:09] I think you're right. I mean Dr. Hunter's in the room and you might remember her kind of speaking at the board meeting back in October about some of the root causes that you know the schools that are engaged in the in the network and improvement community are finding and you know a lot of it is around student beliefs about whether or not the class is gonna be too hard, if they can be successful or not.

[01:22:30] So, you know, the teams are working along those issues. But as you mentioned, once a student gets into the class, we still need to do everything possible to support them to be successful, right? We don't wanna, you know, just be changing schedules. So, you know, we are trying to provide more tutoring support for students in our schools right now.

[01:22:47] We're working with teachers to really make sure that, you know, they have high leverage strategies that they can use to support students to be successful those classes so there is a lot of additional work that we need to do to provide the supports to students in the classes that's a huge piece of it for sure yeah I think it's tutoring but I think a lot of these kids need mentors within the school to help them and I think it's gonna be crucial if we if we really want to see that going up and I was actually floored by the 51% that verified credit statistic that you said and then when you said 24 I was like oh

[01:23:22] my gosh we've got real serious problems nationally and that anyway that just that just floored me i also had a question about the c minus i'm not sure i'm really comprehending that as why we are picking it so i want to put that out there um seems like a low bar especially with your answer that most kids do much better than that so anyway i will just leave it at that i'm not really understanding that very well my life thank you miss sorry okay okay i'll go back we we've got you on a go back

[01:23:59] ms omesh yeah um i'm actually happy to follow this and i'm going to build on some of that so um but i mean i do appreciate it's obvious a lot of time went into this the data analysis piece i appreciate seeing an improved version of this where there's more depth and detail I guess my first question before I start is, we obviously had conversations with the strategic planning piece of, like, what data points will be important.

[01:24:27] You all then refined what exactly we're going to be looking at. How did you come to identifying these pieces? So there is some description in the report itself around how the measures were developed, but they were developed.

[01:24:47] Both ORSI provided some methodological sort of support and advice on a starting point. they were vetted typically through our content folks in central office and then it was shared back with the leadership team as well to make sure that we were honing in on the most critical things in the measures that were shared and there we were also trying to make sure that what was included in the metrics really comprehensively touched upon each of the parts of the measures that were in there because they were often very specific things that the board had asked for and and we wanted to make sure that we were staying true to what you had requested by looking across everything

[01:25:27] that had been included in it. - Thank you. Were there any that were considered but not included? - I would, that's, over the course of this, obviously we were getting feedback, we were getting input, certainly the starting point for it was not the end point of it, and so there were ones that were definitely considered along the way, or tweaked along the way, or changed along the way, so most definitely, in all the cases of the metric development, there's been improvement over time as everybody provided their input and their feedback on what might work best in terms of providing useful

[01:26:03] data points that have centrally collected data we could report on or had the possibility of creating centrally reported data that we could report on. - Yeah, I think that's helpful to know, mostly because I think we're trying to be transformative and probably relying on what's already been measured, already existed isn't necessarily going to do that for us you know I'm taking this just like Dr.

[01:26:30] Anderson where this is a progress or like a status report right I'm not which is great because then that means we could change things but Dr. Reed like Ms. Pekarski and those who were before me I feel pretty strongly that this is not what it's going to be and it's actually really disappointing and shocking that the data is as bad as it is with these metrics because I guess what really gets me in all of this is i want to think of this as like if this was my kid like what would i consider to be successful it's definitely not just barely passing the sol and just barely graduating and getting like a d average that's not i'm not proud of like i mean there's always growth and

[01:27:07] whatnot so i don't want to generalize but like that is not our star student uh and and and the quantitative only goes so far but if and any none of us here would accept that for our kid we would be thinking let me invest in tutors and like find all the solutions and it's urgent and it's like important and we would have to do something about it so i like dr reed one of the things that i remember we spoke quite a bit about when you first came on was the fact that you know in your old district you all didn't do that right you looked at how many actually were achieving at a certain

[01:27:43] like higher level or like um graduation wasn't good enough right so what what happened here like i this is definitely not going to be the transformative work i think that we're looking for um in terms of what we're measuring and yeah so i just want to understand where the disconnect was yeah i think as we look at a baseline for data um i don't know if we again some of this work has been been has been worked on for a couple of years right the algebra and eighth grade work i think has been um a goal for quite a little while here i don't know when it began sloan

[01:28:22] what year but it's been more than the previous strategic plan it was prior to the pandemic even right so i don't know in looking at that data to me what was really important is to draw a line from where we are today to that above 90 percent because right now it feels like we're just kind of spinning on some of the strategies to get there and we need to get very intentional and move forward with specific strategies and supports that on a finite number of measurements right we can't do everything every year because then nothing is getting attended to but what

[01:28:56] we've tried to do in this report is take three really very specific points and exert the full measure of our resources our alignment within the organization to make sure that within goal three this work actually gets moved this year because it i would say to your point has not moved in a way that we would feel satisfied over the last i don't know eight years seven years however long it's been you know a goal but i think when it's a goal that's one of um lots and lots of goals it's

[01:29:32] not going to get the attention and focus it needs yeah i mean it's revelatory that it's like this bad with the bare minimum so that's one thing and then focusing our attentions on that but then can we look at them side by side or at least internally identify that this is temporary you know like Like, these are metrics we're focused on now, because the way I'm receiving this is, you know, after the strategic planning, staff identified what the metrics are, and this is how we're moving forward forever.

[01:30:00] like this is yeah it might be a good time for me to draw a little bit just to explain kind of what that looks like if you I don't know where in the meeting that would make sense meeting managers but kind of just to make sure we understand that we can't develop every strategy or implement every strategy for every goal in the same year like we have to and I could draw that out if that's helpful

[01:30:26] And also take a look at what we mean when we talk about closing an achievement gap, because I think there's some really specific data metrics that we haven't necessarily looked at here that we need to be really clear about.

[01:30:43] And the whole division needs to be very clear about it. Like, I think goal three, these three things, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone that hasn't heard us talk about those three, right? so this is like every arrow moving right there on those three right now but I'm happy to kind of draw that out at some point maybe later maybe now whatever it seems to make sense for you yeah I mean I think I'd like to see maybe like an addition somewhere to this where we explain that we say okay until blank year month whatever this is what we're gonna be laser focused on here are the future pieces that we would like to and that could mean creating metrics maybe

[01:31:20] it's not something that exists that lady has in her back pocket right but like because yeah i want to see kids performing at a b plus or higher level or whatever it is right like you're right i think we have to be explicit and that's keeping us honest internally as well i cannot believe that's my time but i was i was trying to smile at you yeah i'll take the go back obviously all right thank you miss omesh dr reeve maybe what she's asking you for is a type of next step right uh in response to the questions that have come forward in this meeting just maybe consider it that way okay um

[01:31:56] let's see i think we have mr omish ms mclaughlin uh okay so i'm being told that the next steps have been emailed is that correct madam clerk okay yes thank you all right so uh that's an important step for us obviously in this meeting this is really the it's where the rubber meets the road Ms. McLaughlin, I'm sure.

[01:32:26] Thank you. Okay. Thanks. Thank you, Dr. Reed. I'm going to start at the macro level. I do appreciate what others have said that this is probably one of the better reports I've experienced during my tenure in terms of bringing some of the data and metrics and start of analysis that I would hope to see from the division.

[01:32:53] My frustration that I came and spoke to you earlier about, and I'm so upset that I'm trying to keep my voice at a measured pace, I can't understand why we still struggle to help educate the board and the public and the division on what intersectional data means.

[01:33:17] It's not in this PowerPoint. It should have been at the start of this presentation. We will never move off of putting children into singular buckets and help the public really understand what we're grappling with if we don't start there.

[01:33:35] So once again, we have people in a one-dimensional bucket. We do it first starting by race. And then we have in its own bucket poverty, in its own bucket ELL, and yet where we have our subgroups by race that are struggling the greatest.

[01:33:54] disproportionately in the buckets of poverty ELL and if we had those up there we would start to talk about what is the challenge we're facing and then how do we develop effective ways to help kids so if we just don't start there then the narrative becomes well based on race this is how you're gonna be successful in Fairfax County Schools and that's just not only a deeply harmful message but But it's just simply untrue.

[01:34:25] So that's been a boiling point for me sitting here. The other thing that I want to echo is we've been talking about this since I joined the board as well, more than a decade. Are we shooting low or are we shooting high?

[01:34:42] And so, Abrar, you and other colleagues absolutely captured it best. What does a high-performing school division expect for all of its students? some of these metrics are extremely low. And this school division, when I first joined it, used to talk about our just Virginia SOL pass rates. Not pass advanced, because that wasn't pretty. And no one wanted to see those numbers, again, broken out and disaggregated. But it all matters. The final thing I'll say in my 22 seconds is, super excited about the Orton-Gillingham

[01:35:17] training really disappointed that it was under Dr. Garza's tenure that our decoding dyslexia of Virginia parents lobbied for that so that goes back to like 2013 2014 so you know I feel like we're a little late to the game here and it kind of it saddens me and I'm sure for all those children who could have benefited so many years ago and I know I've run out of time so I'll pick up on the whole thing about AVID as well. Thank you, Ms. McLaughlin. I would like an

[01:35:53] answer about why through countless presentations over countless years we didn't profile the intersectional data today. So is there anybody that would like to provide a response to Ms. McLaughlin before we go to the next person? I think we would agree Ms. McLaughlin it's an important point and we'll make sure it's included in Monday's presentation. Ms. Koufax? All

[01:36:29] All right. So happy to follow all of my colleagues with Ms. McLaughlin being the last speaker. As Ms. McLaughlin said, some of these things we have been battling for years. I look around the room, some old faces, some new faces.

[01:36:49] I know you all work hard and I don't want to disparage your work, but we do need to come to get, Because I know you work hard and I don't want to. It's not one thing, one person. It's collectively where we are as a society, as a system. But we have to be real, Dr. Reed. That's what we have to do. Like you said, we've got to stop spinning because we have been spinning for a while.

[01:37:16] So I will get to some of my questions as quickly as I can. Let's talk about algebra by eighth grade. We start in the elementary school where we are not consistent. We are not consistent in advanced academic resource centers. We are not consistent with teachers.

[01:37:34] And I guess I would stop and ask a question. Where are we in recruiting the best and brightest math teachers? I know that's where it begins. So I can say our recruitment efforts, we work very closely with colleges and universities across the country and specifically have conversations with them where we see our greatest deficits.

[01:38:00] We send recruitment teams to those schools to bring those best and brightest teachers back to us. But again, it's really about the relationships that we have at colleges and universities, we stay actively engaged based on trying to bring those critical need positions to Fairfax County and I appreciate that answer I think what we need then is to look mr. Smith at once we hire who we think are the best and the brightest is to go through and ensure that they are teaching at consistent curricula across our elementary schools the whether it's an

[01:38:39] advanced math or regular math in order to meet our goals so the second thing I will ask is you know we heard last year during the budget session we we were successful in bringing advanced academic resource teachers to all of the elementary schools and we heard an outcry from our teachers in middle school who want advanced academic resource teachers there dr. Presidio is that something you would support in next year's budget to my colleagues who are going to be here next year. We're at 0.5. We're at 0.5. Yeah. I'm just double checking with Noel, but we're at 0.5 at all middle schools right now, right? Yeah. So you're saying to increase that to

[01:39:17] one point. To one. I mean, because we've heard that pretty loudly and strongly, and I'm just wondering, would that help if children are self-selecting and they need help, and will that help them as they move up and on in trying to stay in those classes or even with making certain that when they self-identify they are in the right place because we don't want them to be in a place where they're not going to be successful i mean i'm i definitely think that that would be beneficial in a number of instances even beyond the ones that you've mentioned right um again i mean i

[01:39:54] think it's going to be you know it's always difficult to figure out what are the the priorities for the board but yeah absolutely we would support that yes yes yes yes yes okay I think also so with my 32 seconds I'm going to try to get a quick question into dr. Ponce dr. Ponce say when where are we on page 28 where are we in reviewing our programs to ensure that all schools are implementing ELL

[01:40:27] programming with fidelity I'm gonna start on that one and then dr. Ponce can and help because, I mean, we do have a partnership, obviously, with the Office of School Support, working with Dr. Ponce now. But as I was trying to mention, we've gone through 20 schools so far, really the ones that we're prioritizing schools that have large numbers of English language learners, and it doesn't mean that every school's not important, but we've done 20 of those ESOL consultations, so there's quite a few still to go, but those are multi-day sessions with the leadership teams in schools, so it does take quite a bit of time to get through all of those.

[01:41:06] But we're working together to make sure that we can prioritize the staff and the chief of schools office as well as the ESOL office on my team to get as many people out there and do them as quickly as we can.

[01:41:16] Yeah, and I'm going to add that we have been working side by side with Mr. Polio and the races, and at this time, because the part of this, I believe, is that at one point, the data was not actually showing, like you said, we were looking just at genetic, just in general.

[01:41:46] and the time that we had that conversation is we're going to start dissecting in this exactly in the way that we are right now, looking at the whole division, then by region, and then by schools and by teachers. This is the only way that we're going to start moving, this dissecting, because I agree with several comments that I have heard is we talk in general, and we will never be able to move when we talk in general because everybody learns a different way and when we

[01:42:26] look at exemplars as well something that we want to find is okay if we look at the whole division we will not be able to actually go exactly to oh Ponce needs this kind of help because we don't want to generalize and this is exactly what we are in the field probably before this quarter end

[01:42:48] I will be having a report for all the board members and very specific with that something that I'm trying to build is a data how I'm going to be showing the EL very specific so you will be able to compare by areas and by schools actually and by pyramids because it's very important that we see that some pyramids are ahead.

[01:43:20] other ones, and we don't want that. We want to make sure that we are talking about Fairfax. Fairfax is a 90%, means every single one, not only one school or the other, but every single one receiving that different level of support, because what we're going to start, and we started already, is actually prescribing exactly what they need, because not every single EL needs reading. Some of them are really ahead of reading, but they need speaking or listening or writing, and that's how we are going to start actually improving. If we can

[01:43:59] move that, we're going to move the whole division and be above, because I know for EL we are below across the state. Yes, thank you. I think that's an excellent strategy, and Dr. Reeds over there but I think that also could be something that that same a similar strategy could be used with the math students and trying to get them to get to that level that they need to algebra because I believe we are not we are generalizing and we are uncertain of what is before us because we have been

[01:44:35] spinning as several of us have noted so my time is up put me on for the go back Thank you, Ms. Dernick. Koufax, Mr. Frisch. Thank you. I want to focus on algebra by 8th grade as well.

[01:44:52] It was stated that participation has increased to 64% through current efforts from what? From 57. It's like 56 or 57. Okay, so we're at 51% with adequate completion at 56, 57% of participation.

[01:45:14] So we've probably already met our goal for the year. No, because our goal is on successful completion with that C-minus or higher and the verified credit. So I was just trying to make the point in that comment that with just a small subset of schools just working with one strategy around academic advising, we're starting to see some good growth in terms of the number of students that are enrolling.

[01:45:36] But to some of the earlier comments, we still need to make sure that those students are successful after they enroll in the class. So there's still a lot of work to do there. Okay. Yeah. So we've increased enrollment by almost 10 points or eight points or so. since last year. Okay. The report talks about a drop-off between kindergarten and second grade and it blames the screener or the lack of fidelity between screeners. What are we doing to address that? I think it's hard to move forward without clear data or at least reliable data that

[01:46:14] is the same from school to school. Are we doing anything to straighten out where we're getting the screener information from? That's an excellent question. It's really complicated. And I don't know, Noel, if you want to weigh in on this one at all or not. But we actually are moving to some new screening instruments, partly due in part to some changes at the state level with state required screeners. And we don't have that all 100% confirmed yet in terms of exactly what that's going to look like. But I don't know, Noel, if you want to add anything to that.

[01:46:44] Yeah, good morning, everyone. Or perhaps it's afternoon. Sorry, it's afternoon. We are looking at the, in the reading, in the reading venue that come fall we will be changing our screener. So we'll be moving away from iReady and using a state screener. So we are expecting that there will be, we use a state screener for kindergarten. So we're expecting that we will start to be, have something that we can look at more longitudinal data as we use the state screener for kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and so on.

[01:47:10] And so hopefully we'll be able to make, you know, better interpretation of that data. For math, it's not as, we're not as clear when the state, if and when they might be coming out with a screener. So we'll still sort of have that changeover from K to 1.

[01:47:26] But we certainly can look at that data from 1 to 3 to see where we need to improve. Thank you. I get leery whenever I see a big jump in numbers in the report.

[01:47:42] And so we have this jump from 50% to 68% from third to fifth grade, and then a big jump to sixth grade at 68%. It seems like a bit of an outlier. Can you all explain why? Let me see exactly where I'm pulling it up.

[01:48:01] This is page 29. It says, baseline data indicate that from third to fifth grade, the percent of students who met the benchmark was a little over 50%, which followed a similar pattern to the first to second grade benchmark performance. there was a fairly large leap in sixth grade where 68% of all students who took the spring mathematics screener in sixth grade as elementary students met the benchmark. That seems like a pretty huge jump. Yeah, so I don't know off the top of my head exactly either. So I'm looking at the team and I see folks that are looking at the report. So Dr. Hunter, Noel, I'm not sure if you have any comments. If not, we can follow up with you offline on that and we might need to take a

[01:48:40] little bit closer look at that one. Yeah, let us take a little bit closer look. I mean, we can typically explain that that decline in fifth grade because we know our fifth grade advanced students don't take the fifth grade test and it's that year of change for the screener I'm not sure how that plays out how we categorize those students so I need to do a little bit of investigation but we'll definitely get back to you mr. fresh thanks speaking of fifth graders the the report talks about how there's probably more room for growth with our fifth graders who are not taking the advanced we're not taking advanced math and that's taking the

[01:49:19] sixth grade SOL. Can you speak specifically as to what might be done there to assist them? I hate to put Dr. Hunter on the spot, but she did come to the work session and she's leading all of our efforts around math. So maybe we could invite her up to the... And I ask that because it seems like the ones taking advanced would be most primed for algebra and the ones that are going to need the most focused support are going to be the ones not taking advanced. Hello, good afternoon. Amy hunter k-12 math coordinator um so you you bring up a really good point i think that it really

[01:49:57] underscores that right now our advanced math program prepares students for algebra one and grade eight what we need to do is ensure that our standard level program does that and that's where the opportunities lie and so we're looking at an option of compacting curriculum to ensure that our standard level coursework prepares students for algebra one so i think when we do that we'll automatically see potentially an increase in screener data because as mentioned before with sixth grade they are getting exposed if you're in sixth if you're in fifth advanced or sixth advanced you're getting exposed to more content so the screener data would capture that because screener data is not based on the content you're getting in class it's exposure to a breadth

[01:50:35] of content you know it's more comprehensive so i think we could see we can measure increase in fifth grade based on more exposure to content in fifth grade through compacting thank you um it might be useful in future iterations of this work to know when we're looking at data what types of initiatives are moving specific segments of the community because it's at a certain point we're going to be trying so many different things it might all get muddled together to that end we're nearing the halfway point of the school year and we have a goal of 56%

[01:51:12] completion or adequate completion one of the things that you've instituted superintendent read is a variety of dashboards that you're monitoring for very specific metrics that indicate future success are we doing anything comparable to measure for this type of academic success so that we're not finding ourselves at the end of a cycle end of a year wondering you know if we'd only course corrected six months earlier we might have been hit our goal or exceeded our goal so great question and I think one of the things I know that we're working hard on number one is re-envisioning Orsi's role in this work

[01:51:52] as well right not to provide simply summative data but to provide formative data that can be actionable in real time and it's not unlike a school-based response to intervention where you're constantly monitoring and the reason you monitor is to adjust so I think what we are trying to do is tighten our cycles of monitoring so that we can adjust so that is the purpose of the dashboard I I think we also, the team has taken a look at what are the leading indicators.

[01:52:21] In other words, what should we be tracking earlier to make sure that we have the right supports in place to reach the targets we want? And I think, Dr. Presidio, do you want to comment on what we chose as some of those leading indicators, or Ms. Neal, one or the other of you?

[01:52:39] I don't know that I'll get them all correct, so Dr. Hunter could certainly help me. But we're looking at performance, when you look at eighth grade math, right? We're looking at performance, obviously, in math, on standardized assessments in the earlier years. We're looking at the courses that students have taken.

[01:52:54] We're looking at some of our progress monitoring assessments, right? And all of those are the types of leading indicators that we're looking at for pretty much all of these measures that we've discussed. So as Dr. Reed said, we're not just looking at this as like a summative autopsy report at the end of the year.

[01:53:12] We're looking at that programmatically. But more importantly, I would say the schools are looking at their own data, right? So the schools are meeting in quarterly review sessions to look at where they're at in their current performance data, and we're providing additional support to, you know, help them refine strategies, intensify strategies that might be working, try new strategies when things haven't been working.

[01:53:35] And that's where the change is going to happen, right? It's got to happen in the classroom, and schools have to be really well-versed in where their data is both on these outcome measures but also on the leading indicators so I think that's probably one of the strategies that you know we're trying to lean into the most is the supporting schools and reviewing their data formatively as frequently as possible thank you mr. Frisch okay colleagues this is the time we're supposed to stop for lunch but we are let there be light

[01:54:07] okay so we have a choice we only have two more people on this round if we have without objection if we could finish this one round and then we will come back and we will have two-minute rounds for everyone if that's okay. Alright, Miss Maren. So my big takeaways from this is when a subgroups are enrolled they tend to perform well but subgroups are often not enrolled like when we're talking about the math and the CTE rather but when subgroups are not enrolled that's that's a straight-up access issue and even when a substantial amount of growth

[01:54:44] is achieved by a subgroup, it isn't enough to meet proficiency on the SOL. So those are some bright spots that our students, when given access, can do it, but because of the helpful way you explained the difference between a screener and an SOL, I saw that even though our kids might make growth, they might not meet that proficiency, and there's the whole source of things about why SOLs can't capture ability.

[01:55:07] The screeners mask progress. So screeners mask the challenges, but the students can pass the SOL because they're or global, except for what I just said about screeners tests can be discriminatory in some ways. So those are just like my big picture when I think about how are our students doing.

[01:55:23] I love that you teased out the 504, students that have a 504, because so often they get subsumed in with students who have an individualized education plan. Okay, about the grading. So the conversation so far just underscores my ongoing concern that we don't have a clear grading policy.

[01:55:42] And so I understand, you know, why the C-minus was chosen, but Dr. Reed, I'd like to ask that we very, as soon as possible, update our Policy 3003 and the Regulation 3004, I think it was done in 2020.

[01:55:59] So that's regard, wait, hold on a second, back up. That was regard, I'm rushing. Okay, one point is the grading, we need to update our policy on grading. The other policy is the policy on instructional materials, okay?

[01:56:14] So actually, we don't have a policy on grading that is current. Instructional materials, that policy is 30.03, and the regulation is 30.04. But it doesn't say how often basal materials should be acquired, so I think that needs to go in so we never have this much of a disruption again.

[01:56:31] I'm also wondering if the state has given the funding it promised to go with the approved basal resources. One big thing, just in general, is about the teacher's training. I think it would be helpful to include it here. When you say numbers like 1,500 teachers have been trained for letters and 2,000 have been trained in Orton-Gillingham, well, what percentage of that is the teachers that we need?

[01:56:53] And someone may have said this. And when will that training happen? Because I've heard teachers say they really want it, but it gets crowded out. So that's a whole other time thing. Jumping around here. Honors. Honors, APIB. what are the criteria for an honors level class what is the quality that makes it an honors level class i also want to know um regarding ap or ib there was a a piece that says um let me just finish this thought students were counted if they participated in an ap or ib course and the numerator is when if they pass the associate exam but i think it's important to tease out which students

[01:57:30] took the exam and failed and which students who didn't sign up for them at all because that's a a linkage so that's all I can do right now yeah so that's just for consideration but I got some more do do we have any uh responses I hope somebody took some notes I got them all here okay anybody want to comment okay all right so um it's my turn thank you all right so I I um first of all I want to thank uh you guys for this report I know we went through a lot of discussion um just in

[01:58:09] I didn't expect metrics because I think initially we were told that wasn't going to be a part of this discussion. So I want to talk a little bit about what I think may be already baked in, right? And for example, we see that with AVID, right?

[01:58:25] We know that where we have AVID, where we expect young people to participate in certain classes, certain classes expect them and prepare them for example for algebra that they actually do that and and the problem is that it's been baked in that they don't get it unless we give them avid and so I understand that we're trying to expand it but I would expect given what I think I heard here today that those principles would try to help root out those that baked in barrier to students

[01:59:02] who aren't going to do well unless they have that level of support so I want to start there and I don't Dr. Presidio if you want to give some comments with respect to how we can achieve that or whether you think that's necessary I'm open stop my clock please well you'll have to maybe help me a little bit if I'm on the wrong track here I would say so AVID in the secondary school kind of has two components to it if you will one component is the students that are getting kind of the full experience and they're in the avid course which is a tutorial course

[01:59:37] so it's one of their you know eight courses that they take they come to it on a regular basis they learn strategies there but they also get support from their peers and from the tutors in the classroom and then the other component is the more universal school-wide component where we take some of those strategies whether they're note-taking strategies test preparation strategies right and we try to you know infuse those school wide so that all students can benefit from applying those strategies so there's really kind of those two components the students who actually have that

[02:00:12] tutorial section those as part of their schedule obviously are getting significantly more support than just a student who maybe has been taught a strategy and maybe that strategy is being reinforced in their classes with their classroom teachers or maybe it's not so there is kind of a wide variety of supports when we talk about AVID so I guess my concern is that since I've been on this board I've been looking at the same results part of my conversation in discussing this was this isn't new information when I just looked at this and there were no metrics at this report the the great

[02:00:49] takeaway was that we have achievement gaps. That's not information. But I think we're asking why? Why do we keep getting the same results? And when I hear that students who typically would be in that achievement gap area receive AVID and we overcome some of that, then that's baked in, right? And we have a tool to address what is baked in. So I guess what I'm looking for is not just the status report of yes we have these achievement gaps but I'm thinking there are some

[02:01:26] outcomes that have been historical and I think that they have actually been opportunity gaps and I'd like specific strategies on how to address that and I'm wondering if AVID is one of them. I think AVID at that full end of the the continuum that I described, definitely we, you know, and I mentioned a couple data points is showing really good success for at-risk students.

[02:01:52] It's incredibly expensive, right? We're staffing that at really low class size ratios. And, you know, we've been able to expand it to 28 middle and high schools now. But there's students even in each of those 28 high schools that could still benefit from a tutorial course like that, right?

[02:02:08] It is incredibly, you know, costly to be able to do that. So it's a strategy that we have good evidence and data to suggest that it's working. And it's one of those things that I think when we have really difficult financial decisions to make that we can invest in expanding it because it has a track record of success. But, you know, we don't have the resources to expand that universally, you know, just in one budget year.

[02:02:29] I get that. I guess what I'm asking for is can we get creative where it doesn't necessarily involve a class, right, but we're implementing some of those strategies and perhaps that's a next step because we do know these things have been baked in. The other thing that I'm concerned about is the extent to which our teachers are feeling overwhelmed with this transition.

[02:02:51] Have we talked to them with respect to, oh, okay, and I know I'm all for the goal of 5%. However, what does that look like in various schools? And I'm also concerned about what the fidelity tools are to make sure that what's happening in this school over here is actually happening here.

[02:03:11] And, you know, I know we have the same goal, but who's monitoring to make sure that we're using the same tools and we're dealing with the same baked in stuff. That has been a concern and been giving me heartburn for at least, I don't know, since my children were born. So thank you, Ms. Keys-Gumar. I think one of the things that we took a major step last week on was the looking at the school support structure in that department.

[02:03:35] We currently have been providing, I think, Dr. Ponce, we have 30, give me those numbers again. We had 38 schools that were receiving support, but now we are at 108. Right, so historically we've had in the 30s of schools that are receiving that really direct support.

[02:03:55] Now we're over 100 schools that require that direct support. That's a three-time increase. We can't keep the same structure and provide the targeted support that our schools and our staff will need.

[02:04:12] I also think when we think about something like AVID, and Dr. Presidio is correct, we're going to need to be creative if we just talk WICR strategies. And that's all we integrate. That's good for every child, right? That's executive functioning skills. Every student would benefit from that.

[02:04:29] Having said that, it looks very different at elementary than it does at secondary. And so when we think about how and the data points that we have to wrestle with right now for accreditation, the CCCRI data, which really kind of no one's been in charge of because it's a brand new data point, the tutoring that all in Virginia has allowed us now to have some more money, although granted not sufficient to meet all of the tutoring needs, but it's a help.

[02:04:57] But that's a whole, I mean, we have several hundred tutors that we didn't have a year ago, right, to manage which also connects to the early literacy work that I think we've talked about today. So I think restructuring and making that work more strategic because we've evolved to a place where we need it to be.

[02:05:14] Accreditation rules are changing in the Commonwealth in the coming session. So we have a lot of things to tee up and I think the more we align and narrow our intentional focus, we're gonna see different results. And to your point, I think it's also an expectation, mindset that we have that not all children are capable of some of the work we're talking about and i believe that our commitment and our strategic plan that our community has spoken and said they do believe that each and every student has that right to have equity and access and excellence and i that's i don't think that's a mind shift but it's going to be a behavior shift for some

[02:05:53] of our processes but i'm really proud of our teachers and our principals and the work that they've undertaken this year and when you look at our school sip plans that's a major step towards recognizing how important that is because if the work is really just about saying i think you can really i think you could do well in that class if that's the work for some students and i believe that is then that's work we can certainly be uh undertaking lots of work ahead thank you dr reed

[02:06:25] um we're going to lunch you guys how much time can we we we need more than 15 minutes so

[02:06:34] um so can we can we go to 1 15 is that okay with everybody okay thank you please thank you so much

[02:07:22] if we could um finish up our next half of of two minute rounds want to make sure everybody we we had as much time as we could in the first round. The second round will be two minutes per person.

[02:07:41] You can trade if you want. All right, do we have, why are you looking at me? Okay, I think we have three, seven. We're gonna, we're gonna just go back and start from the top because everybody asked for a go back. And number one was Dr. Anderson. Yes, thank you. I'm gonna jump in on slide 21 where you are talking about to support the algebra work you are going to increase the STEAM and STEM work. We have several schools who have STEAM and

[02:08:20] STEM, some of them have dedicated teachers. What are we are what have we seen as the impact of that and what data do you have to show that this is a something that we need to invest in? So this particular recommendation or strategy that I was talking about here was embedding computer science and STEAM concepts into the math curriculum, not necessarily creating any new positions at school. So it's about creating greater curricular access projects into the math curriculum to help with some of the abstract algebraic thinking. No, I think I got that, but I kind of want to couch it into the

[02:08:57] things that we're doing, that we are expanding. How do we know that they are having the impact that we want? Well, I mean, there's research that suggests that some of the same concepts from computer science whether it's sequencing and again I'm not the expert in this and if Dr. Hunter wants to add anything I'd certainly welcome her to do it but that those are things that can correlate with preparing students for you know algebraic thinking so again we haven't tried this yet this is like future work that we're planning on doing over the summer is to embed more of those concepts into the curriculum. I hate to keep pushing but we do have some schools that do have that are we using their data to see the correlation before

[02:09:36] we invest across the division. Yeah, we have schools that have like a steam lab, right? And a steam resource teacher. But that's a separate curriculum from our math curriculum. So that's a kind of a separate program. So to your question, you know, if we measure the impact of those programs at the division level, in terms of like student success rates, we've not done any formal program evaluations or studies on that. Kind of thinking about how much resource do we have both human capital and financial. That's the piece that I would love to see. Like, what are the things that are having the impact? And we've measured it, so we know we should continue to invest there.

[02:10:12] I would also like to hear, since you have some of the new strategies here, what are we no longer doing? Well, that's a good question. I'm going to look at the panel of subject matter experts, and I don't know if any of my colleagues have any thoughts about things that we're not going to.

[02:10:28] If we could run down each of these three areas of reading, algebra, and advanced. - Well, in reading, we're not doing a lot of things, right? And Noelle's got the microphone, so I'll let her jump in. But yeah, we've let go of a lot of things in reading, for sure. - Yeah, thank you for that question, and I'll certainly call on my colleagues if I'm not fully articulating.

[02:10:46] I think everyone is aware that in reading, it is just a 180 shift, right? Moving away from our balanced literacy to practices that are aligned with the research, the science-based research. So there's a big shift in what we are and aren't doing, all eggs are in that basket as far as preparing for that basal resource.

[02:11:08] In mathematics, when you say what are we not doing, I think we are taking a new look at the way that we are preparing students or as we will prepare students over the next five years. The state has just recently come out with new standards, so we need to make shifts to our programs of studies at every grade level, and while we are doing that, are looking at that compacting that Dr. Hunter spoke up so that we can make sure that students have the access to the curriculum that will prepare them for grade eight algebra. So those two things are happening, and so it's a shift from focusing on what we have been doing to

[02:11:46] these new curriculum pathways, so to speak. In addition, I would say with the mathematics, with the math teachers that was brought up earlier, the whole ANIC, the idea of this network improvement community it's it's multifaceted right because as has been said at this table we could put all the eighth graders in algebra tomorrow and we'd be done we've met the goal but that doesn't mean that the teachers are ready that the students are ready and that there would be success so we are spending time and having the teachers really get to that root cause of what you know what is it that we will need to do to ensure success in algebra 1 what

[02:12:25] are the scaffolds what are the supports what are the enrichments for students need them so so that work is happening i don't think it's a an issue of what we're not doing with the teachers this is definitely the anic was something we hadn't really been attending to and that the schools are coming to that work as a new as a new effort the strategies the strategies for course taking patterns i don't know if there's anything that i would say that we've stopped doing i think we're trying to put more attention and increase our fidelity to academic and career

[02:12:58] planning that's been there but we're just trying to intensify it and increase our fidelity okay um you talked about the a nick um and looking at some of these data it shows that our english learners are performing the worst in algebra one are we having the cohorts in the schools where we have the bulk of our english learners because i know last time we talked about being self-selected being selecting yourselves may not necessarily meet the goals in ensuring targeted

[02:13:33] interventions so yes the schools were self-selected because when we started this we this project we're actually under a different strategic plan so and I'll just name that the schools that we have like key is one of our schools high population of English learners so of the schools that we have we have a pretty good representation of those who have pop strong and high populations of English learners and we've pushed the schools that are participating to focus on the groups that need the most attention, and so I feel like because they're focusing

[02:14:09] on the groups that need the most attention, many of them are focusing on their subgroup, which would specifically be students who are English learners or students with disabilities. And again, they're focusing first on ensuring enrollment and then success in the class, because it is a little bit of a -- you can't do both at the same time necessarily.

[02:14:27] You have to make sure students are in the class first, and we have seen an improvement in the enrollment of students who are English learners in particular at the schools that focused on that. Just not district-wide. I'm going to spend the last of my 20 seconds to talk about the goal setting.

[02:14:43] I appreciate some of the comments that were made about the 5% over the course of the next few years in order to achieve the 90%. And I also read in the main report that there will be some years that will have to be increased. There's a chart right there.

[02:14:59] But I also want to name that there are going to be some years where the increase is significant in order to reach that 90% by 2030. We can't do 555 and then all of a sudden do 25. So there has to be a recognition of how reasonable is that or is 5% not aggressive enough to meet the urgency in some of these categories where students are underperforming.

[02:15:23] Like for the first few years here, it looks like we're just going to continue the achievement gap. We're just moving it, not closing it. So I really wanted to make sure that there's some realistic expectations regarding what it's going to look like in the out years. Because if we are, let's take the ELL, and algebra, if I could just finish with one sentence.

[02:15:44] You had a lot of grace, but you can go ahead and finish the sentence, just go ahead. I just want to give the example of the EL students in seven years at 5%, they'll only still be at 42. What does this mean in 2029, are we going to say 50% is the goal?

[02:16:01] Thank you. So thank you, Dr. Anderson. If in this graph, and it's kind of hard to see how much the slope changes, but the outer years here, we have set it for five percentage points this first year to allow us to put things in place.

[02:16:19] But the intention is absolutely next year to think about what is really needed to start shifting some of the groups more than other groups. And so in the example that's there, that lowest performing group actually needs to go up nine percentage points each year in order to hit it so the intent is not five percent five percent five percent and then all of a sudden we need to do 40 it's to try to start changing in the second year what the percentage points are for different groups so that we can actually start moving them faster and hit the target for all of them within the seven year so you're right on target and

[02:16:53] saying we can't just do five percentage points every year thank you no because you got an extra minute and a half, okay. Ms. Toland, did you want to go back? - I do, please. - And I'm gonna follow up on your question, so maybe I'll get your thing answered.

[02:17:12] I was looking at page five and six, and I wanted to give you guys maybe an opportunity to talk a little bit about, like, what this process looks like big picture, because this is our first one, right? We're starting with goal three because of the academic content, but it's the baseline goal three report.

[02:17:29] I'm guessing a year from now, it'll be the year one goal three report and then the year two goal three report for seven years, right? And it does state in here that you picked five percent right now just because it's the smallest amount of performance improvement that will demonstrate any statistically meaningful effect. That's the only reason why we have five percent. But then each year, it could be whatever percentage, right, you determine is necessary. Can you talk about that process that you'll be going through and with these goals and what happens in the next year in the next year so as we begin our

[02:18:09] implementation work there were a lot of structures we needed to put in place a lot of systems which is why we have a smaller effect size in year one the whole division has to start to shift in a different direction and begin that alignment work so we think about even the timing of adopting a new strategic plan a lot of the professional learning things like that for the summer was planned prior to that strategic plan being adopted you we have to keep track of what's happening in in terms of state changes, how we're seeing this data move.

[02:18:36] So there are a lot of inputs that will go into our sort of annual plan, how we set annual priorities. So these are our year one priorities. Many of these may remain our priorities for next year as well as we see where our data is moving, the types of strategies in the work we're gonna need to accomplish to increase performance.

[02:18:54] We'll have a series of monitoring that's happening at the school level with our CIPs, but also centrally, and Dr. Wright alluded to that, coming together as a central leadership team to look at the data what strategies we're seeing are promising, things that are moving the needle, where we're going to need to do additional work, and then setting those targets annually based on the outcomes for each year.

[02:19:14] So the annual report for the board is going to show the progress from the baseline each year. So hopefully that answered your question. No, that is helpful, just to try to see how this report fits in. And then I'm also, just as a board member, trying to figure out on Monday at the meeting, it's supposed to vote for this report and so in my interpretation I guess of the vote is am I saying yes this is the baseline for goal 3 at this point in time I've got this data you know is that a sufficient baseline like I know I for

[02:19:53] example put into next steps you know trying to pull apart some of the information on the various schools like I don't expect that to be done by Monday I'm kind of expecting that to be as part of as you're looking over the next year at all these academic items.

[02:20:12] You know, some of these items on this list, including mine. So can you just tell me what, like, the Monday, it's my interpretation of what I'm voting for on Monday, correct? Yes, your interpretation is accurate. It's whether or not to accept the baseline report as our starting report with our data.

[02:20:28] And then certainly if there are additional needs that the board has beyond that vote, we can also work with the board to accomplish those as well. okay thank you not sure what i can do in four seconds so we appreciate your restraint i just the only thing i want to point out is pyramid collaboration i think is going to be really important on all of this and i know you mentioned it briefly thank you thank you uh miss corbett sanders yes thank you um i appreciate that this is a snapshot in time in the time that we are

[02:21:05] but actually many of these metrics we had bridging the achievement gap with clearly defined metrics under the last strategic plan. And so I would like to have better understood, with those metrics, where did we move the dial or was that just wasted time?

[02:21:26] And if so, then what are we doing differently to ensure that we don't repeat the same problem? Stop my time, please. I lost three seconds. Let me make sure I'm understanding your question, Ms. Corbett Sanders, is that in looking at our previous strategic plan and sort of those final goal reports that were presented what were our learnings what were the things that were working well where are the areas we want to continue to invest our work in? Essentially yes we want I want to understand because we had clear numbers we said we are going to bridge the achievement gap this much by this time we're

[02:22:04] going to raise these metrics by this much this time and so we seem to have just thrown that out. I think, Ms. Corbett-Sanders, if we take, like, one topic, the algebra in eighth grade, I know when I came in last year, I think we had the goal report that reported on that, and I think we kind of slid back a little bit on that data point, if I'm remembering, like, coming out of COVID just weren't quite as, you know, I mean, I think coming out of COVID, all of these plans took a bit of a hit, right, because we just had to adjust so quickly.

[02:22:38] So a year ago, which would have been two years ago's work, I'm trying to be thoughtful here about this, we slid back a little on the algebra in eighth grade. This past year, we stepped up again by, what, 7%? So we turned it around and are now moving back in the direction we should be.

[02:22:58] So it's not like we've abandoned that work, but what we are realizing is that we're going to have to approach that work very intentionally. And at every middle school across the division or every K-8 grade span for us to make the progress at scale.

[02:23:16] Because one of the things that we, I think, one of the reasons this particular strategic plan is critical is we need to not, we can't just look at pilot programs around the division. We're going to have to, as we've talked about before, pilot and then pilot, have a proof of concept and bring it to scale.

[02:23:34] and it's when it comes to scale hopefully we've weeded out strategies that are not effective to dr anderson's point if steam labs aren't moving the dial on that then that's probably not our next best move for that topic it may be for a different topic but it may not be for algebra in eighth grade but we'll know then what has to come to scale to make sure and there will still be some students that require more support and some less support to meet that minimum expectation so I don't think we've done away with that data, but, well, we've looked at it and made some shifts and I feel like this past year we are moving back in the correct direction, I think

[02:24:11] moved more than 5% this past year, so we've got a ways to go, though. You've proven my point, Dr. Reed. There has to be something in this plan and in this presentation that says, you know, we've recognized these are our lessons learned and this is where we are keeping and preserving certain best practices and this is where we're letting some go because it just seems like we're looking for a new, you know, a new shiny penny versus being the thoughtful, intentful people that I know you are.

[02:24:44] And so if you could add to your presentation that, it would be important. Sure. And I could create a quick diagram to explain that if you want. You can even do bullets. I don't care.

[02:24:59] But something that recognizes it. Secondly, we have in this report -- we've talked a lot about success by eighth grade in algebra, and only 7 percent of our English language learners are doing that.

[02:25:15] So we also know that we instill confidence in children in their learning ability by doing certain things in their native tongue. Math tends to be a native tongue subject matter that can be very helpful to give confidence.

[02:25:32] So I would like to understand, have you thought about that? What did you learn? I know you sent a whole bunch of people down to Houston last week. What did we learn in that process? And then finally, what are we doing to maybe do more in native tongue?

[02:25:52] I would also suggest that the CTE area where we are behind would be another area with some of the a couple of select courses that could be done in Spanish I would agree I think mathematics is the language right so I know that one of the things that staff discovered in Houston I think dr. King and I actually had a conversation about this was some of their end-of-course exams were able to be given in their native language I don't believe Virginia allows that so it puts us in a little bit of a different space however there are curricular

[02:26:26] designs supporting our language learners. There's actual curriculum, right, that has less language and more mathematical numeracy work. So I think all of those are plausible. I don't know if you want to add something, Sloan, on that or Dr. Hunter, either way, Dr. Presidio. Yeah, I was just going to check and see, Rich. I don't know. You were leaning in a little bit and you led the visit to Houston for FCPS so I don't know if you want to add anything or not. Yeah sure I mean I agree with I think I agree with everyone on this we we did see in Houston last week we did see a number

[02:27:05] of classrooms that used students home language to to present content and so I think we could start doing that here in Fairfax County Public Schools. Logistics have to be right so we have to you know check with certain schools work with it would have to be you have to have a obviously the same language in that section of class in order to do it. And as Dr. Reed said, we don't give, Virginia does not give final exams, you know, end-of-course exams in languages other than English right now.

[02:27:33] But in order to help students learn content, it seems to be working. So I think it's something that we just need to look at. I don't believe we would start this division-wide, but it's something for us to discuss. And as I said, we have a debrief with Dr. Reed, the whole team, next week. So we'll be you know, I'm sure that'll come up.

[02:28:04] We already do, we do home language support in forced life students in elementary and secondary in the language arts area. So in content areas, we haven't gone that far just yet. - Okay, thank you.

[02:28:21] For Ms. Corbett Sanders, number four is Ms. Sizemore Heiser. - Thank you, and I wanna lift up, I think, a couple of things that I think Ms. Toland mentioned, but really the importance of the metrics, right?

[02:28:36] Because this report is that baseline metrics that going forward until 2030 we'll be using to measure progress, right? And it's sort of what we fund is what our values are, what we measure is what we, right? And so that's why I'm hitting so home on what are the metrics we're using.

[02:28:54] I really appreciate the use of screeners, right? And I appreciate I think Mr. Fish brought up making sure our screeners are consistent from year to year. I think that's important. I think it's really important to also lift up.

[02:29:05] One of the things in our strategic plan, closing gaps was incredibly important, and I'm glad that we're really focused on that, but what is our growth metrics for everybody, right? I don't want to lose that concept as well, right? I love what we had here, which is here's sort of our plan, and here's our target is for a plan on speed for those with the greatest gaps, and I like that sort of dual way of looking at it, but outside of access to advanced coursework, I don't know if I see any metrics that really demonstrate growth for everybody.

[02:29:35] So I don't know if you want to mention that. Maybe I missed it. It was quite a dense report. So if there's a place I missed, please let me know. So I think the intention with this is that all three of these areas are for everybody because we're not necessarily there with all our students.

[02:29:58] And in many cases, not with any of our student groups currently where we would like to be at 90%. So in that sense, I think that for definitely for the reading by third grade and for the Algebra one That we really are focused on all of our students in those That may be a little less true with the advanced coursework CTE finisher that there are some groups that are already sort of in that success zone of 90% The other metrics as well that are in the appendix also speak very much to all of our students and how we're doing in different areas so we were intending to capture all students I think this the priorities are

[02:30:36] trying to really focus on where where should we be doing our work with all of our students right now and that shift that may shift over time over the seven year period but I don't think there was an intention not to be focused on all of our students 100% and I agree with it I just if this is our baseline for seven years I feel like there needs to be a little bit more I understand that not all of our students as an aggregate are achieving these but there are individuals who are and so I just am curious what those measures would be unless there's a plan to update our metrics going forward

[02:31:11] in you know subsequent years I don't know but I feel like maybe there's a gap here in those metrics I don't doctor if you have any comments on that well I think what we don't want to do is close achievement gaps by having our highest performing students perform less high right that doesn't The intent of this work, so I think what we're talking about. Let me just draw this real quick

[02:32:22] Yeah, and you know I want to lift up it's very urgent that we close these gaps

[02:33:58] I'm not trying to say that but if this is our strategic plan metrics I think we need to have that and right and that's what I feel like I'm not seeing the end as much So I'll just leave that as where it is in terms of metrics, right?

[02:34:14] But that was my one of my questions and then I know Ms. Bukarski mentioned the questions of our teachers, but I wanted to lift up that if we're adding these When are we looking really holistically is all and all the expectations and what of our expectations are in alignment? With this plan and these metrics and what maybe is not so we're just not adding on to our teachers goals And I see my time is up. So if we have time for another go back I have like five more questions, but I'll leave it at that. Are you asking about the intersectionality between the executive expectations and the goals?

[02:34:45] or no? I'm just asking about the, when we're talking about this algebra network and things, which are great strategies, what are we doing to look holistically at everything we're expecting our teachers to do, let's say, over the last 10 years, initiatives, and which ones are in alignment with this and which ones may not be? So we're not just adding on to their plates.

[02:35:02] Point taken. Still need that go back? Okay. All right. We'll try. We're scheduled to wrap this up at 2.15, so let's see what we can get

[02:35:17] through. Okay, Ms. Sizemoreheiser, I'm looking for, Ms. Pekarski is not here, so Ms. Omesh. Yeah, thank you. I have more to share on the metrics, I'll hold that for now, but I guess I'm trying to think, okay, so we have the quantitative data that we're looking at, there's also obviously the qualitative, which is important, and you mentioned with AVID, for example, right, like one of those successful programs that have led people to take advanced coursework and whatnot, well, okay, what are the features

[02:35:51] of avid you have closer small group attention you have mentorship for the kids right like so why don't we think of where that can be incorporated and i don't to me a number of these solutions or strategies is like professional development and like things that have been done we're going to adjust the curriculum yeah there need to be curriculum adjustments sure but again if we're looking for that transformative piece because when i see these numbers i'm looking at just like pages 17 and 18 at 28 when it comes to reading and math meeting benchmarks we're well below across groups like where we're supposed to be and then I'm like okay if we haven't met the benchmarks are we at

[02:36:29] least getting kids closer to that similarly like pages 30 31 and then 33 overwhelmingly like 50 percent or less are showing growth right so so again I think if we're really trying to fix this within a seven-year period like we have to think of something that's just different that's more individualized that's that's thinking about this in a way that's not same old as has been done because even even in these benchmarks like if you look year after year it gets worse so then it's like what are we actually doing here because the kid is coming off at a better place than they're ending up so

[02:37:07] long story short I know this has come up repeatedly it's a best practice and other divisions that have done it successfully like individualized learning plans. Why are we not moving in that direction? It's just such an obvious thing, like meet a kid by name and by need. It's trite at this point, like what are we actually, you know, how are we knowing what is, you know, Charlie need and like a Malcolm need and like all the various kids, seriously, like and then measuring their progress. So I don't know, why have we not made that like strategy number one on this? You know, I'm not sure at what point that was

[02:37:46] discussed, the individualized plan, I'm getting a no it wasn't. I also want to be sensitive to educator workload issues at this time. What I think will be, what I think is very interesting and I think we're going to see some examples at the forum that's coming up on AI is that there's some tremendous possibilities for personalized tutoring plans that aren't necessarily personalized educational plans, but personalized tutoring plans that involve AI platforms, which, and I know Ms. Pekarsky and Ms. Tolan have brought AI forward as a

[02:38:23] forum topic, so Gotham Sethi and the Ignite IT summer event, there were some really intriguing, I think, ideas that we can bring to bear within the next couple of years. It's not going to be seven years out. I think it's going to be the next couple of years. It's not going to be this year, But it's going to be, I think, a game changer for students.

[02:38:44] So to your point, do I think it's possible for a teacher at secondary that sees 152 students? Probably not. But AI can be a support in ways that we're going to have to explore as a division. Okay, and I know that's my time. Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say, I don't see how that's not a key component of this plan.

[02:39:03] Like that, if we're going to do it, let's do it now and let's make it something we're tracking. Seriously. All right, that's it. Thank you. Don't ever say I haven't done anything for you. No, I'm kidding. Okay. All right. Thank you, Ms. Darnett-Kovacs. Just love to see. She was number... I lost my track messing with... Yes, Ms. McLaughlin. I'm going to find you on the list eventually. Ms. McLaughlin.

[02:39:30] So, I'd like to pick up on something else that we know about how we assess our students, I believe, by second grade. So, have we disaggregated and analyzed the data by level designation?

[02:39:46] So, we have level four learners, level three, level two, level one, and seeing where they are on the algebra about eighth grade. And stop my time. So, you're talking about AAP level of service, four, three, two, and one?

[02:40:02] To clarify my question without the timer going, the level designations, whether it's for advanced instruction or not, it follows the kids, and that's how they are designated. So have we done the analysis?

[02:40:20] Because even if you stay at your base school, you're still a level three kid, or you're a level two kid, or a level one kid. So it's something we've determined about their giftedness. And have we disaggregated by levels where those kids are or not accessing algebra by eighth grade?

[02:40:40] I don't know, and I'll see if anybody on the team thinks differently. I don't think we've done that in a while. A number of years ago, we had done something similar to that just to look at levels of preparedness. But I don't think we've done that in quite a while. And the reason I was asking for clarification is we also have WIDA levels one through four.

[02:40:58] so I wasn't sure which group you were talking about. And we have done the same thing for our English learners based on their WIDA scores. And when you look at the performance of students that are level three or level four, it's quite different than the performance of students who are levels one and two. So to your point, looking at that level designation and that intersectionality, right, like we've been talking about, and a lot of this is really important because you can't just say all English learners or all AAP students or all students, right?

[02:41:27] intersectionality piece of the analysis is really important so my follow-up question be if we haven't done it why haven't we done it since these kids all have that designation and we use that designation based on this belief that we've effectively assessed them at the second grade on their gifted aptitudes well that level that level of service for aap even though we haven't done this analysis in a while which we certainly can can do that um i think what what we'll find based on looking at

[02:42:03] this previously is it's not really the level of service designation that a student has it's really whether or not they've been accessing advanced math right because that correlation with advanced math and success for algebra one by eighth grade is really really strong um so that's probably the data point that's that's most impactful is and this again gets back to the compacting of the curriculum and trying to get more of those concepts you know if a student isn't qualified for advanced math and we're trying to get you know as many kids exposure is are ready to to do that

[02:42:39] they would still have access to some of those foundational concepts in fifth sixth and seventh grade so that's probably when you look at by level it's probably going to be actually whether or not they participated in advanced math. So colleagues I'm sorry Dr. Reed isn't in the room but you are so I'll just maybe refine why I'm asking this question. It's not because I am so fixated on our AAP students by any stretch. It is something that we do in this school division and label kids and I was in my own family watching my two older sons get labeled level three,

[02:43:17] The youngest one labeled Level 4. It became a family dynamic in it. It was on the playground all the time. And the irony is the Level 3 boys in my household had just as high, exceptionally high SATs and GPAs and advanced scores on the AAP exam.

[02:43:38] So it was a meaningless label. But to me, I'm asking the question because I believe it is a chronic problem with this school division. We do these things where we assess, evaluate, label kids, and then we don't even test to see if our labeling and our categorizing is even accurate. So I asked the question. I really appreciate your honesty, Dr. Presidio. We unfortunately don't have time to really unpack all of this, but I was using it as just as a micro level example on the macro level

[02:44:14] efforts of this school division. Don't go around assessing and testing kids and labeling them in the second grade on where we think they are in giftedness, and then we didn't even measure to find out were we accurate by the time they hit high school or even in middle school. And so this really wasn't about AAP at all, but it's about what we are doing as a division, and are we really checking our programs, our efforts, our assessments? Because if we're not, then I don't know how we're effectively serving the kids.

[02:44:48] - I think those are all excellent points, but since we kind of opened the Pandora's box, I do want to respond just a little bit, Pandora's box being AAP here. So again, sitting here today, I don't know what recent analysis we've run. We do check to see how students in AAP levels of service are performing at different points in time over their educational experience on different metrics.

[02:45:12] We used to include that information in the old strategic plan report. We've not done that in this baseline report. So if that's something that the board would like us to do, it's something that we definitely should do. So that might be something for you to consider. And the other thing I would say is I totally appreciate all the comments and points you're making.

[02:45:30] I do wanna point out that we are required to test and there are state regulations and guidelines that we have to follow to identify students who need an accelerated curriculum. And that is what we're doing, and that is why we're doing it. And I definitely apologize when people feel like they're feeling labeled, because that is not our intent at all.

[02:45:50] The levels of service, one through four, is actually an intent to try to not label a student as AAP or not AAP, so that all students are getting some level of service, right? So if that's working counterproductively, then those are things that we definitely need to have more conversations about.

[02:46:08] But I did just want to point out, we try hard not to label kids. We do have a legal requirement to identify kids who need an accelerated curriculum. So I'll just leave it. Yeah, I know my time's up. I believe you. But I will tell you what educators said to me about my own kids was harmful and inaccurate.

[02:46:29] Thanks, Ms. McLeod. And I definitely apologize for that, because that is certainly not what we want to have happening anywhere in the system. So, yeah. No, thank you. I believe Mr. Frisch is next. did you want to go back yes thank you I want to talk a little bit about how we arrived at the five percent goal because there has been some conversation about whether that is bold enough and my question is it seems logical that it would be easier to hit bigger goals early on and harder to hit bigger goals

[02:47:07] later on as our options for moving people along the continuum become fewer How do we, you know, how do we make sure that we are not shooting too low in this first year?

[02:47:24] I think it's a great question, Mr. Frisch. And I think as we were thinking sort of that hockey stick mindset of growth that you've got to start in some ways as you're shifting the division into a new way of doing work to sort of go slow in setting up those systems and structures and getting the shifts that you may need in curriculum and in content and how schools are setting their goals and monitoring their goals, how the division is addressing their goals. Department plans is a great example. This is new work for the division. In some areas, we've got departments who have provided, done their own annual improvement plans, and some of our departments setting KPIs as new work for them.

[02:48:02] So we're setting those structures up so that we can accelerate our progress year after year. So that five percentage increase in year one is really to allow for some time for the division to make those shifts so that we can be much more successful in accelerating that growth the next year.

[02:48:19] And if I could just add to that, I don't think I've done a very good job of kind of explaining the work, at least in terms of the content that I presented, because we're getting a lot of really good suggestions. Well, did you think about this? And how come you didn't think about that? And all of those points will help us refine our work. And I don't think I've done a good job explaining. We haven't built out like a new set of strategies, right? This is the baseline report.

[02:48:44] that we've just started working on we haven't done our department improvement plans yet we're doing those in december we haven't formed our goal teams and it's the goal teams that will look at all of the research think about things that we've tried that have worked think about things that we've tried that maybe haven't worked and and i and i'm seeing some some furrowed brows but remember that this strategic plan was recently adopted right this is all new well this is new work and i understand some of these things are things that we've been involved in before but i'm just being honest with you this graphic that you're looking at here the only thing we've done on this graphic

[02:49:19] are the school improvement plans right so there's only a fraction of the implementation work around the new strategic plan that's been done this is a baseline report not just on the data but also on the work that's currently underway right so this is kind of a status report it's not signaling everything that we that we intend to do we will still continue to work to develop out better I think strategies and refine those strategies is will you do the other two-thirds of this piece and I think to your point the reason I say this now Mr. Frisch is to your point I don't know that we felt confident that we could achieve larger goals until we had done or larger targets until

[02:49:58] we had really done all of our best thinking about the strategies that we really want to support most consistently. I guess part of me wonders it is always a goal you always want to hit your goals But if we have the potential, particularly with the algebra goal, of breezing past 5%, how am I going to feel about breezing past 5% or almost getting to 9, right, if our goal was 10, right?

[02:50:27] Like, I feel like I'd rather be stretching a little bit than breezing past something. And the reason I zeroed in earlier in my questions about the number of, comparing the number of students, percentage of students who were in algebra in eighth grade from last year to this year, because there's a huge increase, if that's the number one indicator of whether or not they're going to succeed in algebras, they have to take it, right?

[02:50:51] How much of that 5% is going to get knocked out just because we've increased access, right? And so in my head, it's like we need a bigger goal than 5% in the first year. Because at a certain point, I honestly think we're going to be saying, you know what, we are at the point where 5% would be a huge win for us down the road when we have fewer and fewer things to try with a smaller and smaller group of students.

[02:51:21] So I just want that food for thought. The other topic that came up, and I just want to finish my sentence, there was a question as to whether assessments could be offered in home language, and that sounds like a perfect topic to add to our legislative program, which we'll be considering soon.

[02:51:40] Thank you. Did you want to put that on your next steps, Mr. Fresh? Sounds like it's already done. Oh, okay, okay. It's quite robust. Okay, guys, so we're supposed to finish at 2.15. I think we can add maybe five minutes, but there's a couple of people who still want go-backs, and I think, Ms. Marin, are you ready?

[02:52:00] Yeah, I just want to touch on two things. One is I'm very glad to see the special head enhancement plan in there, but to my recollection, where we left that was that there were a lot of very specific recommendations, and I just want to know what the plan is, because it was referenced as using some of those, and if I recall, Dr. Reed was going to come back with a plan about that.

[02:52:20] So I don't know if that needs to be a standing product or if it's going to be roped into the forthcoming work. But I just wanted to ask about that. And also, is it worth it to talk about a type of disability in addition to special ed service level?

[02:52:36] Because I could see, you know, if you have a bunch of students who are dyslexic, right, you're going to give them the same thing. So maybe reporting out in that way and seeing how some of those strategies work according to disability. The final thing I'll say is, you know, I'm pleased to pass this forward on Monday. I think this is the most in-depth report I've seen on my tenure on the board, and I think that it's looking forward.

[02:52:58] So I think, too, I'm just reflecting on my own children's growth and one of them with a major disability. It took years of very intensive services in an optimal environment with good attendance. So I can only imagine how -- and I think about the science of reading implementation, how we are turning that work around, and that's going to take years.

[02:53:20] So yes, I want us to go high and have these high achieving goals, but we also want to put a goal in sight. You know, a good goal is one that is achievable. And if you think 5% is achievable and that's going to keep our staff motivated and our children motivated and it's developmentally appropriate, I think that's the right way to start.

[02:53:42] So I'm excited to see this baseline get used and hear more about which strategies you're finding are working. Thank you. No comments? Okay. All right. I will close up the second round.

[02:53:58] I will say my overall worry is I think, and this has been my experience with my three young men, is that we do test our kids when they come in, and it looks like a little bit like a form of tracking, right?

[02:54:14] And so now we're trying to break that tracking. And when I look at this report, I don't, one of the concerns that I had was that there wasn't real context as to what we had done before. We've had goals before. What do we achieve?

[02:54:30] What were we successful in? And I understand that this is 100 and plus pages, but I don't feel like I can understand what I'm doing unless I have proper context. So that's my first concern. I talked a little bit about the baked in because I do see those tracks, and I also think it contributes to how kids see themselves.

[02:54:53] I see it creating stress for them and competition for them and them feeling as though they're not measuring up because their kids, their friends are labeled in a different way. And so they're fighting to get that label, right, especially at the high school level.

[02:55:10] I think they're more aware. I don't recall hearing anything on the playground. But that's, that's a concern. And then I think the last thing I want to say has to do with, we can't do what Dr. Reed wrote over there, unless we are offering something different, right? When we have those tracks, then they, this is your menu. You get beans, right? Or whatever. Beans of the equivalent in education. Okay, I won't explore that any further.

[02:55:43] but at any rate we everybody wants steak and if you're not getting we at this point the fidelity has not been achieved at some point it you know you have some schools offering those advanced math at opportunities very early and really building the thinking processes very early so that kids can be more than available by not just eighth grade some of them are doing it in sixth grade but then you you go to the other extreme and you have schools that aren't offering it at all as if they don't even have that expectation and then you've got a

[02:56:21] myriad of things all the way in between and so I'm looking for I'm looking for how we are saying this is going to stop because I think it's so grossly unfair to so many of us and it's part of the reason families feel as though depending on where you live you get certain levels of education okay we had a couple of people who wanted to go back. I think we have like 10 minutes. Can we do one minute per person, perhaps? Dr. Anderson? Yes, I'll be quick. I think we asked a lot of questions here. For me,

[02:56:56] personally, to be comfortable to vote on this as a plan, I actually would like to see a plan, because there's a lot of conversation here in terms of avid expansion, in terms of the new strategies. But I would like to see, one, what is the expected outcome of those strategies? I know what we want it to be up here, but we need to have the data to speak to it. Like the strategies that we have right now that we're continuing, what has been their impact? Because that will tell us whether we need to continue those strategies. So we need to do some further evaluation. But I would

[02:57:32] love to see a plan that outlines how this work will be actualized. That's missing for me in terms of how are we going to get there um and i think lastly in my nine seconds i think i'm just going to let that go because i won't open this in nine seconds but thank you that's kind of my primary thing i think i'm missing a lot of information that was the point i was making just a few minutes ago is that we've not developed cons you know those division plans for each of these metrics yet right this is a baseline report those plans are still to be developed aren't you worried that

[02:58:09] we can't actualize this in this year since the department plans are not even done yet well there's a lot of things that we are doing i'm not i'm not trying to say we're not doing anything what i'm trying to say is we haven't had the opportunity to develop all of our best thinking with all of the stakeholders right we haven't had developed those goal teams um you know we haven't finished the department improvement plans right we haven't really as uh we haven't really applied system-wide you know leadership to all of this work yet that's still in development so that that was really the point that i was making these things are still in development those plans are still to come

[02:58:46] but there are a lot of things that we're doing to achieve these targets regardless so you know this is the first year of the plan i i feel pretty confident with the five percent targets in most of these instances that we're going to be able to hit those right just with the work that we're we're doing around partnering with schools and then the school improvement plans. But to hit the 90% target and close those gaps, as Dr. Reed drew on the board, there's going to have to be a lot more intentionality in developing those longer-term plans. Thank you. We've had some people leave.

[02:59:18] I know you asked for, is there anybody else that wanted, okay, these two, okay. And I think you were number three, so, okay. Ms. Corbett, I'm just going in the same order. Ms. Corbett-Sanders. So, you've proven our point, Dr. Presidio, that this is baseline data, a snapshot in time for 2023, doesn't reflect the division strategies that have been ongoing for the past X amount of years.

[02:59:47] These are targets. They're not a strategy, and they're not a plan. And so, perhaps what you want to do is retitle this to be Goal 3 Highlights Baseline Data and targets because a strategy connotes an actual plan with analysis data and time frames for getting there. We don't have that. Okay. I'd meet you most of the way. What I would say and what I've been trying to say is that we have some strategies reflected in this work. We don't have all the strategies that we need. We don't have all the analysis behind all the strategies as you

[03:00:24] were just saying, right? So there's still a lot missing. But my concern is that the public will read this and say this is the whole nine yards, and it's not the whole nine yards. You don't want to end up having people say it's exactly what happened when the last strategic plan was adopted without metrics.

[03:00:42] We pushed to have metrics added after the fact. We pushed for the connection of the metrics to finances being your budget. We don't have budget here either, which has to be a key division strategy. My concern is that you're sending a message and when they pick it up and they go, "Oh, I'm gonna be able to see it all there," it's not there.

[03:01:04] So I'm just trying to help you get to, this isn't maybe even interim strategies or something, but your title doesn't mesh what's in the document. - Yeah, we certainly can take a look at that.

[03:01:19] Again, I think we're close to where you're saying with this slide, not all the way there, right? It's a baseline report, it's highlights, it's baseline data, and we need to revise it a little bit more to reflect interim strategies maybe or something. Right, because you've got to disconnect, and I don't want you to be caught.

[03:01:38] No, I think that's a good suggestion. Thank you. I'm really sorry that Dr. Reed isn't here, and maybe you can ask her to listen to this last part. I think these comments are pretty critical. Yes, Mr. Smith. If I may, and I think that we may be able to do some things.

[03:01:55] So one of the reasons why we have the team created to actually be focused on the implementation of the strategic plan is that the goal report is just that the baseline goal report to let the community, let staff, let everyone know where we are within this process.

[03:02:13] The things that Marcy and Dustin's teams will be developing with regard to implementation will outline what those implementation efforts are and there may be an opportunity for us to then bring those back to the Board and I know that we're slated to bring those back to the Board on a regular basis and it's that implementation piece that I'm hearing that perhaps is not here in this plan because the purpose was to highlight where we are so that we know where we're going to go and then possibly that implementation plan could be something that's separate and highlights the direction that we're going and then how we're going to get

[03:02:53] there and I'm just throwing that out there as a consideration I okay I'll let my colleagues continue their comments did I get to you yet okay you're next a couple quick things first I wanted to sort of talk a little bit about your AVID you talk about AVID expanding AVID and I know at some point the conversations came about embedding AVID strategies into advisory as well so it would be available to everybody is that still something that you're working on you stop my time yeah yes it is because we've made the information available to

[03:03:29] our advisory teachers but again you know I have two kids in school and their experiences and advisory are different from each other right so we still know that we've got a long way to go with helping teachers really understand those strategies and how to actually use them and and work with students on them so we've made the information available it's transferring in some instances but we're definitely not where we need to be I guess I would just lift that up because I think it's difficult to have both a strategy about increasing access to AVID and a strategy about increasing access to CTE because both of those are electives.

[03:04:01] And so I think that's strategies that may not work well when you're asking kids to give up a bunch of electives and also maybe want to take in the language. So I think we really need, if we're going to embed some of those executive functioning learn-to-learn skills, we really need to use advisory. If you look at special ed kids and increasing access to CTE for special ed, you're looking for avid strategies there's no elective left right so I think we really need to look at our different electives we're offering the last thing I wanted to mention as well is are we looking in some of the other ones at course taking patterns because you look at middle school and you look at this

[03:04:36] sort of academic plan and and CTE whatever the word is in here but I don't see no course taking patterns in here so yeah thank you miss Sizemore heiser the course taking patterns and the equity and course taking patterns comes with

[03:04:49] Goal 4 report. Okay. Thank you. All right. Mr. Frisch, I'm assuming you don't need to go back. Okay. Ms. Omesh? Okay. Obviously, leading up to this vote, there are a couple of things that I feel pretty strongly should be in there. Number one is specifying what will change or evolve the metrics, the goalposts, whatever, in the seven years, which we've all spoken to at some point. So that's one. The other is kind of the solutions to this opportunity gap. Like, we've been in this situation over 10 years before even this board came together.

[03:05:21] and it's only expanded since COVID so I don't want this to kind of be like an OCR COVID situation where we all know the data it's been the data we're saying we're doing the same stuff I'd rather not hear solutions that are like let's continue doing or we've been doing or we are you know there's clearly something that's still a problem despite all of that so what is it that's transformative to me again those individualized learning plans at the very least it could be an offer a suggestion, and there could be some costing to it.

[03:05:52] That's fine. Let us consider that and discuss that as a board. And if it requires money, we can discuss that. Resources are always going to be a concern. So that's the second component of what I think the strategy piece needs to be more than an afterthought, like not, oh, these are possible solutions, and they're PD plus the things we're already doing.

[03:06:11] And I say that directly, but not hopefully disrespectfully. I just-- I don't know that I can support a plan without that. And the final thing is, when it comes to that language piece, we're talking about SOLs and whatever, it's been years since the SOL started of this being a problem. We're here, the state's not changing it, it doesn't look like they're going to change it anytime soon, despite us advocating every year. So can we come up with an alternative way of measuring the progress of these kids in the meantime, at least internally, so that we have an understanding of what they're doing rather than telling them their failures, like test after test after test? I think we need to find solutions for that. And anything

[03:06:48] less than innovation on that front seems a little complacent to me. But anyway, I do appreciate that there's been a lot of work on this. I hope that there's some responsiveness to those three components, because I'm finding it really difficult to move forward with this right now. Thanks, Ms. Omash. Did you want another opportunity? Sure. I'll just say I continue to support. Oh, sorry. Okay. I just want to say I support this goal three report. It's very clearly a report. I think we should use the appropriate vernacular. And I think it's, you know, we are telling the story of it today as we go and it is a report with lots of creativity ahead of us thank

[03:07:26] you thank you i'm so sorry ms mclaughlin you get your one minute no worries um i wanted to add the use of our instructional coaches if that is going to truly be a strategy because we know that the professional development there's just not enough time and when we talk about budget and resources We cannot afford to be pulling people out and paying for substitutes and all of that and disrupted learning for kids.

[03:07:55] I routinely still hear from our educators that they're not finding the PD to be meaningful. And yet I think this has been a great work session to hear about all of the robust type of PD that you all want them to learn.

[03:08:12] I will also say that I'm increasingly frustrated that our amazing Virginia universities, name them GMU, GMU, and UVA, just for three big feeders for us to get teachers. I mean, I hope to goodness that what we're learning in 21st century best practices, that they start teaching it while those young teachers are in school.

[03:08:37] We cannot be Fairfax County University. And it's kind of, I feel like we're the ones having to play catch up for them. So that would be my other advocacy to really hammer that point. Thank you.

[03:08:52] Okay. Thank you, everyone, for working with us and trying to get as much comments in as possible. I think I've expressed what my baked-in strategy hopefully was understood. I'm happy to clarify later if I need to.

[03:09:09] I'm sorry Dr. Dr. Reid missed that last little part. I do think it got to the crux of what some of the concern is and I'm not sure my biggest concern is are we confusing or perhaps not providing enough information to the community to understand exactly what we're saying.

[03:09:28] A status report is different than a plan. I am not sure that this is actually a plan, and it doesn't give us the context. So I do have some of the concerns that my colleagues had, and now Mr. Frisch, dang it, I should have stopped talking. I wouldn't have encouraged him. Yes, Mr. Frisch.

[03:09:46] It's going to take 30 seconds. I align with Ms. Marin on this front. I didn't come in here thinking this was going to be a plan. I came in here thinking this was going to be a report, a baseline setting on where things stand. So I do look forward to getting a plan, but that's not what this was designed to be. Thank you.

[03:10:04] Okay. So I do want to remind everyone to fill out your next steps. I think that's going to be critical for staff to understand what the concerns are. And I think we're going to stop. Can we take a five minute break and turn it over to the next part of this meeting?

[03:10:30] And get started. We have with us right now our budget fiscal forecast. And just for everybody who's listening as they get their last snacks and water, Miss Burden, as she's been doing for the last few years, will be offering us the fiscal forecast, just kind of the climate as we know it currently.

[03:11:16] But I think it bears, it's important to share that it is not at this point the most encouraging climate because we know, Ms. Corbett Sanders, did you want to talk about that? I know you've had some conversations and I also have had some conversations with Chairman McKay who has shared, I'm going to scoot over so you can come over, who has shared that they are expecting for some belt tightening on our part.

[03:11:45] and so we must keep that under advisement as we proceed through this presentation. After Miss Burden goes through the presentation we are going to have an additional discussion regarding our themes and I will speak about that in just a little bit because so far only two things had majority consensus so we'll be doing a small activity to determine whether or not we want to consider other issues to raise into our theme, which will then be part of the board's resolution to be voted upon later on this year. So without any

[03:12:21] further ado, Miss Burden. Good afternoon. As Dr. Anderson said, today we're reviewing the preliminary fiscal forecast in preparation for the school board joint meeting scheduled with the County Board of Supervisors on November 28th. And Dr. Anderson, of course, will lead the discussion on the school board priorities after the fiscal forecast is completed. Now I think it's important to say that this review is very high level and the forecast is not intended to usurp the superintendent's proposed budget because as you all know we don't have a lot of information right now. Our enrollment projections are not yet

[03:12:58] finalized. State revenue doesn't come out until the third week of December. We don't have local composite index updates yet. Historically they've come out in November. We still don't have those. We don't have updates on rebenchmarking. So this is a very high level because it's early days, as the young people say. It's worth repeating that Virginia Code mandates, if you could, who's advancing slides? Okay. I don't normally do that.

[03:13:34] So rational. Yeah, so it's worth repeating that the Virginia Code mandates that it is the duty of superintendent to prepare a budget with the estimate of the amount of money deemed to be needed to support the school system and that's commonly referred to as a needs-based budget. You all heard that on your years with the board.

[03:13:55] These numbers again reflect preliminary broad estimates and are to illustrate potential expenditures only and the total of the potential expenditures should not be interpreted as the recommended changes to the budget because we're not there yet. Based on our early projections we're expecting an increase of 66 million in available revenue and an increase of 268.7 million in expenditures which results in a projected gap of 202.6 million or that would be the ask of the county

[03:14:29] for increased funding from local sources the beginning balance funding of 28.1 million will be set aside that is the same level that it is in the current year it's usually around 25 million each year and we usually fund that with year end. In fact the the 25 has already been set aside for 23 because we do that two years in advance. The state revenue assumption is due to our expectation that the recalculation of the local composite index will benefit us, that the re-benchmarking as well as additional funding allocated for the support cap and the compensation

[03:15:06] incentives that were just added recently for this current fiscal year. And then Fairfax City air tuition contract with them. When we assume a projected increase in our budget, that of course flows down to them, so we're expecting a little bit additional money from Fairfax City as well.

[03:15:26] Regarding the expenditure projections, the compensation increase at this early stage, we're projecting a six percent compensation increase for all employees, and that is just an estimate. As far as benefits go, the information that we have right now is that our health care costs are going to increase our VRS rates will go down or expected to go down at this point in time FCERS are also expected to go up the county's retirement system and the ERFC rates are flat because they are always flat

[03:16:02] lined for every two years and they recalculate and then base savings of course is their normal recurring savings due to turnover expenditure projections and required adjustments include enrollment growth and student needs. Again, this is an estimate. Enrollment projections are not yet finalized, but what we're seeing right now is what we've seen the last couple of years, and that's that the overall projection is relatively flat, but it is the percentage of students that need ESL support, special education support, and those that are eligible for free and reduced price meals. Those are the numbers of those

[03:16:41] special populations that we're seeing rise. So for now, we've got 17.1 million, but that is just an estimate. Contractual increases, that also is a routine adjustment that we do for inflation, utilities, fuel, major IT projects, those kinds of things. The 2% compensation adjustment effective January 1. That is a required adjustment. It's not included with compensation because we've already given that increase in this year, and so we have to build that into the base for fiscal 25. The baseline recurring adjustments, you'll recall that the items listed here, fine arts

[03:17:18] stipends, certified athletic trainers, achievement gap strategies, Schedule C retention and recruitment adjustment, all of those are recurring items that were funded at year-end fiscal 23, and so they too have to be added into the base in fiscal 25. And then transfers to other funds is about 2.1 million. About 100,000 of that is the lease for the gatehouse, the debt service for that. And then the rest of it is the other 2 million is for turf replacement. Multi-year investments. The HR technology infrastructure project is in year three. You all know that

[03:17:56] that project, I mean that infrastructure was implemented over 20 years ago and relies on many ad hoc databases for support and reporting. This will support an updated and fully automated work system to support core operations for the entire division and the board is scheduled to receive this contract award on december 14th the jet program the joint environmental initiatives is also in year three and we are slated to have funding of 1.8 million and that covers things

[03:18:29] like the local share when we apply for grants for electric buses three positions to support carbon neutrality and some small amount of funds for the get to green program certified athletic trainers is in year two recall that in the current year we included five additional athletic trainers for high schools and then we'll do an additional five next year and in five years we'll have all 25 of them done and then a small amount of funding two million to accommodate additional inclusive

[03:19:05] preschool classrooms so again based on our early early projections we're expecting an increase of 66 million um almost all state revenue a little bit of other revenue and a expenditure line item of 268.7 so that the projected gap or what we would ask for from local sources is 202.6 million

[03:19:31] We also thought that it would be that you all would be interested to hear that, you know, some key components from the JLARC study that Virginia school divisions receive less funding per student than the 50 state average and the regional average, which equates to approximately $1,900 per student in state underfunding of Virginia students.

[03:19:54] And many of Virginia's neighboring states spend more per pupil on average, including West Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland. Also, you know that from the JLARC study that the current SOQs dramatically underestimate the actual costs of public education.

[03:20:12] The SOQ formulas provide $6.6 billion less than what was actually spent by local school divisions in Fiscal 21. It still uses Great Recession-era cost reduction measures, and it does not adequately account for local labor costs.

[03:20:30] So the JLARC study has highlighted what we've pretty much been saying for years, and that is that the state is not doing its share. As far as the federal government goes, there are a couple of big unfunded mandates with them. The federal government has not followed through on its promise for IDEA funding.

[03:20:50] IDEA represents about 10% of FCPS COTS, and the commitment was for 40%, and for FCPS that would be an additional $112 million. nor are they fully funding impact aid. If impact aid was fully funded, we would see an additional 20.7 million and we currently receive 3.7 million in impact aid.

[03:21:12] We also have a number of items that are not included in the budget. We just don't have enough information to include that now. They may very well end up in the superintendent's proposed. They may not. Again, the fiscal forecast is not intended to usurp the superintendent's proposed budget.

[03:21:28] But if we accept the CEP percentage lowering from 40% to 25%, that would be a $12 million add to our budget, $5 million on the food services side, and $7 million impact on classroom teachers. Implementation of the secondary security audit recommendations, we have a pilot going now, but it is not funded in the out years.

[03:21:51] Market comparative placeholders. That's something that comes up every year, and so we've included that on the list. ESSER-funded initiatives, like the special education teachers, 30 minutes, that has a cost of $24 million. That also is not included. Expansion of middle school athletics, you probably recall that in this year we added cross-country and track, and we don't know yet what we might want to expand that with.

[03:22:19] And then expansion of lighthouse schools, that is also in pilot right now, and so under development. The special education enhancement plan, we do have two million in recurring costs for that AIR report information, and then we have two million of one-time dollars to be able to support the recommendations of the consultant.

[03:22:41] And then the fine arts stipend review, we did some selected fine arts stipend increases in the current year, fiscal '24, but we need to take a look at all those, and that work has just not been completed yet. We also thought that you all would be interested to know what the Social Security cost of living adjustment is and how that compares to Fairfax.

[03:23:04] And including STEP plus MSA, the average Social Security COLA increase since fiscal 20 is 4.14% compared to the average increase at FCPS of 3.7. The next chart shows where we stand as far as the master's lane goes, step one.

[03:23:24] And this is why we are suggesting a 6% salary increase. We also included the 2% that is going into effect on January 1. All of the divisions listed here gave 2%, except Manassas City Schools gave 3%, and Falls Church City Schools did not do the 2%.

[03:23:43] But be that as it may, we rank seventh of eight divisions in beginning pay for a master's degree. And we want to be number one. We want to tell every applicant that we see at a university job fair that Fairfax pays the most.

[03:24:00] That is very important. It will take some time to get there. We can't do it in one year, but we want to be set up to meet that goal. And certainly collective bargaining will come into play, but how, we don't know yet. And, you know, it's also worth mentioning that K-12 education has evolved so much.

[03:24:21] I mean, in the last five years, in the last 10 years, you know, student needs have increased exponentially, inclusive classrooms, pre-K and the importance of pre-K. Full-day kindergarten is now expected. A decade ago, a lot of Virginia divisions still didn't have full-day kindergarten.

[03:24:40] Learning management systems, one-on-one student devices, all of those things, mental health concerns, school safety and security, all of those are things that have topped the priority list in the last four or five years and i'm not sure that that's something some of these are things that we would have envisioned even five years ago that that was something that we were going to need so that's where we are right now as far as the fiscal forecast um and this again will be you know provided we do a joint powerpoint with the county for the joint meeting with

[03:25:13] the board of supervisors on november the 28th as far as the school board budget guidance or budget themes i will just go over a few things you know the objective is to identify broad themes that you would like to see the 25 budget centered around discuss your guidance to the superintendent and then the budget development process is a collaborative process of course involving many stakeholders we prepare a needs-based budget based on the virginia code and we of course always seek guidance from school board members on priorities and we're setting up two by

[03:25:52] twos with the new school board members in January to just kind of give them a little heads-up flavor as far as the budget process goes and all of those things that they may not be familiar with we still have our budget question process we have a Google form either you can submit questions or your aid can submit questions you must be signed into your FCPS schools net account to access the budget question Google form and then here is our budget calendar which the first thing on it of course is the November 28th joint meeting and now I believe well dr. Anderson of course did a Google Doc and asked you all for

[03:26:32] themes that you thought were important and the there were only two that had majority support and that was compensation and equity there were a couple of other topics that had a couple you know one or two people that indicated they were interested in that but most of them were other which means only one person mentioned them and dr. Anderson is gonna walk you all through what you're gonna do to come up with a list of themes that you think we should consider all right thank you so much miss burden I really definitely want to restate that we are going to have some additional conversations with the new

[03:27:11] board that will be in place most of us knew what that was like when we came in January of 2020, so it will be a very similar process. I'm glad that I participated in that and will be able to participate in bringing in the new school board members. So we'll have two parts to this conversation and I know that some folks have a hard stop at four. We are going to ask Miss Burden and her team any questions that we have regarding what was presented. Hopefully at the end of that part of the conversation I want to bring back the other ideas and suggestions that came up during my conversations with you, during your completion

[03:27:49] of the Google document, regarding other things that we'd like to prioritize. They're not listed because, again, they were maybe one or two people who mentioned them, but I'm hoping we can set up some conversations here to raise some of those priorities as themes which is guidance to the superintendent and again anything that is collected and included in our themes will be part of the resolution to be voted upon later this year.

[03:28:17] So with that I will invite you all to ask Miss Burden and her team any questions that you have and after we finish that round I hope maybe it's just one then we can engage in the themes discussion. Yes please.

[03:28:32] Thank you Dr. Anderson I just want to level set a little bit. This year is different than in 2020 when people came in in January. We know that there is going to be some challenges at the local level, but we also know there is a lot of pressure at the state level to change and increase funding.

[03:28:54] So there are a lot of unknowns. But I want people to take into account that there is a high likelihood that there will be Title I cuts at the federal level. The question is how much. We have a current speaker in the House of Representatives who has suggested as much as 80 percent of Title I funding cuts.

[03:29:16] That would be pretty significant for this county. Luckily, we do not depend too much on the federal government because we've had chronic underfunding. When we add up the chronic underfunding from the 1900 per pupil in Fairfax County versus our neighboring states, the IDEA funding and the impact aid, it actually comes up to $477,800,000.

[03:29:43] So the taxpayers, our local taxpayers, are picking up the delta. And that's when you have conversations over the next few days and with your community members, that's the number that we should be talking about, is that there are commitments made by the appropriators at the federal and state level that have not been realized four hundred and seventy seven million dollars we are forced to continuously go back and ask for additional funding but we also know that at the local level that the other

[03:30:21] agencies within Fairfax County government have been asked to take a significant pay cut or reduction in budgets so I just wanted to level set that a bit as we begin this conversation and thank you so much because our budget team does work very diligently to try to find additional funds elsewhere and to provide appropriate benchmarking to local agencies thank you thank you miss corbett sanders we are going to start with our school board members with their questions and comments and we will have three minutes

[03:30:58] Mr. Okay. He took that down. Okay Ms. McLaughlin, yes, can we pull up the slide that shows the master salaries Around the jurisdictions. There we go Dr. Reed This is an important one for the board for you the public and the incoming board. I Say this over and over and over again We will continue to lose on the recruitment and the retention

[03:31:35] messaging to our employees if this is how your staff keeps putting the information out because it's not accurate. The bottom line is out of every jurisdiction up there, we are the only ones with ERFC and Ms. Burden, can you repeat again? What is the employer contribution for the ERFC?

[03:31:56] 6.5 percent. Okay, so Dr. Reed if we added 6.5 percent to go back into those pay scales and to that salary then we would not be sitting where we are and I keep bringing this up Ms. Burden because I know you understand this as CFO that we get a finite amount of money from the Board of Supervisors. You mentioned that in your remarks just now that we have all these competing needs but if this board and Dr. Reed is superintendent and your leadership team do not understand

[03:32:34] if we keep putting up those slides the lack of financial honesty about why that's there to anyone who's listening 6.5 percent is 6.5 percent so we're offering a program that no other jurisdiction has and it costs us an employer contribution of 6.5% so there is no reason that we don't have this honest conversation with everybody if people want us to be at the top of the

[03:33:12] salary scale what are we doing about the extra six and a half percent that we give our employees and the other jurisdictions do not going into a secondary pension system that's kind of a question because I still have 48 seconds. So I think that the ERFC obviously is a tangible benefit. And so I think what you're expecting is to see that reflected on this chart. Is that correct? Okay. We can capture that as part

[03:33:46] of a compensation package, separate from salary, but part of a compensation package. What would that look like, Ms. Burton, if we were to the 60-404? Would that just be another column for, I mean, I don't know what other divisions, I know they don't provide ERFC per se, but Are there other compensation enhancements we would also want to reflect for other divisions, or are we unique in ERFC alone?

[03:34:10] In other words, I don't know if others have travel or if others have things that might also be accounted for. Just curious about that. Generally, ERFC is the big item because none of the other divisions offer a supplemental retirement program or an additional local retirement program.

[03:34:29] I mean, you have some, you know, I think Arlington does a $20 match per month for 403B, but mostly we're the only ones. And just to be clear, this chart reflects salaries, and ERFC is not salaries.

[03:34:49] That is a benefit. Okay. But, I mean, it is a unique benefit for Fairfax County. So, and 6% would put us back up in a, yeah, right. It would put us, okay. I understand your point, Ms. McLaughlin, and we will address that.

[03:35:07] So, yeah, I was doing the math. Thank you, Mr. Frisch. I had about 65,500, but it's somewhere in that range. So, to everybody's point, if you add another 6.5% that the employer is giving every month into the ERFC and not into their paycheck, the annual salary would then be $65,500.

[03:35:33] The top one from Arlington is 64,000. So, we are the only school division in Northern Virginia that does the ERFC. The only one. It costs us money to do that program. And so, I am not disagreeing with, so don't have ERFC anymore. Keep it solvent for those who paid into it, but stop doing it for new employees. I am not saying that. That is a big decision to make.

[03:36:01] But I am incredibly worried as I leave this board that if you don't at least have another slide so every employee understands that there's another six and a half percent you get when you come to work for FCPS, you won't come or you may not stay. It's that simple.

[03:36:18] Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Ms. McLaughlin. Mr. Frisch. Thank you. Picking up where Ms. McLaughlin left off, I think, you know, more than just being in the midst of everybody, I think we want to be leading everybody.

[03:36:37] um including with tangible money being brought home and so while i accept the point that we need to do a far clearer job of communicating what you're getting when you walk in the door here um i think it's also important that we are more competitive with the actual salary that's being offered which will not only give us the ability to talk about that supplemental retirement benefit but also that we are leading the pack.

[03:37:08] And I think that's a goal we should be striving towards. Because to be clear, ERFC, in my opinion, is not even enough, you know, in terms of what we currently offer compared to what we've offered in the past. And retirement for most workers is in a perilous position compared to where it was a generation or two ago.

[03:37:31] And so anything we can do to increase not only somebody's stability entering the system by having a higher income but also their stability leaving the system should be something that we're striving for. We can't control what other school divisions do in that regard but we can control what we're doing for our employees and I think our goal should be to grow both of those things and to widen the net of the people within our system that are included in that however we can do that possible. Now that being said we are in this situation with our current budget forecasting and in my conversations with

[03:38:07] Dr. Anderson about my priorities I've indicated that compensation is my my top priority and I think that needs to be our priority. You know we can't you know whenever we have these conversations I think it's also important that we stress that when we do get extra money for pay from the state even though that's not what we're talking about here when we do get matched money from the state we're paying more than 80 percent of the fee to access that money where another county might pay 50% to get a 50% match. So, you know, our most recent raise was tens of millions of dollars on

[03:38:42] our part for millions in the single digits on their part, when another division might pay 10 million to get 10 million. So I hope that as we move forward, we can continue to offer increased compensation. Because, you know, the last few years, we've been able to do that the last couple years but we need to do it even more. This number is not the only number that that shows our competitiveness but it is a starting one that kind of reverberates throughout the early career of an educator. So I appreciate all the work that's gone into this from Ms. Burden and her team and from our

[03:39:19] chair and vice chair on budget because we're going to have to have some very you know frank conversations in the weeks and months ahead. Thank you Mr. Frisch. Ms. Toland. Thank you. I'll be i'll be quick um i i'm happy to follow mr frisch i think that and and follow the conversation that we had um earlier in the day on goal three and how do we achieve what we need to achieve for goal three and this is only one of the five goals in that strategic plan i suspect that the additional baseline reports that we get will say the same thing unless we get you know the best and the

[03:39:59] brightest in front of our kids and figure out you know how to recruit them and how to retain them we're going to have a hard time achieving our strategic plan goals so you know i also had compensation as my number one you know thing for budget this year so just wanted to express that thanks thank you miss omesh yeah thank you for putting this together um i guess i just had some questions first um the piece that says baseline recurring adjustments and then transfers specifically like admin schedule c adjustment and then turf can you just elaborate on what those are

[03:40:36] the baseline recurring yeah that slide this one yeah yeah the baseline recurring adjustments are the items that were on year end in fiscal 23 recall that we had to reduce our budget in fiscal 23 and adoption based on the funding levels provided by the state and the county and these are the items that we wanted to put back in the budget but we weren't able to because of the

[03:41:14] funding levels and so we funded these items with year-end money which is one-time money and so we had to get them in the base for the next year so that they're then funded with recurring dollars so that's what all those items are on baseline recurring adjustments and then the transfers to other funds the county does a calculation on debt service and tells us what our increase is this year it's only a hundred thousand dollars and that is for the gatehouse lease it's the debt service on that and then the other is a turf replacement to support the scheduled

[03:41:49] replacement of turf fields life expectancy of air turf fields is no more than 10 years and so they have a replacement schedule and this is our piece of that that we transfer okay thank you i mean i guess dr reed for some of these pieces i always have questions about kind of the the levels of urgency and how we assign them understanding that you know we had wanted to do these things in the past and we just haven't afforded it and now we're looking at a massive shortfall can we not like go back and look into it again and reconsider right like how we time them and what because this is all

[03:42:24] all just adding up to what you're putting as the cost, right? Yes. At this point in time, our fiscal forecast shows that we would need $202 million. And that does sound like a lot for an increase in local transfer. But if you look back at last year, at the fiscal forecast, we identified our needs as $177 million, and what was funded was $144. So it's a little higher than what we saw last year, but not

[03:42:56] not crazy do you have a guess as to how much is that too early to ask oh yeah we have it's early days we this is just our best guess right now at this moment and you know it could change tomorrow it will change tomorrow were you going to say something marty no this is not the ask we don't know what that is yet the superintendent delivers the budget at the end of january and that will be the ask okay yeah i mean dr reed we say every year somebody around this table ends up saying

[03:43:35] like okay where can we be more more efficient where can we sunset stuff where can we save where can we and like i really would love for us to have like while we present what the requirements are going to be what we're needing blah blah to also say hey here's the evaluation we did over the year these are the things that we're no longer going to need i don't know if we're going to actually end up with a different with another presentation before our term ends but if we do I would really like to see that, like a slide two or three of, like, you know, we've done an internal cleanup, and, like, here's what is wasting money.

[03:44:11] I don't know, Leif, like, anything off the top of your head sticks out to you as to where or how we've done that, maybe. Remember, we started a program review back in, gosh, was it right before COVID or right after?

[03:44:31] Yeah, it was a while ago, a while ago. Yeah, in the middle. I mean, we did staffing. Yep. uh we went over that with you we went over isd um but it i don't know if it wasn't believed to be helpful or i don't know but it was abandoned uh it may have just been due to the environment that we were all working in at that point but but you're right we i think with that a review is is probably in order but the i mean to try to do that by this budget season would almost be impossible

[03:45:08] I mean, it's just so big, and to try to capture everything and present and have it analyzed and make recommendations is just a huge process that would take staff resources and, of course, your all's time as well. Yeah, I mean, maybe if we start somewhere where it's like we don't have to have the full process in place, but, hey, we've known over, you know, a few years that something's a little stinky in this area, maybe there's something, you know, like smaller piece, piecemealing it essentially this year.

[03:45:39] And then in future years, hopefully we'd have a more robust process. I don't know if that's doable. I think it's worth mentioning that, you know, 90% of our budget is salaries and benefits and 10% is everything else.

[03:45:55] In addition to that, 93% of our positions are school-based positions. And school-based positions are largely governed by our staffing standards, which align with the standards of quality. And so the majority of our budget at the schools starts at zero base every year, and we take the enrollment projections, which are still being finalized, and apply the staffing formulas to it, and that determines the level of staffing at each school.

[03:46:27] So it's not just an add-on every year, oh, they've got 20 teachers, we're going to give them 22 next year. We start from zero every single year. And that's for the bulk of our budget. Yeah, no, that's fair. I mean, I think I do wonder, Dr. Reed, like during COVID, we had kind of bulked up on the technology specialists and like, you know, we have these advanced academic resource teachers that were just kind of added on because it worked in some places.

[03:46:52] And maybe we can look at that because they're applying a formula that's like, hey, the school has this, it needs this because these numbers exist, which is, by the way, a very old formula, right, Lee? Like that's been around a while of just how we calculate staffing. No, I mean, they're reviewed every year, and, you know, occasionally, I mean, I think we've had two or three, four changes since I've been here, and I've been here five years.

[03:47:17] So they are changed periodically, but it's, you know, and we just had a deep dive into the staffing by ERS that was presented to you all in February of 22. Yeah, I guess I'm thinking of the one that specifically targets, like, by the number of FRM, EL, and special ed.

[03:47:38] If I could have you wrap up that sentence and put you on a go back and then I know you asked a question for Dr. Reed to respond to regarding staffing. I do think we can take a look at a number of programs. I think the conversation earlier about the resources connected to are we closing achievement gaps.

[03:48:03] If the resources that we have in place when we evaluate them in some objective manner are not showing the impact we hope, then I think it is time to make a move. So I think anything's possible at this point.

[03:48:20] But I think where your frustration is, is every year we get to a place where we talk about it, and it's either too late or it's not time yet, and we never seem to get to it. Yeah, and to put a bow on it, I came in, and we're like, we serve a county of over 1.1 million constituents with a $3.2 million budget.

[03:48:36] And now we're like, oh, a 3.6 million, you know? And it's like, have we seen the achievement increases? Please bring all of that into your next round. Thank you. I will pick up where Ms. Amesh left off. I know when we started on the board, we had our program budgets and COVID made a lot of that difficult.

[03:49:00] Ms. Tolan and I brought up a forum topic and had a work session on program review to really start to dig into what programs are we offering and where do we have them. And I think, Dr. Reed, given that we have a new strategic plan, we're talking about sort of the implementation path forward, and we're talking about the workload on our teachers and staff, I think this is a really ripe time to really look at what are we offering, are we getting the ROI for the programs we need, what we expect our teachers to do, our programs we have, all of that are in alignment with our strategic plan goals, and really take

[03:49:38] a deep dive into are we being the most efficient and effective with our resources on implementing our strategic plan and moving the needle forward. So I know one thing we talked about in PEC a little bit is do we need to as we're looking starting to look at our standing committees is do we maybe need a finance committee that during the year can get these reports on the program budget to work in tandem with the budget committee.

[03:49:59] So the budget committee is working on the budget this year, whereas the finance committee committee is doing a little more of the deep dive into the next year's budget to kind of do that work in tandem, right, reporting to the board. So otherwise it feels like every time we have a budget committee there's so much work, you know, with great respect to our budget committee, but so much work on this year's budget, we don't have the time and space to really do that deeper dive, whether it's a program budget reporting or whether it's looking at our programming in alignment with this treaty plan. So I think there's some space here to look at our own structure to see where do we have room to work with you and your staff on that deeper dive. So just something I'm going to kind of put out

[03:50:36] there to think about as we move forward, but I do think, you know, especially given a tough budget year, we have to consider how we talk about everything we need, right? So the second piece I wanted to lift up is I think from what I'm hearing, and I myself included, compensation is high, is top on my list because without good teachers and paying them well, nothing else matters right they can't we can't do the work of implementing this treaty plan without good staff so you know we're looking at a 200 million dollar ask in the advertised budget what's the

[03:51:12] communications plan to go with that to start building out what and why are we asking for this what does it mean how does it impact us remaining the premier school system that we are i think i don't want to get caught in conversations with you know our local board of supervisors with our public without really having some good thoughtful analysis on how do we explain what we're asking and why we need it. I mean a couple things I can lift up at the top of my head is our teacher shortage right and how and our compensation to Ms. McLaughlin's point ERFC and our salary and our benefits but just the fact that we need to pay teachers more in a supply and demand. I want

[03:51:48] to lift up the changing needs of our students but I think we need that sooner rather than later. agreed thank you um i don't see any others so we will go to miss corbett sanders thank you um and i'm glad to follow ms seismor heiser because um some of you may know that i was the school board member who under the last board actually and pushed to have our budget link our strategic plan linked to our budget and i would suggest that um in any conversation when it can't be

[03:52:23] oh, 90% of our budget is school-based because that really doesn't say anything when we're a school-based system. What we need to do is talk about X percentage is tied to supporting our students with disabilities.

[03:52:39] X percentage is for meeting the needs of our students who are in Title I schools. X percentage is, you know, so from that standpoint, we also need to be able to very clearly state how we are picking up the shortfall that is not available to us where the federal government should be funding it. So when we talk about supporting our students with disabilities, which we want to do, and be the premier system doing so, we need to also say, and because of that commitment, we spend X amount of dollars on it. I think that it's also important, and as you all know,

[03:53:16] I really pushed for contracting transparency and oversight. The one thing that we might want to consider going forward is actually having as part of our budgeting process and as part of our transparency initiative maybe in your finance committee is to say and these contracts contract a directly contributes to this part of our strategic plan contract b contributes to this portion of our strategic plan so that it all goes back to our strategic plan is student focused and about student achievement focused and ensuring that all students have access to opportunities

[03:53:51] and along those lines tell us what you value show me your budget and this is how our budget links to each of those priorities and that makes it much more much easier in our conversation with our colleagues at the Board of Supervisors and with the state and frankly I hope that it will move the needle in conversations with the federal government as well. Thank you.

[03:54:17] I am going to take my turn. I actually had a question for Dr. Reed that I will put into this room and hopefully we'll reiterate when she comes back. But before I get there, I wanted to go back to the master's scale page. And I appreciate what was said by both Ms. McLaughlin and Mr. Frisch. And I think we were at Falls Church High School and telling the students there what our pitch is for teachers.

[03:54:47] you know come the work is hard you don't have enough time to do it and we don't pay you enough but it's great we kind of have to spin a different tale there but I also thought Miss Burden that we also talked about what the ranking is for our beginning teachers without a master's can you refresh our memory on that where do we fall yeah we rank fourth of eight with the bachelors we're little bit more competitive there um compared to the other divisions thank you um the other piece

[03:55:24] that i wanted to ask and this is the question for dr reed that i'll pose pose into this room um reviewing the board's resolution from last year it was fairly long there were a few bullets and this is the last bullet it says over the next budget cycles a means to review the return on investment of programs and their integrity of implementation shall be considered along with metrics and accountability for the alignment between the budget and the new strategic plan.

[03:55:55] And I wanted to raise this because this is the conversation that we have each and every year. We only have so many, we have finite resources. Are we putting them in the best places that we get the most bang for our buck? And I think that's the consensus around the room wait do we not have enough yes um that we are not doing that i don't think it has to be as big of a heavy lift as the program review which happened under miss marron's watch and i'm sure she could speak in terms of to how heavy of a lift that was for staff but if staff is starting

[03:56:28] again at zero every year why can we not have a more transparent part of that conversation be part of this process like when we were looking at this whether it's isd or oss whatever the departments are these are the things that we are wanting to shift away from in order to repurpose funds particularly this year when we do have the strategic plan there had to have been something that fell off of the the table i think we are looking to know and to have some insight into those conversations so i will pause and let you respond if you have any answers

[03:57:05] miss burden but this is really directed at dr reed and she is not here for that and i hope that i can take privilege to restate this when she joins us um so i'm going to pause here so i can do that are there any other speakers i know we have a go back for miss omesh so we will do that at this point and then miss mclaughlin okay go ahead should i go ahead yeah okay so um i guess in building off of where it left off um yeah and i said million was a slip of the tongue billion

[03:57:41] obviously but going from 3.2 billion at the beginning of our terms in this board to now well beyond that again question mark of like have we really moved the needle i don't know not not that much i know we dealt with covid which wasn't a small feat but still right it's a question of like where's where did the money like where's the money going and what have we evaluated and decided to sunset. So that still remains, which brings me to perhaps what the action item would be, and Dr. Anderson, this one is really more to you, actually, in how we start off with the new board,

[03:58:15] which is why I've actually wanted to be on the budget team several times around here, but here we are. So, I mean, one, I've talked repeatedly about the needs assessment process. We cannot have this arbitrary thing of like, oh, superintendent thinks this is cool, and some board member brought up another idea without any sense of equity or or prioritization and urgency around what actually matters and what's gonna make an impact so what would that look like ideally that would be a year-long process and that would predate this budget fiscal forecast right and like the conversations we have when it comes to our level as a board that there are so many ways this is done across the

[03:58:53] country the most obvious is even the congressional process but you know various departments and various agencies and offices can can do the research and talk to their people on the ground and bring up that information and then they prioritize and offer requests and recommendations to the superintendent right superintendent looks at all these various plans and then like assesses accordingly where the urgency lies because we also cannot be relying on a bunch of group of student activists or whoever a group of activists that show up at a school board meeting and insist and all of a sudden I'm seeing it on the slides and we have no concept of how urgent that was relative to a million

[03:59:29] and one things that haven't been brought up so that's one and relatedly the ROI stuff is a similar component right it's it's hand-in-hand so each department would not only look at what they need but what where they we can even challenge them to try to be budget neutral and how they bring that like we need this more than this this year so both of those pieces I really hope through your leadership on the budget you can bring a new board that develops these practices and it becomes a habit moving forward. I've tried, but you know. I don't think you'll get any disagreement from anybody from around this table, and I think Ms. Sizemore-Heiser did capture it

[04:00:05] well from the conversation of PEC, doing both in tandem. It's just almost impossible why you're building. We're building this ship right now, so that other work, I think it really lives probably right after we pass the first budget. I mean, right after we pass the budget, then you could begin that work where departments will have the whole year I see space for this to be much more clearly delineated and our resolution this year so I am writing that down for this board's consideration once we get the language going but I think the process building for that dr. Anderson starts actually now where we're doing that back-end stuff to prepare it so that one that you're

[04:00:45] that's a little bit more complicated than just the Finance Committee that I'm on. I think the committee that Ms. Sizemore-Hyser mentioned that PEC is going to bring forward may be helpful for that. Ms. McLaughlin, then Mr. Frisch. And I could possibly answer something.

[04:01:02] Thank you. Did you want to answer the question that I posed earlier? And I can answer both of those questions, I think, to some extent. So when we were talking about the ORSI portion of the presentation earlier with Goal 3, Ms. Arruda and her team are very instrumental in helping us develop our metrics, helping us as we analyze data.

[04:01:27] Her team has also been tasked, as we were directed as part of the resolution last year, to ensure that we do have a return on investment structure or framework that we can use as we're making decisions around the budget.

[04:01:43] Because for us to have highlighted the work that we've highlighted for Goal 3 that we've shared with you today and to then go into that work without recognizing what are we doing today where are we getting the the biggest bang for our buck what's working what's not we need to have that the ROI tool that we can use with fidelity across the system we know that as dr. Presidio brought his plan forward back in 2020 I remember I was in my office at home when we had that presentation as we all were, he shared his process and I think that it's important for

[04:02:20] us to have a uniform process across all offices that we're calculating that ROI in the same way. So there's one aspect that's tied to the ROI where we will have that tool ready as we go through that budget process. The second piece, though, that we have engaged ORSI is really around increased program evaluation. We know that over time the Office of Research and Strategic Improvement, ORSI, was previously known as the Office of Program Evaluation,

[04:02:55] and so that office will be bringing more program evaluation back into its portfolio so that WE HAVE THIS TANDEM APPROACH OF EVALUATING PROGRAMS AT A CENTRAL LEVEL AND THEN TEAMS ALSO EVALUATING THE IMPACT.

[04:03:14] WHEN WE HAVE OUR METRICS, WHEN WE HAVE OUR STUDENT OUTCOMES, DID WE HIT OUR STUDENT OUTCOMES? IF WE DID, THEN WE SHOULD CONTINUE THIS WORK. IF WE DIDN'T HIT OUR STUDENT OUTCOMES, THEN HOW DO WE REALLOCATE THOSE FUNDS OR THOSE POSITIONS IN A DIFFERENT WAY? And that's all going to come forward as part of the budget process, and her team is working on that at this time.

[04:03:35] Thank you so much. Ms. McLaughlin, and then Mr. Frisch. Thank you. Maybe picking up a little bit what Ms. O'Mish was talking about, and you know, every year it's about what our budget priorities are. But as I've been talking repeatedly with Dr. Reed, and I say this to my colleagues, for the four of you who remain, 90% of the money that goes out of the door of FCPS, 90%, just about is going to compensation so if we do not have as a board as a school division a strategic

[04:04:11] mission critical focus on how the 90 of that 3.5 or 6 billion dollars is being spent then all the other things you do when you study this budget that's that's the other 10 for my entire time on this board through multiple cfos and and leaderships from the superintendents i've said you don't have to do zero-based budgeting you just have to go with what's federally required and state mandated first start there so you go from there and that's what are we required in terms of

[04:04:49] soqs put it there it's there you got to do it but there's a whole lot we do that is outside of the state and and federal mandates our soqs and we know that because when the state very generously says we're going to give a raise to our teachers well fcps's interpretation is well that's a raise for all employees well that's not how the state intended it they instead it for intended it for teachers who they believe are are not being compensated in competitive salaries so there's

[04:05:25] a whole lot more local money that has to go into every time we're trying to bring up salaries for what is recognized as teachers on the front lines and that is not me discounting all the other professions to support our schools. But I want everybody to understand the distinction that the state makes versus what we hold locally. I really hope that the next board with Dr. Reed's leadership is going to be in a better position, then I certainly feel like the 12 years I tried to get our budgets to be authentically more strategic, and it matters. It affects the 90 percent of our

[04:06:04] people. Thank you, Ms. McLaughlin. 100 percent of our people did the 90 percent of our budget. And that's actually something we will talk about as soon as we get into the second part of our work here today. Mr. Frisch. Yeah, on the the subject of the program budget, I think in the past when we've looked at it, it's felt like a defense of the status quo, whether it's intended to or not.

[04:06:27] And I get that, you know, you have conversations about what could or should be removed from our focus and people get nervous, especially if there's no clarity around exactly what's going to happen. And when you have these conversations about what could maybe happen without any kind of concrete plan, I think you can make a lot of people very nervous about their future in the system.

[04:06:51] um it was good to see a lot of heads nodding about the idea of a finance committee um you know one of the things that excites me about that is not only the ability to focus um on projects that maybe are a one-year shelf life but there's also probably an opportunity there to focus on things that take longer than a year uh to really dig into and so um you know i i believe peck did move that forward at the last nope we didn't but we discussed it we voted to move it forward but we haven't really put any parameters around it was just kind of came up

[04:07:31] at the last minute so we're going to finalize kind of the parameters at the next meeting and then bring it forward so i think we'll all be eager to to take a look at that and have conversations about it um uh because i think it's a priority for everybody all right one last it was going to be added to your survey about standing committees in general to send to the board okay thank you mr frisch miss nana koufax has not yet spoken um why don't you go ahead and take your time thank Thank you. I'm sorry I had to go in and out today. But I do want to say, following along with what some of my colleagues have said,

[04:08:07] you know, we realize that so much of our budget is salary-based, and rightfully so. So how then do we decide that we're not just defending status quo? These are some of the things that I've just heard said.

[04:08:23] I'm going to ask you all as our staff, because I've been here 12 years. I've seen good, bad, ugly budgets. And what would you do differently? You're going to have a new board of eight members, eight new members in less than 30 days, or a little more than 30 days, I should say now.

[04:08:43] And so what would you all suggest that would be different that could help about the fact that, You know, are we really getting fully funded when we're only funding salaries? What do we do?

[04:08:59] How can we do this better? And you might not have an answer now, but any thoughts on that? Well, that's something that I would generally like to discuss with the superintendent, not in a public session.

[04:09:16] I don't want to get out ahead of my superintendent. Well, let's have Dr. Reed respond. She just came back. You may not have seen her. Okay. Did you hear my question? More or less. It's basically that, you know, the comments made from the board have been like, you know, 90% of our budget is salaries.

[04:09:37] We need to compensate our teachers and our administrators to have the best in the region for all the reasons we discussed earlier today. But I said, I've been here a while. And so what you do is you kind of look around the margins for new initiatives.

[04:09:54] And what would your thoughts be if you were going to change that process? How could we do it better? And how will you look to make that more helpful to a new board that's coming in? Well, thank you.

[04:10:11] I think, number one, compensation is critical for all of our employees. Our drivers, our IAs, our custodians, our liaisons, teachers, principals, central office. I mean, salary is critical. Looking around at different initiatives, I would go back to our core mission right now on our strategic plan, which is closing gaps for kids.

[04:10:34] And part of the quality of that gap closing work is determined by the quality of the individuals we have working with our children. So that goes back to compensation. So I would say that I don't know that I would look at a different process, but we can't do everything we've always done budget-wise and program-wise and expect different results.

[04:11:01] That's clear. Yes. I also know that any freeing up of substantial amounts of money to actually put toward a salary increase is not trimming around the edges in different places.

[04:11:16] it's actually a pretty significant, it's increasing class size, or it's eliminating an entire strata of employee class, or do you know what I'm saying? Like, it's not an insignificant move to free up tens of millions for salary. So I think it's a value as much as it's going to be a process, to be honest. But I think if we stay true to the core, which is doing what's best for students and making sure that we not just adequately but effectively provide compensation for all of our staff here in Fairfax County we're going to achieve

[04:11:54] that so I guess I'll leave it there for the moment and I do appreciate that I know I kind of put you on the both on the spot and I didn't mean to do that but what I have seen like you said the only way when we were truly not fully funded when we needed those monies the only thing that we did twice in a row was increase class sizes and that's the only way you can get big chunks of money so that's not ideal and it took us years to work back from that and we still are not you know we're still not an in an ideal size for some of the the needs

[04:12:33] that our students have just like we talked today so last question she's not her time. Yeah, that's okay. I only have one more big question and they're kind of related and they both have to do with the federal government. So I'm wondering why we put zero.

[04:12:52] I'm sorry I missed that. Why do we have zero for the federal government? But, you know, this is a big number that we continue to see and the needle has not moved in 12 years about IDEA. We are all in support of making sure each one of our special education students has exactly what we need and I think we have put our money where our mouth is there. But still, the federal government is falling short over $112 million. That's huge. And I guess I'm not understanding what will the impact be to us with the impact of the federal government lowering the CEP percentages from 40

[04:13:31] to 25. So first one, you know, we'll make this the first one because that's the easier one. I think you could answer for me. Yeah, the 40 to 25. If you reduce it to 25% that are directly certified by the state as eligible for free and reduced lunch, basically there's a multiplier that you multiply that by and that determines their free and reduced rate. So in general, at least based on historically, then that becomes about 80%. So even though 100% of the students at that school

[04:14:10] are eating free, the federal government is only going to reimburse us for 80%, which means the other 20% is on us. So 5 million will be the cost in food services to drop that CEP percentage from 40% to 25%. In addition to that, that typically raises the free and reduced rates at the schools that would be newly designated as CEP, and because our staffing standards are, for classroom teachers, are based on, it's weighted for free and reduced kids, so the more that you

[04:14:49] have, the greater classroom teachers you get, and so if we did that, then that would have a $7 million increase in classroom teacher staffing at those schools, so the total is about $12 million. folks i'm going to have to do a quick time check so if we could keep the questions and answers really succinct because we really do have to get to the second part of the board's priorities and i want to at least make sure we have uh 40 minutes for that uh ms seismorheiser yeah just just really

[04:15:21] quickly and i think um to pick up on mr koufax's point a little bit you know we've as we're getting into potentially more tighter budget time frames um dr reed i really do think as we're looking at our budget process by the time we even get to this point where we're talking about the fiscal forecast because while it is not the budget you're presenting in january right it's not as flushed out it does have some things listed on there as priorities i think we we really need to back that up with the why the alignment and what happens if we don't get it which i think what mr not kofax was talking about with having to increase class sizes or other things you don't have to have it

[04:16:01] all flushed out but I think otherwise we allow narratives to get created that we have to backfill that may not you know be the case so I do think as you're looking at the budget process really as we're looking at tighter budget years right and also the why around what are we not getting funded from the federal government what is the real I mean there's people who rightfully want us to ensure that all students are fed well we have to talk about how do we do that what is the cost what does that mean for the rest of our budget and how can we get support from other government levels to make sure we can make sure students are fed.

[04:16:35] For example, it's one example I give. What I don't want to have happen is we have these great goals, we have the strategic plan, and then two, three years down the road, we haven't done what people expected and we haven't set up the expectations to understand without the funding behind it, we aren't going to be able to have the quality staff and the work we need and the students fed and taken care of and all of those pieces and i think we've got to do better about teasing out all of that together and creating that narrative thank you miss marron hasn't had a turn so miss

[04:17:07] marron so i and several others are going down to williamsburg tonight or tomorrow to the virginia school board association conference and i'm certainly eager to talk with colleagues from around the commonwealth about the jlark study i hope that it will be a topic of discussion and so I'm eager to share that data so people know but also about the unfunded mandates with the federal government and one other thing that I am eager to do at VSBA as I am whenever I am not in Northern Virginia but in Virginia is to educate people about our student population today that we've changed quite a bit from the last 10 and 20 years and to really let people know that we have

[04:17:46] amazingly diverse and also high need populations so I hope my colleagues will also be talking that up a lot. I think VSBA has a lot of potential to help us advocate, but I'm thinking all of a sudden talking points and data points, and it's a lot to pull together literally on the last minute. But it's tomorrow, and the regional meeting is Thursday, or is it tomorrow? So I don't know. And as far as the federal, I would love to do more focused advocacy on that. I think that that is where we have a unique position. I'd rather spend my time

[04:18:22] advocating to higher-ups that make policy and funding decisions than trying to figure out, you know, how we're going to make this plan work, because we are the only ones that can do that. So I'm all for that if people want to jump into that work. Thank you, Ms. Marin. Very quickly, Ms. Corbett-Sanders, your go-back, and then we will need to move to the next part.

[04:18:43] Thank you, and thank you for your explanation of the CEP. As you and I have spoken, I really think we have to disaggregate the difference between providing free meals to everybody in a school and changing the class size for everybody in the same school.

[04:19:00] If what we're doing is going from 40 to 25 percent on CEP, then we know it's going to cost us $5 million, but the remaining costs associated with, by shrinking the class size, I think that's one where we have to have a discussion as a board on whether or not we need to do something different on that piece.

[04:19:24] And just to be clear, so everybody knows, the 40% at VDOE is mandated. The 25% is optional. So a decision has not yet been made, which is why that's included on the initiatives not included.

[04:19:40] No, I think that's true. And then, Ms. Marin, I actually would love to speak to you more about your advocacy because I, too, plan on spending my time at VSBA and have spent a lot of time with the regional elected leaders, encouraging them to weigh in on the JLARC study because it is unacceptable that this school division has a $477 million underfunding between the JLARC study and at $1,900 per kid.

[04:20:11] and the federal government. And so I'm happy to work with you on that. Thank you. I will raise one more thing and my quick go back while the superintendent is here, which is just to go back to the budget resolution of last year that asked about program review ROI.

[04:20:31] I want to be sure that this is not just something we're adding into our language, but is actually having impact. So as you know it, how was that embedded into this year's process? Well, I know we've asked for, well, the process isn't done yet, to be honest.

[04:20:51] This is the very first daylighting of our thinking around budget. And quite honestly, really this forecast, fiscal forecast, is predicated on an ask around compensation.

[04:21:09] So this doesn't yet include the ROI or the attainment of KPIs with different programs or personnel, but it's really related to what would it cost us if we wanted within two years to be salary-wise at the top in our region, this is what it would take.

[04:21:28] And so, and not much else is getting funded really in any big way. So, I think we'll get more to your point, Dr. Anderson, the ROI around programs, I think, we'll see in the coming months prior to the presentation of the full budget.

[04:21:45] That's good to know. And the other piece that I would be remiss if I didn't raise is, as things are introduced to the budget, what has been the needs assessment? Because one of the points that was raised is, if we have a lot of advocacy around something, doesn't mean it's the most necessary thing and the most mission critical.

[04:22:00] So if we include it because we have that advocacy, why? If we don't include it, also why? So I would love to see that and I'm going to hold you to that commitment. So thank you. I also want to just put out in the room in this space that sometimes the things we get advocacy are really not that expensive, but they're a little more than a school can do, but not as much as a PTA or a booster or whatever can do.

[04:22:27] So we also need to, I think, modulate or manage expectations because there's some amazing things we can do that are not high cost. And we don't want to have a scorched earth budget plan either where we start eliminating things that are really good for kids that then create other issues that our students that because they can't do X, Y, Z, now they're out doing other things which we have to now fund to come out in a different direction.

[04:22:52] So I just want us to always be mindful about that. so sure that makes perfect sense just kind of pivoting a little bit all of you should have the document in front of you that has responses that received either via the survey or through communications that miss corbett sanders and i have had with you as you can see the two items that were you that were universally part of this board's themes are compensation and equity but even within those two categories there are some differences

[04:23:27] So what I will ask for you to do first, there's two items first, take a look at the other categories, workforce recruitment, mental health, other, which is huge in budget review, and we're going to break up into small groups to kind of determine do we still want do we want to raise any of those issues to be a board priority.

[04:23:49] So in your group conversations, I would like for you to think about what could be priority one, priority two, and priority three, because we need to set ourselves up for success. So that's what I would like for you to do for workforce, mental health, other, and budget review, priority one, two, and three.

[04:24:10] Or maybe not at all. Maybe this is it. And if this is it, that is okay, too. The second piece I'd like for you to consider as you look at compensation and equity, you could see that there's been some good feedback there. Some of the things that we've talked about in this room, should we be prioritizing within compensation?

[04:24:31] I heard from Ms. Sizemore-Heiser regarding we have hard-to-fill positions, and I've been talking about differentiated compensation for a long time. Should that be priority? We just heard from Ms. McLaughlin in terms of targeting teachers.

[04:24:46] We heard from Ms. Omish about targeting some different groups. Do we even want to prioritize within the compensation and the equity buckets? So those are the two asks. Prioritizing workforce on down, priority one, two, and three, and prioritizing within each of the two buckets with which we have board consensus.

[04:25:11] So we will be breaking out into some small groups of three, So we have a little bit more discussion and we'll do some breakouts one of you Please be the scribe and just write on this document so that it could be returned to miss Corbett Sanders And an eye for us to follow up to create the board's resolutions What question have you yeah?

[04:25:31] I I'm just concerned about this exercise. I'm going to be honest I mean there are 12 of us I get that but I mean I'm looking at this especially in that in the the breakout of what compensation is being defined as equity what it's being defined as I mean I Don't want to be giving feedback even on either of those because I don't think that's established where we as a collective board are even in the Subcategory so I really appreciate that, you know trying to start from somewhere, but I also

[04:26:08] Recognize that only four of you remaining eight of us are leaving and some of us aren't even here around the table for various reasons this afternoon, so I don't know. I'm a little nervous to be sitting here working off of this because I don't feel like it's reflective of certainly what I've heard over the years of this sitting board. And I appreciate that, but at the end of the day, we are trying to build a resolution to give guidance to the superintendent in terms of where do we want for her to focus on. That's what we have been doing for the last three years. That resolution speaks

[04:26:45] about the board's priorities and where we need to be focused because the budget it's ours we own that and we decide what gets funded and what does not I know this is not an easy exercise and again if those two that's posted on the board are it we could leave it just like that I want to pay attention to the other information that board members have contributed to this process and I don't have enough in a great way of doing that rather than instead of just putting it in front of you? Well, I guess I'll just close it out this way. I've said this every time. It feels

[04:27:23] like the tail is wagging the dog. The superintendent is the leader of the school division. She's the operational expert. She and her team should have given us what they believe as of now they can see the most mission critical. We could have then said collectively as a board, we see that and we're going to proclaim it to go forth and build that budget. I am not happy right now that this is basically a gathering of school board members' thoughts based on their own passions, but it is not strategic in any way at all. And so I'm not trying to be negative Nellie here, but wow. I mean,

[04:28:01] Dr. Reed, just my two cents for when you're going to work with your next board. This right now, Dr. Anderson and Ms. Corbett Sanders not set up for success in my humble opinion and in the future you got a lead on this one from the very beginning because when you wear the crown of being the the CEO of the school division it is not okay for this.

[04:28:25] We have a lot of people who want to chime into this and again this is not even something we have to do if we collectively decide we are good with the two themes that are up there that are broad that is okay too but a lot of people expressed lot of different thoughts in terms of what they want to see in our resolution so i'm going to let miss corbett sanders speak as somebody who's been working on this from the inside and then miss omesh so i'm going to make a suggestion um if you look at this list there are a number of things that are under various categories that actually fall into either compensation or equity and so what i think

[04:29:03] would make it much easier for the focus of this afternoon would be for people to take a look at the list and say, okay, from a compensation piece, what are the things that you think are really critical to add into a description of compensation? We have a number of items up there, but there are also -- I mean, compensation is really all about workforce recruitment and retention. And so, if So if we had as our, and unfortunately only three people actually use the term workforce recruitment and retention, but if we actually use that as the capstone and then put underneath

[04:29:38] it, there's a compensation piece and we could have as part of the compensation piece, differentiated compensation, the stipends that we have spoken about quite often, living wage, we've had a general agreement. We've actually had policy work done in each of these areas. And then add to a review of staffing formulas based on what we've heard earlier today. And What is that? Oh, it's over there. I'm sorry. And then similarly, when we talk about going

[04:30:15] to equity, what are those things on this list that we believe actually contribute to the equity piece. And then under other, are there things listed under mental health, other and budget review that we would actually fully define something that clearly does it. And so that's kind of to frame the discussion today and have working groups work on how they would structure it. Because I know that Dr. Anderson, what you were trying to do, which is absolutely correct, is you did not want to predetermine for this board right this is our work and so we have to

[04:30:54] engage in it we're going to have just one more comment and then we're going to have the conversations in our small groups so Ms. Omeish yeah I mean I'm mindful that we're discussing how to do the thing that we might not have time to do so I wanted to that never happens yeah I guess to Dr. to the credit of this process the reason I think we're here is because we've tried before where the superintendent will come and present something and then the board shoots it down and then it's like well I didn't know what you guys wanted and so that this resolution idea came out of that a few years back having said

[04:31:30] that maybe we can actually discuss like and this is an ask to my colleagues like how we prioritize these as well because to me I'm thinking again I have the things I think matter and everyone that's too arbitrary I'm almost like can we peg this to like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs or some kind of thing where we're like a kid who walks into a school and is not able to communicate with the staff because we have not provided supports that's a different situation than like hey how about we add these cool things to the curriculum and like maybe we can inspire kids don't get me wrong that's good too but there is

[04:32:07] a weight to how we assign the things that matter on this list some of which are like basic necessities of a kid existing and and like being a part of that school versus adding above and beyond and excelling so if I may ask you guys please just kind of help us because as soon as the placards go up we're going to just do this can we have these conversations in our small groups write on this forum all of these ideas and then we will bring it back to the budget group and we will engage in that conversation so I'm going to take the liberty of not taking any more placards and just inviting you all we have three right there so I'm gonna invite you to

[04:32:46] get together the three at the end get together abroad you get together with us so we'll have three teams of three engage in these thoughts write them down and then I'm happy to share out after we've had the opportunity if you feel comfortable to offer any feedback do so if you're not yet comfortable to offer that feedback that is okay too I think we have plenty to do there the compensation and equity. The other thing you could lean into is a strategic plan and the goal report we've just had. That should shift some thinking. So we're going to take the next, it is 3:51, we're going to take the next 15 minutes for you

[04:33:23] to engage in those smaller group conversations. List everything on this document that you need for us, for Karen and I to know, and then we will collect it and bring that back to the finance group. Thank you. Appreciate that.

[04:33:35] All right, folks, I think we're going to come back. I do want to thank you all for engaging in this process because we do want it to be what the board thinks, not what Riccardi Anderson believes the board should think, which is why it was really important to get you to engage with what the our colleagues, the feedback that was given.

[04:51:20] So very quickly, it is 4:09. We are going to spend just a couple of minutes asking each group just to share out some of the thoughts that were discussed. So I will pick one person from each group to share, and then we will wrap up our meeting.

[04:51:39] I believe our next step, all of this information that has been talked about here and that you will give me on your documents, will go to inform the resolution which will be voted upon next month early December and Miss Tolan is confirming that shortly. That's information to the superintendent regarding the boundaries of the budget. So we will start with down at Koufax. I know she took notes there. Yes, I did, Dr. Anderson. All right.

[04:52:10] So our group was Miss Omesh, Miss Seismar Heiser, and myself, and we looked at the FCPS's, our school board's suggested budget themes, and we went with two, strategic plan alignment, and then we expanded on that, and then we went with compensation.

[04:52:29] So compensation, one of the things we would ask to consider perhaps is living wage and differentiated pay, meaning, as it was explained within the group, not necessarily give everyone a little bit of the pie, but give some people a lot more of the pie and then offer other bits of compensation to other parties.

[04:52:53] As far as strategic plan alignment, then what we did is we didn't have time to go back and match what our conversation was in regard to our current list in front of us, but we actually went back through the strategic plan and parsed out, and these are not in any order because we, of course, didn't have time to do that, but we have seven and one that we talked about were expanding pre-k readiness expanding pre-k to ensure pre-k to ensure kindergarten readiness language and communication access meaning any kind

[04:53:32] of translation skills any kind of special pads any type of things that people need inclusion make sure we have a professional development training and support to ex to make our administrators and staff understand what an inclusive environment is ensure a safe learning environment and that's extremely important that stands on its own um we talked about expanding what we talked about this morning ensuring that we can ex putting money behind our mouth what we talked about this morning expanding access to advanced math and cte courses in as many schools

[04:54:11] or at least we so you can get them regionally and then funding for our neediest learners on numeracy and literacy thank you that is very much appreciated and i think while some of those items that you've listed are clearly identified in the strategic plan some are not so it's really important to elevate um the needs that you've just described so if i can get that form thank you um miss tolan was it you who had the document for your team miss oh you already gave it to me do

[04:54:44] you want to present it really quickly? Oh, I think this is it. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. We were very succinct and we actually used it in the term terminology of executive expectations, I believe. So it said it is our expectation that this budget -- that the budget proposed by the superintendent will be in alignment with the strategic plan focusing on competitive compensation and equity. And then asking for clarity as to how you would

[04:55:17] implement those objectives they go ahead yeah I think what I remember in that was the third component on the budget review that we were going to capture in dr.

[04:55:33] Reid that is a third bucket of great importance that we are expecting it's an alignment with the strategic plan that your team is going to look at you know know the what do we say the analytics you know the needs assessment assessment and of last year's guidance right but the goal is that this isn't just how we're going to do whatever new money we have this is what we're going to do we really want to see what are the cost savings that you might all find or what is it the programs that aren't giving them ROI and so we're going to

[04:56:07] redirect funds in a different way so that was the third strategic focus that we wanted you and your team to know about? Thank you. While I didn't get a chance to really contribute to a team, I think for me, one of the most essential pieces is that last component. We have finite resources. We are not going to get all of the things under the sun, but how do we reallocate some of the things that no longer serve us? You know, something that you said, Dr. Reed, still sticks with me. We could pay a lot of the people very little, or we could pay fewer people more. I know these decisions are not

[04:56:43] easy or hard but it's the reality of it we have to make decisions that will focus on our most mission critical work and what our needs are which we talked about for two hours four hours earlier so i think that is it i have everybody's feedback so you all will look to see um to find a language draft that will come to you and i'm sure it will be wordsmith to death and then we will present that next month for the Board to vote upon and to give the superintendent guidance on what is it that we want to see in this budget. So is it the intent that this will be a new business item on the 20th? I am not sure what Ms. Toland's

[04:57:22] intents are. We'll vote for it in the first meeting of December. That way it's timely to allow the superintendent to to inform the superintendent's budget. May I ask that maybe we discuss that offline because I know everybody is jumping off ship some tonight some tomorrow and I want to be sure that all of our colleagues have enough time to wrestle with the language before anything is posted but given that we have three board meetings left I do think we it will be here was to post it as new business on Monday and then you know and

[04:57:58] aim for the vote on the 4th on December 4th if it can be posted as new business without the exact language because I don't want for anybody to be surprised I think they can. Okay. Thank you. Have a good afternoon, all. Thank you, Ms. Burden and team.

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