Coraggio Consulting Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, December 12, 2023 Date: Tuesday, December 12, 2023 Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia Length: 2h 45m (video) Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT-frVMGZn0 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [00:00:03] all right welcome yes all right let's make it the best one yet i have some ideas yes we're going to start welcome everyone it is the last work session it is very exciting and bittersweet yes yes for many of us for many of us so anyway we are going to have a great work session i know but before we do that. We have a few people virtual that we need to vote on. Ms. Seismorheiser and Ms. [00:00:35] Kiesgemarra have submitted a written request to virtually attend today's work session due to personal conflicts, while Ms. Cohen has submitted a written request to virtually participate today's session due to a medical conflict. So all those in favor of Ms. Seismorheiser's request, raise your hands ladies all those in favor raise your hands that is everyone in the room wait stop it put your hand up everyone in the room is in favor opposed nobody's opposed and put those hands out [00:01:10] all those in favor of approving miss keys gamara's request all those in favor that is everyone in the room with dr anderson being very naughty this morning and all those in favor of approving miss cohen's request raise your hands okay that is approved they're all approved to be virtually with us um thank you to staff we have our strategic plan goal one baseline report this morning um the whole yeah thank you the whole meeting is dedicated to this uh goal report um and i'm going [00:01:48] to turn it over to dr reid to begin thank you miss pokarski and i am thrilled uh to share the work around goal one and um really our launch pad for our 2030 plan for goal one also i want to remind the board and the community watching that very recently our governor also made an announcement on the importance of early childhood and the commitment of the commonwealth to early childhood education in a much more meaningful way so we're looking forward to how that support is going to [00:02:23] translate into support for our Fairfax community because we know that early childhood is where we really are going to close those opportunity and achievement gaps. So I'm thrilled to turn it over at this time to our Chief Academic Officer Dr. Sloan Presidio and our Interim Assistant Superintendent Marcy Neal who are going to be tag teaming this with staff and our Interim Executive Director as well Dustin Wright. So we've got a lot of data to present and a lot of opportunity to be thoughtful about our youngest learners. So without anything [00:03:00] further, Dr. Presidio, let's present goal one please. Good morning and good morning board members and we're excited to be your some of for some of you your final work session and for others your final work session for this calendar year. So just some quick housekeeping items. The clerk has sent an updated report and we are posting that. There is on page 30 of your report a data point that inaccurately listed the percentage of kindergartners with disabilities meeting benchmarks the data point was showing the target as opposed to the actual baseline data which is correct throughout the rest of the document so [00:03:35] that is being posted on board docs right now so today is the second of our five baseline goal report presentations that we're presenting to the board and the public we previously presented on goal 3 which is our academic growth and excellence report and today's school report is focused on goal 1 which is a a strong start pre-K to 12. The purpose of our baseline reports is to let the board and the public know our starting point and our work with our new strategic plan goals with a focus specifically on our year one priorities. [00:04:04] So as we look at our objectives for today, Goal 1 recognizes that students start their education in FCPS at various points, including those kiddos who start with us in preschool and students who come in to FCPS at various points in their education journey. So we know we have students who come in as military connected students, English learners, and those students may start at various points. [00:04:29] And we know as a division we have a responsibility to support all of our students with a strong start and transition into our schools. In today's presentation we're going to focus in on two areas within goal one. First we're going to look at pre-k experiences and associated performance for students in grades k to three. And then second we're going to look at language progress for English learners. The full goal one baseline report is posted on board docs as a reminder to the public the school board adopted the strategic plan in june of this year and that plan runs through 2030 it's a seven-year plan the adopted plan includes [00:05:07] our five student-centered goals each with our equity commitments to ensure we're supporting each and every one of our students in attaining those goals we have measures for all five of our goals that we will use to share our progress and four pillars that serve as the foundation for our division work towards these goals in the last baseline report we shared with the board that we've identified a set of year one priorities for our strategic plan we're aligning the work of both our schools and our departments to accomplish our goals within the goal one we're looking specifically at availability of pre-k programs including inclusive pre-k to meet our community [00:05:44] need going to the next slide we want to start off by just talking about why pre-k is such a key focus for our division right now the research tells us that the gaps in pre-k opportunities prior to kindergarten can lead to gaps in school readiness, including literacy, mathematics, and executive functioning. [00:06:06] Our pre-k experiences are linked to higher rates of demonstrating readiness skills when students enter kindergarten, and a recent study found that pre-k attendance is linked to an increase in high school graduation and an increase in four-year college attendance. [00:06:22] Within our own data, we can see meaningful patterns of students who had pre-k experience versus those who did not when we look across a variety of assessments in grades K to 3. So in this slide, for example, you can see that 78% of students with a pre-K experience met expectations for fall kindergarten readiness as opposed to 48% of students who did not have a pre-K experience. We see these same patterns when we look at spring kindergarten assessments and first through third grade spring math screener results as well as first through third grade spring screen or reading results. When we look at our third grade [00:06:59] reading SOL, which was something we looked at as a part of goal 3, we also see that students with a pre-k experience pass that SOL at a 74% rate as opposed to 45% of our students who did not have a pre-k experience passing that grade 3 reading SOL. We also want to provide some context about the different types of pre-k experiences that our families choose for their students and talk a little bit about the program specifically provided by FCPS. [00:07:30] So it's important for our community to note that Virginia is not a universal pre-k state, meaning it is not provided free for all students, so families are making choices about pre-k experiences as well. Our kids have a variety of pre-k experiences as they come to FCPS. When we look at our data for the baseline years, 20% of our kindergarten students were served by an FCPS pre-k program. [00:07:54] 55% or the majority of our kindergarten students had a pre-k experience outside of FCPS, so that could have been in a private setting, it could have been another school system, a program offered through the Fairfax County government, and 25% of our students had no pre-k experience prior to coming into kindergarten. For some families that may represent a choice, for other families that may represent barriers for accessing and something something they want for their children. So as I shared in the previous slide, 20% of our kindergartners receive their pre-K education through FCPS. Within Fairfax, preschool students [00:08:34] qualify for our programs based on specific criteria, and these programs fall into two main categories. Our first program, our FCPS pre-K, provides services to income-eligible three- and four-year-old students in a general education setting who are at or below 200% of the federal poverty level or they meet specialized criteria so for example they're experiencing homelessness or living in foster care for this school year we are serving approximately 2 000 students in 65 school at 67 schools in this program our second program is the early childhood special education [00:09:10] program or ecse which provides services for students with ieps and this year the school year we're serving over 2500 students and programs that are offered in 83 schools. As we focus on our pre-k inclusion efforts it's important to note the different instructional models are going to be used to make progress towards those outcomes and we'll discuss more of those later in the presentation. So now we're going to jump into our baseline data for students with pre-k experiences and associated performances in grades k through three and just as a reminder [00:09:44] our baseline data is that three-year average looking at school years 2020-2021, 21-22, and 22-23. So as we look at pre-k experience and kindergarten readiness, we're looking specifically at two metrics. We're looking at the percentage of students who are entering kindergarten with those pre-k experiences, and we're also looking at the percentage of kindergarten students who are meeting grade level expectations for reading, math, and executive functioning in the fall. [00:10:12] As we look at this chart, the data first shows us that 75 percent of our students are entering kindergarten with a pre-k experience. There is a 20-point difference between the student group with the lowest pre-k experience and the overall baseline data, and 78% of our kindergartners with a pre-k experience met all three foundational benchmarks for school readiness in the fall, so that reading, math, and executive functioning, as compared to 48% of students who met the benchmarks who did not have a pre-k experience. This first chart shows the percentage of students who enter kindergarten with a pre-k experience, and And as we look across student groups, [00:10:50] we can see gaps in participation for our economically disadvantaged and Hispanic groups with the lowest rate of a pre-K experience for our English learners at 55%. We also know the percentage of students with pre-K experiences varies as we look across the county. [00:11:07] So this is a heat map from the 2021-22 school year that shows pre-K experience by high school boundary. And this data comes from a baseline year and it's before the addition of our region six to FCPS. As you can see from the chart, the lighter colors represent more pre-K experience with the darker shades representing less pre-K experience. [00:11:28] So as we think about meeting community need, we see variance throughout our geographic barriers, boundaries, excuse me, that we need to consider. We can also see differences as we look at our intersectionality data. So the first chart on this slide shows our students with disabilities who had a pre-K experience intersected with other student groups. [00:11:49] So we had 1,760 students with disabilities with 90% of them having pre-K experience. And as you look across that intersectionality data, you can see differences within the student group. The second chart on the slide shows our economically disadvantaged students who had a pre-K experience. [00:12:07] So 62% of our 4,272 economically disadvantaged kindergartners had a pre-K experience. When you look further at that intersectionality data, see differences in participation rates. So for example we can see that 2,223 of our economically disadvantaged kindergarten students are also English learners and 54 percent of them had a pre-k experience. This means over a thousand of our economically disadvantaged English learners entered kindergarten without a pre-k experience. So as we look at this data there's some clear [00:12:45] opportunities that emerge. We've got over 1,600 economically disadvantaged kindergarten students entering FCPS each year without a pre-k experience. In our baseline data, we can see that this impacts large numbers of our economically disadvantaged English learners and economically disadvantaged Hispanic students. Given the income eligibility requirements for FCPS pre-k programs, all economically disadvantaged kindergarten students would have been eligible for an FCPS pre-k program the year prior if they had applied to the program, lived in the county at the time, and their income met the same criteria [00:13:23] the year prior. So it's clear that this is an access and opportunity gap. It's also important to note that in order to increase the number of income eligible students we're serving we would need additional classrooms and funding for our pre-k programs. Thank you Marcy and good morning to the members of the board. [00:13:41] The final piece of information we would like to share about the pre-k experiences of our students is regarding inclusion for our students with disabilities. Recently, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services published a policy statement indicating that high quality inclusive pre-K programs are important for students with disabilities so they can learn alongside their peers and foster knowledge, skills, and behaviors, gain social and emotional competencies, and feel a sense of belonging. [00:14:09] This report indicated that in 2021 nationally, 55% of preschool student, preschool children with disabilities received early childhood education services in settings separate from children without disabilities. In Virginia, school divisions provide annual data to VDOE every single year for a special education report and one of the factors on this reports inclusion in pre-K. [00:14:33] The area of this report is Indicator 6A and it measures children aged three through five with IEPs attending a regular early childhood program and receiving the majority of special education and related services in the regular early childhood program. You can see on the screen some of the percentages for Favrex County around this video indicator 6A for our baseline years. For the students that we serve 17.93 of our preschool age children with disabilities met the criteria for 6A. [00:15:02] This slide also includes the most recently available state target which is from the 2021-22 school year which is 24.9% meaning that we've fallen short of this state target for inclusion in the baseline years. As the state releases the 2022-2023 data and state target, we'll adjust the baseline data accordingly. [00:15:24] Now we're going to transition to look at some of our kindergarten readiness data. When we review our baseline data, the overall percentage of kindergarten students who demonstrated readiness and met grade level expectations for reading, math, and executive function in the fall was 71%. [00:15:41] And as was shared earlier, we saw differences in this percentage based on pre-K experience with 78% of our students with a pre-K experience meeting this readiness benchmark, and 48% of our students without a pre-K experience meeting this benchmark. As we continue to look at this idea of kindergarten readiness by demographic group, we see gaps for our students with disabilities, our economically disadvantaged students, our English learners, and our Hispanic students. [00:16:08] As we think about this idea of intersectionality data with kindergarten readiness, we're also seeing differences across our student groups. While 52% of our students with disabilities demonstrated kindergarten readiness, we saw a significantly lower performance with our students with disabilities who are also economically disadvantaged at 32%, our students with disabilities who are also Hispanic at 34%, and our students with disabilities who are also English learners at 30%. [00:16:37] When we think about the same idea of intersectionality for our economically disadvantaged students who demonstrated kindergarten readiness overall at a rate of 46%, We see that it's much lower for our economically disadvantaged students who are also English learners and our economically disadvantaged students who are also Hispanic. [00:16:55] At this time I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Presidio and his team to discuss our current work and strategies that are under consideration moving forward. - All right, good morning and thank you Dustin. So we're gonna transition a little bit from the context and background and all of the data and talk a little bit about the work that we're doing right now and the actions that we're taking to expand pre-K access. [00:17:14] And we're gonna start first with income eligible students And that, of course, has been a long-standing priority of the school board to expand that access to income-eligible students. So some good news on that front. As you know, this year, the board approved funding to increase pre-K access by adding two, or excuse me, 10 new classrooms this school year. [00:17:34] And we're looking to hopefully be able to do the same thing in FY25. So that's really exciting. And that's some of the most significant expansion of pre-K programming that's happened in FCPS in a really, really long time. I do think it's really important for the community to understand the funding, though, and to understand just how much we rely on state funding to support pre-K access in FCPS. [00:17:57] Marcy mentioned earlier that the state does not provide funding, of course, for universal pre-K, but they don't even provide full funding for students that meet income eligibility criteria. They only provide about 50% of the funding for students who are income eligible, which means that FCPS really has to bear lot of the burden of the costs here locally. And to do that requires us to be able to take a lot of different funding sources and invest all of those funds into pre-k programming. So we take federal funds, state funds, county funds, and then of course local funds to be able to run our pre-k [00:18:32] programming. So I think with the funding issues really on the table, one of the most important things that we need to continue to do as a school division is continue our advocacy at the state level for increased funding. It's also really important for us at the state level to continue our advocacy around thinking about the income eligibility criteria benchmarks that the state sets. Obviously, in Fairfax County, the high cost of living here makes it much more difficult than it might be in another part of the state to meet those income eligibility criteria and to be able to provide pre-K services. So that's another advocacy point. And then also one of the big [00:19:11] things that we need to continue to do around pre-k is really continue our collaboration with Fairfax County government. Many of the board members have been very involved in that during their tenure on the board and we have made a little bit of progress there but we've got a lot more work to do and just a reminder to the community that a lot of that work is managed by the SCIPT or the successful youth and policy child youth and policy team and SCIPT has several major initiatives that are joint initiatives for the county in the school system and pre-k is one of them and pre-k is actually how skip started so we're really hoping to be able to do some additional collaboration with the [00:19:50] county in the coming months to look at increasing pre-k access particularly for income eligible students on the next slide I wanted to share some of the work that we're doing around supporting students with pre-k inclusion opportunities for our students with special needs and this of course was something that we identified in the AIR special education review recently and it's a strategic priority for the division and we have been able to add classrooms like I said both an early childhood special education and in preschool general education but however that program placement as Marcy talked about is really based on facilities needs as well as the geographic location [00:20:29] of where students and families need access and what that means is sometimes that doesn't match up with where we would want to have optimally our program placement. And we end up with certain programs in some schools and not in other schools. So for example, some schools have both special education programs and general pre-K programs, but other schools don't. [00:20:50] And when you don't have both of those programs, it makes opportunities for inclusion just that much more difficult. So to address some of those challenges, we're developing three different inclusion models That will really ensure that no matter what school site a student with special needs attends for preschool That there'd be an opportunity for inclusion and I think the most promising of those three models is the co-teaching model And that was something that was referenced recently In a report from the US Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education And the co-teaching model takes a general education pre-k classroom and the early childhood special education classroom in the same school [00:21:28] and it really links those two classrooms together and it provides flexibility for students to push in and push out for different points during the day to really maximize the inclusion opportunities based on an individual's student needs based on their IEP needs so that's a really really promising model that we're hoping to expand but it does require you to have a general ed and a special education program at the same site in those schools alternatively where we would only have a general education pre-k classroom and we don't have the early childhood classroom special education classroom we can use a single teacher inclusion model and this of course though does require a duly [00:22:06] certified teacher so a teacher who's licensed in both general ed pre-k and special education and so that sometimes is a barrier but we do currently have seven of those classrooms at FCPS and we're working right now to expand the number of those classrooms for next school year and then finally where we only have the special education early childhood programs we can use what's referred to as a community peers model and this is kind of a reverse inclusion model where students without IEPs join a classroom early childhood special education classroom and serve as peers and help develop friendships within that [00:22:42] school community so all of these models are currently in place in FCPS and we're currently working on a special education inclusion plan for preschool to scale up all three of those models and we'll have more information on that to share with the board soon. And then on the next slide, I wanted to share just a little bit about our future work. So that's all work that's currently in process. In the future, though, we are going to need to continue to prioritize services for our earliest learners because looking at the data, we can see the impact that the pre-K experiences have on students' success in our system. So it's [00:23:19] the right thing to do for our earliest learners. It's also the right thing to do for our school division and for our community. And we do have some promising work underway. The first, of course, is the development of that early childhood inclusion plan that I just mentioned. So that's coming. And what that's going to allow us to do is to have identified inclusion programs based on one of those three models in every one of our school sites that has pre-K services. And that is our goal for next year is to make sure we've got one of those three inclusion models in any of our sites where we do have pre-K services. And we've been working with our school principal [00:23:53] to get ready to do that for next year additionally when we think about expansion of our pre-k program we are going to have some important decisions to make as a school division for example we could continue to kind of follow our past practice and open new pre-k programs when we have space available in our buildings and when we have available funding but we know that that's been pretty difficult to do at scale even though we've had some recent success so there is another opportunity maybe to take some boulder action and you might remember in last year's cip the board did pass a motion to explore the potential for an early childhood center at [00:24:31] our pinewood lake site that is part of our cip and if we were to do that it's possible that we could create opportunities for about 400 additional students to access pre-k services if we were to open that site and that would also give us some opportunities to really do some innovative things with inclusion as well so that's something for us to consider in the future and then Marcy also kind of touched on this but we do know that some families make the decision to keep their children at home and not send them to preschool in the early years so we need to make sure that we've got robust programming to support the families that are making those types of choices and we [00:25:08] do have a number of programs that we need to continue to fund and support and probably scale up so for example we have our we play program and that brings children and parents across the county together to really work in a structured kind of learning environment using play-based learning activities to really develop social emotional skills literacy skills and numeracy skills so that program is critically important another program I would highlight is our hippie program or our home instruction for preschool youth program parents of preschool youth program and that's a program that does a lot of training and provides for parents and provides parents with resources to support their [00:25:47] students who are not able to be enrolled in a full-time pre-k program and there's no financial eligibility requirements to participate in any of those programs and they're really critical because they do provide kindergarten readiness opportunities for students and families that don't have an opportunity to attend preschool full-time so with that I'm going to turn it back over to Marcy and Dustin and we're going to transition to our second major indicator in this report which is English language learner progress. [00:26:16] - Yeah, thank you, Dr. Presidio. And so as he previewed for us, our strong start goal, our goal one recognizes that students start their education in FCPS at various points. And so we've talked about our earliest learners and now we wanna talk a little bit about some of our English learners and those entry points and transitions into our school system, which we know is critical for their success. [00:26:39] As we look on the next slide, we can see some of the metrics that we considered around language progress for English learners. These two metrics focus on the percent of students that met the state standard for progress towards English language proficiency, and the percent of schools that met the state standard for English learners making the expected growth towards that English language proficiency. [00:27:00] As we look at our data overall, these state standards are based on the WIDA access scores that assess English language development, and this is in the areas of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and these are assessed each year for our English learners. [00:27:16] During our baseline year, 45% of the English learners met that state standard for progress towards proficiency. And we saw that there was an 11 point difference between our lowest performing intersectionality group and the overall performance of English learners in our division. [00:27:31] Additionally, 46% of our schools met the state standard for the percent of English learners who met the benchmark for progress towards language proficiency. The data on the chart on the screen in front of you right now also shows the English language proficiency of our English learners overall, as well as the data from an intersectionality perspective. [00:27:54] While 45% of our English learners met that state standard, we saw a lower rate for our English learners who are also students with disabilities at 34%. You can see the additional student groups and how they intersect with our English learners overall on this chart. [00:28:10] At this point, I'll also turn it back again to Dr. Presidio to talk about some of the work that's occurring in FCPS. - All right, thanks. And similar to the pre-K measure, we're doing a lot of things currently that I'd like to share and some things that we're gonna be working on in the future. So, currently we're taking a number of actions to improve language development for our English learners. [00:28:30] For example, our ESOL office is working to ensure that all schools are implementing our L programming model in the division with fidelity. And to that end, a lot of work has happened over the summer and is continuing to happen this fall and this winter. For example, our ESOL office trained all of our administrators in our school buildings in both the federal and FCPS requirements for supporting English language learners. [00:28:53] That training was really important because it reviewed a lot of tools and resources that schools have available to them, like our L-Verification Dashboard, and that's a tool that supports school administrators in making sure that all of our students are receiving the correct amount of ELD services or English language development services really based on the WIDA testing results. [00:29:14] So we have a lot of really impactful data that can really drive instructional decision making when the folks in our buildings know how to use those tools. The ESOL office is also completing L programming consultations with school leadership teams to make sure that all of our schools have the knowledge and skills to really support our English language learners. [00:29:34] And school efficacy in this area is incredibly important for our long-term Ls or those students maybe that aren't making the expected English language development progress that we would like them to make. So the research, again, of course, tells us that students need between about five to seven years to really develop their English language proficiency, but sometimes we'll see students are making progress in the early years and then kind of plateau and get stuck, and we typically refer to those as our longer-term L's, and it's really important to make sure that schools know who those students are, where they're stuck, and what they need to do to really improve instructional outcomes for those students. [00:30:11] So our ESOL office is doing a lot of work, working with schools in kind of a consultancy protocol to make sure that schools are able to really understand English learners' educational history. Also, it's important in that consultation process to involve families in the educational decision-making for their students. [00:30:31] And the end result of that consultation process is the development of a student-specific plan for those students who are long-term ELs really talk about what we're going to do differently for them and the new types of instructional experiences and supports that they might need to be successful. [00:30:48] And last year the ESOL office conducted about 500 of those L consultations looking at individual student data with our school administrators to develop those student-specific plans. We're also really working hard to make sure that the schools themselves have the capacity to make high-quality data-driven instruction or decisions. [00:31:09] And this year, all of our ESOL teachers are receiving additional training in tools from the WIDA consortium. And again, WIDA is the assessment that the state requires to track and measure ELL's progress. And they provide a lot of tools through the WIDA consortium to really help identify instructional focus for students for each lesson plan based on WIDA results to really help them monitor progress for students' development in all four domains of reading, writing, speaking, and listening that are part of english language development and in addition to making sure that those tools are available we're also combining those tools with training around our l dashboard [00:31:48] for school administrators and teachers to really be able to understand again that student specific data and making sure that everyone in the school who works with l's understands how to access that information and then of course we do know that like many areas in the division we need to hire more ESOL teachers. That is a position that is often very hard to fill. So we're doing a lot of work to try to prepare as many teachers as we can who might be interested in that experience. [00:32:20] One of the things in Virginia that teachers can do is they can add the ESOL endorsement by passing one of the praxis tests for ESOL services. So our ESOL office is running preparation courses for existing teachers who have existing licensure, but might be interested in working with ELLs to prepare them for that Praxis test. And we've got about 100% success rate for the teachers that we've supported in that process. So I want to turn to some of the things that we're looking at for future actions next on the next slide. And one of the big things that we're looking at is considering the [00:32:55] adoption of a basal resource for English language development. So again, a basal resource is a resource that you know all teachers would use and that would provide a lot more coherence we believe from classroom to classroom across the divisions for supporting English language development instruction right now we're providing teachers with resources and materials but just like our elementary language arts adoption which we haven't done in 25 years we don't have a core set of materials in all of our schools that we've purchased we have materials that have developed in FCPS. So we have completed requests for information and hopefully we'll [00:33:34] have some additional option information on options pretty soon. Another thing that we're going to be doing for this summer is expansion of summer ELD programming for English learners and we've been providing in the past online support for our middle school and high school students but we're going to have in-person support for our elementary students this year available at all of our summer learning sites. So that's going to be a new expansion that we're very excited about. We're also continuing to think about how we can do a better job with professional development. And one of the big areas that we're focusing on is professional development for our general education teachers, [00:34:12] not our ESOL teachers, but our general education teachers. Because when we looked at our data most recently, we found that 88 percent of all of our FCPS teachers have English learners in their classroom. So obviously the vast majority of teachers are working with ELLs and all staff members need to be well-versed in research-based strategies to support them. So we are working with some partners, external partners, around this training and professional development. We're working with Project GLAD and the Center for Applied Linguistics, which are both nationally recognized specialists in supporting English learners. And so far we've trained 300 teachers [00:34:51] this year and at least the two-day GLAD training. And we're planning to also have our ESOL staff receive train-the-trainer certification from Project GLAD so that we can provide our own training here locally using FCPS staff and we don't have to actually incur the additional costs or send people out of the division to receive that training. And then finally in the area of professional development, our ESOL office is developing an ELD teacher leader cohort. And And what that is, is it's going to be a group of teachers that are going to receive very intensive training and support in each of our regions, and they'll be available to model [00:35:30] best practices for their colleagues, either in their school or folks that might want to visit from other schools to really get a better understanding of the best practices to use when supporting English learners. And then finally, we're looking to do more in terms of collaboration with our families and direct services to families. [00:35:49] One of the things that we hear from families a lot is that they don't really understand what ESOL services are. So, what does that mean when a student's getting ELD instruction? So, we know that we need to do a better job educating our families, both in what students are receiving when they get ELD, and then also how families can support them at home. [00:36:06] So, we're running a number of family night presentations, and we're also working with the Office of Experience and Engagement on additional materials that we can get out, both print, video materials, social media materials, to really do the best job we can to educate our families about how to be involved in the ELD programming that students are receiving. So with that I'll turn it back over to Marcy for a few conclusions. Thank you Dr. [00:36:29] Presidio. So as we wrap up our presentation for our goal one baseline report there are several important conclusions that we want to highlight. So first of all we see that pre-k access is associated with higher performance in early elementary school and preparing our young learners for success and we see that very clearly in our own data. Given the current population served by FCPS programs. An important finding we want to highlight is that in within this data is that there are large numbers of income eligible students who are not applying to participate in FCPS pre-K programs. We know this could be due to a number of factors. It could be a lack of [00:37:06] awareness of the availability of our programs. There could be challenges for families with transportation or barriers to accessing this programs due to a lack of before or after care options it's critical for our division to understand each of these barriers and also identify additional factors we're not currently considering and so closing these participation gaps is going to require additional information from families who would have qualified for these programs but did not pursue them and did not pursue pre-k and other settings to better understand what types of strategies would help address these barriers it's also important to note that serving [00:37:42] our additional income eligible students as we've mentioned before would require expansion of of classrooms and spaces for students to learn. - Another key finding from this report shows that to increase inclusion opportunities for our pre-K students with disabilities, FCPS will need to continue to expand the delivery options in existing and new classrooms. [00:38:04] As Dr. Presidio mentioned earlier, this will include continuing to develop the three inclusion models that were mentioned to ensure that no matter what school site a pre-K student with special needs attends, there will be an opportunity for inclusion. FCPS will also need to continue to collaborate with our community partners to expand access to pre-K experiences to meet our community's needs. [00:38:24] This could involve working with the Fairfax County government, faith-based organizations, or other community groups to provide expanded pre-K opportunities for children in our community. Our baseline data also revealed that our English learners have the lowest pre-K experience rates at 55%. [00:38:41] It'll be critical that FCPS continues to understand the reasons why the experience rate is significantly lower for this population to develop the additional strategies that will help expand participation in our pre-K experiences for this population. We discussed that goal one of our strategic plan commits to providing a strong start for each and every student, no matter when they enter our school system. [00:39:02] So improving English learners progress and development of English language proficiency is an important way to support this strong start and will require a multifaceted approach. And as you heard Dr. Presidio mentioned, 88% of our FCPS teachers have at least one student who's an English learner. [00:39:17] So equipping all of our teachers with the necessary instructional resources and data-driven strategies to meet the needs of these English learners will be critical. Finally, as we've discussed on the goal three report and Dr. Reid mentioned at the beginning with our plan being designed to run through 2030, we know that the strategic work will take multiple years to address many of these underlying reasons for the inequities and to help us realize success for all of our students. [00:39:43] However, we are confident we will continue to make progress towards ensuring that all children will have a strong start pre-K through 12. At this time, I'm gonna turn it back over to the meeting managers for the rest of our conversation. Thank you. - Okay, thank you for the presentation. [00:39:58] Just to remind everyone, we have a quick turnaround on this. Ms. Omesh and I are gonna bring a motion to accept this at this week's meeting. So please keep that in mind. I know it's a busy week. And we're gonna go ahead and give three minutes to everyone to start normal procedure. [00:40:16] You can speak to that during your turn if there's questions or that's what I've been told. So, three minutes, and we have a lunch break at 12, so we'll see how we proceed. We're going to start with Ms. Dernot-Koufax, followed by Ms. Corbett-Sanders. Thank you. [00:40:33] And if this were to be a performance, I would give you a standing ovation. I, seriously, this has been, as those of you, and it's probably just Dr. Presidio at this point, have been on the board with me during my entire tenure, this is something I brought in my very first term. [00:40:52] and this is something that we this is the most comprehensive analysis that we have had in one place between what is needed in pre-K as well as what is needed for the for our ELLs both passion in my heart so and also I do want to thank all of my colleagues and Dr. Reed and the entire community who came together to make a strong start in pre-K part of our strategic plan because that enables you now to give us this reporting data that you can because this is a priority for our system not just [00:41:31] somebody's one-off passion project so I'm gonna move a speak I've already taken up a minute but let's talk about so page six that's data that is updated thank you and as noted during your presentation this is data that we've known but this is updated today and and thank you for that on page 7 where we talk about the PowerPoints the PowerPoint today's presentation I'm going through today's presentation when I note pages for the page 7 you know we [00:42:11] have worked hard to get that 20% so I am NOT going to even think that that's bad for us what I do want is do you have any type of data on the the percentages specifically what the county provides as because you said that included private county and other public system school do you have any data specifically on county the system does have it and we could get it to you but it's not in the report currently and and I'd have to check exactly what the the percentage [00:42:50] so you don't have that off the top of your head slow we could pause the clock for just a second first of all i want to say thank you for your comments and i want to recognize lady and her team from orsi who did a tremendous amount of work on this report so thank you to them i would say we could get you that if you need it but the county's programming is really more supporting those community-based programs so the programs look different than our preschool programs which are full day programs for our students right with licensed teachers licensed in the state of virginia receiving training and curriculum materials and resources from fcps so the number [00:43:28] of students that the county serves in similar programs is actually quite small they're really doing a lot more in some of the community-based programs daycare programs and services and supports like that okay okay well that yeah i would just like to have it just so i have that as a point of reference if you couldn't mind getting that to me prior to my tenure ending um so next um when we go to uh page page 10 um i think that that's very telling as well is the the heat map on page 12. [00:44:04] um i think and and thank you dr presidio for also talking about the early childhood education center for my colleagues who are staying on this board please do not forget about moving forward funding for that early pre-k center at the pinewood lakes community which is in the franconia section on the route one corridor because as dr presidio said that will give us the opportunity to do something phenomenal that we have not done and we can take control of that part of the education not waiting for us to piece together i am out of time i will speak to miss picard i if i if i have time for a [00:44:39] go back please but Ms. Bukarski can I say I know you put your bills in already but during your tenure working for universal pre-k for Virginia and that should cross party lines. All right Ms. Corbin Sanders. Glad to follow my colleague Ms. Derenak-Koufax and yes please put that bill in. [00:45:03] I do want to bring attention to an effort already underway in the county and I think you're aware of this as well on the original Mount Vernon High School where there is an expectation of 200 pre-K spots going into that building with training of teachers in collaboration with Northern Virginia Community College. And so as we look to doing more, we need to make sure that we're fully aware of what others are doing so that we're not repeating or working at cross purposes. But I do [00:45:36] agree that we need to have probably more than one early education center um secondly and and i agree the heat map is fantastic um i would like to know of the where we have pre-k now do every one of our title one schools have pre-k stop the clock please i'm going to check with our director of early childhood just to be sure we we're at uh 67 sites i don't know if all title ones do yes and a combination of both Title I and non-Title I schools? So I would suggest that a priority has [00:46:15] to be every one of our Title I schools have early childhood classrooms. When you talk about the co-teaching model, you talked about a co-teaching model of special ed and our general ed. Given the shortage and the challenges with our English language learning community, why don't we have that co-teaching model include ELL as well and stop the clock please so the co-teaching model is for those two different program types for preschool that I was mentioning right the early childhood special education and the [00:46:52] general education we don't provide English language development services in pre-k we're not funded for that and we're not staffed for that I don't know rich if you want to add any more so we're really looking at that inclusion model is inclusion for students with special needs and IEPs but rich do you want to say any more about the pre-k I mean I would just say that we do not officially screen students in pre-k for English learner services so there's not a there's not an official screener available that the state has endorsed [00:47:27] and so at this time we could certainly recognize families through interviews and working with them to determine that's how we do a look back on the percentage of students who are English learners in pre-k I would encourage given the numbers that we see the greatest needs that Fairfax County either develop its own screener or find a way of including these students in our priorities and so do I need to do a next step that says Fairfax County should develop its own screener or are you guys gonna do something in that area well [00:48:06] it's something we can look at there's gonna be additional funding implications to doing that so we probably would want to put a next step in to make sure that that's the will of the board because it's not just the screener it's then getting ELD services and staffing for those students at that level so there's an expression pay now or pay later I don't I think that when we're talking about making sure all pre-K children have access and opportunity. [00:48:35] I think it goes without saying, I don't think we need the next steps process. I think that we can identify students who are challenged by language in terms of opportunity and make sure that we provide the experience they need. Thank you. That's exactly the answer I wanted, so I very much appreciate that, Dr. Reed. [00:48:54] I also see that -- and I fully support the adoption of our own basal resources English language learning I've been on this board for eight years I had no idea that we did not do that and so I fully support that I also believe another action at the state level should be in the accreditation of teachers that we have some sort of training because what percentage is it now 38 percent of our [00:49:26] students are English language learners if not higher 38.7 so I was off by 0.7 thank you so it and we're not unique we see this throughout the state and so maybe that's another area where the state should be requiring one course at a minimum in this area even if it's an online course and then what else do I have on here regarding the the vote on Thursday I can support that because this [00:50:05] is the baseline but I would hope as part of the motion made on Thursday that you summarize the conversation that we're having today as part of that so that people see this as the beginning of a long-term initiative. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Corbett Sanders. Ms. McLaughlin followed by Mr. Frisch. Gosh, let me erase to try and say everything. I do hope there'll be some go-backs. I do want to first echo what [00:50:40] what Ms. Koufax said. I've spent 12 years being rather harsh and critical often of the PowerPoints, just being honest. No, the slides and the PowerPoints and thank you, colleagues. [00:51:00] Oftentimes the absence of reports that accompany it. So I would add a standing ovation from my end on this. It's an amazing way to go out on a high note to see this progress from the leadership team and the division. So kudos to everyone here presenting today and Dr. Reed for your leadership on that. Of course, I always have grows that I can share because this work is so important. So again, deeply grateful to see what you all have done here. I do have some questions [00:51:39] on slide 11, if we can pull that up. Dr. Reed, I would just say as a macro to all PowerPoints that we do, and I've said this for years, number one, we should have on every slide a little asterisks a footnote that says this is coming from page whatever in the report this way you could absolutely go from the PowerPoint to the report and know where you're finding it secondly on this particular slide 11 again knowing that the reader really doesn't need to be going back and forth between two [00:52:18] documents it should have as a footnote what are the numerators and denominators here. So when we say all students, we need the number on that slide so you can really understand what we're looking at here. And then, you know, so that would be for all students. And then the breakouts from there would be super helpful. And then in terms of slide 13, which I know is comes as no surprise to Dr. Reed and her team and my colleagues that the second bar below to me, [00:52:55] Dr. Reed, is one of the most crucial components of the work you're going to do, is that intersectionality. So I looked, I see where you've given, it's table 13, page 45. So, you know, My concern with that is that page 45, if you note, pretty much goes towards the end of the report, right? [00:53:22] So I would like to see, as Dr. Reed, continue to grow your team's focus and attention to the intersectionality in the front. You know, because really we could almost lead this presentation in talking about the intersectionality. [00:53:42] and so um now i will have to rely on a go back but i will just say the the numbers on the bottom there are hard to understand in that chart and i'll follow up with staff but i can absolutely support the report on thursday thank you miss mclaughlin we'll put you on a go back we have a lot lots of time today mr frisch thank you i think one of the common threads that we're hearing today is is about space utilization um and i can't help but think as we think about where we're going [00:54:19] to be putting these pre-k uh classrooms um that we've got a an issue that impacts that across the entire county so i'm curious if any preliminary steps have been taken to see where we have classrooms in in buildings in school buildings and what admin facilities we have that could be repurposed in other ways to meet these needs obviously a more holistic approach along those lines needs to be taken to see exactly where we can fit things in to maximize community access to [00:54:54] the schools in their neighborhoods but i'm curious what work's already been done there i don't know i see that jessica's with us i don't know if she wants to add anything but i would just start by saying that's part of the pre-k inclusion and expansion plan that we're building facilities the facilities office has done some initial analysis of looking at where the most optimal space would be available but that's going to be something that we're going to need to do additional work on as we develop that multi-year expansion and inclusion plan but Jessica do you [00:55:27] want to say anything else on that no that's accurate thank you I raised that because I'm sure we've all spoken to principals in our districts who have said they would gladly find space for pre-k in their buildings and in providence district um you know we have the gram road community building which is a perfectly situated space in a community that is well represented on that map um in terms of the heat map um very similar to mr net cofax's community in terms of need so um i look forward to having that conversation in the future [00:56:06] And I hope that as we develop the CIP that this becomes part of our work around that. And it can if the General Assembly colleagues who might be there in just a matter of weeks and our governor do right by Fairfax County Public Schools. [00:56:23] To that end, I think we should be working with Michael Malloy to send a letter to our delegation of things that we should be looking out for as this legislation comes together. Because obviously we start off the bat concerned about how they're going to allocate funding if they do put money into this Is it going to be one of those scenarios where we get you know 13 to 17 percent of the the funds needed to access it and have to come up with 80 percent plus So that's one thing, but also we want to make sure that we are buttressing our public institutions Our public schools and that Fairfax County is not left out on a lurch because we have a significant need [00:57:03] So I'll work with colleagues. I think we should definitely be sending our delegation and the governor a letter You mentioned the pre-k inclusion and expansion plan. When do you expect we'll have something to look at? Oh, hopefully by January we are we've been doing work on that this fall I still need to get a final version to dr. Reed to incorporate any feedback and changes that she would have but we're hopefully targeting that for January I [00:57:34] It's specific to the Graham Road School, I talked to Janice Siminski this morning, and they have high-level numbers for several scenarios, which I'll be including in the Friday letter this week. I will be eagerly anticipating it. Get to bed early. It'll be a great report to read. [00:57:50] I will not read it while driving, I promise. I kid. But I appreciate all the work that's gone into this. As my colleague said, it is a very robust report, and I plan on sharing it in my newsletter, because I think everybody needs to see it. [00:58:07] This is exactly why when we talk about how our population in our school system has rebounded quite a bit, but the population that we're servicing is far more expensive, and this helps put detail to that. [00:58:23] And if we follow through in our commitment to pre-K, it's even more so. Thank you. - Thank you, Mr. Frisch. Ms. Toland followed by Dr. Anderson. - Thank you. - Thank you for the report. Seeing this report as our second goal report has made me really excited about our strategic planning process and what we can do if we're actually following that process and looking at what the goals are that we came up with the community. [00:58:55] So thank you very much. Regarding goal one, I wanna follow up a little bit on the facilities comments that Mr. Frisch made. I'm wondering even in the short term you know Herndon is another area dark dark blue on this map and we have a number of renovations that are occurring you know shortly Dranesville Elementary Herndon Elementary and Armstrong which is the rest in but right next door and you know we I believe we put just two you know regularly do we put two preschool classrooms in during those renovations. [00:59:31] I'm curious if we can really look at the capacity, 'cause we're adding capacity at, I believe, all of those schools, should we really be looking at, should more of those rooms be pre-K? That may be a question for Jessica. [00:59:50] - Yeah, so several years ago, we started including an additional two pre-K classrooms at all elementary school in addition to whatever program they already had at the school, looking at how we were expanding pre-K several years ago. So those are currently in design. then there's a just a competition of space and resources so we need to look at how we're prioritizing you know programs at the school and if pre-k is the one that we're prioritizing at this time as we expand our you know literal footprint of the building what that looks like as far as cost go in addition to centers right where we've talked about the pinewood lakes [01:00:26] route one elementary former now the early childhood center perhaps another one at graham road etc we've been looking into opportunities is it going to be a center are Are we doing school-based focused only or a combination as we go forward? All right, thank you. [01:00:41] I see your ISD folks next to you nodding their heads yes as you're speaking. So I'm assuming those conversations are ongoing and, you know, we're making the best decisions that we can. Dr. Reid. I also want to make sure that we don't overlook the space we currently have in some of our secondary schools. [01:00:59] I know we recently, in our leadership team meeting, our Mount Vernon High School principal, Javon Rogers talked about space classroom space and even providing preschool opportunities for staff children as well as community children because we know that often when staff travel child care or preschool is really important so I don't want to underestimate or underutilize existing rooms or existing spaces we've even had early childhood programs at some of our at least one of our secondary schools with a playground and so forth [01:01:34] And close those programs. So I think we have more facilities than we think. And I know that Jessica and the team will be able to surface those as we move through this seven-year plan to provide opportunity for all children. [01:01:51] No, that's exciting. And I know one of my habits when I'm at McLean High School is watching the preschool kids sometimes get dropped off. So, you know, expanding even those programs where our high school kids are learning to work with that population would be incredible. So I really appreciate all that creativity. [01:02:08] Yeah, we wolves, you know, we, what are the Mount Vernon majors, we majors, you know, I think there's an opportunity for just thinking about our spaces and our work. [01:02:27] Yeah, we call them Little Macs. That's great. That creativity is great. I know that with some of the work that Mr. McLaughlin and I were doing on Skipped, we asked for a report. It was when Maura was retiring, so it's a little bit ago. [01:02:44] Last night I was thinking, ooh, I wish I could quickly look this report up. But it talked about how many students, you said in 2025, that we are actually serving. And then it talked about how many three- and four-year-olds we have in Fairfax County that actually need support. [01:03:02] And I would be interested in trying to dig that report up. but I remember the numbers were staggering, the thousands of children that are not supported either by ourselves, Fairfax County, private citizen, preschools, et cetera. [01:03:18] So I think the bottom line is there's lots and lots of room for growth and that we can't do it all. And so this collaboration with other organizations through SCIPT or other ways we can do that is gonna be so, so important. [01:03:37] I do wanna throw out there, I know just talking to people in Herndon, they love our hippie programs, so I wanna just shout out to them around that. But I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about collaborating with organizations like Herndon On and the Kindergarten Readiness Program that we have in the Herndon area and how you might go about that, who's gonna work on that, how are we gonna measure that success, et cetera? [01:04:05] Well, I'll see if Lisa has any comments on that particular program in Herndon. If not, I mean, we can talk a little bit more just about, you know, how we collaborate with community-based organizations and partners. To your first point, though, about the county report of the data, we do have that. [01:04:22] The last time the county pulled that information together comprehensively, I believe, was 2019, so it is a little bit out of date. My understanding from having conversations with the SCIP team and the county office is that they're going to do that again in 2024, so we would have updated information. [01:04:39] And there are a large number of students unserved, but I think for the purposes of this report, we've really tried to focus on two groups of students. First is the income-eligible students, so students that we actually can get state, federal, and local funding for. [01:04:57] So this report really kind of focuses on about 1,600 of those students that are income eligible as four-year-olds that would have been income eligible as four-year-olds if we would have had the facility space and the budget and everything else to serve them. Obviously, it's going to be more if you factor in three-year-olds, but the vast majority, like 95 percent of the students that we're serving in our income eligible program are four-year-olds. But we'll hopefully have updated numbers um in 2024 and lisa i don't know if you want to talk just a little bit about ms toland's question regarding like how we work with community partners [01:05:33] um so there are several community programs that are offered from it's the neighborhood and community services and uh one of the particular programs that i've had the opportunity of visiting is all children read together where um those are typically our families who don't meet the income eligibility requirements however their children are they need some pre-k and it gives them a pre-k experience very lovely program and they're in various community centers throughout the throughout the county and there's that there's that intersectionality for true collaboration our preschool special [01:06:13] education resource teachers provide special education services to children and families in those programs so we have those and I know there are some others that are throughout the region. We do have hippie, family lit, early lit. Those are FCPS programs and we play. We play this year. We've worked collaboratively with the county to use county space to provide we play opportunities for our families at Woodburn. Woodburn is a school that has a little over 50 percent of their children come to kindergarten each year without [01:06:51] pre-k experience so however they don't have space and giving the that opportunity with the we play program being offered in the Heritage Center is an opportunity that we've worked collaboratively with the county to provide all right those are great examples in my last seconds I would I'm wondering we've had great conversations about community schools and moving that whole idea forward and I would think this kind of falls right into that [01:07:24] discussion for our pre-K learners. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Anderson. Sorry, I skipped you. Not once. So I expect additional minutes to make up for that. I want to pick up on the conversation that Mr. Frisch started because this was also part of my notes in terms of the governor's being very generous with wanting to fund early childhood, but we have to be clear that this cannot be tethered and calculated the way that it is currently. So to that end, Can anybody speak to how much does it cost us to operate the preschool programs that we have currently [01:08:01] that are not part of the VPI, I know I'm saying that wrong, and the other programs? What comes out of our operating costs? Pause my time. Yes, definitely pause the time. [01:08:16] I don't know. Three seconds ago. Yeah, Lisa, I don't know if you have that information or if we need to follow up on it. If I have a second, I can give some numbers. It doesn't have to be right now, but I think that's a number that's important to put out because it does cost a lot to support early childhood when we are not universally funded. [01:08:39] The other thing that I want to speak to is space availability. I'll have, to be honest, I have a different perspective based on what I see in my schools in terms of where space is available. Because space was available at Wayanoke, but the entire fifth grade classroom is in trailers to make space. [01:08:56] Was that really space being available? space was available in mason crest but they've lost all music classrooms all teacher work rooms and had to cut sack in half so i don't think those are reasonable plans moving forward so i wanted to get a sense from dr reed how is it that we're going to um ensure that space availability doesn't result on what has happened in those two schools sure um i think that again that goes back to our planning so that would be Jessica in terms of your team as long as we have a [01:09:33] we look at the heat map about where we have the highest need as well as a map of where we actually have current space and we need to make sure there's an overlay there to the point around Wayanoke again I would have to go back to the map of need the blue map the heat map as we were there and also where we have classroom space so I think or where we can cite a modular or set of classrooms right if there isn't any classroom space so i think that that certainly uh will be a continued conversation between our early childhood our instructional services special [01:10:09] services and planning department i i think that has to be looked at a little bit more on a granular level because again space availability is not proving what it is in my schools the other thing to account for it's also not just the space particularly when we have programs that require additional administrative support that doesn't come with it and so now we have schools that have to pivot and staff that have to pivot and support those systems i'm sorry those classes without the additional staffing so i wanted to raise that thirdly i think it's critical for us to take a [01:10:45] look at the spaces that we have that are available to us where we could have these programs graham road we visited that months and months ago and i think subsequently you went with miss pal check and mr frisch to visit that is space that belongs to us that can serve this purpose lee's center pimmitt hills those are not spaces where we have to squeeze into the schools these are spaces that are readily available and i'm looking at this heat map that was provided you know these dark blue i put like five dots around these should be the five places where we have [01:11:21] those centers or programming because also we don't want for those classes to be singles it is hard to really be a fruitful and productive teacher when you're the single one in the school having an opportunity to have colleagues with whom to to engage and to speak it really helps to push the program the other question that i have is regarding this heat map is do we have one that speaks to where our current programs are. [01:11:52] - I would assume our instructional services, Dr. Presidio, as you oversee that, do you, I mean, I assume you have a map of current services. - So the facilities department helps us create the heat maps and that one actually is a little bit out of date. We're in the process of collaborating to update those. [01:12:10] And I do think we had one that had the sites, but again, it's a little bit out of date, but we could share what we have currently. - Thank you. I would like to go back, but I want to just wrap up this part of my statement when we are talking about space available. I'd like for a next step to be the full evaluation of what that means. What will this mean to the school site? Will it mean that programs will have to be cut out? Will it means that modulars trailers will have to be added to the school site? I think we need to have our entire community go into this wide open eyes wide open because again at Wayanoke, it was quite the shock that the entire fifth grade classroom is in trailers to provide this accommodation. [01:12:48] I don't think we have to spot on no you know cut our nose to spot our face on this, and I would like to go back. Okay, yes, I will sorry about that I did give you some extra time so forgive me. [01:13:00] It's going followed by the size more hyzer. Miss Cohen, can you wait a second we're having audio issues. Can you try again. [01:13:32] Sure, is that any better. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. Sorry, I'll start over. Thank you. Thank you for this report. As I said, as a former preschool teacher, this is the best one I've ever seen. So I'm really excited for this certainly to be our last work session altogether as this board. [01:13:51] I just had a few comments when we had the conversations about EL kids. You know, I want us to make sure that in particular in a preschool and young idea, pre-K through, you know, at least second grade, When we look at kind of the neuroplasticity of kids' brains, and we see so much change, I just want to make sure we don't forget about our sign language users, our kids who are using Braille, our kids accessing AAC devices. That is, when we talk about English language, I know we [01:14:26] are typically talking about kids whose native language is not English, but I don't, I would love it if we could broaden our perspective of what English language learners, what that really looks like because we have an awful lot of kids who are not getting i think the early targeted services that they could be getting that at the same time as we see this for all the other categories it would be life-changing further down the road another thing i just wanted to mention i hope somebody has maybe looked at mountain view the project opportunity that we have there is [01:15:01] absolutely amazing and some of the family support programs they have the stable families thriving futures program there i think in a lot of ways especially with building utilization there could be some interesting opportunities to have our kids have our students be able to have their kids back in a pre-k program um the other thing i just wanted to mention is um you know i know that a couple years and and please i may get the details wrong so remind me but i remember this board [01:15:37] fighting about trying to keep some early childhood employees employed we were talking about cutting them i think we used some esser money but i just wanted to check where where are we when we look at staffing i know building is a huge constraint totally get it but also for our pre-k staffing what are we doing to really ramp up folks coming there uh joining us there and um and and what do the gaps look like well thank you for all those comments miss cohen and i'm not sure that we have [01:16:13] any staffing gaps right now none that i'm aware of in terms of vacancies for programs we've been pretty successful when we've had the funds available and we have advanced notice that those funds are going to be available to add new classrooms we've been very successful at recruiting the teachers into those programs so we believe that we can continue to do that i mean recruiting highly qualified staff is always going to be something that you know we need to factor in to any type of program expansion but we feel pretty comfortable with that and that's not really been an issue for us right now the biggest issue on the staffing front [01:16:49] other than having additional funding for you know to fund new positions is if we look at the duly certified programs right so i mentioned one of the inclusion models is the single teacher inclusion model that would require a teacher to be licensed in both special education and general education pre-k that's actually much more difficult but that's not our optimal inclusion model our optimal inclusion model is that co-teaching model where we have both the early childhood special education and general education preschool at the same site and is there a way i know that we had a conversation um about we were able to use some of that extra money from lifting [01:17:27] the support cap this year um to help do the two percent raise for teachers but i wondered i know i hope i know that there's going to be a push in the general assembly to even broaden um broaden that amount of funding and and really get rid of the support cap altogether i hope that that will that will be the case but is there a way to utilize some of that support cap money that we are getting that we didn't necessarily expect to try to help increase the preschool program well I mean I think that's a question we would need Ms. Burden to weigh in on but what I can say [01:18:04] is as we're you know as Dr. Reed's preparing her FY25 budget we're going to be looking at all of the available funding sources that might be able to be brought to the table to support pre-k expansion for for next year and I think that's a good suggestion is to look at that funding source as well well thank you so much I know that I'm out of time but I just appreciate this conversation more than I can say and certainly know that you have partners headed to the state level who fundamentally believe in this and we'll keep fighting for it there too so thanks so much [01:18:35] thanks Miss Cohen Miss Sizemore Heiser go ahead thank you can you guys hear me okay can you hear me okay yes okay thank you so um first i echo my colleagues in saying i'm very appreciative of this report and this work um we all i think have a really good understanding of the importance of preschool for long-term success for our students so i'm very excited to see this and as one of the board members saying on this board i'm excited to continue this work going forward um having said that i did i know dr reed you mentioned some of our secondary schools i believe robinson has a [01:19:13] program and used to have an early childhood program or at least used to have a program to teach students or to give students chances to work in early childhood as similar to the teachers for tomorrow. I could be wrong, but I think there's space there for them to do some of this work. A couple questions. I love the heat map. I think that's fantastic. I would like to know maybe going forward where within this heat map we have pockets of need Because while I know initially we need to focus on the areas that have higher need, I know there's pockets of need within all these places. [01:19:45] I think it'd be helpful to know that going forward. Similar to, we're looking at income eligibility of 200,000, or 20,000, sorry, 200% below poverty level, excuse me. But eventually, going down the road, I would love to get ideas of how many families who are closer to poverty level are accessing pre-K to kind of see the continuum of need for income you know for students who are economically disadvantaged and the last thing I wanted to lift up raise a pause here and see if you have any thoughts around maybe a grow your own teachers for tomorrow type program for pre-k and whether they're UC1 at Robinson or other sites we might want to do that because I have heard of similar [01:20:25] shortages for pre-k teachers especially those who are doing the certified yeah so that that's - That's definitely something that we're interested in and our high school principals expressed additional interest recently in trying to bring back some of those early childhood CTE programs, right? [01:20:45] And many of those programs that we had at one time that were really robust, we've lost a number of those over the years because we haven't had teachers to start those early childhood programs to work with our high school students and have those students actually working with our preschool students. But the High School Principals Association very interested in trying to partner to bring those programs back so we're going to be working with them to do that um and i think we'll be able to to have some success on that here in the short term and ms seismorheiser we appreciate the um so my time has been going with the entire time you all have been speaking so i don't know if i can get some of my time back but i've lost at [01:21:23] least 30 40 seconds i just noticed it and i know it sounds silly but considering we're very time limited as board members to speak i'd appreciate it yeah and thank you and ms seismorheiser i was just going to add we appreciate the suggestion on further ways to look at that heat map you know one of the outcomes that we are hoping for out of these conversations is to provide our baseline data and where we are and then also start having conversations led by the board to figure out what are the additional questions that we need to ask so i think you're giving us some good good ways to continue to look at this data to really understand how we can support our students thank you i think [01:21:59] i had a minute 41 i see 59 seconds now it keeps going back and forth so um i just one more thing on the heat map like it'd be helpful to have it percentage of population size as well you know in terms of the number of students in each area so um that would be very helpful as well as as well as looking at pockets of need within that i did want to shift a little bit to our inclusive preschool and the special ed pre-k and in slide 19 you mentioned the three different plans for inclusion does that for all early childhood in the pack class as well as our early childhood classes [01:22:31] so that's really looking those specific inclusion models are really looking at our early childhood special education programs and our general education programs and that's where we're really starting with those inclusion models and we've been working with our schools i think some board members know we've been working with our schools this year to make sure that each site that has pre-k services is going to have one of those models or more of those models in place for next school year so that's been the immediate lift and then we're going to need to do some additional work with those preschool classes autism classes as well but we're really starting with the focus on [01:23:09] the early childhood special education preschool classes i have some concerns with that because i think that we're creating a separate but unequal model here from what i understand with the preschool autism classes the only inclusion opportunities is a when the child is ready to be pushed in to an inclusive setting the child gets the chance to do that and i think we all know that when you're ready model can sometimes take a long time to never so i um i don't think parents should have to choose between aba best practices in preschool and inclusion so i'd love some comments on that [01:23:44] no i mean i think you're right and please stop my time i'm sorry three minutes goes really fast and when you lose 30 seconds of three minutes it's a big percentage of time so i apologize for lifting this up but there's a lot of important stuff to talk about here no sure no i think - I think you're right. [01:24:01] I mean, we obviously have a lot, and we saw on the slideshow in terms of like where we're at with our state targets. We have a lot of work to do on preschool inclusion. There's no question about that. And we do have work to do with our preschool autism classes. One of the challenges, of course, is, you know, making sure that we have students of similar ages in the preschool inclusion opportunities. [01:24:21] And sometimes in our autism classes, we have students who are significantly younger than students that we have in our four-year-old income eligibility program. So there's a lot more work that we need to do, but there's some additional challenges with some of the preschool autism classes as well. And I don't know, Lisa, if you want to add anything to that. [01:24:40] Absolutely. So with our preschool autism classrooms, we have been looking at some schools with the community peer programs. There are many factors that we're taking into consideration when we're looking at preschool inclusion as far as PAC is concerned and having those times whenever children are having recess together and have an opportunity to do activities we do lean on the expertise of the teaching teams and them having an understanding of the developmental readiness and [01:25:18] appropriateness we I have had pack in my my previous school and you may have some children that they they thrive with some more peers that are of the same age and some students it could be a bit overwhelming but finding that sweet spot to be able to grow the skill sets as appropriate we do lean on our school team and the IP teams to drive those decisions and yes I agree with you absolutely we want to I think we need to be really careful [01:25:53] looking at mindsets as we're doing this work um i think we need to maybe look at growing mindsets around um the importance and value of inclusion and i will just lift up what hhs and department of ed said which they said segregating settings in preschool lead to segregated settings in um education so i think maybe there's an urgency and a mindset viewpoint that might be helpful to address as we're looking at expanding inclusive opportunities okay thank you so we're supposed to And I have a bunch more questions. [01:26:25] I know I believe I'm, I guess I'm out of time. So if I could have a go back, that'd be great. Thank you. Yeah, well, we're just going to go down through the list for go back. So don't worry. Sounds good. We're supposed to break right now for lunch. We have three people left. Would we, do we want a break or do we want to finish our first round? [01:26:43] Break? Sounds like a break. We'll see y'all at 1230. You have some board members that are members from Kofax and Ms. Marin. [01:27:02] you're in 5056 and then dr anderson they're just you're in 5050 and then are the rest of us here and the rest of you are down here in 1610. i'm going to talk to them and we're going to figure [01:27:17] that out quite figured out what we're doing with next steps but people are asking because the [01:27:51] problem right is all right we have seven board members in the room we're going to go ahead and [01:28:38] reconvene everyone all right just a reminder to folks um we have a next the next steps have been been posted, the sheet, so you're welcome to go ahead and put your next steps in there. [01:28:54] But again, reminder, as Ms. Mekarski mentioned earlier, because we are voting on this Thursday and our typical turnaround for next steps is longer than that, it's a bit of an awkward situation. Just be mindful that those are going to be, the voting on next steps is going to be completed after, but obviously you're welcome to post them and we'd encourage folks to try to finish posting and voting today so that we have, or before Thursday at least, so we have some sense of what's moving forward. [01:29:18] - They will all be forwarded to Dr. Reed as usual. - Yeah, right, yeah, with the votes marked, I guess. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead. We have Ms. Marin, followed by Ms. Keith-Gamara. - Okay, so given the conversation earlier about the connection with facilities, and I'm really pleased to see our staff from a number of different offices, facilities in English language and other, and I do think that when we have discussions about programs, we need to have not only our staff here to answer questions, but the actual work in here, because we could have great programs, but if we don't plan out, [01:29:58] like we could measure how many classrooms are we adding each year. We could measure how many funds are on the CIP bond or the public bond, we could measure those things. So I really think that measures need to include those kinds of aspects, professional development. [01:30:15] Do we have professional development, like you mentioned for our ESOL teachers, what are the metrics there? So I do think that there's room to add more metrics and I don't necessarily need to see them for Thursday's vote, but really, if we wanna really do this, we need to look at this in the multifaceted way that it is. [01:30:33] And to that end, I think there could be some metrics in there about what the community already provides, because perhaps what we do will influence what others provide or what we do will continue in a vacuum that others are not providing. but we can show, and that will just be continued proof of the supports that we need. [01:30:52] So that is one of my biggest things. And the next thing, Dr. Reed, that I wanna tie to that is, we need to update the facilities policies. This is something, I mean, I'm very anxious about it in relation to the CIP that's coming forth, but I don't see how we can move forward with adding new classrooms when our current facilities policies are dated. [01:31:15] So, you know, if they're prescribing things that don't allow early childhood to even exist in our buildings, you know, that's something we need to consider. Our policies also could encourage the existence of early childhood in our buildings. And again, could drive the CIP development. [01:31:31] So, you know, I believe that we really need to work on that policy. And I know we've had discussions with board members about who drives the policy work and whatnot, but I'm already very anxious about the CIP being developed with policies that are not updated. [01:31:47] And to that extent, too, the basal resources came up. The Instructional Materials Policy, 3003, last time it was reviewed, was going to be 10 years this June. So again, that's another one for the basal information. I also wanted to add about trauma. [01:32:06] So I appreciate, if you recall, when we did this strategic plan development for goal one, there was a big discussion about how much early childhood to include and also some of of us wanted to talk about the entry points for later students, perhaps our students that had limited and interrupted formal education or SLIFE students. [01:32:21] So I'm glad to see, and this is on page one of the report itself, you state what the measures are, and of the six measures, I would classify the first three as pre-K, the fourth one is pre-K, but the, excuse me, the fifth one is pre-K, but the fourth and sixth, those are ones that could be pre-K to 12. [01:32:40] So for those ones, when we talk about metrics, How are we measuring, for the kids that come in later, let's say from a traumatic experience, how are we measuring helping them? And how does that get into the baseline? And then how do we measure the students who are entering who are older? [01:32:58] Overall, I'd like to see more data and measurements of the students who are entering after that pre-K period. I'm thrilled at the early childhood conversation we've had today, but this is supposed to also encompass those students entering in later stages of life. Thanks. [01:33:20] I have to say that that is very strategic thinking. Obviously all of our, the policies become another arrow in our work, right? And if they're not aligned with the direction that we're headed in the plan, that's a problem. So definitely I would agree that a review of those policies in conjunction with the CIP process is very appropriate and strategic. [01:33:39] So thank you for raising that. - All right, Ms. Kees-Gamaro, followed by Mr. Carson. - All right, Ms. Kees-Gamaro, followed by Mr. Carson. - All right, Ms. Kees-Gamaro, Thank you. I want to thank our staff members for this excellent report and providing the basis we really need for a quality conversation. [01:34:07] As I was writing my notes today, I wrote down a strategic plan to address the preschool gap, and that's kind of how I'm looking for it. listening to my colleague Ms. Maren, I would add, and for those entering before third grade, to make sure that they can be successful. So to start on the, you know, what the next, what I consider to be the next step, I'd like to know more specifically, I understand that we have a percentage of students that we are able to serve who are income eligible, but I'd also like to know [01:34:47] what students were missing right because i i'd like to have a budget um for those people that we can't serve is that something that's available please stop my time i'm sorry i'm having trouble hearing you dr presidio sorry can you hear okay let me just try turning mine up i have it i can't hear him either okay so it's not me no it's not just you i can't hear him either okay well we'll [01:35:26] have to see if our uh that's better that's better oh see there you go all i had to do was think technical support team and they already fixed it so now what i was going to say is i'll see if any of my colleagues at the table have anything else to say but i think in the presentation we talked about um the number of students in kindergarten who didn't have pre-k experience being about 25 percent or about 3 000 students 3068 students overall so that would be the total number of students without that preschool experience but if you look at the number of students that are [01:36:01] income eligible it's about 1600 students that would meet the income eligibility criteria to receive pre-k if we were you know again if we had enough facility space and enough teachers to be able to provide it so perhaps i should reveal the strategy for the reason i'm asking that question i think it's helpful to advocate for funding when we know precisely what the actual need is I think that FCPS has been doing you know a great job of trying to address working with what we have but fundamentally we need to think about you know those students that we can't reach and [01:36:37] what that particular cost is and so I'm trying to get as specific as possible you know I think I mean I think that's a great strategy I think if you wanted to advocate outside of the income eligibility criteria again it would be that 3 000 students that we're talking about no no i'm trying to you know based on the eligibility criteria certainly that's another aspect of the argument i'm looking for if i were to say for example hypothetically i was talking to a third party about what the needs are in fairfax county i'd want to talk about what students are currently [01:37:14] eligible that we can't serve. We already know that even the Governor has signed on to the significant importance of preschool, but I also think a good part of that argument is, and this is what we're not able to do in Fairfax County. Yeah, that's the 1600 student number that I was referencing. So we've got about 600 students that would meet the income eligibility criteria established by the state that we've not been able to serve. And do you have a budget cost of what it would amount to those 1600? Not at the table, I don't. That'll be part of our expansion plan [01:37:53] because it's more than just the staffing costs and program costs. There's facility renovation costs that need to be done. You know, for example, when we remodel a building to put it in an early childhood classroom, we have to have, you know, facilities, sinks, toilets, and the like for eight are going to be age appropriate so there's associated costs with that so i don't know so that's my next question what facilities costs are also needed about what it really takes to deliver those yeah no we we can work on we can work on a more precise calculation for that okay i also want [01:38:31] to sign on i think it was dr anderson that mentioned the heat map and the the darker areas and that's where we should be planning do we have say for example and i i've went through this as much as I could a plan of how where we would like to place things and potentially where it could be. [01:38:50] I agree with Ms. Marin that we do need a strategy with respect to how we are expanding and where we're expanding and making that a part of the overall strategic plan. So again our facilities team has been really helpful and is going to continue to build that out for us but we always look at that heat map and go to those neighborhoods and those schools where we have the lowest participation rate. I'm wondering if it would help if you were closer to the mic. You're going in and out. I'm so sorry. Okay, I'll keep trying. Okay. Yeah, so again, I was just [01:39:28] mentioning that our facilities department is really helpful in doing that analysis for us, and we have historically always looked at that heat map and gone to those neighborhoods where we have the lowest participation rates in PK, right? Those darkest areas on the heat map and try to locate new facilities and classrooms in those neighborhoods whenever possible. [01:39:50] But as Dr. Anderson mentioned, oftentimes those schools don't have the available space and we have to look at other parts of the county to do that. But we always start with trying to locate and cite new programs in the areas that have the greatest need. I'm sure you do. [01:40:05] What I'm trying to do is make it a part of our discussion, say for example, as we update those policies that were mentioned, that we would actually have a plan with respect to where that might be used. My last point before I run out of time is really looking at a previous JLARC study that was looking at how we serve and meeting best practices. [01:40:27] And I'm kind of reaching here and I'm happy to share the specific language, but it said the appropriations act does not direct education to take meaningful steps to monitor and ensure the quality of programs implementation, the cost of professional development support programs and technical assistance would also be part of that budget item that I mentioned earlier. [01:40:53] know you're that i appreciate that that comment so i would love to have that information if at all possible thank you i'm out of time all right uh don't forget there's the next steps document maybe that's a place to include that um okay okay thank you um for for everything you have i'm sorry i'm having trouble hearing you guys really loud you you know that ah there we go that's better okay anyway um thank you uh i will just start first of all thank you for the confidence [01:41:33] that so many of you have in in some of us that we will fix all of the ills in exactly one session i will say i do have some work underway in some of these um on some of these issues but i'm not going to tell you because that way you'll call me and still talk to me after i'm gone so you'll have to wait and see. The heat map on page 12. Could you, Ms. Seismarheiser started to touch upon this, but you know the percentages are helpful, but I want to know what does this mean in terms of students. [01:42:08] What does 47 percent of students in Lewis look like versus 30 percent of the Westfield pyramid in raw numbers? I think that matters because when you look at this heat map and you look at the west end of the county and how few um you know places and spaces that we have here um i i just don't know what to make of the data is the bottom line so do you have that quickly offhand to share thank you so i'm gonna check with lisa i think she has some of that information available so we can [01:42:45] share maybe a little bit right now of course i'm sorry i think i'm loud and i'm off control but i'm not so this is a snapshot of our schools um in the lewis pyramid from september 30th of this school year yeah so if we look as far as raw numbers of students with no pre-k experience in the lewis [01:43:09] pyramid give me one second that 47 is a total of 92 children okay and in the westfield area just pick one i'm just trying to get an idea of raw numbers chantilly centerville anything west west [01:43:41] field 130. yeah that does make i'm sorry wait that's inaccurate 153. okay um well a couple of things i'm kind of confused you well hang on hang on i think this is i think this is one where we probably need to follow up okay the intent of this heat map is to look at the percentages because the raw numbers are going to be different right like one pyramid is going to have more students right Right, so it could have a lower percentage and still have a larger end size. [01:44:19] So I think it would probably be most prudent for us to get you the end sizes offline. Right, I agree, which is actually what I'm getting to, which is why I'd like to know to be able to make that comparison. So this is just, to me, not helpful. It's something, but it's not helpful. [01:44:35] I want to know what that is because speaking, and I've said this, you know, every time I think we've talked about this, We have areas, look at even South County, right, where I think because of the population and the pockets that the need is masked, but the access gap is there. [01:44:57] So I will leave that. I would love to see that comparison in numbers, though, before I leave or whenever you get that. I think another part of this conversation is the quality. I know we talk about just the experience, but I think also the quality of the pre-K experience really matters, too. [01:45:18] So, you know, maybe we're not that far now. We're just struggling to have an experience, but quality will, at the end of the day, you know, make the difference, right? I had, and I didn't write down the number, but I thought it would be helpful to maybe have some idea of how many classrooms were added in those different buckets of, that we, not very helpful if I don't have a number, but the different types of pre-K classrooms that we have, just to have an idea of what this, what the numbers look like. [01:46:00] Now, the ESOL. Thank you, Dr. Reed. We've spoken about this so many times, the need that we have in our ESOL population, and maybe it's apropos that we are leading this meeting because Ms. Omesh and I have spoken about this over the years and with each other many, many times. [01:46:18] I feel in many ways this is a hidden population who doesn't often have, you know, folks here talking to us and bringing that voice into the room. But we do need changes, and I'm very excited about these changes. [01:46:38] And I know many of you have talked about it. I don't want to leave you out as well because I know you have. and and it's really exciting to see that we are going to be um doing something about that you know i know some division oh i'm out i'll take a go back sorry we're gonna be able to get to the go back so um thank you staff for putting this together um and i appreciate particularly the pieces on what next because i know we did ask for that um a couple of things i guess i'm i'm encouraged by a lot of what's here i think it's better than a lot of things we've done in the past in terms of what's presented to the board [01:47:16] maybe I'm not as you know celebratory of just certain components I think maybe that would be helpful to discuss so just starting off well let me let me say yeah let me start with this you had a couple of the slides that were under development work I'm just wondering what budgetary implications if if you guys have done any thought around that just so we have a sense of the commitment assuming these are if they're under development I'm thinking they're already in the works but well there's two different things that I was trying to highlight things that are currently in process and then things that are under [01:47:53] consideration or under development. We're funding anything that's in process with current existing funds but as we look at you know some of the things that we might want to do we're gonna have to think about what the funding implications of those would be. So for example if we were to adopt a core basal resource for our English language development program obviously there's going to be associated costs with that. I don't have information on that right now because we're in a RFP or an RFI process but those are all things that we'll have to figure out how we would fund either repurposing existing dollars or looking at new revenue opportunities okay would it be fair to say I guess to [01:48:31] clarify maybe even the slides to say like there are the under development and then the future possibilities yeah that's how I would try to that's that's how I was trying to distinguish them yeah okay yeah Marcy and it maybe that's something just for Thursday I'd feel more comfortable so thank you for that clarification so with that I am wondering what our takeaways are I guess from like just looking at slides 11 16 23 some of that data especially racial data I know we have the intersectional pieces but it doesn't actually fit exactly into the categories you would think I guess based on stereotypically [01:49:08] what our data is unfortunately tends to unfortunately reflect I'm curious what our takeaways are like what is our analysis and understanding of why that is or what this suggests and how that informs our action items frankly. So Ms. O'Mes excuse me I think as we look at the data where we're seeing is in looking at the slide that's talking about pre-k access and experience the really large gaps we're seeing in terms of who we serve as a school community currently with our dollars would be our economically disadvantaged students and when we [01:49:45] dig deeper into that data and look at our intersectionality data in particular it's our students who when we do a look back at the kindergartners it's our english learners that population of students it's our hispanic students so really thinking about what are the barriers for those families is it an awareness issue for our families is it an access issue for our families because our programs don't offer that before and after care is that a barrier for families because they need that longer sort of window of time based on work schedules trying to get deeper into understanding and I think that's going to require us to have some conversations with our [01:50:22] families who are our kindergarten families now to understand why didn't you apply for a program that you would have been eligible for to participate in a free pre-k program so I think that's one of the areas as we think about strategically moving forward that we're going to need to explore so that's looking at the um and I don't know if Dr. Presidio you want to add to that looking at sort of pre-k experience no not really I mean I apologize the one thing I would add is we're talking about families that maybe have an access pre-k remember though we have a waiting list of students and families who want to access pre-k but we don't have the slots available so we've got over [01:50:58] 400 families and students on a wait list right now to access pre-k services so one of the reasons that folks aren't accessing more more folks aren't accessing pre-k is we don't have the slots available for them right of course but i would assume that that's proportional i mean there's There's no reason to believe that the people in and the people waiting are significantly different when it comes to demographics, right? [01:51:24] Well, that was kind of my point. Yeah. Right. But it's not that it would skew the data. It would still be consistent, I think, right? Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that. I was just saying, I think when we're talking about trying to understand why families didn't access pre-K, it's always important just to remember that we have a lot of families who are telling us that they want to access pre-K over 400 and we don't even have the space. [01:51:47] And I would presume that many of those other families probably didn't even go through the process because they knew there was a wait list. And then as I mentioned in my talking points, we do know from our conversations with families that some families don't want their children to start school in pre-K. So there's a whole host and variety of reasons. [01:52:04] Where the programs are located, whether or not there's before and after school care, right? So there's a whole bunch of different things and different factors I think that go into this. And Marcy's point I think is really good to understand that more deeply. going to need to have more conversations with families and do more study on that what i'm sharing are all things that are kind of anecdotal that we've you know collected from families in the past in terms of reasons why they haven't accessed okay i guess i mean respectfully like what then how have we come up with solutions right like why did those conversations not happen before we generated solutions that we're going to commit money to to solve the problem that we still don't [01:52:41] know how to diagnose well a lot of the things that i talked about were again issues related to quality of programming, right, and trying to make sure that our programs are more inclusive. So that was a big part of what we're doing around pre-K is the inclusion part. The part about access, again, largely comes back to whether or not we have slots available for students and families to access. [01:53:03] And we're more than 400 students and families behind just in terms of the family members that are telling us that they want those programs. So I was trying to provide some information about different opportunities to expand access. We talked about thinking differently, maybe instead of, you know, just thinking site by site, looking at, you know, early childhood education centers, like at the Pinewood Lake site. [01:53:26] Some of the board members surface that there's other possible opportunities to do that, like at Graham Road and other places. Those are all, you know, strategies to get at the access issue. Yeah. I mean, the waitlist piece, it's not lost on me, right? Like, we have a major funding problem, and this whole project has major structural issues. [01:53:45] But I don't know that that addresses the disproportionality, which is, I think, what I'm trying to touch on. Like, we're not taking it on as mission critical, urgent, that we have these major gaps. And English learners is just the most obvious one that continues. And that's where I'm like, Dr. Reid, why are we saying these are our solutions? [01:54:04] Like, why are we committing to this kind of, we're going to put money behind that, and it's going to be millions of dollars. when we haven't done the due diligence to understand how to address the disproportionality because maybe maybe we can't open it up to hundreds of more kids right now but we can certainly understand why we're seeing gaps right like why for one kid it's a different experience than another or for one kid it's different access reality than another I think that that the spots are still there well I think it's also important to remember when for the purposes of this presentation we were talking about expanding access for [01:54:40] income eligible students, right? So students that are at that income eligibility level of 200% of the federal poverty limit, which is for a family of four, federal poverty is around $30,000. So 200%, $60,000, right? There's going to be a lot of intersectionality with those income eligible families that also happen to be English language learners, right? There's a very strong correlation between our English language learners and families that are in poverty. So a lot of that disproportionality would be actually addressed by focusing on getting more access to our income [01:55:15] eligible students. Sure but that's different than their ability to access our program right just because there are more of them it doesn't mean if we have more access for those families that are income eligible then obviously the number and percent of students that don't have pre-k that are free and reduced meals eligible will come down but simultaneously the number and percent of students who are English language learners without access will come down because of the intersectionality with those student subgroups. That's making some assumptions, I think, but yeah. [01:55:52] Well, I'm not making an assumption. Our data bears that out, right? Right. I mean, I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that there's obviously some kind of mission-critical response needed for the disproportionality, and I don't see that. And honestly, it's hard for me to not see that as like structurally racist to some extent. [01:56:14] This is not an accusation on any one person. I know as a system we're committed to the ideals of One Fairfax, but it's a normal data point to us and I don't see any of the action items being directly responsive to that. Again, I don't see how that's not blanket like, oh yeah, we expect that of this population. [01:56:34] Anyways, that is my time. But we have a long list of go backs, so we'll go ahead. And if you don't want it, obviously, you're welcome to just let us know. So we have Ms. Darinak Koufax followed by Ms. Corbett Sanders. [01:56:51] Just to clarify, are we doing two minute go backs or one minute? Yeah, so thank you for asking. For the sake of time, we're gonna do one, colleagues, because we are at less than an hour, actually. I know, we thought we'd have more time. Okay, 90 seconds, fine, fine. 90 seconds, but at the risk of going over. [01:57:07] So, okay, thank you. So I'll start with some of the comments, or try to address some of your comments, Ms. Omesh. I think for quite a long time, the ELL population has been addressed when we started seeing when I first got on the board. [01:57:24] And Rich Polio, you are part of this solution where we came up with different structures for students. Remember what Dr. Presidio said, it takes five to seven years for the students to get to a point, and sometimes much longer than that. [01:57:42] and you get 15 and 16 year olds at a high school level and some of them aren't capable or willing and through life circumstances of being able to do that. So I don't see, there has been no attempt at racism or putting down this population. [01:57:59] I think it's extremely important that that be said because there are so many of us who have worked from the moment we got on this board to ensure that our newcomers as we call them, our English language learners are those which demand our attention because that's what you want, right? If you come to this country for new and better opportunities, you certainly don't want to be left behind. So I say that and then I will just end with my pre-K comments. To those who are being here, obviously it's financially prudent to move forward on this. I think that statistic that [01:58:33] I've repeated so many times for every dollar you invest, it's an estimated return on society between five and $17. So it's extremely important that we invest in this because we will be saving on remediation on discipline on, you know, improved mental health issues. So I look forward to us doing that. And to our state delegates who are moving forward. I know you we'd like to tease you all. But the 50% match has not worked for years so please don't bring that back to us so thank you and thank you [01:59:09] again go ahead thank you miss amish an interesting interesting data point we really were taking a look at how our division looks size wise and demographically compared to how we looked in 2018 19 and i think one of the interesting data points is we've added over 14 000 economically disadvantaged students and we've lost six thousand second language learners so I think that [01:59:46] there's an interesting story there I'm not sure what the story is but I think that we often attach narratives to data and I just think it's an interesting data point to to think about I'll make sure you all get a it's the one where it shows and I my computer doesn't seem to have Adobe available to me so I have to read it quick because then it disappears but it has one two three it's the new chart that has the economically disadvantaged uh the number a sheer number of our students would be the fourth [02:00:23] largest division in the commonwealth so it's that new data but i thought it was interesting that we've gained so many free and reduced lunch students but actually have fewer second language students as part of the context thank you um miss corbett sanders thank you um and i appreciate that data. I think a lot of it has to do with affordability of living here, and that is it gets more expensive than it does, and some of the jobs that typically went to English language [02:00:58] learning people are not available because we have a slowdown in some of those areas. So I appreciate that. I actually think another comment that you made about the importance of early childhood education and child care for teacher retention. And looking at that, I've spoken to a number of teachers and principals, principals in particular, who are losing staff to jurisdictions south of here because of the child care and early childhood education piece. So anything we can do [02:01:35] in that area would be important. I also think it's important when we look at our Twilight programs, Many of those students are in the Twilight program because they are providing child care themselves. And so looking at the domino effect of increasing these programs are really important. [02:01:56] And finally, we've talked a lot about space availability, but I think we have to at some point look at boundaries because there's only so much that you can put into a building. And as Dr. Anderson has explained, it is not comparable space when we move children out into trailers to address the needs of other programs. [02:02:19] And so I would urge the next board to take a look at the impact of these programs and how we may have to address them. Thank you, Ms. Colby Sanders. Ms. McLaughlin? Yes, can we pull up slide 13? [02:02:39] so I would like staff to look at that lower chart and just talk a little bit more about what we're seeing in the disproportionality when we look at the intersectional data and if you could stop my time thank you Ms. McLaughlin I will do my best to try and I think get to your question so a good way to think [02:03:15] about that bottom chart is when I look at the far left box for all of our economically disadvantaged students, we're saying that we've got 4,272 of them. And then what we're showing is that 62% of them, or about 2,600, showed that they had a pre-K experience. [02:03:33] So as we move across the chart, we said that we have about 4,200 economically disadvantaged students. And we look in that next box, what that tells us is that we have 2,200 economically disadvantaged students who are also English learners. [02:03:49] And so we can see the amount of students that are in that category that have that pre-K experience. - Thank you, I appreciate that. And I wanted to emphasize this for everyone because this is one of the things that we've talked about that when you look at the intersectional data and my second question would be, do we have the available for this discussion when you break out the poverty rates among our racial subgroups, what percent of our white students are identified as FRM, [02:04:24] or economically disadvantaged, Asian, Black, and Hispanic. And you can stop my time, thanks. - Ms. McLaughlin, I think you're asking if we have the overall school system. I don't know that we have that data available today. [02:04:40] - For the school system. So Dr. Reed, I would say, 'cause I'm racing against the clock here, I would ask in the future for the next board and for your team, we should know that number off the top of our heads i mean my vague recollection is about 10 percent of white students in fairfax county are in poverty um and then i know for black and hispanic students it's four to five times that number um that are in poverty and so um i say that because ms omish [02:05:16] was expressing concern about do we have any racist practices here um or or a race-based notion of who's not accessing pre-k and why and i would argue that no based on this slide chart alone what we are seeing is that even among the racial subgroups you will see that whites in poverty 73 percent accessed pre-k black students 76 percent accessed pre-k um so you know these [02:05:50] These numbers here, I think, are just an example of why the intersectional data is so important. I know, Ms. Amesh, you've been a supporter of it as well. But I want to be very careful, especially for maybe future board members watching. We should always be mindful of this intersectional impact before we look at things through a lens just specifically on race. [02:06:13] All right. We have Dr. Anderson. Thank you. The data that was shared on pages 18 and 19, and I'm talking about the full report, that talked about the student readiness for kindergarten skills based on pre-K experience, is that inclusive of any and every, I'm assuming rather, it's inclusive of any and every pre-K experience? [02:06:44] Do we have any breakout data in terms of did they perform differently if they were at preschool with us, daycare, county programs? Please stop my time. So there is some information towards the end of the main pre-K section that describes specifically students who were in our particular programming. [02:07:09] Let me see if I can find the exact page. Maybe we could just pull it up, too. I think it's page 22 is where it starts. And so there's a section that talks about outcomes for FCPS pre-K and our early childhood special ed programs. [02:07:26] So students who attended that and then what we saw in terms of students before they arrived in kindergarten, so the percent of four-year-olds that met the benchmarks for literacy, that's Table 8 on page 23. I guess what I'm asking, maybe you could just give a recap. [02:07:44] Do we see any differences, no matter what stage in which we're evaluating them, whether or not, do we see any differences in performance if they attended FCPS preschools or some other programs? So the types of students who FCPS serves are different from the types of students that are served in other kinds of pre-K programs. [02:08:05] So when we have looked, there are differences, but a lot of the differences are related to those demographic differences and who we're serving. So we're serving primarily our economically disadvantaged and our special ed students or students with disabilities. And so those groups of students are going to be likely performing lower than students who are not in those kinds of situations. [02:08:27] I didn't necessarily mean private programs. I meant like the county programs or the daycare. Those programs that we are collaborating with the county on, are they performing just as well as the ones that we administer? [02:08:44] So for this report, we didn't do that kind of comparison. WE'VE DONE HISTORICALLY A WHILE BACK A REPORT SPECIFICALLY THAT DID LOOK AT FCPS PRESCHOOL AND COMPARED IT SO I COULD SHARE THAT WITH YOU IN TERMS OF -- IT'S AN OLDER REPORT THOUGH. [02:08:59] IT'S PROBABLY FROM 2017 OR SO. AND HOW MANY STUDENTS DO WE HAVE THAT ARE PARTICIPATING IN THOSE COUNTY PROGRAMS? SO I DID LOOK THIS UP BECAUSE MS. DORANA COFAX ASKED ABOUT IT. AND WE HAVE ROUGHLY 5.4 PERCENTAGE OF OUR STUDENTS COMING into kindergarten were involved in some kind of county program there is a 1.7 percent overlap with our own program where they're being served both part-time in the county program and part-time with us so that would be roughly I'm gonna say about 600 students who are then captured in this kindergarten [02:09:35] assessment for kindergarten readiness yes I'm just curious because I wonder if there's a conversation there to be had in terms of being more robust in terms what those programs um include but my time is running really quickly and i want to get to these other two things um i know that there's been a lot of conversation uh miss pilson we've had those conversations in terms of how to engage with the community to get them to come and access our programs this has been going on since i've been on the board what is going to be done differently now [02:10:08] because that's one of the points that you have here please stop my time well i'll see if lisa wants to add anything but again remember we have more families currently interested than we're able to serve significantly that number is over 400 students lisa's team does a lot of outreach and partnership with the county sending information out in a variety of different ways written information social media information videos radio advertising going to community centers going to churches to provide information about the eligibility process. So there's a lot of outreach [02:10:48] that happens right now, but definitely we can always improve. And that's something that we're going to need to work with our office of engagement and experience and engagement around looking at different ways to engage families. But again, we have more interest than we're able to actually accommodate and serve still at this point. Oh boy. I don't know if Lisa, if you want to add anything to that what would you like to specifically know about dr anderson well i i'm just going to pause maybe i'll speak with you offline because i'm running out of time for my next question because i want to get that there so i'm going to take a pause there and i know we continue to talk about [02:11:26] the lack of resources but i also want to raise to dr reed that we've had some conversations and even some visits with the montessori of arlington because not only do they serve their populations but they also charge other students to come in which helps to generate revenue i'm wondering has anything occurred from that conversation thank you dr anderson that's your time respond thank you we i am actually putting together a note to go out to elementary principals to ask [02:12:00] for interest in helping to plan or be a part of a conversation around that it's my intent i think the montessori programming is outstanding for uh children period uh maria montessori her work speaks for itself um and there is federal funding to support that work so it's my intent over break to put together a steering group a small single-threaded leadership group i think as we've talked about to explore possibilities with montessori because it is um you know into miss Toland's many conversations we've had you know maybe we start moving to tree [02:12:36] houses and outdoor classrooms for early childhood right like it may not always require I know Mr. Glock but I mean in the well in the sense that you know there are snow on the ground yesterday yes right if I can be out in our street my bathrobe and slippers at four in the morning I think you know we can think about what are learning spaces look like for our children our youngest children and um to answer your question directly we are we will be working on a planning or steering committee for a montessori idea thank you may i have a point of privilege on the blended model of [02:13:12] money we are actually in fairfax county we do that i'll be happy to share it with you i'd like a go okay we didn't recognize you and we don't have time so uh if we have a go go back all right let's decorum guys please all right so mr frisch thank you i appreciate the conversation around the intersectionality I just very quickly wanted to make a point about structural racism. It does exist and I think in order to see what impact it's having it has to be interrogated. Here's an [02:13:50] example that I usually share with people when talking about it. In the auto financing industry car dealers are allowed to attach extra percentage points to loans that originate within the dealership. And research shows that people of color end up paying many more percentage points on those loans with the same credit profiles as white car purchasers. Now, that's not to say that the person creating the paperwork is racist, but something in that system is creating a situation where a disproportionate impact is happening with people of color who buy cars that originate loans [02:14:30] in the dealership. And so it is not to say that looking at the stats we've looked at in this great report, that somebody in that chain of command of how we've dealt with this issue going back is a racist who is doing things to specifically hurt our English language learners. It is to say that we're having a disproportionate impact and that disproportionality requires a disproportionate response. And so I just wanted to put that out there because I don't want anybody watching at home to think that anybody here doesn't believe that that we do have our work cut out for us [02:15:07] in terms of addressing not only disproportionality as it relates to race but also intersectionality. All right. Ms. Tolan. Thank you. There is a forest, very popular forest preschool at Riverbent Park by the way. But just to throw that out there. But really the question that I had was more around And I'm always very concerned about staff and hiring staff and retaining staff. [02:15:38] So I was very interested to hear about the ESOL teachers' support to take the praxis test. And I just wondered how many teachers we have involved. Rich, do you have any numbers on that? [02:15:54] Yes. Last year we had 70 teachers, 70 who were so current FCPS licensed teachers who took the praxis. And we listed in the report that we had a near 100% pass rate on the first time. [02:16:09] And I don't know, it's possible that all 70 pass the praxis with the passing score. Now, that doesn't mean that all 70 are necessarily ESOL teachers right now. However, a great many of them are. And we continue to have, I believe right now, this fall, we have around 60 in a prep class that we just completed. [02:16:31] And we'll do another one in the spring. Thanks. I was thinking maybe it was like 10 or something. So those are great numbers. I'm excited to hear that. And then the only other thing I was gonna kind of point out is a lot of the professional development that I did, even with Get to Green, we did it with teams of teachers. [02:16:56] So I don't know if we can just hear just very quickly how that is working maybe across the different content areas to ensure that our teachers are working with their ESL counterparts and getting trained on you having those ESL students in their classroom. [02:17:18] - Yeah, Rich, I don't know if you wanna comment on that one or not. - Ms. Tolan, could you repeat exactly that last part? - Sure, I was just asking a little bit about practices now in ISD, in any content area, math, science, how the training is done so that, I'm kind of hoping that maybe it's done in teams so that you've got your content teacher, you have your ESOL teacher, you have your special education teacher, can you just talk a little bit about overall instruction for professional development for educators to be able to work [02:17:55] with these kids? Sure, so we have a few different models. I guess I'll go straight to if our ESOL office is working with a team, let's say, I know, I'll just pick, if we're working with a high school, we have tended to look at go by content area to work with content area teams. Teachers seem to prefer that at the middle school high school level because then we can talk specifically about you know which strategies whether it's you know visual strategies looking at sentence frames looking at conversation structures might be specific for that for that particular content area we do have also at the [02:18:34] elementary level we're also working with teams so generally speaking grade level teams but special education teachers would be involved ESL teachers it could be other instructional coaches, others. We have current principals in the room have a lot of, for example, training through Project GLAD, which is a team-based training so that teachers across a grade level have similar strategies in their toolbox to use. That doesn't say that, that doesn't mean that we're not also coaching individual teachers. We are, but when it comes to training large groups of teachers, we tend to, we feel it is best to kind of go with a team approach. [02:19:14] - Thank you, I appreciate that information. - That's all? Okay. Ms. Seismar-Hyser, I don't know if you want to go back. - Yeah, my apologies. I thought Maureen was ahead of me on that. So let me just pull up my list. [02:19:32] So I wanted to go back, of course we had some of my questions, but to the heat map question, it would be very helpful to have both a heat map, you know, by percentage of population, as Ms. Bacardi was mentioning. So we have an idea of raw numbers in each area, as well as a little more detail to get an idea of numbers within a region or a pyramid. [02:19:53] Similarly, it'd be helpful by type of program, right? So we get an idea of where special ed programs are located in terms of access, as well as other programs. I say all this because as we're approaching CIP and facilities work, having this more detailed information would be very helpful in if there is either budgetary or CIP impacts to some of this. [02:20:11] So that's the first thing I wanted to mention. I wanted to go back a little bit to the question about PAC in saying the PAC isn't necessarily included right now in some of the inclusion strategies, I didn't even lift up your slides or confusing. [02:20:27] 'Cause on slide eight, it lists PAC as well as deaf, hard of hearing as part of all the early childhood preschool programs. And then slide 19 talks about the strategies for early childhood preschool, but then you're saying PAC isn't included now. So if you can help address that or clarify that for the public so PAC parents know what to expect, that would be helpful. [02:20:46] Please pause my time. Yeah, so slide eight is really speaking to the different types of services that we have for preschool age students with special needs. [02:21:03] And as I was trying to mention, and I'm going to ask Lisa to kind of weigh in and provide some additional information as well. We are looking at inclusion for all of our program types, but we're really starting that work where we have the majority of our students in the majority of our programs, which is in like-age classes, so really looking at those four-year-old classes and some three-year-olds that are receiving services in early childhood, special education pre-K programs, or the general education pre-K program. [02:21:34] We are trying to do some work with preschool autism classes, as Lisa mentioned earlier, but the majority of the work that we're doing right now is we're starting to build out our inclusion plan is really focusing on those programs where we have students of similar ages so we can do the age-appropriate inclusion. [02:21:50] But I'll see if Lisa has any additional information she wants to add. You captured that very well, Dr. Priscilla. All right. Thank you. I appreciate it. Well, then I might add that perhaps there's an opportunity here to look at differentiating by age because my understanding is preschool autism is age 2 to 5 and early childhood is 3 to 5. [02:22:12] So there's not that much difference in age groups. But I also know that both in early childhood and elementary school, having these multi-age classrooms makes it more difficult for the teachers. And if it's a barrier to inclusion as well, perhaps that's something to look at. And with my five seconds, I would just say it would be very helpful. [02:22:29] I love this report. This is great. But as we're going into budget season here in CIP, it would be really helpful to get some thoughts as you're building out a plan as to what the impacts for this upcoming year would be. Thank you. I know I'm out of time. I appreciate this report. It is fantastic. Thank you, Ms. Asmerheiser. Ms. Marin. [02:22:46] I'm fine for today. Thank you. All right, Ms. Kizomara, do you want to go back? Okay, Ms. Bukarski. I'll go quickly. I mean, I think this has kind of been talked about, but my comments around where we are with ESOL and where we need to be, I mean, the data is where the data is, and I think there's been a lot of good work and people who care, but the entire pack, you know, including staff and so on and so forth, but it's going to require systemic change. [02:23:20] and I think we have the team in place to do that and I think we're seeing that so that's what I'm really excited about I really am and I also agree classroom teachers I mean need to know how to provide instruction that is effective to our English language learners and a lot of times that instruction is also really good for our students with disabilities it's good instruction [02:23:50] So what are, a course would be great, but what are we doing, and if, I don't know if Ms. Tolan asked that, I will admittedly say I was kind of talking on the sidelines here, but where are we in terms of the professional development of our classroom teachers currently to be able to provide that best instructional model for kids? [02:24:12] Yeah, it's a great question, and I always appreciate your advocacy for our English learners, which is incredibly important because, as we've discussed here today, oftentimes that student subgroup doesn't have the same external advocacy. So it's really incumbent upon us to raise up their needs. So I appreciate that discussion we've been having today. [02:24:33] You know, we're basically in competition for time for professional development for what our teachers need, right? So it is a challenge. One of the things that we mentioned in the Goal 3 report that we're working on is trying to figure out how we can provide some coherent professional development for teachers that will help them be successful, as you mentioned, with several different student populations, right? [02:24:59] So some of those cross-cutting strategies that can work with advanced learners, 2E students, English learners, students with special needs, and we're largely designing that around universal design for learning principles. So we're working to train central office staff members who can provide some of the summer-based training that we hope to do in universal design for learning for our teachers right now. [02:25:23] So that's a big push for us, and then we're gonna try to make sure that that's something that we can kick off well in the summer and something that we can continue to focus on next school year and beyond to follow up with our general classroom teachers. But we're trying to package some things together in a way that will be a little bit more efficient. [02:25:41] It is. I am not envious of you and that job and all the things we require and want to see done and the people taking these trainings. And the other part of this is the summer offerings for this group of students. That learning needs to be continuous. [02:25:58] So I'll be waiting to see what the ideas and what the funding will look around that to keep these kids coming. I will say I taught summer school many moons ago, and it was actually my favorite part of the year. It really was a great experience for these students and teachers, so thank you. [02:26:17] Thanks, Ms. Bukarski. Where are we on that, just to build off of that? What is the current offering? Who does it serve and not serve in English language learners? So Rich will provide a little bit more detail in here in just a second. I do want to say, since we're going to talk about summer school funding, that we're in pretty good shape for this summer. [02:26:36] But I want to remind everybody that the ESSER cliff is here and we've largely been funding our extended summer program that serves over 35,000 students with ESSER dollars. And we're going to go over that cliff for the following summer of 2025. So we're going to have to get creative to figure out what we can do to keep some of these robust offerings in place. [02:26:56] But Rich, do you want to provide a little bit more information about what the ELD summer programming for elementary students is going to look like since we've had the secondary students in place for a while? Sure. So in the past, we have had for elementary students, our elementary English learners have joined with all of our students in our summer programming. [02:27:14] We've done our best to prioritize, you know, certainly our lower level English learners, level one and two, to make sure that they are in summer school at the elementary level. And we've also had at the secondary level, we've always had, and I would say always, for several years, we have had an online summer school that has met the needs of approximately 1,000 students. [02:27:37] And that's an online program throughout the summer. This coming year, so for summer 24, what we, and perhaps we should have been doing this for years, but what we are planning for this year is a expanded but limited, it's not going to, we're not going to be able to reach everyone, using Title I and Title III funding, we're going to specifically focus on English language development for a number of, and we're not sure what number yet, but as many as we can budget for with using Title I and Title III. [02:28:12] We are going to have a specifically focus on reading, writing, listening, and speaking, this additional ELD program for English learners. So English learners will also, So some English learners that we can provide this ELD program for, specifically targeting, I think we spoke earlier, students who are long-term English learners, we're going to focus on this project. [02:28:37] Other English learners will be part of our, I guess, regular SOAR and Imagine summer school program. So some ELs will be part of the regular program, some ELs will be part of the ELD-specific program. [02:28:56] And that's funded with Title I and Title III for this summer 2024. Thank you. When you say they're part of the regular program, they're just attending, like, normal summer school? Correct. So they'll be invited to attend our regular summer school program that's available for, you know, all students in the summer. [02:29:14] Okay. Wait, how is that then EL summer school? It's not, right? So that's not. So we're saying there's an ELD, there will be an ELD summer school program for certain, for a percentage of our English learners in the summer, elementary English learners. [02:29:32] And then is the secondary online thing, A, was it always online, and B, is that also just normal summer school? That's funded by Title III, and for years, that's not part of, that has been around for several years, and we have invited all English learners at the middle school and high school level to participate in that. Okay. So we don't have EL summer school, I think. We have ELD. This is a new thing. The other offerings are, of course, they're available to all students, but the EL students don't have targeted curriculum, right? Currently, we've had it at the secondary level. We're adding it at the [02:30:11] elementary level for 2024. The online program has EL curriculum for those kids? The online program is an English language development program for middle and high school students. Okay, so yeah, that one, was that always virtual? Yes, even pre-pandemic. Okay, I guess I'm struggling with that. I want to understand a little bit why, about more about why. I know that the pandemic revealed to us that actually online English learners rolled back a lot because they need that practical in [02:30:47] person. I could explain more about exactly what it is. So what that is, the online summer school is a live teacher meeting with students a few times a week online, providing instruction and also giving practice things for students, assignments and planning for students to practice throughout the week, and then come back to meet with them one or two times per week. [02:31:15] So it's a supplemental program that we've had this English language development program for, I don't know exactly what year it started. A couple things I want to add to what rich is talking about and i know we're wrapping up here but um a few things to remember prior to the pandemic we did not have the esser funds to have an expanded summer program so we were largely running our secondary programs at one or just a couple sites around the county which makes it really difficult for a student to drive from herndon to you know fairfax high school for the eld portion that was one of the main reasons that we were doing the online supplement to summer [02:31:53] programming if a student just wanted that ELD piece. If they were already coming to a credit recovery site, then that was something we could support them with there. The other factor to remember is we're funding all of this out of Title III grant funding, which is really, really limited. So a lot of it had to do with availability of programs in the county, and the other major cost driver was how much budget we had available for it. So, okay, I remember in 2020, it was literally like my first budget motion on bringing back el summer school because it was cut that year and [02:32:29] then none of us really picked that up and we've i thought we restored it i guess it fell off after that until esser i don't know i was yeah what i was just responding to or just referencing was prior to 2020 the model that we had right um during the pandemic years we've had some additional funding from ESSER some additional funding from the board but again fairly limited compared to what it would take if we were going to run this type of programming at you know obviously 141 elementary sites. Okay I really appreciate that and I know you all are working within the limitations [02:33:07] of the resources you have. Dr. Reed I am raising a flag an alarm you name it whatever because this again this goes back to kind of the structural racism in my mind where it's like what where are we allocating resources the need for this is huge we know a third of the kids in our system our English is not their first language when we look at the numbers consistently and it could be any work session put any label on it EL is always behind you know in terms of like that whatever academic metric we're looking at and we don't have proper EL summer school I appreciate that we have the ELD piece I think there's a lot of potential there [02:33:43] I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of that but we are far from sufficient resources on this kind of support and I realized that we were talking about this possibility here for the pre-k piece but my gosh such a clear systemic racism issue to me anyways that is my time and we are actually just a little shy of two I know two people asked for a go-go back I think we could probably do it so I think that was dr. Anderson and Miss Corbett Sanders if there was no you had something you were trying to say earlier okay that's fine [02:34:19] So if you want to go, go back, please raise your hand. Okay. All right. I only see two so far. I don't know. But all right. Ms. McLaughlin and then Dr. Anderson. So I just wanted to go back to what Dr. Presidio said with professional development. [02:34:42] Because Dr. Reid, this is something we continue to wrestle with about time. You know, how do we get important professional development in place? And so I would, again, urge the school division that in this effort, not just with pre-K professional development, we have got to start partnering with our Virginia universities and schools of education in particular and ask them if they are truly teaching their bachelor's and master's programs in a 21st century environment. [02:35:15] You know, what are they teaching versus maybe what are they refining to understand what is most important and given the changes and the challenges that we've seen just in the 21st century alone um for our population challenges and the things we've discovered over time that we have been so willfully um not addressing to something even um you know mr frisch was talking about you know if we talk about a systemic mindset of access and opportunity then we need to identify and and [02:35:50] as he said disrupt that too and then finally i would also just implore this really intentional citation of parent education we know that all the research has shown on national level when parents are engaged in their children's education their ability to succeed is far greater we also know that children whose parents are college educated children who are not in poverty huge um leaps and bounds and if that's what the research is showing we have an opportunity [02:36:26] with wraparound services community schools and all the things to mitigate those challenges that our students may face so i i believe in the future and promise of this work all right thank you i'd be remiss if i didn't raise this as we're talking about opportunities to raise revenue i mentioned the montessori and the fact that we can include other parents who would be customers and paying tuition i also want to raise what i raised at the budget meeting with the county supervisors the opportunity for us to have a meals tax that is targeting opportunities for us to have early [02:37:01] childhood support and construction support so i i want to make sure that's that's part of this conversation a question that i had earlier that i didn't get a chance to ask is as you talk about the professional development and all of the information and resources that's going to be provided to staff is this guidance or is this expectation because we've had this before dr um dr presidio oh i mean whenever we provide professional development the expectation is that we're providing meaningful content that can be turned around and will be turned around in the [02:37:38] classroom and it's our responsibility across the system whether we're a coach in a building an administrator in a building or central office staff to make sure that we can support teachers and successfully implementing those strategies so yes I mean to your to your point yes when we provide professional development we expect that those strategies are going to be used in our classrooms okay so if those strategies if the expectation doctorate is that they are going to be utilized how are they going to be monitored well I would expect our chief academic officer chief equity officer and chief of schools to be working with our regional assistant superintendents and principals to make sure that they [02:38:17] they're utilized. And so in terms of participation and engagement in the professional development, is this mandatory or optional? If it's the practice that we end up settling on as a best practice, it would be mandatory. And the reason why I'm being so specific, it's because we've been here before where robust opportunities are provided, but participation and delivery is not an expectation of the system. We currently have professional development that is required and the expectation is the staff do complete professional development and then there are professional development opportunities that are not required so I think we need to have a [02:38:56] clear delineation to your point about that so how will the board be informed as we've spent what the past three hours talking about the need for professional development in this area for el students for preschool students etc how will we be informed that the status of this professional development whether it's going to be mandatory or optional so i think when we get to the executive expectation around professional development and rc is that under hr the hr executive expectation that would be something i presume that we would have data to report to the [02:39:30] board on okay um thank you since i have a little bit more time i will go back to that question miss pilsen again what i wanted to raise is in speaking with you before this meeting in years previous i know that there's been a number of efforts from your office from setting up office from setting up tables at churches setting up tables outside of laundromats just really significant effort to bring people in and i also hear what you said dr uh presidio that we have a wait list of 400 but a lot of the information in this report if you read the first [02:40:06] i believe 10 or so pages speaks to the fact that we need to do that outreach that we have to have some intentionality and I'm just wondering what will be different given what you have done before and we still have a gap of people who won't participate even without the wait list this may still be the issue. Absolutely Dr. Anderson thank you for that question as related to there's two things that I do want to address I feel awkward because I can't see you I'm sorry it's took I know I'm struggling too sorry so we do share our wait list with our Fairfax County [02:40:42] government colleagues so that through VQB 5 there is an expectation that we have coordinated enrollment efforts so that say for instance a a region is unable to serve a family that family's information is shared geographically and those families are reached out to so we do share our wait list for families to be reached out to to have to be offered placement at a another early childhood whether it be a family day home whether [02:41:18] it be a community provider so we that is very strong efforts are being put into that as we speak additionally with our families English as a second language has been mentioned our families not only it is English a second language for them literacy is an issue. So through comprehensive services that we have through our Head Start grant and VPI, our comprehensive service staff, our family service specialists, our family services assistants, they will go out to schools, community centers, wherever that they can meet a family and help them with the completion of the documentation that needs to be submitted so that [02:41:57] their application can get processed for their children to get a placement either in school or their packet is in the system if we don't have a slot available at that location. We're continuing to reach out to our schools, work with our Neighborhood Community Services Office for Children. They have a new name, and I'm sorry it's escaping me at this point, but we are definitely having strong, concerted efforts and not only looking for the preschool experiences that children need but also what does the community need [02:42:36] because there are things that we are learning that the community is needing that is really beyond what the school day has to offer in terms of like that shift care. So those are efforts that we are working collaboratively with our county partners to make strides in. [02:42:53] Okay, and speaking to that wait list, can you give any information as to where those students are located? another heat map, if you may, we can provide that to you. - Okay. - Yes. - Thank you, and thank you all for your work. [02:43:10] - All right, Ms. Seizmerheiser. - Thank you, I just wanna quick go back for a couple of things, as we're building out and talking about some of these great plans that you're doing and the need to expand early childhood and looking at heat maps and looking at inclusive preschools, it would be helpful Dr. Reed if we had some sort of synthesizing of the data, the trends in terms changing needs of our population and some of the costs and facility needs as you know as obviously as many have said at this table and many of your staff have said you know we can't fund this alone [02:43:46] right and there's partnerships we need to have with our county funders with our state with federal for example it talked um somewhere in here about how much the federal government funds the percentage of our um our head start and other programs but it didn't talk about the federal government percentage funding of our special education preschool and if i missed it my apologies but again having sort of a succinct one or two pager on talking points this is a huge priority i think for this board obviously it's in our strategic plan this is one we really need even with our community partners right looking at outdoor class spaces or other spaces having that ability for us to have quickly the why and the buy-in right the change needs of the population the data that shows [02:44:26] the differences in outcomes when we have when children have access to early childhood it would So it would be very helpful for your communications staff and your staff to prepare that one or two pager as we start having these advocacy conversations with our funding partners and other partners. So that's just something I wanted to lift up and I welcome any thoughts on that. [02:44:43] - So thank you and I'll ask Dr. Presidio and Ms. Pilsen to meet with our communications team to put that document together. - Thank you. - Okay, we are two minutes, we're just around time. [02:44:59] So with that, this meeting is adjourned. Reminder, next steps document. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Coraggio Consulting ยท aguyonx.com