Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 4h 17m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDRm_Wods3I
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 2026-11-01. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:42] Let me call today's work session to order, with the quorum being present. The missing board members are Mr. Dunn, who is not feeling well this morning. Mr. McDaniel, who is out of town on business. Ms. Dixis, she is not feeling well either.

[00:01:00] Mr. McDaniel is also out of town on business. And we are waiting for one more board member. This lady is on our way. there being seven now 10:35 and then we'll start we have two very heavy topics to discuss today this lady has just walked in thanks for being here we'll start with the students rights and responsibilities also called SRNR this is annual discussion nothing new but we set aside two hours

[00:01:39] until 12:30, and we'll take a lunch break, and then we'll return at 1 o'clock for the goal presentation, goal number 5, and then we are scheduled to go until 4:30, but that doesn't mean that we have to exhaust next to six an hour, every minute of next to six and a half hours.

[00:01:59] If it can be done earlier than 4:30, that's okay too. With that, let me call Dr. Reed. Thank you Mr. Moon and as you shared it's our interest this morning to share the student rights and responsibilities update and this is the first work session the board has scheduled for this topic and it's an important topic as it governs essentially factors that affect our culture and climate in each of our schools in the division. So at this time I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Nardis

[00:02:34] King and her team to share where we are to date and then look forward to the conversation and feedback from our board. Thank you. Thank you Dr. Reed and good morning to the board. Thank you for your time and collaboration. We appreciate all the feedback that we've received thus far from staff, students, families, and board members. Please allow me to introduce the SR&R team. At the table with me today is Kathleen Waltz, the Executive Director of Equity and Student Relations. Dr. Shannon Anderson, Coordinator of Equity and Student Conduct. Lisa Forrest, Administrative Hearing Officer. And at the table behind

[00:03:12] us over there, but part of our team, we have Colby Bruno, who is the coordinator of Title IX. And not with us today, but they've collaborated with us through this process. It's Dr. Michael Axler, who is the Director of Intervention and Preventive Services, and Stefan Mascall, who's the Coordinator of Student Safety and Wellness. All of us work together to ensure that we provide feedback and information about the students' rights and responsibilities throughout the year.

[00:03:37] I would like to start by sharing that the Students' Rights and Responsibility, SR&R, booklet is designed not only to uphold a safe and respectful learning environment, but also to foster a culture of accountability and personal growth. It empowers our school administrators to decisively address instances of behavior that violates the SR&R, ensuring that students are held responsible for their actions in a manner that is fair and just. At the time, the SRNR is built on the foundational belief that mistakes are opportunities for learning and personal development. It advocates for

[00:04:16] constructive interventions that guide students towards understanding the impact of their action, encouraging them to make a positive change. Through a balanced approach that includes clear expectations, appropriate consequences, and supportive measures for rehabilitation, the SR&R ensures that our schools remain environments where every student can succeed while learning the value of responsibility, empathy, and community. Currently, each school within FCPS follows the guidelines set forth in the SR&R booklet, which outlines disciplinary policies and procedures. A little

[00:04:53] background about the SRNR booklet is comprised of two sections. The Family Guide, updated each year by staff once Regulation 2601 has been finalized, and Regulation 2601 chapters 1 and 2, the students' rights and responsibilities, reviewed and approved by the school board. And please note that chapter 2 of Regulation 2601 is also Regulation 2602, and it can be found in the booklet. Before I turn this over to staff who will be taking us through the presentation I wanted to make sure you saw

[00:05:31] that staff has placed before you a hard copy of the current SRNR booklet as well as hard copies of the current regulation 2601 which can also be found on board docs today we are here to share with you feedback received and recommendations based on that feedback with that I will now turn this meeting over to Kathleen Waltz executive director of student equity and student relations Good morning. Today we will be discussing recommendations for the school year 24-25 SRNR based on school board two by twos, stakeholder listening sessions, and constituent comments.

[00:06:09] The process includes reviewing and approving recommendations and determining alignment between school board and staff regarding the stakeholder survey. We can go to this Next slide. The slide titled SRNR Annual Review Process, please. As per Virginia's model guidance for positive and preventive code of student conduct policy and alternatives to suspension, it is recommended that school boards engage in systematic reviews and updates of existing policies and student conduct standards on an annual basis. FCPS adheres to this recommendation by conducting

[00:06:47] an annual review of its SRNR document and legislation. During the annual review process, we closely monitor and cross-reference discipline-related legislative updates to ensure alignment with state and federal mandates. Requisite revisions to the SRNR are made based on the identified legislative updates and any necessary adjustments to uphold the integrity and relevancy of our policies. Additionally, we continue to prioritize stakeholder engagement throughout the revision process to ensure inclusivity and responsiveness to the diverse

[00:07:24] needs of our school community. We provided multiple opportunities for engagement to various stakeholders, including parents, teachers, administrators, students, and community members. SR&R listening sessions and community forums were held during the school year 23-24, encompassing a range of groups and dates for maximum participation, including principals, parent and teacher associations, parent groups, school board advisory committees, student advisory council and student equity ambassador leaders, superintendents teacher advisory council, communities and families,

[00:08:04] an advisory committee for students with disabilities. We also conducted scheduled 2x2s with school board members in February and March, providing an additional avenue for comprehensive discussions and feedback on proposed revisions.

[00:08:19] It goes without saying that FCPS remains committed to maintaining a safe, inclusive, and conducive learning environment for all students. We will continue to ensure that our policies reflect the evolving needs and priorities of our school community. Next slide. Thank you. During October and November 2023, the Equity and Student Conduct Office hosted several listening sessions with these specific groups representing the FCPS community. The purpose of the listening sessions and feedback forms distributed to these groups was to help identify any specific considerations that may need to be addressed

[00:08:57] for the 24-25 school year. This report assesses the feedback from all of the listening sessions and feedback forms distributed during October and November, providing insights into various aspects of the SRNR, including policy on cell phone use, dress code, drug regulations and enforcement thereof. With the information gathered from the listening sessions and feedback forms, we will explore the need for organizational or structural changes to the document. This month, we also met with 11 of the 12 school board members and received their feedback as well.

[00:09:33] Next slide, please. The SR&R guides our families, parents, caretakers, students and staff. Through our stakeholder feedback sessions, the following themes emerged. A need for enhancing consistency, refining enforcement guidelines, training initiatives pertaining to the SR&R document and behavior management. Additionally, feedback on the following themes was also received. Cell phone usage, substance abuse related policies, considerations for self-defense, inclusivity measures for neurodiverse students, and refining certain

[00:10:11] terminology for greater clarity and alignment with institutional norms. Consequently, we will be discussing these minimal changes during this work session. Next slide, please. Today's presentation is organized into the following categories. Topical feedback with staff recommendations, recommended editorial changes, recommended glossary additions, and possible stakeholder survey. Let's begin with our topical feedback. During our stakeholder feedback sessions,

[00:10:46] the topic of cell phones resurfaced as some schools are struggling with managing the student use of cell phones during the school day. So currently, at the middle school level, phones can be used before and after school and during classes needed for instructional purposes under the direction of the teacher. At the high school level, phones can be used before and after school during passing time at lunch and during class as needed for instructional purposes under the direction of the teacher. They are prohibited in restrooms except in emergencies.

[00:11:23] So there was a recommendation to change the high school cell phone guidelines to match the middle school cell phone guidelines and the staff recommends that we do not make this change. We believe that with additional training school based administrators will gain clarity on understanding of the cell phone use consequences and how to enforce current guidelines. Next up is aligning consequences for possession use and distribution of inhalants. Currently vaping should have the same the I'm sorry the recommendation is that vaping should have the same consequences

[00:12:01] marijuana use possession and distribution. Our staff recommendation includes currently possession and use of vaping inhalants already mirrors the guidelines in the SRNR for possession and use of marijuana. Distribution of vaping products does not carry the same consequence as distribution of marijuana. It's referral to the AOD for first violation. Distribution of marijuana carries an automatic referral to the division superintendent. Staff does not recommend making the consequence for distribution of vaping products the same as distribution of marijuana. And then the third

[00:12:39] topical area of feedback is clarity on enforcement of certain guidelines. So, the recommendation was to make the change from all Mays in the document to Shells. Staff does not recommend this change. Staff believes that with additional training, school-based administrators will gain clarity on understanding the Shell versus May concept when considering consequences.

[00:13:06] of the Mays refer to the division superintendents. So there we have our topical feedback and we continue on to the next slide. So here we have possessing, using, and being under influence of controlled substances and feedback for consideration is per VDOE. School divisions are required to adopt disciplinary policies that are consistent with or more stringent than the VDOE guideline.

[00:13:36] Current VDOE guidelines state that possessing, using, or being under the influence of a controlled substance should be treated as a level three to level five offense. And staff recommends coming into alignment with the VDOE guidelines on the possessing of marijuana and THC oil.

[00:13:54] FCPS is in alignment on possessing of all other controlled substances. This would entail changing possessing of marijuana and THC oil to start at level three, currently from a level two. FCPS is already in alignment with the VDOE on using and being under the influence of controlled substances.

[00:14:15] The next area of topical feedback is self-defense. For consideration is to include recommendations from VDOE regarding self-defense, and we concur with that recommendation.

[00:14:27] So the video we recommends every school system include clarity around self defense in the student conduct book. Although we have a definition of self defense, clarity will be added to the document regarding the parameter for determining self defense claims. So just a little bit of language from the video. We school officials may in their discretion consider self defense as a factor when determining disciplinary action for misconduct involving fighting self defense will never justify or excuse any other violation of the SRNR, including but not limited to any possession or use of

[00:15:04] a weapon. Self-defense does not constitute a valid defense against possession or use of a weapon on school property or at any school-sponsored activity. In cases where self-defense is claimed, administrators will allow students to present their version of what occurred, as well as a review of facts involving school personnel and others as appropriate. Include students other staff who may have witnessed the incident or have observed previous interactions between the students involved. In cases where self-defense is claimed, previous interactions between the students

[00:15:39] administrators may take the investigation beyond looking at the single incident to examining patterns of interaction, past threats, and bullying. Information may be obtained from a variety of persons including bus drivers, custodians, teachers, other students, and parents may be relevant to determining the administrative response. In addition, the person claiming self-defense must be without fault in provoking or bringing on the fight or incident, have reasonably feared under the circumstances as they appeared to them that they were in danger of harm, have used no more force

[00:16:16] than was reasonably necessary to protect them from the threatened harm. And then we move on to recommended editorial changes to the SR&R. So that's on the next slide, please. So in the editorial changes, we recommend that we add guardian to all parent statements for inclusivity. So currently in a number of places in the SR&R, only the parent is listed and we would include guardian. Ombuds, we would like to change the term ombudsman to ombuds.

[00:16:53] Change of the overseeing department, so changing the name of the Department of Primary Responsibility from the Department of Special Services to the Chief Equity Office. And then change of primary office, so the Office of Primary Responsibility from Intervention and Prevention Services to Equity and Student Conduct.

[00:17:14] So these are minor changes, but those that are recommended by staff. Next slide, please. May I be recognized, Mr. Moon? Yes. I just want to ask, the neurodiversity one seems to have been omitted from your review, Ms. Waltz.

[00:17:31] It's in the, yeah, the neurodiversity one. Maybe here. Coming up. Oh, okay. It's right on the screen right now. Oh. As long as it's coming up, that's great. Maybe I missed it. It's coming up. It's coming up. Later slide.

[00:17:47] Okay. I see it. Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. Yes, neurodiversity. So, what we would propose for consideration is to add language at the beginning of Chapter that speaks to the differences in how our student body learns, behaves, and processes things, as well as different levels of maturity. We would also include language in the introduction of the SRNR booklet around neurodiversity. So we do recommend this edition, and we would work with our FCPS neurodiversity specialists for the verbiage and language to add. We would then seek your

[00:18:20] approval to include this in the SRNR. I apologize for omitting that. Okay, so we We are now on recommended editorial changes for threat assessment to risk assessment. So we would change out the term threat assessment for risk assessment to align it with the name of the regulation procedures for conducting risk assessments.

[00:18:44] This adjustment ensures consistency and clarity in terminology across related policies and procedures. An additional editorial changes we're recommending is change from the Office of School Supports to the Office of Out-of-School Support.

[00:19:01] This was an error that needed to be corrected and can be found in the current regulation. Moving on to recommended glossary additions, and we see neurodiversity again, so here we go.

[00:19:18] So here are some of the glossary additions that we are recommending to be added to the SR&R. These proposed additions aim to address emerging issues and reflect existing understandings of student conduct and responsibilities in a rapidly evolving educational landscape. We appreciate the guidance and support as we strive to uphold the highest standards of integrity and inclusivity within our community. These glossary definitions include self-defense, neurodiversity, digital citizenship, generative artificial intelligence, and

[00:19:55] scholastic dishonesty. And in previous, we need to discuss a possible survey. So previous surveys were conducted in school years 22 and 23. We surveyed students, staff, and families on the SRNR. In school year 22, 82 percent of respondents agreed with our guidelines on the topics of cell phone use in schools, the acceptable use policy, drug misuse, the ability to voice concerns, and to be heard, and 91% felt knowledgeable about the SRNR. In school

[00:20:33] year 23, 83% of respondents supported our overall guidelines around cell phone use in schools, dress code, substance misuse, addressing discriminatory harassment, hazing, and bullying, while 90% of respondents supported the changes that were implemented in school year 24 around the same topic. These survey results emphasize the significance of engaging stakeholders in shaping our policies and practices. The consistently high levels of agreement and support indicate that our efforts in crafting and refining the SRNR are resonating

[00:21:09] positively with our school community. As we move forward, we remain committed to maintaining open channels of communication and incorporating feedback to ensure that the SRNR continues to reflect the values and needs of our stakeholders. Next slide, please. After careful consideration, the staff has evaluated the possibility of conducting a survey for the school year 24-25 SR&R and is recommending to not conduct a survey at this time. And the reason being that the results from school years 21-22 and 22-23 indicate consistently high

[00:21:48] approval rating of the SR&R and the discipline guidelines and it suggests that the current SRNR framework is largely satisfactory to stakeholders based on previous feedback. For the school year 24-25 SRNR, there are minimal recommended changes implying that the existing framework is still deemed effective and relevant by stakeholders and staff alike. However, it is important to note that a survey will be conducted if the school board makes this request. The decision to proceed with a survey will be guided by the Board's directive and overarching goal of ensuring inclusive and transparent

[00:22:26] policy development processes. And next slide please. So next steps include if the decision is made to send a survey out to stakeholder it will need to be completed by March 25th to have feedback available in time for the April 2nd work session. The SRNR second work session again is scheduled for April 2nd. The SRNR new business is scheduled for the April 25th school board meeting, and a vote will take place at the May 9th school board meeting. Thank you for your continued dedication and partnership in this proposed endeavor

[00:23:04] and we look forward to your questions and feedback. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I had a brief conversation with Dr. King prior to the work session. I think Dr. King may have a further comment on a whether we can actually have a survey done in time for April 2nd work session if the board all decided to both survey and the work session could you comment on that we will absolutely do what the board directs us but we will find challenges in getting a survey out and because

[00:23:39] spring break next week and the information back and disaggregated in a meaningful way in order to present to you the findings of that survey by april 2nd okay i will see we'll see whether where the board is will be on the survey and the next works audition work session april second with that as usual each board member will have three minutes for the first round and then two minutes for the second round my suggestion is that we first do a q a and some comments

[00:24:12] and if any board member has any specific amendment in mind then we'll discuss that after we are done with the Q&A. With that, I have Mr. Chairman first, followed by Dr. Anderson and Ms. Lady.

[00:24:34] Mr. Chairman. Thank you. On the question of the survey, even disaggregated, the information is almost useless because it's not representative of anything other than the people who decided to fill it out. So we could say, you know, 2,000 families filled this out, disaggregated in these schools in these regions but it's not a representative sample of our school community and i think too often we use our surveys to represent the community when it's not representative so i don't support doing a survey unless we can do something that has a representative sample and we certainly cannot

[00:25:10] do that in time for april 2nd let alone maybe even the vote i have a macro question that kind of relates to the may versus shall conversation if we identify that one of the big problems is the lack of consistency from school to school in the administration of the SR&R. Do we really think that people need to be trained on the differences between the word may and shall? We're talking about the most senior administrators in our school division. I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't understand the difference. Dr. Lee or Dr. King? Yeah, I'm happy to respond

[00:25:50] to that. I don't think we would need training on understanding the difference. I think it's a different connotation and a different accountability expectation. And I can accept that many of the may versus shall questions are related to the superintendent's work. I don't think any of us want to change something that doesn't make sense, but there are a lot of places throughout the SR&R where shall would create more consistency at the school level, so I'd like that to be reconsidered.

[00:26:16] On the issue of cell phones, again, this is one of the areas, you know, I had spoken about doing middle school, and I think that was more out of frustration for what I'm hearing from educators than anything, because it is different from classroom to classroom at the high school level. in every school that I've been to, and you know that breeds educators not wanting to enforce the policy because then they become the bad guy. It is harder to be the bad guy at the middle school level where the rules are the same in every room. On the question of controlled substances,

[00:26:50] you know we had another meeting yesterday at Lake Braddock about fentanyl and heard from the fosters and other parents about this issue. I think there are open questions about how controlled a substance marijuana will be going forward given the legislature's inability to get the governor to sign a marketplace legislation that would actually put some rules and regulations around it. I'm more concerned about what are we offering parents when their students are brought up on these topics for you know using or having a controlled substance. What are we doing to make sure those parents

[00:27:26] have the various tools that the fosters have talked about needing but i mean that's good feedback for us to take into account um mr fresh and then finally two final comments um i appreciate the um approach to the self-defense question that we didn't just implement what the state is encouraging that we looked for where that might present problems and it makes sense that we wouldn't include some kind of premeditation uh with weapons um as a self-defense um and i also

[00:28:01] appreciate that we are uh you know basically codifying the use of generator of ai as a an act of scholastic dishonesty i think that'll probably take some some highlighting with our student population i'll wait for i'll go back i appreciate it thank you for all the work thank you dr henderson um thank you um i i think my questions are very similarly aligned to what mr frisch had had asked i wanted to go in and take a look at the survey results that were shared on And I believe the first or second slide was very early on.

[00:28:40] Do you typically have a target in terms of participation of the surveys? And then how far apart do you end up being from that target? This is my first time, you know, I took over this July 1, so I didn't have the expectation, right?

[00:28:58] We always want full participation, but we recognize that sometimes when people are satisfied with their experience or with the documents, they don't show up. we think that a lot of times the people who do show up have something to say um so no we don't have a baseline uh again we hope for full participation from our community sure and i think full participation is probably more aspirational i just think we need to have data that is more reliable we need to have a reliable set whether it is a constructed um group like mr fish had talked about or a sample that would be considered representative because we do rely quite a bit on the data

[00:29:38] Going down to, I think, one of your last slides where you talked about that 82% of the respondents in 2022 were satisfied and 83% in 2023. Can you share with me what is the end for each of these groups?

[00:29:56] 83% of how many people participated? Yes, the last two that you noted on, rather, slide 12. If you wouldn't mind looking into that, but I think my point will still be the same.

[00:30:14] is a small subset of individuals but yet we're saying so many of them are are um satisfied so we don't require a change it's really i i it doesn't make me comfortable because i know it's not necessarily representative of our community so i'd like to have data that we could rely on a little bit and so we could use it and speak about it with a great with a higher level of assurance the second thing that i wanted to raise is the inconsistency of implementation one of the things that has made me very nervous in reviewing this and i'll also say this and i don't know whether

[00:30:50] this is a typo on the first page of the document of this document it said last year there was substantial change to the srnr regarding cell phone usage did you mean in 2022 because that was when we had the big change to the cell phones and i think it was it was changed in 2022 to be implemented last year. Okay oh I see I see what you mean. I was thinking when we voted on it. Thank you. One of the things here that causes me a lot of concern is the self-defense. This is on page seven of this document that talks about that school officials may in their discretion consider

[00:31:29] self-defense. It's either our school officials consider it or they do not because we know how that presents. I was one of those school officials. We have different levels of tolerance. We have different thresholds. Or maybe I don't like you as much as I like you. All of the sudden, my discretionary authority just is implemented in a very different way. And I know everybody's trying their best, but that's a reality that we do have to cope with. So if self-defense is a part of our document, it's either everybody's using it or is not using it. And that's just one of the instances

[00:32:05] that I wanted to raise because it's the newest thing here that will just continue to add to the inconsistencies that we see in how our SRNO is implemented in our schools. And I see that I have 12 seconds left, so I'll wait to hear from you. That was the recommended language from the BDOE, but we will take direction from the board if you would like it to be a shall rather than a may.

[00:32:26] I just think how we apply it across our schools is our responsibility, and I personally would like that to be a firm language I do not want for personality to be what what allows some students to have this opportunity to exonerate themselves I'd like to go back please thank you mr. lady thank you and again thank you for your hard work I'm going to start with feeling disappointed about what was omitted in terms of changes in terminology and that's when we discussed admonition and counseling as a former counselor director student services I don't think you put admonition which the definition of is to an act of admonishing an

[00:33:05] authoritative warning with the word counseling those who are not familiar with our counseling work you cannot put discipline and counseling in the same word and and so if you want to use you know engaged in a conversation or coaching that's fine but those of us that actually have been through schools and have masters in counseling have an issue with that it's on page 26 if you want to know and I didn't bring my copy but I read it several times within the SRNR so I just would like that changed it can do admonition just don't put counseling with it please then secondly you know I'm I'm one of the ones who

[00:33:45] kind of feels like marijuana and vaping are one of the same and maybe I just am ignorant but can we test a vape for whether it has THC in it of course we can't which is why to me they're one of the same when I when I visit schools and when I talk to people who I've worked with the number there are two things that they just that are just controlling them and and and is hindering them as educators and one is how stoned the kids are in class and they can't do anything about it and the second is this whole cell phone thing because like my

[00:34:19] colleague Mr. Frisch mentioned there's inconsistencies and the bottom line is the dialoguing that's taking place about when they're going to meet in which bathroom and and what they're going to do is become something that that our administrators and now our teachers who have not had hall duty in years I just learned that counselors now have lunch duty at some schools which is not part of the ASCA model, and they also have hall duty.

[00:34:51] And I heard from one high school that they've shut down all but two bathrooms and there's people sitting outside of those every single time basically checking students in before they can go in the restroom because they cannot get control of the vaping. And the other shenanigans are going on in bathrooms. So I have a very strong feeling about cell phones.

[00:35:09] We are training our middle school students that they don't have them on their person And when they come to high school, I don't think we set them free again. I personally, and I know some of my colleagues might disagree with me, but it's the one thing I hear my colleagues complain about the most, is the fact that why do they need a cell phone during the day?

[00:35:28] There's plenty of adults, there's plenty of phones, there's plenty of ways that we can make sure our kids are safe. And yes, we do have some children who are responsible, but from my perspective as an educator you know one of the biggest challenges in education and I'm about to run out of time is the reality that we hope to have to help the kids who don't have the self-control help themselves okay we can't just sit here and say well they're not learning and not deal with the fact that their cell phones are their distraction I also well I'll take a comeback I'll take a go back there thank you thank you mr. lady we have Madame vice-chair thanks mr. moon thank

[00:36:07] you superintendent staff so on the cell phone matter I do agree with the sentiment previously shared, I do not support changing the high school practice to match the middle school practice. I like the way Ms. Lady put it that we are teaching the middle school students how to use that in high school. I mean, look, even if a student is self-controlled enough to put it away, it's still best practice to not have it as a distraction, even if they can, you know, control it. Adults, we have challenges with that. I am curious why the staff does not recommend the consequence for distribution of vape the same as marijuana so if

[00:36:44] you could just put the up in that for a second the thing about training the additional staff and this is really an overall comment is it it sounds like our staff are trying to do so much and i don't hear the talk about family engagement and this comes back to year in and year out with the srnr we talk about students rights and responsibilities but you know we have parents We have families sign it, but what is the continued support throughout the year to talk about how this is going with their kid?

[00:37:15] We hear these awful stories with fentanyl, the parents think that their kids are okay until they're not, and in any instance, bullying. This also gets to the idea of upstanders, and I don't know if that's a defined piece being an upstander, but the things I hear about students observing the bad behavior and just watching it, not saying it, perhaps videoing it, sharing it. First of all, there needs to be a consequence for that, because sharing has really extreme circumstances that we've seen since I've been on the board. And second of all, we need to teach our kids, and it has to happen younger. So yesterday, I was actually at Marshall Road Elementary, which

[00:37:52] is leading the way on composting. It's just amazing. And the kids are into it, because they're little, and they're young, and they think it's cool. And the middle schoolers, maybe not so much. And the high schoolers, it's really hard to get some of them on board. So what are we doing to front load our elementary work in behavior and being an upstander so that we can continue to grow that habit?

[00:38:12] The thing about the surveys is this. I don't see the teacher voice in the surveys at all. There are administrators. There are families. I see parent groups. I don't see in the survey results, not even the teacher groups.

[00:38:30] What I hear is from the teachers, how the teachers are doing. I don't know how we -- I think teachers should have a full seat at the table and our IAs and other instructional staff who are the ones who have to address this behavior. The biggest concern to me is disrespect when I hear stories of disrespect to our teachers.

[00:38:49] That's got to be immediately addressed with some serious consequences because we just -- if we're trying to retain our teachers, we can't have kids being disrespectful to them. So I would love to answer that question. Why did the staff not recommend as a consequence for distribution of vape, the same as for marijuana?

[00:39:08] Thank you. I'm going to let Lisa tell you the difference between the two and then why we didn't recommend that. But I also want to share with you that for the survey results we did offer through the superintendent's teacher advisory group, we sent the survey to them during the meeting and asked them to share with the teachers in their school to provide us feedback.

[00:39:31] Nobody took us up on it. I say this it's a it's a flogged thing because I've worked in schools for 27 years. You have a stack that Could you ask me for recognition? That's why this lady. Go ahead. Sorry I just know that there's sometimes when your stack is fantastic and does every single piece of turnaround and In sort of like gets staffed to participate and then sometimes it's like crickets and it's not done So, you know, that's all I'll share anything for thank you for the feedback

[00:40:08] All right, so in SRNR, the possession, use, and distribution of e-cigarettes, tobacco products, and vaping products does not require a recommendation, a referral, mandatory referral.

[00:40:25] And that's part and partial to the requirement that does mandate distribution of THC when the vaping device contains THC or marijuana. That is mandatory. this section here puts it just in the device itself and let's say an empty device or that contains nicotine or tobacco so the part I believe that's where you're looking at on page 37 I was going I was going off the chart earlier when you were running through the staff recommendations of the topical changes the topical or the topical feedback and the staff did not

[00:41:01] recommend. Miss Marin we're seeing a lot more younger children involving themselves in in vaping nicotine products. If we put it in the same category as distribution of marijuana, we're going to see an uptick in students getting referrals to the hearings office for their first time use with nicotine or trying vaping if they're caught.

[00:41:27] And so what is staff thinking about that? It sounds like you think that's a negative thing. I think that in past boards we're pushing staff at the time to not be as stringent with the in the SRNR when it came to even marijuana let alone nicotine so it was based on that past advice but we will surely go in any direction that this board seems necessary. Okay thank you I have Miss Anderson to be followed by

[00:42:02] Mrs. St. John County. Okay so I love what I saw in here related to increasing training to determine how consistency is going I guess my question is what What measures are we going to use to ensure that consistency is actually happening?

[00:42:23] So I have thought for a while that we have lots of data that we already have at our fingertips that we could utilize to determine whether or not, at least within the hearings office, to determine whether or not there's consistency in even our own -- in the own -- our own process to determine the outcomes of hearings to ensure that there is consistency amongst how things are going.

[00:42:46] Definitely encourage that moving forward to figure out there's to determine whether or not there is consistency amongst what you guys are seeing in terms of which offenses are being brought to you all of that. Thank you Miss Anderson. I can tell you that their consistency is our biggest issue right and we're looking into how we can you know beef up our training over the summer with assistant principals who are mainly responsible for discipline in the schools and principals as well because they're the ones making the recommendation to bring a case forward so we are working on the training module that because we know

[00:43:23] based on cases that come to the hearings office because that's what we see right we don't see what's happening day to day in schools but we recognize from even having conversations with principals how there's some inconsistencies and thought around in culture and different schools different consequences so that is how we do our how we conduct our training will determine better outcomes for consistency. I love that and I agree that training fixes a lot of things. I would encourage us to ensure that we put measures in place that we're planning on checking as we move past the training to determine whether or not it was effective and whether or not there are aspects

[00:43:58] that need to continue to be trained. I also think that we need to empower our principals and assistant principals to ensure that they understand that they do have the support of everyone to go ahead and put stuff in the record. Write down discipline. Don't have things that are carried off at you know an informal level because what happens is is that if it does reach the hearings office then it gives an inconsistent viewpoint of each individual child and that is someplace that I would like to see consistency in terms of how all the kids are handled. So that's

[00:44:31] one thing. So I am probably the lone person on the board that that agrees with you that I do not think that we should change the high school policy related to cell phones because I do believe that it's a learning opportunity for our kids. I think that middle school, they need to put it away for the day. I also think that our teachers need to model that for our students in a way that we need to make sure that that's happening. We also can't allow teachers to give it as a babysitting tool if you've got five, ten minutes left in class. So we need to beef up that conversation. I believe

[00:45:06] strongly that in high school they need to have the opportunity to make mistakes with consistency in the classroom that upholds the standard that we already have that says it's away during instruction. Because I've said this before, as someone who taught in the college classroom for years, if you showed up at my class and you didn't know how to manage your cell phone, that would be a problem for me.

[00:45:27] And it would reflect poorly on the school system that you came from. And I would hate for that to be the instance for our kids. So, again, I think that if we want to start showing how cell phones are a tool that can be used effectively and talk about during meetings and things like that model again for for your students that we put it away and that we're not interacting and so we used to have those conversations in my classes thank you miss Anderson for that feedback and I do want to say that part of our recommendation was based on this change was just made right and so we do want to see consistency but we if we keep

[00:46:03] changing the document every year as system this big it's gonna it's gonna be harder for that consistency. I've had the opportunity to speak to students in the last couple of weeks and they tell you that some teachers allow it some teachers don't so then we understand that we have to do a better job of making sure that all staff members understand what the policy says and how we need to implement it. So thank you for that feedback.

[00:46:27] Ms. Ossing, John Cunning. Thank you and thank you for all your hard work. I'm gonna go back to this survey and just ask these questions and you can get them for me. The 20 the the 2022 and 23 surveys, if you can get the completion rate for us, please, going back to what everybody else has said about surveys. If you look at this listening session which you presented, which was not a survey but a listening session, did you survey the people

[00:47:04] at the listening sessions? Okay, so does that include the 82, the survey responses? Because i would like to see the completion rate because i did some quick math and there was about 800 participants in those listening sessions and those listening sessions too my concern was the participation of there was only 114 that were participating that included the teacher's advisory and uh 94 if you put parent groups and family and community members which is not representative of our population and and i understand surveys are hard and i understand

[00:47:44] getting that feedback is hard but also from my limited experience in the school board i'm realizing that a lot of times people just sign that and don't read that and there's a lot of miscommunication in terms of the community and families because they come back and say well we didn't know this um my my next question so we can get that completion rate i think that would be

[00:48:06] MS. JOHN, CAN I INTERRUPT YOU FOR A SECOND AND LET YOU KNOW THAT SHANNON WAS ABLE TO LOOK UP THE RESULTS FROM 2022 SURVEY, WHICH WAS REFERENCED IN THE DOCUMENT, THERE WERE 2,987 FOLKS THAT COMPLETED THAT, BUT IN 2023, WHEN WE HAD THE LARGE CHANGES, WE HAD 13,148 PEOPLE COMPLETE THE SURVEY.

[00:48:27] that's really positive to hear thank you um the other question i wanted to get to is in terms of this changes you talk about not making certain changes because of additional training hat number one has training been provided and how do you define that additional training for schools because i i agree with all of our a lot of what has been said here the consistency or the lack of consistency is an issue um and the lack of as um oh god i was going to call you miss smith

[00:49:08] as miss anderson said was that you know there's an inconsistency in reporting certain reporting things so um i think the training aspect and saying we need more training and who are you training so last summer um when dr rey joined us she she wanted to make sure that we did a reset Because COVID, you know, we had a lot of new assistant principals hired during COVID that didn't probably receive the same kinds of training based on our situation.

[00:49:37] So last summer, we did have a training for all assistant principals. It was mandatory for everybody who did discipline. And a lot of it was informational. I think that it's important for us this summer to focus on scenario-based training so that we can talk about scenarios, live scenarios that's happened in the district and then get feedback in groups of how you would handle that and then discuss it.

[00:50:02] Because even if we sit and get, people's interpretations are different based on their own lens, their own experiences and their own cultures in their schools. So sitting down and having stronger conversations with the people who are responsible for providing discipline in schools that are scenario-based I think will help us move towards consistency and then a constant review more than one time a year like we did it in the summer maybe returning and adding it I'm sorry to date with the assistant principals training we did it in December as well that scenario based

[00:50:40] and looking at the SRNR giving them a scenario and talking through how you make a decision around it and we just did another one was in March or February February. In the February we did another one of the assistant principals. And again, I think that when you have new assistant principals every year, we have to make sure that we remember that and they also start at different times of the year as well.

[00:51:03] And then just speaking the same language about consistency of enforcement of the rules. We have rules. Let's be consistent in enforcing those rules. Thank you. Let's go to Mrs. Eismerheiser.

[00:51:23] Thank you. I really appreciate this and just to give you a lift up and thank you for adding the language on neurodiversity and I really hope that as you work with Ms. Hainer, the language will be sort of lifting up the social model of disability. So I really appreciate it. I just want to put that out there.

[00:51:38] Thank you. For cell phones, I will say that I just want to make it clear for the public who are listening, my understanding is that the current recommendation is to leave it as it is, which is away for the day in middle school and away in classes in high school and just available only in high school during passing periods or lunchroom before or after school is that correct okay so so go ahead now we don't allow cell phone use in bathrooms well I was asking for clarity so I was waiting for clarity so may I pause my time for so please go ahead and clarify students are not

[00:52:17] allowed to use phones in the bathrooms and so there's an emergency thank you so The suggestions have come up to have it away for the day in high school all the time, right, hallways and lunch rooms. Right now it's away for the day in classrooms and bathrooms.

[00:52:34] I would say I would agree as another college professor, I don't agree with changing high school to having it away for the day the entire day. It's a big leap then. Part of high school is preparing our students to be out in the real world, and it is a huge leap. I also know I've talked to many students who are either responsible for sibling care after school or have jobs that schedule at the last minute.

[00:52:55] lot of hourly shift work jobs will reach out to you at the last minute and if you don't respond quickly you will miss your shift and so I want to lift up those students as well who need to be able to get to their cell phones during the day either for work sibling care and then I've heard from students who run clubs and run after-school activities and need to get to hold their cell phones to be able to manage those things all of which are important so I think we have a good balance between in the lunchroom in the hallways I appreciate the way in the bathrooms I know there's issues there and I appreciate the way in the classrooms I think that's a good balance let our students learn how to be adults my two cents on that I'm keeping it middle school as it is which is a way

[00:53:34] for the day shall versus may I wanted to lift that up a little bit in the presentation it said the May language is mostly referring to the division superintendent but I looked through here just briefly on page nine there's May language around student and parents and what they can do and if we change that to shall we're requiring students and parents to do some things I'm not sure that would be the right thing to do if you look at page 35 if we change that it's it's really the maze and shells I'm seeing is more when a principal shall suspend the student for up to 10 days and shall refer to the division

[00:54:13] superintendent I see it on page 35 page 43 page 39 so if we did change that for example, then a principal must suspend the student for 10 days for violating the acceptable use policy, for possessing a laser pointer, for gambling any form, so there goes the NAAC brackets.

[00:54:31] I mean, I just think that, you know, there's just a lot of things that if we're going to make that big of a change, we really need to go through here with a fine tooth comb because I'm not sure I'm comfortable suspending a student for 10 days for participating in an NAAC bracket that exchanged 50 cents each.

[00:54:46] I'm just saying. And thank you. This shows my lack of... Could not do a bracket this year. I'll go for a go back. But I just think we need to be really careful before we jump down that road. Thank you.

[00:55:07] Okay, thank you so much. First round is all done, except me. And I'm going to take my less than three minutes. As, you know, Dr. King, you will remember, you know, how much of time I spent in 2x2, you know, emphasizing upon the importance of maintaining consistency.

[00:55:29] It's a school to school, staff member to staff member, even within the same school. I think there has to be consistency. Granted, there were a lot of changes to the SRNR implemented last year.

[00:55:45] I feel that we should give a little more time to our system, to our staff, to be properly trained and to become more consistent than it has been because I'm hearing things otherwise.

[00:56:01] So for the recommended changes, I am going to go along with the staff's recommendations, except for perhaps self-defense. I don't want to see a situation where one school or one staff member keeping using me or misusing me versus another staff member applying more of a share in this situation.

[00:56:28] So with the accession for self-defense, I will accept, I'm prepared to accept the staff's recommendations. On the survey, I don't believe we need to do another survey this year. And I'm going to go toward the end of this discussion when I'll be asking my board members whether they would desire another work session on April 2nd.

[00:56:50] And depending upon how the conversation goes, I may vote not to have another work session on April 2nd. Okay? With that, do I assume that everybody who had spoken in the first round wanted to have another round with two minutes each?

[00:57:09] So I'll go in the same order then, starting with Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much. To the subject of inhalants, it's indicated that we wouldn't have the same penalties, etc., that we would have for marijuana.

[00:57:30] Are we testing a vape cartridge to see if it's THC-related? I don't believe we are. Currently, no. It's turned over to the school resource officer, but there is no school-based testing of that vaping device.

[00:57:50] So how are we making the distinction between the penalties? On most occasions, for those cases that I see, it's based on the assessment of the SRO, whether it's THC, based on the characteristics of the substance, the smell of the substance, whether the students admit that it's THC.

[00:58:10] But they're usually given the benefit of the doubt if they're told it is nicotine or tobacco. Seems like a pretty big out should probably be fixed.

[00:58:27] So I'll be looking at that one closely. On the subject of cell phone policy, I accept that there's a good balance on paper between what we've set up for. And many of the benefits to the high school policy that we discussed when we first put it in place haven't even been mentioned today.

[00:58:49] I think where my discomfort comes from or my issue and perhaps my overreaction to want to go towards middle school is in the disparate implementation of the policy, right? still think that there's remarkable promise for many of the reasons that have been addressed today with the high school policy on cell phones as long as it's implemented the same way in every classroom and you know I look to you all to find a way to make that happen. On the question of shall versus may I agree with Ms. Sizemoreheiser and others that we need to look carefully at each of

[00:59:28] those instances and that we can't paint them all with a broad brush to say we We shouldn't or we should keep or change what is there, and that's something that I'll be looking at closely as well. Generally speaking, I've quite appreciated the approach to the SRNR this year with the two-by-twos and the work sessions and the conversations we've had, and I look forward to the continued conversation.

[00:59:56] Thank you. Dr. Henderson. Yes, thank you. One of the things I would like for us to reconsider, particularly in light of what was said in terms of students not being allowed to use the cell phones in the restroom. Actually, let me stick a pin.

[01:00:11] I'll come back to that. The middle school language that says teachers may allow usage of cell phones for instructional activities, I think that's a place where we really set up our folks to have that greater inconsistency. I personally would like for this to be removed because we have one-on-one devices.

[01:00:27] So if students are needing to use devices for instructional purposes, they have computers. So this is a space where you take it out to do a kahoot and you can't put it back in. Before you know it, you've got the administrator being called, et cetera.

[01:00:43] So I would like that consideration. Secondly, can you share, because I didn't find it in time, what occurs if a student is using their cell phone in the bathroom and they're found? Let's say they are filming a fight and you know exactly who did it. What's the consequence?

[01:01:00] Because they don't know. That would be a principal's discretion, right, based on whatever they find. There's not a mandatory consequence for that act, but it would fall under, you know, inappropriate use of devices.

[01:01:16] It could be causing a disruption based on what they filmed. So it really leaves discretion up to principals. Okay. And I'm going to voice my earlier concern on that. But I do want to take that a step forward because we do know that there's a whole different world in which these interactions are filmed and posted.

[01:01:35] I would like for us to treat that separately and differently, where students who are filming these fights and posting these fights, I would like some stronger language there in lieu of letting that be discretionary. But I'll come back.

[01:01:51] How will you be evaluating this consistency? I know Ms. Anderson mentioned it earlier, but I don't think I heard from your end. We'll have the trainings. How will you evaluate consistency of action in our schools? Yeah, that's a hard question for me to answer right now, right, because we haven't done that in the past.

[01:02:11] We're not in schools every day, so we don't see what happens and the actions that follows when something does happen, right? The way we know that there are some inconsistencies is by what we see at the hearings office because those make it to us to see. We do look at our discipline, you know Shannon has a report that we'll be presenting soon That shows discipline in our schools And you know you can make inferences based on some schools have a lot of discipline Some schools have no discipline, you know in the system So that's something we would have to definitely sit down as a team and figure out how we could manage the consistency or the

[01:02:49] lack of by our school teams. Dr. Reed, that would be something that I would be very interested in. I definitely think what Ms. Anderson mentioned regarding the hearings office, that's a great step, but we also need to evaluate what's happening at the school because otherwise the training is just throwing it against the wall and hoping it will stick. So how are we evaluating that stickiness?

[01:03:11] We need to be able to do that. Yes, ma'am. I think that there is a target-rich environment on that topic and we've actually talked about that in a um a variety of meetings recently uh not the least of which are re-entry conference plans and making sure there's a division-wide template and that there's a circle back for those that they actually get refiled with the hearings office so that we know that there is a follow-up right like so i i think that um the consistency obviously is an

[01:03:48] accountability topic so one we're very aware of and we'll get on it right thank you This may be an area in which I offer a follow-on as we go through the process a little bit I I do have two more questions. Hopefully. I'll have another chance I'll give you another chance Dr. Anderson. I have a I have a Mrs. Lady to be followed by Madam Vice Chair Okay, um, so I just want to share that you know Sometimes people are watching these and to get a text from teacher that says Robin We appreciate your perspective keep speaking the truth Because I do think I do represent what's going on in the school Because I know a lot of people at that level not not saying that everyone else doesn't but

[01:04:28] And to the phone thing, you know, I think the big issue too is they're they're they're on their person all the time They're in the bathrooms. I we every time you walk in a bathroom in a high school every kid has their phone It's an impossible thing to to manage mean so of course it's and what's your option?

[01:04:46] You take the phone and then you're in a situation where you've got to you know put it lock it up in the safe and whatever I just, and the other thing I'm going to go back to you, I'm going to go back to what my colleague Mr. Frisch talked about, which was the vaping. You can't test it, and it's, to me, the fact that we have 6th graders, 7th and 8th graders vaping, absolutely there needs to be something harsher done.

[01:05:10] They have to, we have to get their attention, okay? So I'm going to go back to the fact, to me, there's, vaping is no different than marijuana, and I think that there needs to be a harsher penalty related to that, and here's the reality. maybe that will help the cell phone problem maybe it will because they won't be able to to take advantage of being in the bathrooms or vaping you know often where they because that's the disruption it's very very very disruptive learning environment and while it might be more referrals to the to hearings office you know I think that historically going back to two boards

[01:05:46] ago when this was more rigid we we had we didn't have the problem we have today I mean it's just it's it's just it's cutting out of hand the other thing about the phones thing is i really want our system to dig down more into clearinghouse data um because we have kids filling out of college who show up and they don't have responsibility around it um or any technology for that matter um they have the the the academic skills to succeed but they don't have the other um and then the may and shale i worked for a principal who was absolutely on top of that and was consistent in required consistency i worked for a principal who this shall meant let's

[01:06:23] not did it work and we can't have that which is another reason why we have to address this man shell and I think that sometimes we have to go back and make the change to shell but again maybe not everywhere in the document thank you mother Russia so I would support a survey only if it's surveyed our teachers I don't think that we're going to get valuable information of just resurreying some people I also think about the tremendous efforts that happened for our strategic planning work and we talked to a lot of people the students filled out those surveys, they were participants. I mean this is a bigger

[01:07:02] question about how do we get meaningful input from our stakeholders. So whether it's this, whether it's you know whatever the number of things that we do get feedback from, budget, the CIP, and so I'd really like the superintendent to to think about that and come to us with you know how are we going to consistently make sure that all the voices or a lot of voices from the stakeholder groups but especially teachers, always teachers. The cell phones. I'm probably more strict than other parents.

[01:07:31] I have a 14-year-old. I set her things on her phone. She can't use it. So are we at the point where we need to ask parents instead of signing the SR&R, it's here's the steps to set up your phone and check it. I mean, I'm not trying to be a big brother here, but the teachers, everyone's trying to do what they can do. And unless parents want us to spend our time policing cell phones rather than teaching academic content and ensuring students are safe, we're going to need more help from our families. We're just going to. So how do we do that? How do we

[01:08:05] work as school board members to be ambassadors for that? But what's going to make it happen? And I don't think we should change the cell phone use policy. As Dr. King said, let's let it go for another -- let's let it run for another year or so. Let's see what happens. We just did it. I'm not in favor of changing it. And I think having the middle schoolers have less capabilities, they learn. Two years, they learn the good habits that get them to high school where they earn that privilege of how to use it well. And I agree with Dr.

[01:08:31] Anderson that we should not include the part about flexibility to use in the classroom because I've seen that used different ways as well. Overall, I'm in favor of directives not suggestions regarding may and shall. Clear directives. Thank you. Ms. Mayer, can I respond to one thing you said about teachers?

[01:08:49] Yes, please. 13,148 total that responded in 2023 when we made the big changes, 29.7% came from teachers. We did hear from them in regards to the changes that we were made, and the responses this year were about changes that were made last year.

[01:09:12] Any other board member for second round? Okay. Mrs. St. John Conning, to be followed by Mrs. Seismar Heiser. What I wanted to go to in terms of the vaping, and I've had several discussions with students that are so frustrated because they can't use the bathroom.

[01:09:38] Bathrooms are closed. In a high school, there's one bathroom open. That's ridiculous. I mean, not only is it inconvenient when you're changing, you know, classes that that's when you can go. I mean, it could lead to medical issues. So, and a lot of it is the vaping. It's a lot of what's going on in the bathrooms.

[01:09:54] and yes you can't use your cell phone in the bathroom but come on let's be realistic I mean I'm going to be honest I have gotten things forwarded to me from parents whose kids are in the middle school where there was a filming of a fight and as a school board member you should know this and it's from a middle school that's supposed to have restricted but they find a way they find a way so let's let's be realistic about that but the one thing I do want to go to is I looked up the use of nicotine products in Virginia. And according to the Code of Virginia, no person less than 21 years of age shall purchase, attempt, or purchase, or possess any tobacco product,

[01:10:30] including but not limited to cigarettes, and it goes on to vaping. So why we can't just have the same policy for vaping since we can't test it? Like, it is illegal for kids under 21 to have any nicotine products. So why we can't just say, let's just get rid of vaping? I mean, that's causing a lot problems. So that's, and from a very personal level, in terms of the addictive qualities of nicotine and the fact that on my husband's side of the family, there has been an, there have been a lot of cancer deaths due to tobacco, you know, and so that's just another health issue that we

[01:11:07] have to look at. We can't police anybody. We're not the, you know, we can't be the nanny state, but at the same time, if our kids, I work in an elementary school, we have found vapes on kids as young as third grade so come on guys this is the reality thank you um thank you um i really appreciate um what all my colleagues have had to say i wanted to lift up a couple other things i think it's so important what you're talking about with the training and the scenario-based

[01:11:41] training because we did a lot of changes a year ago um and i think there's it's hard for me i will say to know what is training and what needs to be tightened up what needs to be changed with just a year under our belts right and so I think it'll be very helpful you know whatever change I'm making this year to still have that training to come back and say okay this was a training issue here issues we're still seeing that we actually maybe need to address through the SRNR so and I think as you look at that the shell in May should be an important part of that consideration right like where is it a training issue versus where is it we really need to be prescriptive I do agree with self-defense I think that should be a shell to be perfectly honest I

[01:12:21] I think it's all it is saying they shall take it into account. It doesn't mean they have to actually determine it was self-defense, but I feel uncomfortable with saying you can decide to take it into account if you want to, as opposed to the shall may, which is this is what you shall do to consequence.

[01:12:38] I think there's a difference between that, so I do think it should be a shall for self-defense. I will say that I think in terms of serving, I want to make sure our teacher voices heard, because I've heard from a lot of teachers.

[01:12:53] I wanna make sure that we really understand what's going on in the classroom. I wanna make sure we're hearing from a variety of stakeholders too. Some of these prescriptions end up being more difficult. I will say when you have neurodivergent students that we don't understand well in our schools.

[01:13:10] So I think there's a training aspect to that as well. I think it's hard. There's a lot of changing happening. So I will just kind of leave it at that. I think I'd be very curious to see with all these changes, the additional training impacts the inconsistencies that we're seeing. I also think in addition to training there's an empowerment aspect. I hear a lot from principals and teachers saying they're not allowed to do these things, they're not allowed to, and I look at the SNR and say you are allowed to. So I'm wondering in addition to training of what you can do, empowering to say and it's okay to do that. I think that's an important piece of it.

[01:13:47] Okay, I have two board members for second go back. They are Dr. Anderson, Mr. Chairman. anybody else? Okay, I have Dr. Anderson. I think generally I hear the conversation and I'm glad that the public is having the opportunity to hear it, which is why I would like to say can we hold off on canceling the second work session because now that people have

[01:14:23] had a chance to hear, they might be reaching out to us with things that we want to raise back in this room in terms of the SRNR. But Dr. Reed, I would love to just hear from you a little bit in terms of where do you kind of see our division heading? Because we know that things are happening at a younger and younger level. Are we heading towards a zero tolerance policy? Can you just speak a little bit in terms of what your vision is on this end? Thank you, Dr. Anderson. I think that we all have the same vision, and that is that students are safe and healthy in their classroom

[01:14:57] so they can learn. When students don't feel safe in school, learning's impacted. So I think right now we're still coming out of sort of this COVID experience and I tend to be a little old school. I think that behavior needs to be consequented. We're at the beginning stages of moving forward with restorative justice which is not an alternative to discipline. It is in addition to discipline. It's that making it right part of discipline but there have to be consequences for

[01:15:30] choices, good and bad, right? So I think what we're trying to find now is that sweet spot of what makes the most sense. Zero tolerance has shown relatively, I mean, it depends on the topic area, but it's very difficult. I think there are some absolutes, and I think the team has put several of those forward. I think the board discussion around those will help provide feedback for the team to be clear about which things need to still be a little tighter and which things a little less tight. I do think though as we move forward

[01:16:05] we have a number of new principles as well and when you have new principles that perhaps have less experience I think the more clear and the less flexibility the better and there's some topic areas where honestly flexibility is not helpful for the team. We all need to be clear about what the expectations are. So, you know, I think, again, the vision is to have a safe and healthy school experience for every student. And currently, you know, we're not 100% there.

[01:16:37] We've had some incidents that are troubling and some responses to those incidents that are troubling. So as we become aware of those, we address those. And I think this summer, again, we're going to reinforce what I think the scenario training makes all kinds of sense because it has us around the table calibrating practice. But I would hope to see less and less of the disparate responses moving forward. Thank you. I appreciate that. You know, I'm a more traditional parent as well, but I also want to be sure that we're being mindful of the trajectory that this sets

[01:17:12] for some of our students. That's a conversation that I'd like for us to also hold as we are LEVYING OUT THE CONSEQUENCES AND YOU SHOULD. THERE SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY CONSEQUENCES FOR WHAT YOU DO. WE ALL HAVE IT. SO THANK YOU FOR THAT. THE OTHER THING I WANT TO RAISE IS GOING BACK TO THE SURVEY, WHO WE'RE TALKING TO, I APPRECIATE THE 13,000 NUMBER, BUT GIVING THAT IN CONTEXT OF OUR GREATER POPULATION, IT IS A VERY SMALL PARTICIPATION RATE. SO AGAIN, WE HAVE TO HAVE THAT BE IN CONTEXT. AND IF WE ARE GOING TO DO A SURVEY OF TEACHERS, I THINK WE SHOULD BUY OURSELVES TIME TO MAKE IT A ROBUST

[01:17:50] survey. I believe two years ago we didn't vote on the SRNR until June in 2022. So if that will give us, if that's an opportunity to give us more time, then I'd like for us to take it in order to make the best decision, not just the most expedient decision. I'd like to get a sense of Dr. Anderson, can I just say that June causes a lot of issues on the back end when it comes to having it printed and getting in place by July one you know principals were concerned about the timing of the printing and the training that has to be done they have to adjust their practices

[01:18:29] based on any changes that we made that's why we wanted it earlier this year so that we could avoid that for next year fair enough that makes sense thank you for raising that the other thing that I want to make sure that I get a sense of because I've got lists okay am I going to do a follow on am i going to be in of do an amendment there have been a lot of things that have been raised here regarding various points what should i expect as a board member are there going to be changes that you all will accept do we need to give consensus what is our next step with some of these things as a meeting manager what i have on my mind of doing it after we are done with all

[01:19:05] the q a and comments i'll be seeking a board's guidance to staff on several issues whether we we should ask them to make further changes to what they have on their mind. And then, if any board member disagrees with the final product from the stand members, then they can come up with an amendment to that.

[01:19:27] - Much appreciated, thank you. And I agree with Robin about the cell phones. - Okay, I now have Mr. Chairman and Madam Vice Chair, Seismatizer. Anybody else? And I have Mrs. Lady, anybody else?

[01:19:46] want to join the wagon. All right. Mr. Chairman. So my understanding is that during a recent high school bathroom remodeling, when they took the pipes up for the new toilets, they were filled with vaping cartridges, which was one of the problems with the plumbing in the restroom. So it's unfortunate that the state is making it harder for us. Delegate Siebold had a bill this

[01:20:14] session that was killed that would have pushed the distance between schools and places where these materials can be purchased but it was killed. So hopefully we get some relief there next year. But what works when it comes to nicotine is making it inconvenient. Students who use vaping devices as I sound like an 80 year old are four times more likely to smoke regular cigarettes as they get older.

[01:20:45] And even though hard drug use by teenagers is at record lows, use of tobacco products, including vape devices, vapes, went up almost 40% before the pandemic.

[01:21:04] If we don't get a handle on this, we are going to contribute to the first uptick in tobacco usage by a population since the big crackdown on tobacco started in the 80s. That would be a tremendous mistake. We can only do what we can only do.

[01:21:21] So I hope that we will show that there are consequences for this. On the subject of consequences, I think the reason that the may versus shall become so important is that we end up with disparate impact between populations when we don't provide clear guidance.

[01:21:38] That's what, you know, ballooned the penalties in certain populations previously was that certain principles were, you know, dispensing punishment unfairly compared to other principles and within their own schools and so you can take that out of the equation by putting good rules in place to do that and then finally i think we need to proceed as planned on the timeline for the srnr and that if there are suggestions to make next year's process better or more robust with community impact input i think that's something that we can talk about in the months ahead in

[01:22:09] advance of next year's process thank you mr chairman i have a madame vice chair so i'm glad it's been raised that students will learn best when they feel safe and that's why i'm so glad that we're doing our social-emotional learning and especially for those younger years and so when I hear people saying why are you spending time on that it's because if kids don't feel safe and they don't practice the habits of being an upstander being confident learning to say no to things that aren't good for them or you know healthy for them that's only going to grow so um I just wanted to make that connection I do think the consequences have to be real um and all the

[01:22:45] matters that we've talked about I mean I say it as a parent and I think from what I've heard in schools. When kids see the results of their actions, that's when behavior changes. I would like to verify, Superintendent Reed, what data the school board receives about discipline.

[01:23:00] I know we receive a few and we certainly see the appeals that come to us, but in a moment I would love that information, please, what reports and stuff. The other thing that's missing from this conversation is the role of our public health officials. I think, you You know, I've heard a lot about what the school is doing and hosting and educating.

[01:23:20] But what I'm not -- I don't see the presence in our schools of those resources. And on a related note, and I do need to check this, but, you know, we had been budgeted for school nurses. The county had budgeted for that, and the school board had advocated for that.

[01:23:37] And I'm not aware what the fill rate is for all those positions, but certainly those public health officials can be partners in addition to the staff that are already doing this public health work, which is not necessarily what they're trained for, though they're trained for communicating with students.

[01:23:53] And I just want this SRNR to include some relief. So some relief for teachers, some relief to students. Parents most often tell me they want their kids to feel safe. Often it's related to potential gun violence. But they don't want their kids in the hallways when there's a fight, and they're worried about their kids, especially if they're younger kids.

[01:24:12] So what relief can this version of the SRNR bring, even if we're going to know that there's some other changes to come so that the question the thing about relief is for my colleagues but dr. Reed I'd love to know about the data that we receive in terms of reports and or better um you know what you like the dashboards miss Marin I'll answer that question since I have it right here the school board will receive a report twice a year on the discipline incidents that happen in our school system by subgroups and so you we are working on first semesters report now and you should receive it sometime soon.

[01:24:48] And then we will do one again at the end of the year that you will receive as well. You're welcome. Okay. I have a Mr. Seisman Hydra to be followed by Ms. Lady. Thank you. As far as the vaping issue, our current version of the SRNR, it's the May language, I believe, in terms of principals may treat vaping the same as marijuana, but they don't have to.

[01:25:12] I think that may be an area where the May shall language will be looked at or maybe it's a training issue I don't know but I do know that there is I just looked it up I don't know which page it's on is that correct yes a level two three so the principles may determine that it's worthy of a referral to the superintendent's hearing office based on the circumstances or may not that may be an area we need to tighten up that may shell language and I would recommend maybe looking at that or maybe that's in addition something on the training side of things right if they feel like the school is unsafe and the kids can't use the bathrooms, that may be a discretion to principals that they already have, and

[01:25:49] maybe we need to tighten that language up. I don't know. I'm just lifting up that I think there's already -- even if the language doesn't change, there's a path, and that goes back to my empowerment point. But I also think that may be a spot where we change it to shall. I think that's a question for the board to discuss or maybe your staff to discuss.

[01:26:06] That's the question. Dr. Reed, did you want to -- I think that's an obvious place to have that adjustment. Yes, ma'am. I think so, too, and I think that would be an easy adjustment to change that to shall for vaping, and I think that would help, to your point, making our school safer and taking some of that discretion out.

[01:26:22] I do want to lift up a couple things that, as we're doing this, as we're looking through this, I was at a recent PTSA meeting. I believe Dr. Anderson was there also and Mr. McLevine, and there were parents who, as they put it, had a forever 17-year-old in the opioid crisis, and one of the things that they felt contributed to the forever 17 year old issue or reality was being removed very quickly from his school being suspended for 10 days without the support without the proper transition back referral to CSB which has wait lists and doesn't have services I just wanted to lift up that there are consequences on both sides which is why I think we need to be very mindful as we

[01:26:59] go through here on the maize and shells to find that good balance between tightening things up empowering our principles but also understanding what happen to some of the kids who are suffering from a medical disease of addiction. And how do we find that balance? I don't have a good answer. I don't think society has, but I think as we look through the maize and chowls, that's something to keep in mind, as well as I'm just going to say, until we have a neurodiversity-affirming culture, I think that it will actually lead the other direction for some of our students. So I think that's a balance we need to consider. But I think it's very important to go through that and tighten this up, because I do think we are not there at all in terms of

[01:27:34] having a safe school environment. And I think the last thing I'll say on this is that I want our students to feel safe in our schools. I want our teachers and principals to feel empowered to ensure that their school buildings are safe. I want them to be able to know, because they're in the buildings every day, what that is. I want our teachers to feel empowered and know people will have their back. I don't necessarily know how to make that happen, but that's what we need. Thank you, Ms.

[01:28:10] lady okay quick Google search of can you test a vape comes down to a urine test a blood test or hair follicle test which we don't have the ability to do I'm just going to share a quick conversation I just had because it speaks to the inconsistency and that is I asked an AP do you turn all vapes over the SRO no I take a picture and throw them away do you hand over marijuana to the SRO nope he said he just throws them away and he doesn't need them I've tried I honestly don't think there's a protocol and there definitely should be If there is, I don't know about it and it's not publicized.

[01:28:45] Secondly, I personally think that it's out of control, that we should charge all kids with vapes. So I want to share that. I also want to say something. We should charge all kids, yeah. I also want to say something as a former drug and alcohol counselor to what my colleague just said about a forever 17-year-old.

[01:29:04] So when you start using, you emotionally stay the age you started. So if a young person starts smoking marijuana at 13 and has a consistent use of that marijuana and does not get clean until 17, 18, they physically look like a 17 or 18 year old but emotionally they have not engaged in their world.

[01:29:24] And I've seen this with, you know, like I said, I did the work as a drug and alcohol counselor and I've seen this with my friends who've, it's too common that kids have these issues with addiction. So I do think that it's incumbent upon us to help address that at a very early age.

[01:29:42] And then I also wanted to say, talking about parents, I don't think that we require parents to engage around things that happen to the extent that we should be engaging them, requiring them to come to parent meetings. It could even be the first offense is out of school for two days or the parent has to commit with the student to do some sort of training, and they learn how to search bedrooms and find where these things are hidden, because we do know that our kids are pretty savvy with that.

[01:30:09] And the may and shale also concerns me, because if it's a may, and they do refer to hearings office, there are situations where the hearings office doesn't take the case. Can I stay a comment on that, especially the last part?

[01:30:26] Well, there are times when we tell the principal if the misconduct is a manifestation of the student's disability and there's no indication of serious harm or threat of serious harm, The principal is asked whether they are going to withdraw the case.

[01:30:48] If they proceed with the hearing and we determine that the elements of serious harm or threat of serious harm are not met, then they're required to remove that referral from the student's record. When SRNR mandates a school-based consequence, then we do direct school officials that it It says they must impose an in-school suspension as opposed to a referral and therefore we would not take that discipline case because a referral is not mandated and SRNR mandates a school-based consequence.

[01:31:25] Which is a shall versus a may? Okay, I have two additional board members wanting to have a further go back. I have two Andersons. Anybody else?

[01:31:41] Sorry. Okay. Anybody else? We have three members. Starting with Dr. Anderson to be followed, okay? If you could, and then we have Sandy Anderson.

[01:31:58] - So I have a question. As we're collecting data, is there a way to actually start collecting data for what our, I mean, we're doing a great job of talking about the fact that if a kid doesn't read by third grade that we've got negative outcomes for the rest of their lives. Can we have some data related to whether or not the kids that are consistently sent to the hearing office actually have negative outcomes related to graduation?

[01:32:21] I mean, because this is part of what I'm concerned about, the way that this conversation is going. We're not giving kids an opportunity to actually learn and learn from the consequence and the mistake that they made. And I want to make sure that we are not so stringent on the consequence related to a specific offense that we are creating a pathway for a child to not be successful related to the outcome.

[01:32:44] So I am extremely concerned. I understand that we need to create safe environments. as someone who also graduated from an FCPS school, I guarantee you there was smoking around our bathrooms. They were smoking all over the school all the time. It did not, it was not necessarily something that I picked up on purpose.

[01:33:01] And so I think that the education aspect of it is definitely something I think these kids and parents need to be informed about what vaping, why vaping is such a significant issue. I think part of the reason that instances have risen is not because of availability. I think that's part of it. But I also think that it's because people misunderstand that they think that it's a safer version of nicotine and it's not true. And so I think that there are ways that we can increase education as a as a deterrent to some of these things the same way as has been done related to smoking for years. But I am very concerned about the idea that we would immediately refer kids to a

[01:33:40] hearing after watching what's going on and movement from schools and all the things and the negative outcomes that I know happen when you move children from school to school dependent on what the result is. So I would like us to just keep that a tiny bit in mind as we're talking about these tiny humans that are making mistakes. Mrs. Anjan Cunning. So again, we've shifted to the vaping and we've got to look at the reality. We're fighting big tobacco.

[01:34:17] They, exactly what Ms. Anderson said, they're making these things that taste like bubble gum. They do seem like if they're not anything that could be harmful, and they are, in fact, more harmful. And it's sad when you see these young kids.

[01:34:34] It's an addiction. It's a problem. It is a medical issue. It's our responsibility. Our kids and our staff can't fight back against big tobacco. It's our responsibility to look at that. with the caveat that we with consequences we also have to have a commitment to ensure that we have supports for our students and for that that issue i i do know that what i've done as a family liaison is had programming for parents and our school has amazing programs where they have examples that show the vapes and i've partnered with the health department to have

[01:35:13] these programs we just have to make that more robust and it's hard yes we need more parent engagement some of these parents are completely unaware of what's going on and not because they're bad parents just because kids are good at hiding stuff particularly in certain populations so i do believe that we have to have consequences but we also have to have a commitment to support these kids in ways that our entire community we can't do it alone our entire community can do it we have to do better our kids can't fight big tobacco our staff can't fight big tobacco

[01:35:48] and as mr fricks said we're going to have an increase on our watch i i can't i can't i just can't in my good conscience deal with that when i sit at this table and can help do something about it okay i don't see any more both members other than mrs seismorizer as the last one other than the last minute um picking up what on miss anderson said is it possible to get some data around how long students when they are referred to the hearings or staying out of school from

[01:36:24] sometimes what i see or homebound or it's sometimes weeks they're kind of in this in-between place is it possible to get some data just in general around long-term consequences is it possible to we could look at this holistically we're talking about the sr and r here but what do we need to do in terms of our when we are transitioning a student out of school what are we doing around those transition support services to make sure that as miss anderson said that we we can also ensure that these students are getting the supports they need so that they can learn from the consequences, right?

[01:36:55] Consequences for little people without some sort of ways to learn from them may or may not work. So it would be helpful to me to have some of that additional information in making this decision because otherwise it feels like it's a one-sided decision without having some more of that information.

[01:37:13] So if we can get some information on other things, we talk about trainings for staff, what are we doing to help our students learn from the consequences? Sizemore Heisman, just to be clear, you want data that once a student is referred to the hearing office, how long that process takes before they're actually in school again?

[01:37:33] Yeah, and whatever in school that means, whatever program they end up, and also what supports are in place in between to help them learn from the consequences and continue their education. So then we have an idea of how they're learning. Because the last thing we want to do is move them, whether it's an alternative program or not, and have them continue right down this path.

[01:37:49] The purpose of consequences is hopefully to change behavior. I'd like to get an idea of what we're doing to help change that behavior. All right. To my great delight, I have two more board members, and each of them will have one minute.

[01:38:10] I'm going to go with Dr. Anderson to the right, Mrs. Leidy. So I agree with what we're discussing. I also think that there are certain things that if referred to the hearings office, that there's not a victim, that it's okay sometimes to let kids continue to go to school until that process runs its course.

[01:38:26] I think we can evaluate the process of being referred to the hearings office with this in mind, we want consequences, we want people to learn, but maybe it's not going to be a reassignment. And I also want to hit harder on the fact that I believe that we have to engage parents.

[01:38:42] In lieu of a referral to the hearing's office, it could be the parents have to attend with their child certain things. But my point is, we need to get the parents' attention and get the kids' attention. And so it doesn't necessarily -- but we have to have consistency upon how we're going to deal with it. So I just want to share that. I do -- I am sensitive to what we're saying because I want our kids to be successful but I do know that we need parents just they're not aware they can't they're not aware you can order you know a Percocet from Amazon and it could have fentanyl in it they just there's so much that they don't know.

[01:39:14] I'm glad to kind of follow that because one of the things I wanted to raise is how much we're paying attention to the populations that are impacted by our SRNR. I know the disproportionality data was one that was shared with the board some point ago I don't think I've seen one recently but that would be information that I would be very interested in having so because we know if you're black and brown and poor this is your srnr for the most part because resource people have a way around it so i want to make sure that i put that in the room and um one last thing thank you for raising the me um the meeting from annandale

[01:39:49] high school last week um i know that the parent raised this as a point and it's not all on us but i just want to put it in the room for consideration when we are providing resources that are from the county how accessible are those resources because we are all only trying to help and we're just say hey call here go here go there and when parents do that they're find that they are unable to even get through to even access someone or when they do there's no help there to be received I just want don't want to get in a place where we're kind of raising hopes with what we're passing out without really knowing whether or not they're going to yield the results

[01:40:26] that we're intending thank you thank you so much for that we're gonna give us have some guidance I'm gonna start with a survey questions first I'm not inviting any debate by the way just raising your hand as to the survey as the survey basically we have a three options three options I'm gonna ask you

[01:40:55] no survey two teachers only three full survey I'll start with a no survey if If there are amongst seven of us, if there are four supporting those surveys, then I'm not going to be asking you the other two questions related to survey.

[01:41:19] Okay? And, okay, with that in mind, raise your hand if you think you don't need any survey. Don't need any survey. Okay, that answers the question. Now, the survey's question is over.

[01:41:36] Now, we're going to go to the cell phone issue. Cell phone issue is, first is keep the rules and keep SRNR as is related to, hold. Point of order?

[01:41:52] Yes. Are we voting? No, we're not voting. It's just giving guidance. We're just giving guidance so that they could modify SRNR. I believe that we were planning on using the next steps document in order to do that. Yeah, I think that's the next steps as opposed to voting in this room. It was already sent to us.

[01:42:08] So I believe that we're going to use next steps to determine whether or not there's consensus. I think this is the next steps document, not a vote in the room. The next steps is an ask for information and so I think that is very different and it's actually listed right on there.

[01:42:25] It's an ask for information. I think what I'm hearing that Mr. Moon is trying to do is to give staff some guidance as to what to do with the feedback that we threw out today. We threw a lot of feedback. Whether they should make language changes in SRNR so that they could let us know whether Any board members want to come up with an amendment to consider, right?

[01:42:50] And we're not, I mean, what we do does not really bind us. It's just like giving a guidance for their work. And the extra step is the extra step. It's just separate from this. So continuing with... Can I just, can you just get me to look up the next steps to read what it says?

[01:43:07] Because I feel like we're going very fast here on this one. So I, because we've done, used next steps before to actually give this kind of guidance to staff. It hasn't just been information regardless of what it says. So I'm a little uncomfortable going this fast on giving guidance, especially with four of our colleagues not here.

[01:43:36] I'm going to continue on with the cell phone. Cell phone, there seems to be either keep as is is one option. Another one is make the high school rules same as middle school is another one.

[01:43:52] And third one is, I think the third one was somewhere in between. i'm forgetting the third one i thought i wrote it i had requested for the removal of the teacher allowing cell phones during the instruction hours right modifying and that's at the middle school language i don't know how anything else would lay okay so those are three i it's again we're not forwarding on this just giving guidance whether you know still wants to do a further work

[01:44:28] on this mr moon yes can you please repeat this okay first one get them first one is keep the cell phone rules as is those who give that guidance to staff at this point in time raise your hand keep the cell phone rules as is raise your hand okay we're gonna keep them as is for the time being and if any board member wants to propose an amendment obviously they have a right to do so

[01:45:00] going forward for the time being we're just gonna keep them as is and the next one is a vape versus whether we should make the consequences of using vape same as smoking marijuana or treat it as if it is marijuana. I think there was a debate about that. So, keeping the rules as is one.

[01:45:25] Point of order, I'm sorry. We're having a second work session, right? I will decide that. Well, I think it's hard to, I think that should be the first question we decide because if we're having a second work session, I think then we have space to have these conversations there before making these decisions but otherwise because again a lot of our colleagues aren't here today if we're having a second work session they may have a chance to share their voice so i don't know if we're not going to have a second work session then maybe this getting some consensus makes sense but otherwise okay it doesn't make sense that's a point point point well taken

[01:46:01] point well taken yeah mr chairman so i've looked at the next step document and the governance manual The language used is should. There's no shall. And if there's anything we know coming out of this meeting is the difference between may and shall.

[01:46:19] And so we have used next steps before for similar purposes, and the argument could be made that the request for information is a change, and that's what I need to vote on this document. So it could be done as part of the next steps document Because the governance manual is not explicit in what material may or may not be included in the next, next topic.

[01:46:42] I'm only a meeting manager for this person. What happens after this is Mr. Chair and Madam Vice Chair, they will do what they need to do. All right, I'm just going to manage this part. Can I make one other point? I also asked for some data, and I don't know if I'm ready to give my opinion on some of these questions without the data and information that I'd ask for from staff.

[01:47:03] So I think that's difficult. That sounds like a next step thing, but okay, let's continue on. I have eight minutes before my time is up. Vape, keep the rules as is, is one, another is, treat it as if it is marijuana.

[01:47:22] Point of order. Yes. Are we going to have another meeting or not? Because I am not ready to make this discussion one way or the other without knowing if we're having another meeting or not and getting the data I asked for. Okay, I'll respect that, so let's vote on that first, whether we want to have another work session on the April 2nd. Those in favor of having another work session, raise your hand. Okay. So we'll have another work session and how much time you're going to assign a lot to that will be up to the Mr. Chair. With that, let's go back. Vaping versus marijuana.

[01:47:54] Keep the rules for the timing as is. Raise your hand. Okay. That's fine. I just want to give a step, but, you know, guidance as to what to be done next.

[01:48:12] may i ask a question um i i appreciate what's being done here and i'd like to cut and i i also i'm in a little bit of a fog with some of the questions not all of them some i'm ready to vote right now and some not as much and this last one is one so i guess my question is what would be our expectation since we're going to have a next work session of what staff is going to do between now and then outside of the requests for additional information you've asked for some data you've asked for some data do we have any other expectations of them between now and the next work session because if we do not

[01:48:49] outside of the data requests then maybe we don't need to engage in this as intense as intentionally as we are doing right now it sounds like we are doing next steps and extra step could determine the data yes mr chairman to dr anderson's point one thing that might make uh the exercise we're going through now more useful would be if if the rough consensus here is that x should happen perhaps that isn't a dictate that the document be amended perhaps it is a dictate that staff would

[01:49:25] consider that as like okay here's what the language would look like uh if this is the direction the board wants to go yes massage major i think dr reed wanted to say something well i just i want to be really thoughtful about what the board expects on this it's an important foundation for the success of our students. I also want to be mindful that in the voting or the consensus taking today that there have been several times where what happens the next steps actually looks

[01:50:01] very different than perhaps the conversation at this table and it could come to pass because it has the staff are asked to do one thing with one document and a different thing here and I just would want to know at some point which would trump which in terms of if we get different direction on a similar topic for example so i think clarity around what you need for the next meeting is important and because we want to provide it and clearly we'll do whatever it is that you wish to move forward i just think for us as staff it's going to be important

[01:50:41] to get a sort of a clearer sense of if something's on the table or off the table that would help us as long as it doesn't come back on the table as part of next steps in a different way because then we're trying to respond to both of those practices and I think at times it's been a little confusing. Dr. Reed, at this point since we're not voting on SRNR until May 9th, I don't think we can consider anything off the table and just giving a general guidance to staff for further work if they need to do any further work at this point but

[01:51:16] we're going to have a another work session April 2nd yes I guess I'm very confused why we're getting feedback right here the next steps process was to do that and ensure the feedback especially direction to staff on whatever information or they may come back to us or changes they may make it It was put in place so it was clear that it was a board direction with seven or more people saying this is what I want staff to do.

[01:51:41] And so I think I would put out that perhaps we should continue using that process and whatever information or even suggestions of please come back with an SRNR that has two different sets of language for us to consider at the next work session. That could be something in the next steps, and if it has seven or more people who say we should do it, then staff can come back with alternate language, perhaps, or, you know, option one, option two, however they may want to do it, but I think perhaps if, I know I would maybe appreciate some extra time to think about what other things I may or may not want from staff.

[01:52:16] You know, I want to be mindful of staff time as well, and so I would maybe perhaps put on an alternate suggestion to colleagues here that if there is changes that colleagues would like to see as drafts in the SRNR, additional information they would like, or any other work that they would like staff to do, that we utilize the next steps process that we have in place, and that way we ensure that there's seven or more colleagues who would like to get that information or whatever it may be, and we give clear direction to staff, and that way we are not trying in this moment to figure that out. If that would work for staff in terms of direction, I just would maybe give that

[01:52:52] as an alternate suggestion since we're, I know, almost out of time as well. Okay, I'm just going to continue doing with the next two minutes. Just one last thing is we're going to do, as I understand, we're going to do the next steps as we have been doing, and I don't know what that's going to contain, but based upon today's conversation, I just want to wrap up our last point dealing with the self-defense self-defense i just want to see amongst seven of eight of us

[01:53:22] today how many of us are in favor of keeping the language as is versus okay those who want to keep the language as is raise your hand okay then that's the guidance so far we are i don't think we had a no or an abstain vote we just had a yes so i think if we're going to do some sort of consensus we need. I know, but it was only, I don't think it's a no, or I think there's an abstain part of that vote that we need. Okay, those opposing, raise your hand. Abstaining, raise your

[01:54:00] hand. Opposed, not changed. So keeping them as is, okay? All right. It's only a guidance to staff, so staff will consider. Consider this as our feedback from this table. Well, can I ask a point of order? I'm sorry, I don't see any clarification. So when I recall what was proposed was, are you asking for a vote on what the staff stated or what they what they are suggested the staff suggested a change is that correct so are you asking does the board agree with what the staff proposed I stand corrected I'm just I'm

[01:54:39] asking I'm asking board members whether board members would agree with the steps recommendation that was my point okay if we could do that what I would appreciate that I have clarity now thank you okay I'll redo that and thank you thank you those who support steps recommendation related to self-defense raise your hand those who want the change to I think we talked about making a share raise your hand this is what you see those who are abstaining I mean

[01:55:14] obviously those abstaining okay all right so I just like to raise it I don't necessarily think a two and one or two to two vote when most of us abstaining should be considered direction oh it's not direction it's just a guidance or guidance I don't think it should be considered either until we have room for people to have their voices so I'm just gonna put that out there that I think when the majority is abstaining that is not guidance that's abstentions well and I again a point of order if I could be recognized sure okay so again I'm looking at the recommendation from slide 7 and it doesn't say anything about

[01:55:50] shall or may and I believe that was the option you offered so to me again the vote is does the board agree with the self-defense recommendation does the board agree with the staff's recommendation to follow video is recommendation to add our language on self-defense and according with video e guidelines so does the board agree with the staff's recommendation that's the question I don't know some of the board members raised the point that we should make that as a share that is why I brought that up right okay with that we have another work session April 2nd we're not doing any survey and I will

[01:56:28] take a lunch break until 1 o'clock thank you we will continue our work with a

[01:57:32] presentation of baseline goal 5 report data from staff we have this portion of the work session to go until 4:30 at most and we don't have to use of every many of that. I just want to note for the public that four school board members are missing for

[01:58:02] today's work session. Mr. Dunn and Mrs. Dixit are not feeling well today. Mr. McDaniel and Mr. Ryan McClendon, they are out of town on business. So with that, Dr. Reed. Thank you, Mr. Moon. It's my

[01:58:26] pleasure this afternoon to present Goal 5, which is one of our five goals that our community has shared are critical for our strategic plan. And to that end, I'll turn it over to our strategic planning team at this point to introduce those at the table. Ms. Neal, do you want to take care of that, please? Sure. Good afternoon, board members. I'm Morris Neal, the assistant superintendent for strategy planning and learning, and I am joined with the team of folks at this table as well well as at our side table and in the audience who are here to support today's conversation. I'll let folks introduce themselves as they're speaking. Today is

[01:59:06] the third of five baseline goal report presentations that we're bringing to the board this year. We previously provided a presentation and update on goal three which was our academic growth and excellence. We provided a presentation on goal one which was our strong start pre-k to 12 goal. On April 2nd there'll be a work session for goal two, which will focus on chronic absenteeism and discipline disproportionality. And in May, the final goal report will come to the board, which is goal four focused on equity and course taking patterns and enrichment and extracurricular activities. So the purpose of these baseline reports is to let the board and the public

[01:59:42] know our starting point with our new strategic plan goals with a focus on our year one priorities. It's important to note that the data we're presenting today really focuses in on the areas the division is aspiring to improve and isn't representative of all of the FCPS data by design. The information that we're sharing today represents our starting point and not the seven-year plan itself. The board is scheduled to vote on the goal five baseline report on April 11th as again the division's starting point for this work. Our objectives for today are to ensure the board has the information needed to approve the baseline report and to

[02:00:19] provide feedback to determine that based on what the data is telling us is the division taking the right steps through both our current and future strategies to move in a direction to achieve our goals for our strategic plan by the 2030. We look forward to hearing from the board anything we may have missed in our initial thinking that will better position the division to reach our goals for each and every one of our students. As a reminder to our public the board adopted the seven-year strategic plan in June of 2023 and the adopted plan includes the five student-centered goals with equity commitments as well as as measures for each of these five goals and pillars that serve as the foundation of operationalizing

[02:00:58] this work. In previous baseline reports, we shared a set of year one strategic plan priorities where we're aligning our school and department efforts to accomplish our goals. This set of annual priorities allows us to focus both resources and strategic efforts on a targeted set of outcomes.

[02:01:15] Within goal five, we're focused in on graduation equity. And what I mean when I say graduation equity is the understanding that each and every student should graduate on time, participating along the way in the most rigorous and meaningful courses that are engaging to them, and that they have a plan for success after graduation.

[02:01:36] Today's report we're going to be focusing in on the following areas, first we're going to look at graduation outcomes, so we'll look at on-time graduation and dropout information, we'll look at the types of diplomas that students are earning, and we'll also look at post-secondary plans and college enrollment.

[02:01:54] As a reminder to the public, these are baseline reports, FCPS uses a three-year calculation to define our baseline as a starting point for the work. When the board adopted the strategic plan, the measures were identified for each of these goals and then staff identified a set of metrics or data to use to monitor the progress towards these goals. In some cases we have metrics that are still under development as we create systems or tools to help us capture the data we'll need to show how the division is doing overall. And for our metrics you'll also see a set of final targets as well as targets for the end of this school year.

[02:02:27] Our annual report reporting, which will start next year, will provide the progress the division is making against these baseline data. Before we start our presentation and looking at the data, I do want to bring the board's attention and the public's attention to some intentional shifts in language. While VDOE refers to our students as English learners, FCPS is making that shift to multilingual learners and this asset-based language acknowledges that our students are gaining English in addition to the languages they already speak.

[02:02:58] So this is our first time making these changes in the goal reports, so I would ask that if we missed anything, we will certainly make sure we go back and make those adjustments. So with that, I'm going to turn this over to Dr. Wright, who's going to walk us through the first set of data. Thank you, Ms. Neal, and good afternoon to the board.

[02:03:15] My name is Dustin Wright, the Executive Director of Strategy and Planning. At this time, we're going to jump into some of the data that's reported in this baseline presentation around the idea of graduation outcomes. We want to start by grounding ourselves in where we are compared to the rest of the Commonwealth of Virginia. As you can see on the screen our on-time graduation rate in FCPS is 94 percent over our baseline years whereas in the rest of Virginia it's 92 percent and you can see the the parity in our dropout rate in FCPS compared to Virginia. For on-time graduation rate this expresses the percentage of students in a cohort who earned any state board recognized diploma within four years of entering high school for

[02:03:54] the first time and this also provides allowances for our multilingual learners and our students with ieps whose educational plans allow for additional years in the high school setting for our dropout rate we're calculating that in accordance with the the state dropout rate calculation that is a part of the accreditation process in this report on the i the concepts of on-time graduation and dropout rates we're looking at four specific metrics. For on-time graduation rate when we're thinking about all of our students we'll be using the concept of VDOE's on-time

[02:04:30] graduation rate and when we're looking at the performance of our schools we'll be thinking about VDOE's GCI requirements or graduation completion index and how many of our schools are meeting that level one accreditation. When we think about dropout rates again we'll be using V2E's dropout rate for considering how all of our students are doing and again at the school level we'll be using the state dropout rate requirements for level one accreditation. We're now going to look specifically at the topic of on-time graduation and think about this for all of our students and then look at some of our specific student groups. As a whole we can see some high

[02:05:08] level percentages and data points about the entire FCPS division on the screen. Overall 94% of our students are meeting this on-time graduation requirement but we can see there still exists significant disparities among some of our student groups we have a 21 point difference between our lowest performing student group for on-time graduation and the baseline for the entire division when we think about how our schools are doing with that gci accreditation requirement for the state 97 of our comprehensive high schools our alternative high schools have an alternative accreditation process but 97 percent of our comprehensive high schools are meeting that gci

[02:05:49] accreditation for level one in regards to the state's requirements when we start to think about how our students are doing overall you'll see a chart on the screen that presents our student data and this is also found on page 15 of our baseline report you can see that each student group is displayed on the screen. And for our students with on-time graduation, FCPS has set a final target for 90% or above for an on-time graduation rate. And overall, we have high levels of performance with this, with seven of our nine student groups already

[02:06:28] above that 90% rate. But we can see some significant gaps with our multilingual learners and our Hispanic students. Here are the specific numbers that were just displayed in that chart, and And additionally, the number of students that each group represents.

[02:06:45] So again, on page 15, we can learn a little bit more about those multilingual learners and Hispanic students. And we're hoping that by the end of this current school year, there'll be 5% gains for each of those groups. And thinking specifically about our multilingual learners, you can find more information about how those students are doing on the screen.

[02:07:06] The top chart takes the idea of how VDOE measures our multilingual learners for accreditation, which it includes our current multilingual learners and our former multilingual learners. So when we look at all of those together, there's a 73% on-time graduation rate.

[02:07:22] But to focus in and learn a little bit more about those students, we can see that our current multilingual learners, which are ELP levels one through four, our English language proficiency, and there's some detailed definitions of what that is. We can see that those groups, that graduation rate drops to 63%, but for our former multilingual learners you can see it at 98%.

[02:07:44] Thinking a little bit more specifically about this idea of our ELP learners, you can see on the bottom level the breakdown at each level of ELP. So for our levels ones and twos who have the least amount of language acquisition, we can see the graduation rates for those students.

[02:08:03] Looking more specifically at another student group, our students with disabilities, you You can see some information on the screen where we look at our on-time graduation rate at the top of the chart for all students and for our students with disabilities. And then the second row of the chart represents when we take the applied studies diploma option out of the calculation.

[02:08:23] So you can see that that shifts our on-time graduation rate to 93% for all students, but 84% for our students with disabilities. Students with disabilities may continue to pursue a standard diploma with or without accommodations even after they initially receive an applied studies diploma until they age out of a free and appropriate public education opportunity.

[02:08:43] There are several reasons why a student or family may choose to receive an applied studies diploma as an intermediate step even when their ultimate goal may be a standard diploma. Additionally with our students we want to think about the idea of intersectionality and so this is the idea that some of our students might be members in multiple groups and it helps us understand the relationships between those groups and so what you'll see is is some of our intersectionality data for our multilingual learners on the top and our students that are economically disadvantaged on the bottom.

[02:09:18] So to use an example, for our economically disadvantaged, we can see that our graduation rate for those students is 91% for our economically disadvantaged students. But when we think about students who are economically disadvantaged and also multilingual learners, we can see that drop to 76%.

[02:09:33] So there's some good information on this screen that helps us be able to specifically understand which students need the highest levels of support. To take that a little bit further, and we can stay with that example of economically disadvantaged students, another way of looking at the same information is what you see on that top row.

[02:09:52] Again, those same two data points. So 91% of our economically disadvantaged students are graduating on time. But when we think about those students who are also multilingual learners, we can see that it drops to 76. But when we can think about our economically disadvantaged students who are not multilingual learners, you can see that it's at 97%.

[02:10:12] So again, helping us understand that our multilingual learners that fall into that economically disadvantaged category is where we need to focus a significant amount of support. The second row is a similar analysis with our Hispanic students and how it interacts with our multilingual learner population.

[02:10:33] The last piece of data that we'll look at around the idea of on-time graduation is with our GCI or school level accreditation. and we can see that during those baseline years, 24 out of 25 or 97% of our comprehensive high schools met that accreditation level.

[02:10:50] The GCI index is used by VDOE for school accreditation and is calculated by assigning points to students in a graduating cohort based on their completion of a diploma, GED, certificate of completion, remaining in school or dropping out.

[02:11:06] So again, during this baseline year, We see that 97% where we are, but with our target being 100% of our schools. - At this point, we're gonna take a look at dropout data.

[02:11:22] As we all know, dropouts can have a significant negative impact on students, a lifelong negative impact, so this is an important metric FCPS is paying attention to as we prepare all of our students for success after they leave us. In looking at our baseline data for dropouts, you can see that overall 5% of our students dropped out in the baseline year.

[02:11:42] And there was, again, a 20-point difference between the student group with the highest dropout rates and the division average, so a significant gap. And then looking at that data for Level 1 accreditation, VDOE accreditation for dropouts, 88% of our comprehensive high schools met the requirements.

[02:12:00] So this slide provides a summary view of dropout rates by student groups, and this is on page 18 of your report if you're following along. FCPS has set a final target to ensure all students and all student groups are dropping out at or below 6%.

[02:12:16] As you can see from our data, overall, FCPS is already meeting our final targets. For all students, we have a 5% dropout rate currently, and then for six of nine of our student groups. However, for our economically disadvantaged, multilingual learners, and Hispanic student groups, we've set targets to reduce these dropout rates by 5 percentage points this year.

[02:12:35] This slide also provides the same information, again, where you can see the percentages and overall numbers of students within each student group for our baseline years. Similar to our on-time graduation rates, we also looked at this data for our multilingual learners across different English language proficiency levels.

[02:12:56] So when we look at our VDOE-designated multilingual learners, you can see that the dropout rate is 25%. Similar to our on-time graduation rates, when we look at former multilingual learners, so again, those students who are no longer accessing ESOL services, their dropout rates are very low at 2%.

[02:13:14] In contrast, when we look at our current multilingual learners, so our students with an English language proficiency level 1 through 4, their dropout rates are 34%. As we look more closely, again, we see similar patterns on this with higher dropout rates for our students who have level 1, level 2 English language proficiency.

[02:13:33] This slide shows additional information about our students with disabilities and dropout rates. So our level one students are students who are receiving special education services for less than 50% of their instructional day.

[02:13:49] And our level two students are students who are receiving special education services for more than 50% of their instructional day. So overall, our students with disabilities dropped out at 4%. And when we look at our level one students, that rate was 2%. and we look at our level two students, that rate was 7%.

[02:14:10] As with our on-time graduation rates, we also looked at intersectionality for dropout data. So the first chart shows that intersectionality data for our current multilingual learners who are also members of other student groups. And we can see that our multilingual learners who are economically disadvantaged have a 21% dropout rate, and our multilingual learners who are Hispanic have a 41% dropout rate.

[02:14:32] The second graph on this chart, second chart on this slide shows the same information for our economically disadvantaged students who are members of other student groups. So looking further again at our economically disadvantaged and Hispanic students, you can see on this chart for our students who are all our Hispanic students, that dropout rate was 16 percent.

[02:14:54] When we look at students who are Hispanic but not multilingual learners, that dropout rate falls to 2 percent. So again, this type of data helps us be very specific about which student groups are in most need of support.

[02:15:11] So just as a summary, as we're thinking about the totality of our dropouts, in the baseline year we had 739 dropouts. Of the dropouts, 82% of those dropouts were our students who are VDOE designated multilingual learners. As you funnel down, 80% of those were our level 1 through 4 ELP students, and 66% of of those dropouts were for our students with an English language proficiency of level one and two.

[02:15:36] Again, this data just helps us to hone in on where we really need to provide additional supports. Our final key accountability metric for dropouts looks at that percentage of schools who are meeting the BDOE dropout requirements for the level one accreditation.

[02:15:51] For our schools to meet that level one accreditation, they have to have a dropout rate that is less than or equal to 6%. So our cumulative baseline was 88% of our schools hit that threshold, and we've set a target to improve that to 93% for the end of this year.

[02:16:07] That's our final target to have 100% of schools meeting this by the end of our strategic plan. Now, throughout our strategic plan, there are several measures and goals that we have that are tied to specific years in a student's educational experience, reading on grade level by third grade, algebra one by eighth grade, and now we're talking about some of the graduation requirements.

[02:16:28] And for all of those, reading on grade level by third grade has a specific focus in third grade, but we know that it's to make progress in that we're going to need to think about what's being done in second grade, first grade, kindergarten, and even to our preschool years. So the same idea applies to this pathways to graduation.

[02:16:46] Although this is specifically something that we're talking a lot about the high school experience of our students and even more focused at the end of their high school experience, we know that a lot of the supports that we can put in place or a lot of the interventions and actions that we can take can happen much earlier in a student's educational experience.

[02:17:03] So we want to look at some of the early indicators that we have, and one of the specific ones that we want to highlight for you today is how our students are doing at the end of ninth grade and some of the data that we have around that. So we have two pieces of data that is based on a body of research that comes out of the University of Chicago that are early indicators and highly predictive of how students are going to do for on-time graduation.

[02:17:25] So at the end of ninth grade, when we look at data for students that have completed five credits or more, you can see some information on the screen. And what this is showing us is that, again, the students that have earned those five credits at the end of ninth grade, which is also important because that is what determines their becoming tenth graders, we're seeing 94% of those students graduate on time, whereas students who earned those five credits, only 3% of them did not graduate on time.

[02:17:54] We can see an additional data point related to this idea of a predictive indicator with the students that are earning two or fewer Ds or Fs at the end of ninth grade. So again, 86% of the students who earn that did graduate on time, whereas only 3% of the students who earned two or fewer Ds or Fs did not graduate on time.

[02:18:21] So again, this is helpful information for us that is to identify the specific students as early as possible to get those supports and indicators in place, and this is also something that is specifically mentioned by the board in the measures and the strategic plan, students that are on track for graduation at the end of ninth grade.

[02:18:39] Now we're going to take a look at our diplomas that our graduates are earning when they leave FCPS. So all students in FCPS can graduate with a standard or an advanced studies diploma. The specific requirements to earn that diploma are on page 22 of the full report.

[02:18:57] It is important to note that some students may make an intentional choice to pursue a standard diploma over an advanced studies diploma when it aligns with their post-secondary goals. The advanced studies diploma in itself is not a requirement for college admissions, rather our universities are looking at strength and schedule that students can demonstrate with or without meeting that advanced studies diploma requirements.

[02:19:18] In addition to the standard and advanced studies diploma, our students with disabilities can also earn an applied studies diploma if they meet the requirements of their IEP and certain requirements of the Board of Education but do not meet the requirements for another diploma. It is important, again, as Dr. Wright previously stated, that our students who earn the applied studies diploma have the option to continue their education at FCPS to either work towards another diploma or to work towards post-secondary employment skills as long as they remain age eligible. So looking at our baseline data, 68% of our graduates earned an advanced studies diploma,

[02:19:54] 31% of our graduates earned a standard diploma, and 2% of our graduates earn an applied studies diploma. This slide provides a deeper look at the types of diplomas that were awarded by student group. So for each diploma type, you can see the percentage of graduating graduates earning the diploma. As we examine the patterns that exist between the advanced studies and standard diploma, diploma, we can see significant differences between student groups.

[02:20:20] What we currently don't know and is going to require some student voice to better understand the data is to what extent the students are encountering barriers in accessing and completing the diploma they prefer and to what extent is a choice that students may be making.

[02:20:35] Finally, as we look at the Applied Studies diploma, we can see that 2% of all of our graduates are earning the diploma and the Applied Studies diploma makes up 12% of all diplomas that our graduates with students with disabilities earn. Regardless of the type of diploma a student earns, we want to ensure that students with their families have the information to make an informed choice, fully understanding the impact of their choices, and a choice that supports both their short and long-term goals. And while we've provided the baseline data for these diplomas by student group, we are going to be collecting additional student voice data to determine the appropriate targets to set. Finally, we're going to take a look

[02:21:14] post-secondary plans in relation to college enrollment. Prior to our students graduating FCPS administers a senior survey to collect information from our students about their post-secondary plans and on page 24 of the report you can see how students answered those questions about what their post secondary plans are which represents the multiple pathways to success that our students are pursuing after high school graduation. Although there are multiple pathways the student can take outside of college currently we only have division-wide post-secondary data on college enrollment, so that information was analyzed for this report. So on this slide you can see a comparison between

[02:21:52] the percentage of seniors who reported college plans on the senior survey, again overall and by student group, and the percentage of students overall and by student group who enrolled in two and four four-year universities based on the National Student Clearinghouse data. The total percentage of students enrolling in college represents all students who enrolled, so not just those who said they had a plan to enroll.

[02:22:16] This means some of the students who reported college plans did not enroll in college and some of the students who reported plans other than college ended up enrolling in college. I think this is most apparent when you look at our students with a 504 plan where you see higher percentages that enrolled versus reporting college enrollment plans.

[02:22:36] At this time we're going to shift years and start to talk about the types of strategies both current and future the Division is implementing or considering to support graduation equity. We're going to share some examples of strategies and there are some additional strategies that are detailed fully in the report. So at this point I'm going to turn this over to Ms. Marie Lemon who's our Assistant Superintendent for School Improvement and Support. Thank you. So FCPS is currently doing a number of things to support graduation equity for students and I'm going to share some of the highlights of that work this afternoon. First, we've expanded opportunities for students who are

[02:23:13] at risk of failing courses or who have failed courses before to earn recover high school credits. We know failing a course can take a student off track of graduation and put them at risk for dropping out and it's critical that we get them back on track and get them back on track quickly.

[02:23:30] First, our twilight program is allowing students to recover credit after regular school hours and that can be done synchronously or asynchronously. The program began last year with a pilot in 22-23 at three high schools to support students who were at risk of not graduating or of not being promoted to the next grade level.

[02:23:54] And in that pilot, 78% of the students who participated met graduation or promotion requirements. So this year, this pilot has expanded to this fall to serve students now in 14 high schools plus our two alternative schools, Bryant and Mountain View, with almost 400 students participating.

[02:24:15] Second, FCPS provides schools with data tools to support early interventions to keep students on track for graduation. These include our on-time graduation dashboard that allows schools staff to identify students who are off track and then work with families and school staff to create plans to get them back on track for graduation on time.

[02:24:38] We also have the chronic absenteeism dashboard, and this allows schools to monitor students who might be at risk of missing 10% of more of their academic year. So that, again, we can develop plans and attendance plans with families to support students with multiple unexcused absences or excused absences, both of those, to support them to meet the on-time, I'm sorry, to meet the expectations of the VDOE for attending school.

[02:25:08] At the division level, we're also monitoring this data so we can support which schools may need more assistance for supporting students. For our schools with higher chronic absenteeism or dropout rates or lower rates of on-time graduation, additional targeted resources and supports are provided.

[02:25:29] Some examples of the targeted supports include an additional counselor for schools staffed at schools with high percentage of multilingual learners to support newcomer students and their families. We have nine centrally funded on-time graduation resource teachers, and they work in schools with higher dropout rates to focus on both intervention and prevention.

[02:25:51] For schools that did not meet VDOE Level 1 accreditation and chronic absenteeism or dropout rates, each school was required to develop and implement an SSIP goal, SIIP goal, and strategies to improve these outcomes. These schools also received additional support from the Department of School Improvement support and the Project Momentum team.

[02:26:13] And finally, we've recently identified 15 schools, 3 in middle and 12 in high, that are receiving support from EduForturo to re-engage multilingual learners who have not consistently been attending school or they've recently dropped out.

[02:26:28] The last strategy I want to share is focused on the work we're doing to provide programs to students who need additional support to prepare and transition to college. Some examples of these programs include AVID, which we are now expanding to all Title I schools.

[02:26:46] We also have the Early Identification Program, and that's a partnership with George Mason University, and it supports students who will be the first ones in their families to go to college here in the U.S. We also are hosting financial aid workshops that are done with partnership with College Access Fairfax, and those support families in completing applications for federal and state aid.

[02:27:11] I'd now like to send this to Dr. King, Chief Equity Officer. Thank you. Thank you, Marie. As you heard from Ms. Lemon, we are currently doing a number of things in the division, and we know that there's also different work ahead.

[02:27:28] In the next few slides, we are going to discuss the strategies that we are currently developing or considering to ensure that every one of our students graduates ready for their future. Looking forward, our data indicates a need for additional flexibility to continue to engage students and support them in graduating with their preferred diploma prepared for their post-secondary goals.

[02:27:53] First, we need to focus on expanding flexible opportunities for students to earn credits. This is a key strategy to closing many of the gaps that we see in our data and also expanding opportunities to all students. This could look like bilingual classes like Algebra 1 taught in Spanish and English, the flexibility for students to enroll and complete courses at different times of the year, semester, summer, or even year-round.

[02:28:21] This is especially important for many of our newcomer multilingual students who often enter midway through the school year and miss out on credit opportunities at the high school. Additional evening options for students as well as self-paced AI-powered individual instruction could also be a strategy.

[02:28:42] The secondary strategy is focused on expanding student access to CTE, specialized courses, grow your own student programs, and apprenticeship opportunities. These programs provide students with a pathway for future career opportunities and also serve as engaging courses that keep students connected.

[02:29:03] Next, we will want to continue to advocate for additional flexibility at the state level for students to be able to use work experience and additional courses to meet graduation requirements. For our older students who may need to work, the ability to apply their work experiences towards their high school diploma is a critical strategy.

[02:29:28] And for all students, the ability to have more course options that can meet graduation requirements, such as using a nursing course to meet a science requirement, allows all students to have a more personalized path to a diploma. Finally, we are examining the possibility of developing additional certificates of completion for students who meet the requirements.

[02:29:50] While a certificate of completion is not a diploma, it does allow for students to access more pathways after graduation that dropping out does not. FCPS has the opportunity to locally define these certificates.

[02:30:05] Currently, our certificates of completion is available to students who complete all of the requirements for a standard diploma, but failed to earn verified credit requirements. In addition, in the spring of 2023, we developed a nontraditional adult certification program for students who earned 16 credits across the subject area as they were making progress towards the standard diploma.

[02:30:33] Developing and issuing additional certificates of completion could allow us to celebrate the individual progress of a student that has made progress towards earning a diploma and motivate them to continue to finish those diploma requirements.

[02:30:51] We could consider additional certificate pathways for our newcomer multilingual learners as well as our pathways such as a CTE certificate pathway. way. As we explore the possibilities of additional certificates of completion and ways to reduce our dropout rates, it is important that we focus on this as a strategy to continue towards a diploma.

[02:31:15] I would now like to turn it over to my colleague, Dr. Presidio. All right. Well, thank you, Dr. King, and good afternoon, everybody. It's great to be here with you. I'm happy to share some additional information about strategies that we're putting in place to really support and strengthen the learning environment in order to promote greater graduation equity for all of our students.

[02:31:36] And I think the first thing that's really paramount is that we've got to start as early as possible in these efforts, and I think you've heard in some of the slides that we've been presenting so far this afternoon that we've got to start as early as ninth grade in making sure that our students are on track and staying on track for graduation.

[02:31:53] So to that end, we're doing a lot of work to enhance our data tools to support schools with early identification, being able to identify students that are falling behind, whether it's due to chronic absenteeism or whether it's due to poor course performance.

[02:32:08] And we're making sure that those tools, and we mentioned the dashboards, for example, is one of those tools that we're using, that those tools are available to counselors, to administrators, to teachers in all of our schools to be able to identify students that are slipping off track as early as first quarter and ninth grade so that we can develop plans to get them back on track with the appropriate supports that they need to be successful. Additionally to set students up for success we also have to be thinking about what we're doing in the transition process to high school.

[02:32:39] And so it's really important that as students are transitioning from middle school to high school that all of our school-based staff are working with families to develop strong transition plans for students at the high school level. Part of that enhanced transition process that we're working on is trying to make sure that our families have better information about the rigors and expectations of the high school experience, are really supporting students and understanding that there's going to be increased academic expectations and that they know how to get the supports that they need from their teachers, from their counselors, and other staff in the high school to be successful.

[02:33:18] We're also really doing a lot of work right now and planning to do more work around enhanced professional development because we've got to make sure that all of our teachers can provide effective accommodations that are going to support those equitable course taking opportunities for students particularly for our students with disabilities and we saw the data about the different diploma types that students are earning and one of the reasons that a student might not earn a standard diploma is because they need additional accommodations to be successful in some of those more rigorous classes so we're going to be doing enhanced professional development for all of our teachers particularly those teachers that teach honors AP and IB courses to make sure that we're

[02:33:56] putting in effective accommodations for students but even before that kind of at a tier one level you might have heard us talk a little bit previously about universal design for learning and that's going to be our major PD focus and emphasis for next school year to make sure that all of our classrooms are really creating equitable learning opportunities for students and all of our teachers know how to provide accommodations to support students with different learning needs in an inclusive environment and then I think as we've been going through the data slides one of the trends that you can identify is that there's a lot more work that we need to do for our multilingual learners

[02:34:33] particularly our newcomer multilingual learners so we're working right now to really make sure we're putting enhanced supports in place for our multilingual learners to keep them on track for graduation one of the things that we want to do is to develop a bridge program that would provide additional supports for multilingual learners when they transition into FCPS. It's of course incredibly important that we get those students enrolled in school and enrolled in a regular high school course schedule as soon as possible, but we've got to do more than just enrolling them in courses. We've got to give them some supports and strategies to be successful in those classes and that's what this

[02:35:09] bridge program would be all about. They would provide additional counseling support, hopefully pair students with adult mentors, whether they're in the school or from the community and really ensure that our family liaisons have the information that they need to partner with families and engage families with the types of information that they need to understand the American school system to understand all the complexities of FCPS and to effectively help their students navigate our system here to success. Another thing that we're working on for our newcomer families and students is making sure that those

[02:35:44] students have an individualized plan for graduation. And again, when you look at the data, that's the subgroup that we really need to provide the most support for. And we really believe that we need individualized plans to support students with graduation, with their graduation goals.

[02:36:00] And then one of the other main things that's really important for our families and our students to understand, particularly as we have students coming in at those lower levels of English proficiency level one and level two, you could see that those graduation rates were the lowest in the system and the highest dropout rates. But students are entitled, just like our students with disabilities, our multilingual learners are entitled to stay here until they're 22 years old.

[02:36:22] So even if they come into ninth grade as an overage student, maybe they enroll at 16 or 17 and they don't have any credits, they still have time to graduate and to graduate on time. So we really want to make sure that our students and families understand that. And then we know that we need to do more to be flexible with the types of course taking experiences that those students have. And And again, as we've discussed a little bit, providing as much flexibility as possible in the course taking opportunities, giving students opportunities to earn credit for their work experience because many of these students have jobs, and providing as much flexibility as possible to ensure their success.

[02:37:00] Another strategy that we want to highlight here is that we're really working hard to also increase the number of our teachers who have a dual endorsement in ESOL and in a content area course. And that's really important because, as Dr. Reed has shared previously, about almost 90% of our teachers in FCPS teach students who are multilingual learners.

[02:37:22] So it's really important that they have the knowledge and skills to be successful in providing the right instructional supports for those students. So one of the things that we're working to do is to really encourage teachers in FCPS to earn that dual endorsement, because the professional learning that comes along with that endorsement can really provide a lot more effective instruction and support in meeting the linguistic needs of our multilingual learners.

[02:37:47] And this year, so far, we've had 173 teachers in FCPS who have taken the FCPS preparation course to earn that endorsement. They've passed the required state exam, the paraxis exam, and they've earned that dual endorsement. Some of those teachers will move into a role as an ESOL teacher, where their primary responsibility is to provide direct instruction, English language development instruction to our students.

[02:38:12] But many of those teachers will remain in the classroom, and they'll be able to use that new content knowledge and the new strategies to be more successful with the multilingual learners in their classroom. And then finally, something that we're very excited about at the last board meeting, you all approved the adoption of our basal resources in language arts for students in grades K-6.

[02:38:33] And you may remember that we're very excited that we're going to be getting Spanish language materials and English language development materials as part of that adoption. So that's the first time we're going to have English language development materials that have a strong research base behind them and have been developed by a publishing company, and we think that that's going to be very exciting.

[02:38:53] That's called Benchmark Express, those materials. And our ESOL office is also looking to see if we might be able to do an adoption for our middle school and our high school classes in English language development as well. So we're in conversation right now with a couple different vendors about that opportunity.

[02:39:11] So with that, I'm going to turn it over to our chief experience and engagement officer, Lisa Youngblood Hall. Thank you. Good afternoon. Our final set of strategies focuses on pillar B of our work, the vibrant home, school, and community partnerships that need to be in place for students to be successful.

[02:39:28] In our report, we shared the importance of students and families being able to make informed decisions about academics that support them with their short and long term goals. To do this, we must increase the fidelity of academic, career, and post-secondary planning activities to ensure students and families are provided with the information and support they need to make the best decisions that support their future.

[02:39:52] So while academic and career planning activities are occurring across the schools, dedicated time for professional development and implementation in schools, as well as resources and monitoring are needed to ensure consistent implementation. For our students with disabilities, we are also working to increase staff's ability to consistently share information about the diploma options and transition programs and supports available to students with IEPs. Students and families need support with long-term planning to ensure they graduate with the most appropriate

[02:40:28] diploma type. A student may have difficulty switching the type of diploma they're pursuing, especially if they wish to transition from an adapted curriculum to pursue a standard diploma. FCPS has been focused on increasing the knowledge of IEP team members and family liaisons to support sharing this information with families and students. Students with IEPs have additional pathways available to them that families and students need to be made fully aware of to make sure the choices that best support them. For some of our

[02:41:04] students who are struggling academically, they need non-academic supports to be successful. Expanding community partnerships and wraparound services can remove some of the non-academic barriers for students to allow them to be successful. FCPS has a number of existing models like short-term behavior health services and telemental health that can serve as models to engage community partners in our collective work of caring for our children. Finally, support graduation equity for all students. To support graduation equity for all students, we must ensure consistency in inclusive partnerships,

[02:41:42] outreach and engagement with families. We must work with students and families to co-design solutions when things aren't working. One example of this is the work that we're beginning to conduct empathy interviews with multilingual learners and their families to increase the understanding of barriers to graduation to ensure that their strategies we to ensure the strategies we move forward with are truly designed to meet the needs of our students and now I'll handle it back over to Dustin. Thank you very much. As we bring our presentation to a close who would like to share a few of the conclusions and implications from this

[02:42:22] baseline report. As you've heard throughout the presentation overall in several measures there's high levels of division-wide success, yet we are still seeing significant disparities with several of our student groups.

[02:42:37] We were able to show that ninth grade performance is a strong predictor of graduation-related success, and this is in line with some of the national research on this topic. Some of the highest levels of need that came through in this report is with our multilingual learner populations, and we've been able to see that this idea of language acquisition has big impacts on their likelihood to drop out and their ability to graduate on time.

[02:43:02] And additionally, as we have looked at some of the diploma options, we've seen that the majority of our students are earning that advanced studies diploma, but we're still seeing significant disparities within our student groups. And that with our applied studies diploma, it's a small percentage of our overall population, but when we look at our students with disabilities, it's about 12% of that group that's earning that option.

[02:43:22] Finally, when we think about our post-secondary outcomes of this report and the information that we shared, we've seen that our senior survey and those post-secondary plans that our students have, we're seeing that gap between those planning to go to college and that actually attend.

[02:43:39] And that with both our diploma options and some of the academic achievements, GPA, advanced course studies, we're seeing connections between those indicators and the levels of enrollment in two or four year colleges. As we've looked at the data that comes through in this report, the strategies that you've heard presented to you, there are two significant implications that we'd like to focus on in conclusion.

[02:44:02] The first is the importance of having multiple ways for students to earn credits towards graduation, and the second is to having lots of different options for students to accelerate their own learning. Both of these will be able to address some of the key areas that you've learned about in this presentation, and also have an impact on each and every student in our division while they're an FCPS student, and help ensure their success after graduation.

[02:44:29] Both of these options have increased flexibility and increased personalization to have impacts on our students and we can see that they can be options that will impact students who are at risk for dropping out, need additional supports, need additional accommodations, need the option to earn the right credit at the right time.

[02:44:46] It can help our students that are on track for success but would like to pursue additional opportunities to customize their learning experience and make it more relevant to their goals. And then it can also be for our students who are looking to earn credits for a higher education experience, industry credentials or specialized coursework that may not be available in their educational setting.

[02:45:07] This flexibility personalizes the learning experiences for our students and it helps meet them where they are and then help them get to where they want to be as learners. It puts our students in the driver's seat of their educational experiences and allows them to make choices to pursue the path that matters most to them.

[02:45:25] At this time, this concludes our formal presentation of the Goal 5 baseline report, and I'd like to hand it back over to the meeting manager. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you for the presentation. That was about 45 minutes, and I was expecting even a little longer than that.

[02:45:41] There's a lot to cover, and you did very well. With that, before I go to four board members who have already had their nameplates up, Would you go to page number two just to remind us the objectives of this work session?

[02:45:59] I just want to see them. That's number two, page two. You have to go one by one, huh? This was way in the back.

[02:46:15] Could someone just remind us what the objectives one more time using the slide? Certainly. So our objectives today are to make sure the board has enough information to be able to approve the goal five baseline report which will come to you all for a vote on April 11th at your regular meeting and then for the board to be able to provide feedback to based on the data we've shared with you today based on the strategies that we're currently doing and planning to do do you believe we're on the right track to be able to accomplish these goals by 2030 are there things that we need to go back and consider that we may have missed okay

[02:46:51] with that I have a forward member starting with the dr. Anderson far. Thank you. There's definitely a lot here so just go ahead and put me on a go back. I want to go ahead and talk about some of the data that you provided. Slide 13, I think that's one of them that shows the graduation rates by student group. And very grateful for the intersectionality and I have some additional question there. This is division-wide. This is how we're

[02:47:25] performing. Have you pulled out the same set of data across different school regions or across pyramids? Not specifically for this baseline report but that is data that we use to be able to determine where we're providing additional targeted supports to schools where we're seeing those lower on-time graduation rates or higher dropout rates. Ms. Lemon was sharing the Project Momentum schools that's where they're going in and providing some of those additional supports. Sure let me just kind of hone in a little bit more in terms of what I mean. I definitely know that there's some schools where there's greater concentration of some of the populations that are performing the

[02:48:02] least well. You know, if you're Hispanic, if you're multilingual, if you're low SES, you got all the shorter ends of the stick. And so the data points to that. What I'm trying to get to, if you are a Hispanic multilingual low SES student and place X, do you have the same likelihood of performance as the same kind of student and place Y? And what data can you show me that either proves or disproves that? I think you're maybe looking at the idea of benchmarking schools to schools. Is that Dr.

[02:48:33] Anderson. I think we're leaning into that. Not particularly for this report. I don't know if Ms. Lemon you want to add or Dr. Presidio anything to that. Nothing for this report specifically. That would be data that I would be very interested in because I'd like to know is there something else in the water outside of some of the demographics that we've pulled out. So thank you if you could collect that information. Secondly you shared very quickly about the shift from EL to ML and I did noticed that when I was reading that last week. I'm like, what did I miss? Where did this change?

[02:49:08] So thank you for introducing that a little bit. Can you give a little bit more information as to why we've made this shift and how does it align with state reports? Yeah, no, those are, those are great questions. So, you know, one of the things that has happened this year is we obviously have a new chief of schools, Dr. Giovanna Ponce, who comes out of Texas and has a lot of experience and and a wealth of knowledge in working with multilingual learners.

[02:49:34] And he actually hosted a number, or a visit to Houston, to visit a number of schools down there, and we had quite a contingent of central office staff and some school-based folks that went out and visited programs in Texas. And they used different terminology than we use here, and it prompted a senior leadership team discussion about, you know, what's the right way to really refer to our multilingual learners?

[02:49:56] And we really felt like multilingual learner respects the skills that students have, it values all of the work that they're doing as learners and it was really a better and more accurate way to refer to that student population. Really more asset-based language, if you will.

[02:50:13] Different states use different terminology, so we are out of sync with the terminology that VDOE in the state of Virginia uses. And that's okay because for state reporting purposes, we'll still comply with the reporting purposes and requirements that we need to. But internally, we definitely want to make the switch to multilingual learners and we're going to continue to advocate that maybe the state consider some changes in their terminology as well. Thank you. That's very good. I appreciate hearing that.

[02:50:42] On one of the slides, I can't find it, you provide the information for students with disabilities in terms of their performance, whether it be dropout or graduation. However, you did not provide that by different demographics. Is there a rationale as to why we don't have the information for students with disabilities that are Black, Asian, Hispanic, low SES, that's missing?

[02:51:04] - Yeah, thank you, Dr. Anderson. So the presentation includes some of the high-level information. In the actual report, there's the main section, and then there's a section on multilingual learners, economically disadvantaged, and students with disabilities.

[02:51:21] In that students with disabilities section, you'll see the intersectionality chart that's similar to the ones that we presented here appreciate that I will look for that one of the things you also well let me ask this question how many years does it typically take a student and I say typical I know everybody's there's a little bit of difference there does it take for a student to gain language proficiency to go from EL1 to former EL so there's a pretty strong national research base on that that on average it takes a student five to seven years to develop their English proficiency to the level where they would be able to be successful, you know, as successful on

[02:51:59] English language exams like the SOLs in this state. And that's why you see when you look at our data, obviously our level ones and our level two students, for example, aren't performing as well whenever whatever data point you're looking at, right, is our level three students and our level four students. And then obviously, ultimately, those students who have exited services. And that's That's why I think the intersectionality data is really important in this report in particular because it helps us hone in on the students that are most at risk when we think about graduation in this context because students who come to us as Level 1 and Level 2 students

[02:52:37] have a lot of academic support that needs to be provided to help them be successful. And if we're not providing that in really proactive ways and if we're not making sure that those students know that they have more than four years to graduate and there's different options and supports and programs for them in the system it's very easy for them to get discouraged and to consider to leave you know early and to drop out so we've really got to do a better job I think supporting those those lower level of English proficiency students thank you for that the reason why I ask is because I was fascinated by the data point that you shared which speaks to where students are at the ninth grade level how high of a predictor that is to

[02:53:16] their eventual academic success because they're graduating our schools. It just made me wonder, should we be looking at infusing some more intentional supports earlier on, given that it's going to take that many years in order for students to gain fluency, because I'm honing in on the data set where our multilingual students are the least likely to graduate from our schools, and they're requiring seven years in order to gain that language proficiency. It just made me wonder, should we be providing that intentional support that Ms. Levin has just spoken about

[02:53:51] earlier than ninth grade so that they can make that indicator and then have the play out that we've seen on outcomes? No, that's an excellent point. And yes, we definitely need to provide additional support to our newcomer students, our level one and level two students, no matter what grade level they come to us. Since this was really focused on graduation, I was really just kind of directing my comments at the importance of that ninth grade year, but you're 100% correct. Even if a student comes to us in the primary grades of elementary school, like, we need to be providing those students with additional supports to make sure that they can be successful. Thank you. I still have lots more

[02:54:27] questions, but I'll wait for it in the second term. You're on the go-back list. I have a Miss Lady to be followed by Madam Vice Chair. Thank you. Thank you. This is a a volume of work. I'm gonna need to go back. My first question is just because refresh my memory how is one considered in a cohort so we're talking about our MLL students if it takes them seven years are they considered not on time?

[02:54:54] Like what is it six years is it five years? What's the clarification on that? So as long as they stay enrolled VDOE will designate them as what they refer to as a slider. So let's say that the student came to us and they didn't

[02:55:08] graduate in the fourth year of high school, but they re-enroll that following fifth year. They slide down into that next year's cohort and they can do that again and they can do that again until they age out of availability at age 22. Thank you. So my next one's going to be a challenge and hard for people to probably hear me call out, but I really, really appreciate slide. I believe it is 36 because you delineated senior survey data with clearinghouse data, but yet I also did a simple Google search of the Fairfax County profile that's on our website and

[02:55:43] remain disturbed by the fact that it says 86.8% of the approximately 14,000 plus high school graduates indicated their intention to attend post-secondary education institutions. 86.8 is higher than what you have on the slide, I believe, if I go back to that presentation, but my main question is why are we still reporting student reported data out to the public world and not clearinghouse data and I'm gonna go further and say that when I was a director I stopped doing that on my profile and I put clearinghouse data and if memory serves me well I was then told I had to put senior survey data and then it was

[02:56:22] confusing to my colleges as to why I had two data points on the profile so if you can respond to that I'll pause my time please take a stab at that Miss lady I imagine the difference between the 86% you're referencing in the 84 is this is the three-year baseline versus that's probably a single year data point I think one of the challenges that we have that we're going to have to try to figure out how to solve is in terms of looking at our alumni the only reliable data source we have is the national clearinghouse right so we don't have information on our students who are going into the workforce consistently across the division or other pathways military other things it's one of the things that we're wrestling with how do we get that student voice of our alumni to really understand did we

[02:57:00] set them up for success after after they graduated i think the senior survey is the only thing that gives us a sense of where kids might be going but as you have pointed out there's obviously gaps students may say one thing at the point of their senior year and may make different decisions or may have life circumstances that yield to a different result for them so one of the pieces we're working through is how to collect that alumni data so we can better understand what's happening to our graduates once they leave us so i don't know if i answered the totality of your question i just for the record like to make an ask that we put the accurate data on our on our

[02:57:34] public facing website of Clearinghouse and not self-reported. Next thing in terms of online campus, I mean there was a lot of creativity within these slides but it begs the question, do we have to keep every high school on the same bell schedule?

[02:57:50] Because when you think about different populations who may be able to do a mentorship or may be able to do other things, we can't continue to require all 27 to be identical from my perspective. Online campus, I think we need to be asynchronous with check-ins. I think that we are limiting the kids who can access online campus because they really can't be athletes or in marching band or have jobs.

[02:58:13] We need to be nimble. I also think we need to think about offering online campus for students who are virtual high school is a better option because it does impact dropout but also absenteeism. Also think that in terms of absenteeism, I think we need to be nimble with technology that where there's a way in which a phone call goes out.

[02:58:33] I'm not very good at IT, but I do know when some sort of avatar or someone wants to interact with me, if I answer this, I get that question, I answer this, I get that question, instead of it having to be a body, right? These on-time graduation coordinators, all they're doing is tracking absenteeism at the high school level.

[02:58:49] And they could be doing more if we had a system like that where they got to the fact that I don't have transportation, and then it can be like, oh, I'm on my way, or something to that effect. Also concerned about FAFSA completion, as we know, those of us that are in that world of college admissions. The FAFSA is a train wreck this year. I have not seen anything coming out of late. When I recently studied the data, it was something to like only 25 percent of the folks nationally who have completed the new FAFSA did it correctly. There's going to be a lot of money that's not utilized. I don't know what we're doing. I do love college access, but I know that in the Drainsville area I did not see any FAFSA completion workshops.

[02:59:27] I don't want to leave this up to schools to invite in. This needs to be a priority, and It's still an ongoing issue, so I'll stop there and wait for my go-back. Thank you. Okay, I have a Madam Vice Chair and then Mr. Chairman.

[02:59:44] I'm going to try and be succinct, but I am really, I got a lot going on in my brain because this is also the first time ever I have a student who is going into high school and the course selection. And since late January, I have experienced what it's like to be a family member trying to navigate the high school course selection process.

[03:00:03] And let's just say I know a little bit more than the average bear, right? Is that like such an old reference? Anyway, look, a lot of this for me boils down to communications. It's just the story of Fairfax. There's inconsistent communications about understanding terminology, standard diploma, advanced diploma, all these things parents don't know, kids don't know.

[03:00:27] The process for selecting courses, including at school, at home, the conversations that happen in research, and at school, and also the options for coursework. You know, I've heard Dr. Mizell at Langston Hughes talk about high school, the planning for high school beginning in sixth grade.

[03:00:44] And by some of our kids, if they take eighth grade algebra, they are taking high school credit bearing courses. And I have not seen evidence of consistent information going out, educating students and families about the trajectory that needs to happen. I appreciate the intersectionality of the data, it's very helpful to see.

[03:01:02] What I want to know is, and I think so, for the purposes of this report, you've captured where we're at, and that's the intention. So what's going to happen? I have seen the school division work hard this year on absenteeism and getting kids to school. It's everywhere. It's outside doors, it's in text, it's emails, principals are talking about it. What kind of campaign is going to happen about this? But it's not just dropout. It's the trajectory to successful high school graduation. So when I look at a cohort and I see there's 500 kids that are at risk, what is the action plan for each of those kids? You can name those

[03:01:37] kids. So what are the steps that are going to be taken? And then, what are the steps for all those other students who are in that same category of demographics? It's a two-step communication plan. I don't want to just talk about graduation rates. I want to talk about helping kids plan for being successful after graduation. And we absolutely have to find the data about what our graduates are doing, whether it's the foundation and they're getting alumni or what. But if that's a project for the next seven years or six years until we meet the strategic plan, that's a project. And you know what? We can help advocate if we need different federal policy laws that, you know what, maybe institutions of higher

[03:02:16] ed, which have very little reporting requirements when it comes to their efficacy in actually letting kids earn, having kids earn a degree, maybe we help get legislation passed about we need information about what our graduates are doing. I also think a ton needs to be done about advanced and standard diplomas there's a ton of confusion it's a Virginia thing i think you know what what's the main line message we need to send to kids you need these things to be to be successful again i try to be succinct but there's just so much here and it's way more than

[03:02:48] the dropout rate it's all those years before it gets to that dead end thank you so much mr chairman thank you um someone said in the presentation that the applied studies uh diploma was a intermediate step on the way to a standard or advanced diploma and as i looked through the report i didn't find anywhere indicating what that trajectory success is so i'm curious how many applied studies diploma recipients go on to get a standard or advanced studies diploma we can

[03:03:26] pull that information it's not detailed in the report we do have students as you pointed out that the applied studies is the terminal diploma for them and we have students who do the applied studies and continue on to get a standard but that's data we could bring back to the board i would appreciate that because i do notice throughout the report it mentions how difficult that is several times and so i'd hate for us to be sending a signal that it's happening more frequently than it actually is and if that's going to be one of our goals then i'd like to see a strategy for helping those students achieve that standard or advanced diploma um on the on the debt on

[03:04:04] On the dashboards, I'm curious what level of automation exists on the dashboard so that administrators are not having to find the students who need additional supports themselves. Is there a system where it's automatically flagging students who are in risk areas and stuff like that? So there's actually two different, Marie and I were trying to figure out who's going to answer this one first.

[03:04:26] There's actually two different tools. We have our existing dashboard that does have some of that functionality, but we're in the process of working with IT right now to roll out a new tool in the student information system that's going to be a lot more automated and have a lot more functionality for school-based teams, and that's called our early warning system, and that's going to be live for schools in school year 24-25.

[03:04:51] So we're excited about that because that's going to allow basically administrators to get the information and counselors and teachers, depending on how the school sets it up and what their use needs are. But basically, it's just going to drive that information directly to them. So it would identify students based on a variety of factors that might be at risk.

[03:05:09] So attendance, credits earned, discipline issues, like all of that information is going to be grouped in an automated format to allow administrators. to know exactly who to work with without having to do any data entry or, you know, any of that additional work. I know that was a big undertaking to get all of that information to talk to its counterparts. I'm curious where the 5% goals came from. We have it for both the on-time graduation

[03:05:41] rates and, you know, I'm curious, did we just pick 5% or is there something behind it? Sure. So we we selected five percent as our improvement for this rate it's the smallest meaningful increase to show improvement in year one and we selected those smaller targets this year as the division was making those shifts to be able to address our new strategic plan goals with the understanding that we're going to need to see larger increases for some of our student groups year over year to be able to get to the year-end targets and if some of these subgroups are not hitting that five

[03:06:18] percent would that be an indication that whatever we're doing there is not either being done with fidelity or it's not working. Yeah, it's an indication that we're going to need to make changes, whether or not it's the strategy itself that's not working or the implementation of the strategy that we're going to need to make some adjustments. That's it for me now. I'll have more on my go back. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will go to Mrs. St. John Cunning to be followed by Mrs. Seismon Heiser. Thank you. Thank you for this powerful report. I appreciate all the data.

[03:06:53] However, I want to dig a little bit more into the data and ask you some questions. When you talk about multilingual learners, are you taking that data as just the high school students, or is that all of the FCPS multilingual learners? So that's going to be looking at what their status is at the time the data point is being looked at.

[03:07:15] So if they're dropping out, it's what their ELP status was at the time of dropout, or if it's on-time graduation, that senior year for that student. Okay, because my question following that up is of those students and understanding that language acquisition is five to seven years, are these students that are just coming in, newcomers that are coming in when they're in high school or middle school, or do we have data points that show how long they've been in the system?

[03:07:43] So, obviously, if there are kids that have been here with us since elementary and they haven't moved, then that's a different issue. If they're a newcomer and they're level one, so I think that would help. And when we're talking about that language acquisition time period, there's no way that a newcomer that just came in as a sophomore is going to be able to meet that benchmark.

[03:08:04] So, I think that's a distinction that's important. The other breakdown that I'm interested in is, and obviously as a Latina and seeing that our Hispanic students are not doing well and our multilingual learners are not doing well, really personally, you know, is something that I take very personal.

[03:08:25] I would be very interested, also, when we're talking about multilingual learners, what percentage of them are Spanish-speaking versus other languages? I think that also would be important to see if there's a difference between how successful different languages or, you know, that impacts, you know, socioeconomic, cultural competency.

[03:08:46] There's a lot of other data points there that I think would inform us. So that's information. I don't know if you could get down into the weeds about that. I do want to celebrate that we're using multilingual. I think that I want to celebrate that being from Texas and knowing that that's important. And that's kind of how I've always looked at it.

[03:09:07] I also would like to get more information on the look at bilingual classes year-round and how that, and I know that that's probably a strategy that you're going to be looking into, because we do have a spectrum of kids that come in, some with interrupted learning and some that have a lot of information, but they just don't have the language.

[03:09:29] So that's just something I'd like to explore more. Well, I have a few more minutes to say that I would even venture to say we've got to start looking at this much earlier, not just the ninth grade and not just middle school, I say since kindergarten.

[03:09:47] And again, early intervention, or like I like to say, is early inspiration for kids to look at what they're going to look at after they, you know, finish high school. Well, thank you very much for those comments and questions. A few things I would want to say. I think first of all on your last point definitely we need to start providing supports as early as possible so I just want to be clear with the community that might be listening for the purposes of this report we were really honing in on when we talk about graduation starting with those students in ninth grade right but that that doesn't mean that we're not supporting students in middle school getting them on track and as a few board members have pointed out students do

[03:10:25] have opportunities to earn high school credits in middle school right so it's really important to make sure that they're being successful there and of course success starts you know from the first day that a student walks into our school buildings and we need to be taking advantage of early supports that way but for the community listening I just want to say we were really focused for this report on looking at what we're doing at the high school level since this is a graduation report I think you know you had a few questions about the L data and I want to say a few things and then invite rich polio if he wants to add anything as our director of ESOL services because we have a lot of of other data that's available that is not part of this report. And a few things I would just point

[03:11:03] out when we talk about some of the intersectionality in the data that we're looking at here. And again, we're looking at data here as it pertains to the particular outcome. So as Ms. Neal said, when we're talking about if a student graduated or dropped out, we're looking at students that would have been in that graduation class and the outcomes for those students. So we're just looking at a small slice of our students, but I would point out, like, I think it's really important, and if we go back maybe to slide 14 and look at how students perform as their English language proficiency develops, it's really, really important because if you look at this chart,

[03:11:40] and you'll notice that our former multilingual learners on the top have a 98% graduation rate, right? So that's saying as they develop their English proficiency, they're outperforming the division overall average and that's pretty much true for our multilingual learners when we look at any of our standardized measures after they exit the services they have strengths and assets that are allowing them to outperform our division averages and then on the second chart down here when we look at it by level you can see the dramatic increases in graduation rates just based on the elp level that students are at so those students coming in at level one right when they're

[03:12:19] they're trying to graduate that's very very difficult and you know they're gonna need more time so that's why we need our students and our families to understand you can stay with this till age 22 just like students with disabilities can stay with us till age 22 and back to mr. back to mr. Frisch's comment a little bit earlier students need to know that families need to know that if you take that applied studies diploma and graduate and walk with your class that doesn't mean that you're done you can stay with us and get more educational opportunities in work-based experiences but for our english learners as we look at that trajectory by the time they get to level four and 91 graduation rate i think is quite high i mean i

[03:12:56] think of myself if you know you were to drop me into a country um where english was not the the native language of that country if i'd only had three or four years of experience i think i would still need a lot of support but a lot of our students are doing well here so that was probably i heard the bell that was maybe a little long-winded but rich do you want to talk about some of the other data tools that schools have access to because we do have a lot more robust information about multilingual learners. Sure well I did want to add you asked about the time in US time in schools and FCPS schools for our dropouts so I do know that for our multilingual

[03:13:32] learner dropouts approximately 56 percent about 56 percent dropped out within the first two years so zero to two years another 32 percent was in that three to five year range so when you see a high percentage of our level one students because they really may have dropped out before they had even time to to gain english language proficiency and then we did have 12 percent or about you know over 70 students who are we would consider long-term multilingual learners and they were with us for six or more years so but just 12 percent uh here six or more years

[03:14:11] about 32 percent three to five years and 56 percent zero to two years all right if you don't mind i'd like to also add something um dr renee la huffman jackson who's the director of our family and school partnerships shared some information with me last week that i wasn't aware of and if you wouldn't mind moving over to a mic to talk about some of the tracking that your department is doing for your early literacy programs and how that might be connected to the success of our

[03:14:42] students. Good afternoon. Last week Lisa and I visited some of our early literacy and hippie programs and in that opportunity I was able to share with Lisa that we track our students that are involved in these early programming in which our family engagement programs where we're trying to engage our families in their child's learning early and we track those students from entering our programs before kindergarten for school readiness on through graduation.

[03:15:21] So we've been tracking it for the last six years. So we're hopeful for what that data is going to bring us in the future. And if I could just add to what Dr. LeHuffman Jackson, those programs are funded with federal Title III dollars.

[03:15:43] They are specifically for multilingual learner families. So the program's hippie and early literacy specifically for multilingual learners. Are you done?

[03:15:59] You've got 12 seconds left. This is to be followed by Sandy Anderson. You can go and put me back on it to go back. So I will just start there.

[03:16:16] I don't really even know where to start. So I think I'm going to start with my big picture comment. I really appreciate the data and the work. And I appreciate the focus on the students who are showing the greatest sort of needs in terms of getting to graduation, right, and being successful when we leave, and we need to do that. But in some ways, I think we're missing the forest for the trees. When I look at our strategic plan goal five, there are many things in here that aren't just on getting kids to graduation, right? And I know I mentioned this in our two-by-twos. I know you're probably not

[03:16:55] surprised that I'm sharing this now. There are many things that talk about getting our kids to be successful when they leave, and I appreciate kind of at the end some of the things that we're planning and i understand that sometimes we're so focused on what data can we have that's easy to find and dig into and reported that we focus the bulk of the report on reportable data as opposed to reportable data and how are we going to get to this goal not just how are we going to measure that we've gotten there but how are we going to get there and then let's think about how we're going to measure that right so i look at um i have it in front of me right a availability

[03:17:34] and accessibility of multiple pathways. I'm glad we're talking about this tripping completions, but that doesn't get our kids to graduation. So that in itself is a goal that seems to go against the on-time graduation. That's the bulk of this report goal. Portrait of graduate competencies, digital and financial literacy, innovating and preparing for the future.

[03:17:55] I'm just going to leave that there, that I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. I think we need -- if it's a triaging situation where we've got to get all the kids to graduation and then we can do that, I think it would be good to talk about that but otherwise this looks like those are the two things we're focused on and we're fairfax county i want all of us to get all of our students and when i appreciate miss lady bringing up the clearinghouse data i think that's a really important point and i support what she's saying however i think we should also be looking at the data that talks about four-year and six-year post-secondary success as a benchmark because my understanding from what i've seen it the four-year

[03:18:34] completion rate for students nationwide is 40 something percent and i think fairfax county is just under 50 which the last time i saw it somewhere floating around and i think that's a hugely important data point that we're not talking about because that goes to this actual goal which is success so that's my big picture comment and i've used all my three minutes up um i appreciate all the hard work please don't let me take that away from your hard work but i don't think we've hit a report that gets to this goal um so having said that which sounds really harsh and i realize it I'm sorry and I just I still believe in this plan I really believe in this

[03:19:14] plan and I don't want to lose the plan because we're focused on the trees I'll take a go back thank you miss Anderson I just wanted to say I will likely not need to go back but I do I am gonna at the risk of learning in public I am gonna ask a question that doesn't make much sense to me so as we've been flipping through all of them the end changes on every slide so if we're talking about the average graduate number over three years why is our n changing a great question

[03:19:52] so in some cases we're talking about a cohort of students and in some cases we're talking about the students that graduated so that's a little bit of some of the end changes you're seeing in the data points only 21 seconds and they'll go back oh my goodness okay i'm the last one for the first i'm On the last one, on the first round, you know, to a large extent, I do agree with Mrs. Seismarheiser.

[03:20:33] And I'm hoping that this year's just focus happened to be on graduation rate. And next several years, we'll start discussing something other than just a graduation rate. Obviously, we'll have to continue, you know, collecting data and hoping to see an improvement in the graduation rate.

[03:20:53] Having said that, I'm going to go even a little further up on a little more global level that I know that looking at slide number two, one of the reasons I wanted you to remind us what we should be focusing on today is, and that slide number two does not include the discussion about ultimate target in 2030.

[03:21:21] and because i cannot accept i cannot accept 90 as our ultimate goal in anything i don't know whether the prior board when they developed their strategic plan and discussed and then decided 90 would be our goal our target for 2030 in all five different goals uh that's not what i have heard if i'm wrong about that you know please correct me but i am hoping that i think i made a request

[03:21:54] mr chairman that we have a time hopefully some sometime in the near future after we go through first year of all these reports have a baseline data on all five different goals and talk about our target and you know bold agreed upon target as opposed to what is just being presented by the superintendents as our ultimate goal of 90 percent yeah if you look at if you look at our goal number

[03:22:25] five it says every student will graduate i know it's every not all students every but every could be by most of people will be interpreted as 100 as opposed to 90 being our ultimate goal in 2030 and for me based upon our even grading scale 90 is a minus a minus is not a bad grade however a minus is not something that we should be aspiring to achieve and i also suck or gain also correct me

[03:23:04] if i read this thing this wrong from our report that tolerance range of four percent four percent And so if something falls off below that target by 4% that is still within the range, because within the tolerance range, I am not going to accept 86% as our aspirational goal to achieve by year 2030.

[03:23:31] But that's a conversation I would like to have some time again on this one. Whether my time is up, I'm going to put myself on the go back. Yes, Dr. Reed. Yeah, so I'm not sure where the 90% came from. intent in 2030 is to be at 100%. I want to clarify, yeah, I just want to clarify that we started this year with the 5% ads because a lot of the pieces we needed to put into place to even gather the data needed to be built this year. So we felt like we needed a year to build those

[03:24:09] systems, the data collection systems, the dashboards, the tools. In fact, to Dr. Presidio's point one of our I think most nimble tools for this work is still under development and we want to make sure we roll that out to principals in the fall high school principals we've also asked middle school and high school and elementary principals to identify the tiles and that's kind of how we refer to our data bytes six tiles no more than eight that will go to their desktops

[03:24:42] every Monday morning next year, which are those high leverage data points that are going to enable us to hit the goal. So we absolutely expect 100% each and every student by 2030, hands down, done.

[03:24:57] We also, though, to be fair, early on we realized that we can't focus on every measurement of every goal in the same year. We really have to take the highest leverage measurement areas of each goal this year, and that was on our early slide, to get a handle on where each and every student was.

[03:25:20] And these are the ones we picked for each goal because we also asked principals to be very attentive to this. And the entire system came around, for example, graduation equity this year and got every arrow on that topic to the degree we can, moving in the same direction.

[03:25:38] the portrait of a graduate work, the innovation work, absolutely are going to be coming. We felt like as we looked at research around the 2080 rule, for lack of a better example, if we could hit the highest leverage data points and get those managed and moving forward to get to that 100%, those other measurements would slide in there.

[03:26:02] And actually, we felt that once we layer the targets, those are better layered because they're not going to be as comprehensive. So, for example, Goal 3, the 3 we selected, reading by third grade. We just think that's our highest equity leverage move right now, the algebra by 8th grade, and advanced coursework in high school.

[03:26:24] Now, we know there are other Goal 3 targets and other Goal 3 measurements. But in the next several years as we march towards 2030, those will get slid into these reports. But we felt foundationally this year as we built the systems, this is where we were headed.

[03:26:40] But if we left the impression that we wanted less than 100 percent, I apologize for that. I want to be clear that that's where we're headed. Well, thank you, Dr. Reed. I saw 90 percent a lot of places in the report. That's why I brought up. But having heard from Dr. Reed, I feel much more encouraged.

[03:26:57] But that's something that the board needs to discuss after we are done with collecting all the baseline data. So with that, I'm going to go to the go back list. I have a one, two, three, four, five, six, including myself.

[03:27:12] Dr. Anderson first. Yes, thank you. I appreciate what has been said regarding where we are and what we're targeting. But for myself, when I look at our graduation outcomes from 2023, I'm just going to read some numbers that will help you understand where i am personally coming from as the representative in the mason district i shared this at the board meeting um when we had one of the el's or academic matters around this but i'm going to share it now justice falls church and annandale respectively

[03:27:43] graduation rates from 2023 are 82.5 86.3 and 87.3 percent that to me is an alarm that to me is an alert, and that has to be, we have to raise that in order to raise the overall profile of the entire division. So for me, this is the work that I want to hone into. Having said that, going back to my prior question, I'm looking at some other schools. Again, this is just one year. I know you looked at three years. Fairfax High School, Edison High School, all the way down to Westfield, they are

[03:28:17] ranging from 95% all the way to 98. Well, 100% going down to TJ. It makes me wonder, do these schools not have EL student, ML students? Do these schools not have students who are Hispanic? Do these schools not have the same demographics that we have shown are the least likely to be successful in our system to date?

[03:28:44] So I am very curious in terms of what is happening here. Is the slight percentage representative of the people who are showing up in those groups with that data point? I need to have that information because for me it's going to really open up the conversation for some pointed discussions. It can't just be these students. There's got to be other things. And I'd like to either prove that or disprove that.

[03:29:12] I also wanted to talk about, I do appreciate the term graduation equity by the way, I wanted to throw that in there, I thought it was a good, that was, oh, okay, I'll just power through one more, particularly given the conversation we had in the previous session earlier, is there a way to have the intersectionality data that has a column that speaks to discipline issues, whether or not kids have been out of our system and moved around schools or in hearings office. I'm just curious to see the connections. Except for dropouts specifically Dr.

[03:29:51] Anderson or on-time graduation or all of that data. I mean they're pretty much the opposite of each other so I think whatever you get in one end you might get it on the other but yes dropouts that will be fine because if you're dropping out you're not graduating. Yeah I'm sure we can bring that data. I would be very much appreciative of that. Can I add one thing because I think you had a lot of really important comments there. If we could just take a look at slide 17 because I just want folks to maybe really see this data point, particularly in the community, and you talked about demographics and schools, and we certainly can provide more data and more information by school by school and do more of that benchmarking, and Marie's team actually does a lot of that work,

[03:30:31] and they do a great job with it. But I just wanted to bring up this other intersectionality data point, because when we were showing our dropout rate by student subgroup and ethnicity, you could see on the bottom row of that chart that the graduation rate for Hispanic students 82%. So we called out that Hispanic students need more support around graduation. But if you follow that across, you see that the graduation rate for Hispanic students who are also multilingual learners is 56%. And when you follow it one more time, you see that Hispanic students who are not multilingual learners is 97%. So the issue isn't so much about your ethnicity and your cultural

[03:31:10] heritage. It's about what language services do you need. And I think it's important for people to see that because when we used to just report student subgroups, I think there was a lot of mischaracterization and misunderstanding sometimes about different student subgroups.

[03:31:25] So this type of intersectionality data is really important and I'm proud that the school system has asked us to do that because that's going to help us target student needs better and it's going to help us, I think, really present what the actual needs of our communities really is in a better way.

[03:31:41] Appreciate that. Thank you. I want Ms. Lady to be followed by Mr. Chairman. Thank you. So I want to drill down a little bit more and sort of piggyback on what my colleague Ms. Marin talked about, which is the academic advising course selection process.

[03:31:59] I mean, I'll just tell you that, you know, even when I go on different schools' websites, certain things don't link the way I think they should. So a lot of people don't understand that academic advising is under student services. There should be a link on every home page, and it should say course selection or academic advising, because I don't think parents even know the different terminologies.

[03:32:20] think we just need to be more intuitive. I'm also curious, Dr. Presidio, you mentioned on several occasions additional counseling. I'm excited about that. What does additional counseling look like in your bridge program? Also, when we're talking about IEPs and people understanding with fidelity graduation requirements, i.e., our MLLs and the ability to attend until they're 22. Who are we training? Who are we doing better training with? Are these case managers are going to be better trained on? Because it's been my experience that a lot of times case managers do not understand graduation requirements. And no matter how

[03:32:59] hard I've tried, and I've did trainings while I was at Chantilly, it's something that just never -- it's just never computed for some of them. And then I also know that we have, you know, counselors, quite frankly, in our district who don't understand a finer practical art with some of those consecutive electives and can't even, without looking it up, tell you what our diploma types are and what fulfills them.

[03:33:25] So I'm just curious to know about the PD if you can answer that question. Yeah, I think I would say a couple things. First of all, the way that we're really approaching these additional supports, whether it's the bridge program, transition supports or services, is really thinking about a team-based approach and providing a web of support for students, not saying like any one particular individual in the school or one role in the school has to take that additional responsibility on.

[03:33:52] But we know as a system in each of our individual schools, we're going to need to do a better job working with some of our students and families if we want to hit our targets. So we do have some additional resources already built in in our staffing formula. Again, kind of back to Dr. Anderson's point about, you know, the demographics among schools sometimes is different. We've got multilingual counselors in 10 of our high schools, so that's an additional position in those 10 high schools that have the largest numbers of multilingual learners. So those people, in terms of how they're interacting in those schools, those schools have that additional resource and they have a little

[03:34:29] bit more capacity to serve the multilingual learners. In the schools where we don't have those resources, it's going to be that team-based approach. So I never meant to suggest that we We would have, for example, a case manager or an assistant principal or whomever, one of the adult mentors or a community partner that might be part of that team doing the academic advising.

[03:34:49] That would not be prudent. They wouldn't have the content experience and expertise to be able to do that, but they could fulfill other roles. They might do a better job connecting with the family and helping make sure that the family has access to the information that they need and know how to find it. They might be able to work with the students on some of their social emotional needs that they might have.

[03:35:08] think about our community schools that Miss St. John Cunningham came from right like there's a lot of different supports that I think when we take that team based approach we're going to be able to be more successful because we're not going to have more staffing in our schools to be able to do that so we've got to utilize the resources that we have in smarter more of more efficient ways thank you last thing I'll say is I do know that there's a there's a there's a data point that qualifies you for that MLL counselor but I will also share that prior to my retirement, I had planned on having a multilingual counselor with Chantilly, and then that was undone after I put in my papers. But it was requested by our East Law

[03:35:48] Department Chair, who also resigned after I retired. And that's because of registration processes. It's because of having the expertise within that curriculum. It has to do with communication. So I guess what I'm saying is I would encourage our schools to evaluate their numbers and see whether or not because it is more personalized if you are you have one in you know delineation if you will I'll take another come call back what do you call it come back go back go back she'll call back okay Mrs. Seidmerheiser to be followed by Mrs. St. John Conning thank you yes to

[03:36:26] what Miss Lady said about training for all those folks I will lift up that if If you really want to, what Mr. Frisch said, to have students be able to go from an applied studies diploma to a standard, you've got to start that in second grade.

[03:36:41] Because once they're off the SOL path for curriculum and you're learning an AUSL curriculum, there is no way you can catch up. So if you're having that conversation in ninth or tenth grade, it is too late. So I would, because once, because you're getting a completely stripped down curriculum once you go off that path starting in third grade so you get to fourth grade and fifth grade you've learned half of what you're or less how are you supposed to get back on the SOL track by ninth grade so I would say that these long-term conversations you're talking about have to happen in second grade for students

[03:37:18] with IEPs because that's where that decision is made I don't think people realize that that we are at second grade tracking students so and I maybe I'm a little feisty about this because I just met a young man who is the probably only second person in the state who has an RBT technician certification on an applied studies diploma and there is no way this young man who by the way was at Burke and Frost should be have gotten an applied studies diploma so I'm just putting that out there I love the thought of an individual plan to graduation but I would like to see some programming that goes with it because

[03:37:56] right now there's no way we can have an individual path to graduation if we don't have access for multilingual learners to access classes in their strengths, right? Whether it's advanced coursework or elective coursework, we can't have individual pathways to graduation if after 18 there's nowhere for people to go other than Davis, Pulley, and STEP, which were not designed for students who are accessing the standard applied studies diploma, nor is there even a way for students who need to take those additional classes to get to a standard applied studies, or advanced, excuse me, not applied studies, diploma, to take the classes and access workplace training skills. So this is a pie dream unless we

[03:38:34] actually look at programming? I'll take another go back. Thank you, I have a Mr. St. John Conning. Okay so I was really happy to see slide 40 which is you know the different strategies under consideration and the reason that I say that and our strategic plan goal 5 which is leading for tomorrow's innovation is that we live in very interesting times. There are students now that can get certificates of completion that can get into jobs earning $180,000 a year and

[03:39:10] not have to get a college degree and I think we have to look at that and you know it's blasphemy for me to say that but not all kids need to go to college to be successful our measurement of success has got to be different and so when we look at that graduation and that high school diploma it's a valuable but if we can within our systems build that value to where I have seen kids graduate with with some of the programming that we have like for you know auto tech and things like that and go on to become their go to Nova and get a business

[03:39:46] degree and they have their own businesses so I think that we have to yes you know and and this came as a response to what mr. moon had misinterpreted about you know if I if I don't see a you know 100% graduation it's like we've got to look at what that high school diploma might look like it might look different because we live in a very different time and there are kids getting out of college with incredible debt and they can't get jobs and so this is where we can be nimble and look at that but again it's the programming. I know you know lamentably in my case one of my daughters

[03:40:25] didn't complete college but she got a certificate of you know completion and she's earning a lot more than I ever have you know so and she doesn't have the debt so I think we've got to realistically look at all of that and I'm really happy to see that we're starting to look at it but we do need to have the programming for it but I just want us to have that mind shift because we are in a different time frame any comment from staff before okay Dr. Bastille well I mean just briefly I would say I mean we definitely agree with you and I think there's a theme kind of emerging a number

[03:41:01] board members have kind of spoke about the need to look at additional programming more flexible access to programming right and and we know that we need to do that and those are some of those measures that are built into the goal around innovation flexible pathways to graduation and again you know for better or for worse today's report as dr reid said is really on those foundational measures that we were asking the entire school system to focus on and you know we're excited that you're excited about those other measures and you know that that's some of I think the most impactful work so we'll get there together and I appreciate folks foreshadowing the importance of that today.

[03:41:37] Any other board member on go back? Not the second go back, first go back, no, you're, okay, what am I going to share? You go back. Okay, thank you. I am feeling like it's just a repeating conversation, the same themes of communications, long-term planning, data collection, so I am feeling like a little disheartened.

[03:42:03] So I guess I want to summarize by saying I think for the goal 5 work to make progress in this goal, the work needs to be communications, directives, so must do's, not shall do's, may do's, may, and then the data to evaluate and measure what's happening.

[03:42:20] So for instance, let's take AVID, amazing program, not in all of our schools yet. Some have it in high school, some middle, there's even one or so elementary. So you're supposed to -- some schools recruit for AVID and they invite students. Other students just happen upon it.

[03:42:35] Maybe a teacher recommends it. It's so much happenstance. Then there's strategies for success. That's a course. There's also the college partnership program, which is a club after school. I didn't even know what these things were, and again, if I don't know, I guess to say that many parents don't know, and in fact, I know they don't.

[03:42:54] I was talking with parents, friends of mine, we have the same age kids in school, and one of them said, you know, I don't really know what IB is. What is it? Why is it, you know, these are, you know, college educated, two-parent households, middle to upper income. And the good thing is I think parents trust our schools. They're like, oh, I trust SPS. They'll figure it out. But we're not engaging them in the way or, you know, giving them that data that's like, oh, wow, I've got to pay attention right now to this. Also, you know, events at school.

[03:43:23] I would just love to see some kind of checklist that's like, here's how we're going to make sure everyone's got all the information. It's what courses are we recruiting, what clubs, what field trips, what info is on the website, what's going home any number of ways. You know, this week Avid's having a college fair at one of our middle schools. Like, you know, there's just so many things that I guess I just want to make sure all of our students get access. And the other thing is the evidence. So one thing is, you know, it was mentioned online learning and, you know, my kiddo didn't know about online language learning, that she could do American Sign Language. I just happened to dig and dig and dig until I found it. We've got

[03:43:58] to stop these random pieces of information. We've got to have a consistent process so we know everyone is doing all the things that really matter. So in summary, communications, directives, and the data to evaluate and measure that we're doing this work. Thank you, Ms. Marin. I was in an avid elementary school this morning, Pinewood Elementary, who's going to be hosting 16 other title one elementary principals uh very shortly because we're adding avid to all our title one elementary schools so it's not sort of random so i just wanted you we haven't gotten to that report

[03:44:37] yet but that works occurring and um nikki the principal there was very excited and about the 16 principals coming to visit to see what the strengths in that program were so just spoiler alert but we are we are making sure that the best practice exists across the board. Okay with that let me take my two minutes. Some of you if not more than some know my story that a former ESS student who came to the US after sophomore year in the middle of high school junior year very tough to come to a different

[03:45:15] country with a different language in the middle of high school years. I consider myself as one of those successful examples of fine esl program back then we call it esl in the city of alexandria that that was 50 years ago 1974 could you believe that a half century ago but what they did for me was this even though i finished sophomore year in korea they allow me to repeat my sophomore year here in here in the u.s so that i could have a little more time before

[03:45:50] i went to college because i needed that extra time i do not think we provide that kind of flexibility in fairfax anymore or even in the city of alexandria but i think that's something we should consider another flexibility they allow me to have i think it's by design eventually a the a ultimate goal was ultimate goal of esl program mr polio was to mainstream me into regular classes so instead of holding a esl class and of one fixed period whether it's first period the world

[03:46:30] fourth period of the day they scattered it they did monday would be first period tuesday would be second period and wednesday thursday and friday so forth how will that help me because i could always go to regular classes and all my regular classroom teachers knew what my needs were. They knew, they understood, so they were able to really provide additional support for my growing. That kind of support would go a long way, helping our multi-language learners become

[03:47:09] more successful in Fairfax. Okay, with that, my time is up. I'll go to Dr. Anderson to be followed by Mrs. Leidy. Thank you. The competition of AVID reminds me of something that we've been talking about quite a bit i know we have avid which i consider to be intensive which is the avid classes that it takes a whole lot of different ways to get into them at the middle school one of our middle schools you have to apply and have an interview to even get into avid at the high school you just waltz in um so there's the avid intensive programs that i know are having such

[03:47:43] great such great um success with our schools and then there's the avid light that i call it it's It's not bad, but it's just embedded in what you're doing throughout the day. We have some opportunities for our students to be in the intensive AVID programs, but for some of our students who are learning language, they don't have any electives in order to do that as an elective.

[03:48:08] I think that's a barrier we need to remove because they're in a Successful Strategies class or they're in an ELD class. Necessary and important things, but it doesn't give them the opportunity to have their feet in, you know, one foot in each of these places.

[03:48:23] So I'm wondering, Dr. Whitehood, oh my gosh, Dr. Reed, how can we expand opportunity for students who need that intensive, avid support? So actually, our SAC team presented a number of topics, the Superintendent Advisory Committee last week.

[03:48:43] And I'll be doing a short video with Pablo, who's a multilingual student, and he talked about his experience in EL courses over three years. And he argued for exactly what you're saying. He wanted to be in different classes, but there was a requirement for him to test out of the program to do that.

[03:49:06] So I think that the WICR strategies, which are the core of the AVID work, certainly could be integrated into academic work, period. And I think we have to look at what the electives are.

[03:49:24] I've heard really mixed reviews on some of the electives you've named. So I just, I think we either need to beef those up or change them out or look at AVID as the maybe curriculum within those or unstuck and on target I can never forget and remember the on target part but some type of executive functioning support with AVID and behavioral support that we don't need a separate class for every topic right like we could integrate I think those skills without costing kids our electives because more than anything they want to follow

[03:50:01] their passion projects and their passion and talents as well. So we're going to be taking a really close look at scheduling for high schools here starting later this spring, and we're already monitoring scheduling in middle school right now. So more to come on that topic. Thank you. And that kind of connects to my other question for Dr. Presidio. You mentioned this. I didn't see it as a written part of the presentation, but you mentioned individualized learning plans for students. I wonder how we can dovetail students who may need those additional supports but don't necessarily need to be locked into the classes with what you shared previously. I do have a

[03:50:40] question, slide 28, where you talked about the target for 23-24 is 93% for the end of the school year. Any sense as to where we are right now? I know we're closely monitoring the dropout information with our on-time graduation dashboard. The question, I believe, Dr. Anderson, is do we

[03:51:04] know how close we are to that 93% rate. Halfway through the year. And I don't know if we know the answer to that today, but we can certainly come back to the board. Just to get a sense of whether or not that 5% is going to be achieved. Also, you talked quite a bit regarding the Twilight programs. 78% increased to a high school diploma. Yes, and you've increased from three schools to 14 schools. How many students participated? What's the total number of students and who are those students specifically who elected to

[03:51:35] participate in Twilight. Currently we have over 400 students participating in 14 schools and right now we are also with our new information around flexible learning from the VDOE that's allowing us to bring students in outside of school hours and provide instruction to also roll back some of the chronic absenteeism from from there's schools are going to begin targeting students. Maybe that fit in both categories and we're working with Edu4Toro.

[03:52:07] to really re-engage a lot of our multilingual learning students and their families in coming back to school or who are kind of behind in credits to not only come back to school but then to also get involved with Twilight. If you were to kind of share what is a day in the life of a student who is participating in Twilight what does that look like because I don't have a good sense are they in school at all part of the day? So for the most part it should be the children are coming to school. But then after school, there's time for them to participate in

[03:52:41] a small group with teacher support, lots of times using the Edmentum curriculum to recover some of the credits that they might be missing. So it's just more schooling. It's an extended day. It is an extended day, but I will say there are some schools that are using it strategically if there's struggling or they're trying to really make more of an individualized plan with students where if a student might not be coming in the morning, they're coming in the afternoon and then they're using Edmentum in the afternoon as part of the twilight.

[03:53:13] Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Lady to be followed by Ms. Seismarizer. So your questions about Edmentum made me realize that I'd like to ask one about Edmentum and that is that my experience at Chantilly is when we were trying to triage somebody to get them to graduation, which in turn might mean we're going to drop three electives because they only need four core.

[03:53:36] The main struggle there is that you had to have a teacher as a point of contact. So I guess I'm asking if we can have someone centrally who could perhaps be like an online campus person. Maybe they don't even come into effect until the spring, I don't know, but there has to be a way that I can't just be begging a teacher to take on one additional thing.

[03:53:57] Sometimes if they have that student during the day, they might be willing, but that's where the rub is. It's hard to get kids in at minimum for credit recovery during a school day because you have to have a teacher assigned. So if there was something centrally, maybe instructional specialists. I don't know. Or maybe department chairs, because they have a period off. I don't know.

[03:54:14] But we need some directives around that, in my opinion. I also wanted to make sure that I said thank you. This is amazing work, and nothing makes me happier than the innovation and creativity of the conversations at this table. I have always been an outside the box thinker and a creative thinker and a creative problem solver, and I think I did great work when I was down at the school level getting kids to graduation who otherwise looked hopeless.

[03:54:41] But part of that's because, with all due respect, I broke some regulations to get there. Because sometimes there's what you do for kids in need, and I'm just being honest. But we don't need to have regulations prohibiting that kind of progressive thinking and nimble thinking.

[03:54:57] The other thing I just want to add is AVID is amazing. We added it at Chantilly. We had to trade for the staffing. It's something we had to fit in and make happen. I also think we need to be nimble. I'll just share this real quick about a zero period and a ninth period When I was at Osborne High School this past week I happen to be talking to a former DSS for Fairfax who is a counselor there and the health and PE chair was in the office They were looking at numbers for staffing and I looked and I said oh my gosh soccer Oh my gosh, you know, maybe there was another one and that was sort of you know They teach that as a class think if you taught soccer as a zero period how many more kids might we get to school?

[03:55:34] How about if we're talking as a ninth period, how many more kids might we get to finish? And the same with when we're talking about these individual plans for our neediest kids, a lot of our kids want auto tech and auto collision or carpentry, and they can't get the class. So we can write this plan in seventh grade, and then they don't get the class.

[03:55:51] So what about a zero and a ninth period where we can add more sections of that so more kids get it? Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Sizemore to be followed by Madam Vice Chair. And I promise I wasn't stealing what you said, but literally I had it written down.

[03:56:07] eighth period. When I talk about programming changes, right, we can talk about AVID, which is phenomenal, and strategies in all these classes, but the reality is, and this just popped up my Facebook this morning from our, from VDOE, talking about the value of music education, and reducing chronic absenteeism, and getting kids connected to school, and all of these other classes that Miss Lady talks about do the same things. So I don't know how we look at chronic absenteeism and drop out without looking at programming changes to really address the authentic ways that students want to go to school, reasons students want to go to school, right? And I know there may be costs

[03:56:45] involved. I don't know all the details because that's why we hired you, right? But I do think that, you know, if we're going to, I know, I'm sorry, Dr. Reed, you know, if we're going to look really at authentic change to address some of these longstanding gaps, we've got to be willing to look at how we're providing the services, not just the PD, and I appreciate all you're talking about, but if we're taking away kids' electives to get them to AVID, if we're taking away kids' electives to get them executive functioning, we've got to better use our intervention block. We have to focus on, it's three things, right? It's communication, it's professional

[03:57:21] development, because to this day, I hear so much about on-time graduation that it takes away from principals and admins focusing on an individualized six-year plan, whether it's EL students or students with disabilities, right? And maybe that's a PD issue that they realize they can slide. I don't think our second grade teachers understand the long-term impacts, right? That's a PD issue, and it's got to be consistent, but we won't get there unless we focus on program. For two years, I know Dr. Procedo and I talked about a pilot for strategies, either during intervention block or after school, and I don't know what happened to that pilot, but

[03:57:57] it shouldn't, if we're going to take two years to do a pilot, we're never going to get here. so and i don't it's not on you it's just covet other things happen i'm just trying to say that like we have to be willing to think big or these gaps will be there forever and we have to look at the data as to what actually gets kids to go to school and stay at school and i feel like the focus is how are we going to get them the information they need and not how are we going to get them to want to be here and then get them the information they need and yes you guys are phenomenal and this is amazing and everything doc dr lady i just elevated you said i don't want to

[03:58:33] take that away, but I feel like, again, forest and trees. So I appreciate all your hard work. Thank you. Madam Chair. Well, thank you, Ms. Sizemore-Heiser. When we talk about flexible scheduling, I think that's what we are talking about. And I think the ability for students or staff to flex their day, I think, and flex our calendar, quite frankly. I think we need to take a closer look at what we're doing and think about how we use our days, not just within the day but across the course of the year and at the end of the day the

[03:59:12] cross-crediting conversation around certain courses counting for math or science I think are really timely conversations many states have already addressed those topics to link core academics with apprenticeship programs or externships make a lot of sense so I I think we're all in and we'll kind of review Miss Lady's strategies that may flirt with our regulations so that we can better write our regulations but that's you know we're not going to stop

[03:59:47] at anything to make this work so and our thinking has to be strategic but not we can't process forever because our kids have waited long enough thank you I don't think Miss Lady broke any regulation just should only exercise or discretion and flexibility with Madam Wai-Share.

[04:00:10] I am heartened at the creativity and the expansion of the conversation from just the dropout numbers and the data, which I know we need, but I also think about, again, the other components of this goal, career tech education, it's been mentioned.

[04:00:26] So how will the work of Goal 5 track the expansion of career tech education? How will we see how much more has been added, accessed, kids, students graduating with credentials. Same with dual enrollment. There's just all these other options, and I'm glad that we're all talking about it.

[04:00:44] I just do want to be sure that it's captured in this, because even thinking about when we designed this goal, it was for the future. It wasn't just get kids to the diploma. It was, you know, really set them up for life success. So I would like to see us sustain that, the breadth of that vision of the goal.

[04:01:01] So I will leave it at that. I will simply respond by saying there's a lot of similarity to jazz music. We have to establish the rule and then move to improvisation. And what we're trying to do this afternoon is establish the rule.

[04:01:19] And then we're going to be able to improvise. So right now, it's getting every student across that stage and whatever at graduation. and then I think we'll be able to layer in the other topics.

[04:01:41] - You still have a minute to Dr. Anderson. - Thank you, and actually you took the last few things that I wanted to raise, which is how are we, I don't see goals for CTE or a baseline for CTE and dual enrollment.

[04:02:02] So that's a question that I have in terms of why don't we have current state. Where's my pen? - So in May, our goal four report is gonna be looking at equity and course taking patterns and that's where you're gonna see that type of information showing up so that we have an understanding of how our students are accessing the different courses that are available to them and where we're seeing gaps.

[04:02:25] - Okay, thank you. Kind of going back to AVID, if you recall, Dr. Reed, one of the first conversations we had was with Mr. Welch, a teacher at Justice High School, advocating for this very thing that Rob and Miss Lady just talked about, which is having an eighth period or ninth period opportunity.

[04:02:46] It occurs at TJ, there's an opportunity there. So I would love to see that conversation move to the next step of being a part of the improvisation as you are working through some of the AVID opportunities because we do know there's a deep need at that school.

[04:03:04] And if we're going to pilot anything, I would love for that to be a consideration. My last comment is just kind of going back to all of the strategies that you've outlined here. And you mentioned it a little bit, Dr. Presidio, but I do want to elevate it in this conversation.

[04:03:23] When we're talking about having the supports for instruction, we still don't have text that is targeting our students at the high school level when it comes to English. I know there are some supplemental materials, but that's a piece that is still pretty missing at this point.

[04:03:41] No, you're right. I mean, we've created our own curriculum, and I mean, there's some strengths and challenges with that. One of the things that I tried to mention in this report is that we are hoping to adopt secondary English language development materials, and Rich and his team have been doing a great job to identify a few different products that we might be able to pilot for next school year, so we're working on that right now. Well, Rich's team has been working on that for a number of months, so we're getting pretty close, I think, to at least having something that we can pilot for next year. Okay, thank you. One more thing that I just kind of wanted to highlight in this conversation, across the strategies that are being either considered

[04:04:20] for development or actually are being implemented is increasing fidelity in things. I always find that to be a black box in which I'm not clear what that means. I would love some more specific language when we're talking about fidelity. It's just a little bit too open and I see that's, oh,

[04:04:41] No, that's not my time. Okay, so I have just one last thing. When Ms. Maron was talking about communication, I think there's a great space to have communication go out to families. But as a current parent, I actually just sat here and pulled up the number of emails I received from FCPS in one week. It is daunting. And at some point, you just turn it off. And I'm plugged in. And I find it to be overwhelming.

[04:05:09] So, Dr. Anderson, one of the things we're working on right now that I am really excited about is, well, two things. One, we're revamping the website, and two, we're creating an app for Fairfax County Public Schools where parents will be able to have information on their smartphone and also will enable us to push information to families that is more critical in nature.

[04:05:36] And thirdly, we're developing a division-wide calendar so that we can avoid both internal scheduling conflicts where we have three professional developments on the same day. So a particular school has 15 staff out on the same day, as well as the scheduling of back-to-school nights at the same pyramid schools for families who have children at two different schools and can't get there.

[04:05:58] we're working on that division-wide calendar a refresh of the website and our first mobile app that will allow translations in real time i hope i knew i would um hopefully effective translations more effective translations but will also enable us to push information to families i think that will be more critical and it'll enable families to subscribe to certain information streams that are critical for the you know their success as well so we're really hoping to take our communications game up in those direct areas and those should be ready to go for fall 24

[04:06:37] this coming fall thank you can you also address the fidelity comment the fidelity comment so i think that one of the things that i'm excited about in the fall and every school i've been been visiting recently is I can't wait to come back and see our new basal materials that are going to be used. All of our leadership team is getting a really clear understanding of what those materials are. Our principals are getting a heads up. Our elementary principals recently had an opportunity to review those. And so fidelity simply means when we are out in classrooms,

[04:07:14] we're going to see those materials being utilized. So we're excited about that. And I think that But there are a lot of expectations that have become a little tighter over the last year or two for a variety of reasons.

[04:07:30] And I think the fidelity of implementation is a little easier when we have the resources. I think what's happened is it's hard when you're in different schools, you see different materials or different -- and some of that's just because context is a little different, but the ability to see similar materials across classrooms and across schools I think is really important.

[04:07:55] Material delivered at grade level, particularly for elementary students. So fidelity, I think will require internal communication. And honestly, our principals and teachers want to have materials to avoid the Swiss cheese that happens for children, right, as they go through the grades.

[04:08:14] So I think it's a desire we all share. And I think now, at least in literacy, going to have those resources to do that no appreciate that that's great that's not exactly what what i meant it's just as a strategy when it's i didn't when it's articulated here we don't now speak for myself we don't have a good understanding of what that means it's almost become the term robust that we all love to use here like there's other things that can be a little bit more specific to at least indicate what the work is going to be okay well let me try to give you an example then maybe that's more clear oh no it was great it's just as a point of presentation okay but no what you offered was tremendous and I appreciated

[04:08:52] all of it particularly as we have our students travel from school to school and they're seeing something brand new and our parents are feeling well did they get more here are they getting more here it's we just need to have that level of consistency so I was good with what you provided but I was really just talking about the presentation materials and how we convey the plans so I know we've been talking a lot about communication and the importance of that and I'm glad to hear everything that we're doing to improve our digital communication coming

[04:09:31] from a background of a community school coordinator and family liaison and I'm glad Dr. Renela Huffman Jackson is here because the most impactful communication are those relationships and so those family liaisons those counselors those are the people that can really get the message in a meaningful way to our families um so i think that that's something that we have to keep in mind um and even parents to parents talking to parents i know my kids went to spanish a spanish immersion program in rose hill and i remember as the family liaison there when people were coming in saying well should i put my kid in this or not and saying

[04:10:09] you know this translates into dollars when your kids go to college because they don't have to take those language requirements and that was as early as kindergarten and that's when those light bulbs start going off so i think it's important that we don't lose sight of how important it is that our school staff develops those relationships and communicates that because i think still we are the best ambassadors or our school staff are the best ambassadors and as much as people say were not trusted we are i see parents coming in and we're trusted so i think it's critical that

[04:10:44] we get that information to our staff and motivate them to get that out to our families and of course there are those people that are better at digital not me but uh i know that still those relationships are what are really critical in terms of communication thank you and i i asked my colleagues indulgence as this is an area that's been quite passionate for me and i've actually lectured on and presented on around some of these things so similar to miss lady it's it's it's a real passion of mine so I would encourage us, Dr. Reed I really appreciate what you said of

[04:11:21] kind of setting the level right and then and so I kind of thought about it in phrases that my son uses which is leveling up right so I would encourage as you build that plan out and and to channel my former colleague Miss McLaughlin maybe build that project management plan up I would encourage you to look at it as instead of on-time graduation right time graduation because

[04:11:46] Because I think the on-time grad, especially if there's a slider availability, right, I think the folks on on-time takes away from the focus for our EL, sorry, our ML students, excuse me, and our students with disabilities to access school until 22.

[04:12:01] I appreciate, Mr. Moon, very much you sharing your story of that extra year and how it supported you. My son was also one who had an extra year, mostly due to the impacts of COVID, but it got him to where he could be successful also. So when he, again, is a student with a disability, could be here 'til 22.

[04:12:19] He didn't stay that long, but he could. So I think if we focus, if we change our language at the right time graduation, that might change some mindsets. First thing, I would encourage when you're looking at leveling up, to look at leveling up transition points, second grade, fifth/sixth, eighth, ninth, and eleventh, and what are we doing for those leveling up transition supports, and who's the team involved, parents, students, and you've got to include second grade in that.

[04:12:42] I don't think I've heard anyone else talk about second grade, but for students with disabilities, huge leveling up point. I would look at we talked about flexible programming but I think you need to look at flexible programming and varied programming right that supports students connections provides multiple pathways and leads to right time graduation and post-secondary success.

[04:13:02] It's not just flexible but it's also varied right so you have strategies at an intervention block or a class and if I could just indulge I really think you've got to look at what are we providing programming for 18 to 22-year-olds right for those in the applied studies those who are applied studies working towards a standard of advanced multi-language learners and the last if not least I really want to tell you say this to you you've got to provide access to college and workplace skills for standard and advanced diploma earners students with disabilities and multi-language learners

[04:13:38] it cannot be siloed anymore thank you that would be my last thing to say but please look you have to look at providing college skills and workplace skills opportunities maybe 18 to 22 and i apologize for taking a little longer um for students with disabilities in particular to be able to both have the chance to gain those skills workplace programming and have actual programming options to get the standard diploma or to be able to go to a um half day pulley davis step or block schedule Pauley Davis step it should not be choosing between what

[04:14:18] you get at Pauley Davis step and being able to take a class that gets you to stand a diploma and right now students have to choose so I'm happy to talk to you offline about that I know well over my time I apologize please look at right time graduation it's okay for you to take a more time if you need I mean we are way ahead of schedule yeah one last thing that's one last thing when I I promise. When you look at your dropout plans, please don't just look at how do we get the

[04:14:52] education into the students. How do we get the students to want to graduate? How do we get the students to want to come to school, those authentic connections? And then how do we get them the education they need? That's it. I promise. Okay, with that, unless Dr. Reed has a concluding remarks, thanking everybody for ending it already. Well, yes, I do. Thank you, Mr. Moon. I do want to

[04:15:21] Thank the team. There's been a lot of effort on this and each of the goal reports. And I also want to recognize that I don't really, I don't think the team, the full board team maybe realizes what a shift shifting boards is as well. This work began, honestly, last fall on this goal. It's not something that just began three weeks ago, right, to work on this data, set up systems, work on the dashboards, build the structures.

[04:15:51] So I think we're still evolving in our understanding of the expectation and what to bring to the table as evidence and data and clear information that will help us do what I think all of us want to do, which is make sure each and every one of our students doesn't just graduate because they're on the, you know, assembly line, but because there's something really exciting that draws them to school every day and that they leave us.

[04:16:21] like bounding out of bed every day because they've got such an amazing future i think that's what we want and i want to thank the team we've got um we're not perfect we're not there yet but i think we're building a foundation that won't be of sand but rather rock which will enable us to really anchor the work so it's sustainable over time um so and appreciate the board's questions your feedback, the direction you're setting for us is really important, so thank you.

[04:16:51] Thank you. That concludes work session for today.

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