Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Committee Report Work Session, Thursday, June 20, 2024

Date: Thursday, June 20, 2024
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 4h 9m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtyZ3fpPKBM
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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[00:00:04] All right, folks, we are going to go ahead and get started since we have quorum. And before we begin, I'd like to share that Ms. Marron has submitted a written request to attend a portion of this meeting virtually due to a medical conflict. All those in favor of approving Ms. Marron's request, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

[00:00:24] That is everybody in the room. No one will abstain or oppose. Ms. Marron, if you could check the mic. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you very much. A little louder. good afternoon thank you very much for thank you our end madam clerk if we could raise the volume a little bit so she can be heard we're working on it oh okay a continuing problem i think we should have plenty of time to do that um so without any further ado i'm very excited to um present the ace chair who will be going through the reports folks we have approximately 60 minutes and we will stick

[00:01:00] very tightly to that and we will start with three-minute terms and I know we have an exciting presentation and so I will turn it over to mr. Ken Balbuena and after his presentation we can make comments or ask questions mr. Balbuena all right thank you dr. Anderson and thank you members of the school board I'm very excited to be here to present to you once again about the adult and community Education Advisory Committee's work and to kind of go over a little bit about what ACE is so ACE is we really have three different components under the Dalton Community Education Advisory Committee as you see on the screen here

[00:01:38] first one is we take care and make recommendations to staff as well as the school board on adult and community education as our name would imply and that can include anything from the trades also to different enrichment type of programs such as world languages and also some computer and business type of courses. We also provide guidance to adult ESOL and that would include just the same thing that you would find in the K-12 system just with adults and sometimes our students also come from the K-12 system as they matriculate into the adult ESOL programs to continue their language acquisition. And the

[00:02:16] third component that we have is our adult and community or excuse me our Fairfax County Adult High School. And with that particular component, that's for people who don't have on-time graduation. They're able to complete either their high school diploma or earn a GED through the high school equivalency program. And so all those three different components are what ACE Advisory Committee makes recommendations for, both for staff as well as for the school board to take action. Now, before we get into what our recommendations are for this year's annual report,

[00:02:51] we always wanted to take an opportunity to look back at what's been accomplished for FY23 and our recommendations in that annual report, both by staff as well as school board. So first is we made a recommendation last year to leverage existing FCPS technology. Coming out of the pandemic, a lot of our ACE courses were conducted either over Zoom, Sometimes they might have been Google Classrooms or Google Meets.

[00:03:15] It really depended on the instructor. We were able to get a little bit more alignment with our FCPS technology and provide Zuma for online instruction for our courses this year. We also noticed that there was a need for a new student registration system.

[00:03:31] So that was a big recommendation that we endorsed last year. And this year, there was an RFP that went out. There was a contract that was awarded. And we are in progress of having implementation of that contract this year. Our third recommendation we saw a lot of action on from last year's report is utilizing the skipped workforce report.

[00:03:49] So there was a skipped workforce report several years ago that included several different recommendations. And ACE has been named as a key workforce education partner by some of the subsequent work from that particular report. And we do touch on that a lot in this year's report as well.

[00:04:06] And finally, last year, there was a lot of discussion about looking at some of the nontraditional programs as a whole. and maybe where the adult high school fits in. So with this particular year, we noticed that there was a lot of continued support for on-time graduation and a lot of support for our adult high school.

[00:04:25] So those were four of the nine recommendations that we saw a lot of action on this year. And we definitely want to thank staff, but most especially want to thank school board for your support in making progress towards those reports, last year's reports recommendations.

[00:04:43] This year's charge, we were asked to collaborate with staff maximize FCPS, Fairfax County, and external resources and support structures to ensure ACE, Adult ESOL, and Fairfax County Adult High School programs increase accessibility and best meet the needs of county residents. ACE's work will be data-driven and guided by the goals and pillars of the FCPS strategic plan. That was our charge this year. We tried really hard to implement them as much as possible and to really work towards that particular charge.

[00:05:17] And to do that, we broke into five different subcommittees. With those subcommittees, we had our technology subcommittee, we had our completion to success subcommittee, marketing and outreach subcommittee, which I know will make Mr. Frisch happy. We have our skip for school subcommittee and our data analysis subcommittee.

[00:05:35] Many of these existed last year as well. We continued the work that we were doing and we made a little bit of tweaks to the marketing and outreach. Last year it was two separate committees. This year we recombined them back into one, but we worked a lot on identifying different goals and worked towards those goals to really try to capture a lot of work to support our charge from the school board.

[00:05:59] We did face a couple of challenges. One of the most significant challenges that I'm sure everybody can understand and relate to is the change in the school board. We had a lot of uncertainty this year, whether a lot of your appointees would be continuing on. Therefore, it made it a little challenging for us to be able to work together as a whole committee. In years past, we've had different guest speakers. We've had robust discussions among the entire committee, and we've had some idea of where the committee as a whole would want to advise the three different components

[00:06:33] of ACE advisory committees, you know, charges, if you will. This year, we had a lot of more updates from staff on some of their progress and where some of their enrollment might be for those particular programs. So it wasn't as special topic, special speaker driven as it was in years past. As a result, a lot of those special discussions were passed off to our subcommittees.

[00:07:01] And so our subcommittees met with a lot of staff. They met with different stakeholders and really tried to do a lot of work at the subcommittee level rather than doing it as a committee as a whole. So those were, that was one of the big challenges, but also how we responded to that particular challenge. And as a result of all of our work, we had seven different recommendations that we put in our annual report this year for your consideration. The first recommendation, and I'll skim through these and we'll spend some greater detail looking at the specifics of what we're recommending for each recommendation. Recommendation number one is a repeat of what

[00:07:36] we recommended last year, and that's for school board and A staff to consider seeking alternative funding sources. So it's not as reliant on the school operating fund, but looking at some different types of funding sources. Recommendation number two is to understand the digital divide a little bit better, specifically how students access their virtual classes and help to escalate different technologies to help with student learning in the adult communities here.

[00:08:06] Recommendation number three is from our completion and success committee, and that is when we do this new student registration system, we start to collect different data that we can use to help inform different decisions about what kind of courses we're offering, the formats that we're doing, but also it can help us with understanding some student learning outcomes.

[00:08:28] What are our students interested in accomplishing by taking ACE courses? And that can inform quite a bit of different things. And also, it can help to evaluate the work that ACE is doing and whether they are making a difference.

[00:08:43] We know that they're making a difference, but how can empirically we realize that they're making a difference in our community? Recommendation number four is as we get this new student registration system up and running, aligning some of our marketing campaigns with that. And we'll explain a little later in our presentation why that's important to time those two things together.

[00:09:03] Recommendation number five is exploring a K-12 and post-secondary alignment, particularly within CTE programs. Just a little preview for next year's recommended charge. This is something that the ACE Advisory Committee has recommended to the school board at BR Charge next year, is aligning the K-12 and post-secondary and look for those opportunities, particularly within CTE programs.

[00:09:28] Recommendation number six is to continue working with the skipped workforce readiness report. and particularly how we can have opportunities to increase our support of goals number two through five of that particular report and our final recommendation is to explore the use of language learning models to supplement ace operations and the broader fcps ecosystem i was just talking with miss st john cunning before this and one of the things that she really liked about another subcommittee that we won't name but another sub another committee is that they aligned it with our

[00:10:05] with our strategic plan and i was like oh well ace did that last year and we've done it this year too so because we are ace and we aced aligning with the strategic plan all right so with this um the annual report does show a matrix of where our recommendations align with both our fcps strategic plan goals as well as the four different pillars of the strategic plan in particular we are very proud of numbers five and six and in our evaluation numbers five and six align with every single goal as well as every single pillar of the strategic plan and

[00:10:42] that's of course uh exploring that k-12 and post-secondary pipeline for cte programs and aligning with our goals two through five of the skipped report force readiness report so to look at things a little bit deeper for goal number one our recommendation number one continuing to seek these alternative funding sources we are encouraging both a staff as well as a school Board to look at different federal grants as well as state grants that are available to continue to advocate for ACE, particularly considering working with state lobbyists for potential funding sources.

[00:11:17] And continuing collaboration with the Board of Supervisors, this is something we pushed last year a little bit, and that's looking at different opportunities, like we had co-enrollment classes at the WISH Center, as well as developing the original Mount Vernon High School as a place where we can offer ACE courses. For recommendation number two, continuing to explore and understand the digital divide, we wanted to focus on how students access courses. So are they accessing the more virtual? Are they hybrid? And what barriers exist for those particular students?

[00:11:51] We also wanted to see how technology can help to, you know, inform whether we are scheduling more virtual classes, whether we're scheduling more hybrid classes, and how we can make those accessible to students, in particular students who may be geographically distant from some of our locations. How can we use that technology? But also we want to understand are there those barriers and how can we use those community supports? In the K-12 system, students are very fortunate that they can get these MiFi devices to access courses. They get a one-to-one device. That's not necessarily always the case for our adult learners. So how can we partner with some of these community

[00:12:30] organizations to get those supports where they can maybe get MiFi devices. Maybe they can get some laptops if they can't afford them. How are we supporting those, you know, those adult learners by using those existing community supports that extend beyond FCPS themselves, ourselves.

[00:12:49] For recommendation number three, this is a continuation of a recommendation we had in last year's report. So how can we better understand our students' learning outcomes? And we think we can do that with the implementation of the new student registration system.

[00:13:05] As we are starting to phase that in and have ideally a full implementation by the end of 2024, we can record some student learning outcome data that we can use then to evaluate whether ACEs successfully meeting their needs. But we also are borrowing from some of our findings from the marketing and outreach subcommittee. And we realize that a lot of our people who are accessing our registration site, at least from our marketing campaigns, they were accessing them primarily through mobile devices. So really working with staff to ensure that when we implement this,

[00:13:41] that we do keep a mobile-friendly optimization in mind so students can access courses in a very easy way using those methods of access that they already do, which is primarily mobile devices, cell phones and tablets rather than laptops themselves.

[00:14:00] So leading into our marketing and outreach subcommittee, we are aligning our campaigns with the rollout of that new student registration system. We found talking with our vendors, our marketing vendor, that we did perform very well with our marketing campaigns. However, as they put it, it's some ways putting the cart before the horse.

[00:14:18] What we noticed is when we got students, potential students onto our registration page, they were unable to find their courses in many cases. Now, whether it was a course that already exists in the registration system that they just couldn't locate, or whether it's a course that we don't offer, we found that 4% of the students that we did follow-ups with after abandoning the registration process, only 4% cited financial reasons. So we know that it's not a financial reason that they are not enrolling in the courses, but it could be possibly that they are not really They're having trouble navigating this registration system.

[00:14:57] So while we have successful marketing campaigns, we want to continue those successful marketing campaigns but align it with the implementation of this new student registration system. Nonetheless, we still found a lot of interesting demographics. We found that there are different, primarily it's women that were accessing our ads.

[00:15:15] We found that they were also, again, using it for mobile devices. So as we design our marketing campaigns in the future, we want to be able to use that information and use some appropriate language that's going to resonate more with females rather than males, because we know that that is what the primary audience that are accessing our ads are.

[00:15:34] On the same token, we can design campaigns that are more geared for, you know, just attracting males to our system by having those particular campaigns that go in that area, and we can use the lessons learned to move in that area. And lastly, we want to focus on our online anytime courses.

[00:15:50] There is a financial reason why we want to include those courses and focus on them that we include in the annual report. Primarily, we only get charged anytime a student actually enrolls and takes that course. There is also a reduction in overhead by marketing the online anytime courses where we don't have to have classroom space and we aren't at risk of having to cancel that class due to low enrollment.

[00:16:16] So online anytime courses are a good avenue to focus on that has been very successful in the past, as we've found. So we want to continue marketing those. For recommendation number five, we have tried, our committee has tried over the last several years to have a good partnership with the Career and Technical Education Advisory Committee.

[00:16:36] We've had so-so success primarily because of the timing of our meetings. CTE tends to meet early in the morning. We tend to meet in the evening, and there's been hard difficulties trying to align schedules together. But we are both open to meeting.

[00:16:52] Our committees are both open to meeting. My wife is actually going to be vice chair of CTEAC next year. So hopefully our communications will improve a little bit. If not for the two committees, hopefully us just actually talking to one another in the house. We also have some benefits that ACE can offer.

[00:17:12] So there are some students, and I used to work in a community college, so we know that there are some students who really just aren't interested in going to college. They are interested in going to the workforce, or they're interested in short-term credentialing. That's where ACE bridges that gap and has that alignment with the K-12 system where we can serve the needs of students who are not college-bound.

[00:17:33] Also, this recommendation aligns with the SCIP Workforce Readiness Report, and we discussed that it could potentially help with some of the teacher shortages. in the fact that if we have more students interested in going into trades we maybe can develop some partnerships with industry we could have some of those teachers almost serve as like what you would find in college kind of like adjunct instructors that can teach on the side which would then help with the teacher recruitment issue that is kind of prevalent throughout not only FCPS but also throughout you know other school systems throughout the country. Recommendation

[00:18:09] number six, there are, as I said, five different goals, and we believe that ACE can help to support goals two through five, so almost all of those goals of that skipped readiness report. There was an add-on group that was known as the Fairfax County Opportunity Youth Network, or FC, I'm not sure how to pronounce the acronym, FCCOIN? All right, FCOIN. All right, so with them, we were identified as a key workforce partner. We also worked with the skipped groups to create

[00:18:48] Apprenticeship 101 and Health and Medical 101 based off of some of those discussions. And as I said, we support four out of those five goals. And that is one of those recommendations that does align with all six or all five goals of the strategic plan as well as the four pillars.

[00:19:06] And finally, for our data and analysis, data analysis subcommittee, we talked a lot about the language learning models as a way to use AI to supplement but not replace classroom instruction. And that can have benefits to students, teachers, and a staff. So for students, it helps to personalize tutoring. So we're adapting learning to each student's learning pace and style. They get those extra necessary one-on-one resources from a digital space that's customized to maybe some of their areas of struggle of where they're struggling or need additional support. But for teachers and A staff, it helps to automate some of the administrative

[00:19:45] tasks. For teachers, it helps to provide learning insights into each student. So maybe if they're noticing that a student needs a little bit more support in this particular area, while this student needs a little bit more support in this particular area, it gives insights that maybe a teacher can't necessarily learn when they're observing the classes as a whole, and maybe not necessarily having those one-on-one conversations with students. And then for A staff, it helps to balance workloads. I know A staff is often very overexerting themselves, I would say, with the reduced amount of resources that they have available. So this could help to automate some

[00:20:24] of the tasks and free them up to be able to balance their workloads a little bit more. So just to kind of summarize some of the five key points and takeaways of our annual report is really just looking for some alternative funding sources that will take some of the stress off of the school operating fund and decrease the reliance that ACE has on it. Number two is the student registration system. It's got several benefits. It could also help with data capture and learning a student's preferred method of instruction. Number three is marketing efforts

[00:21:01] were very valuable and driving traffic to ACE's registration page, but that is where we were losing them in the enrollment funnel. Number four is ACE is a key partner for Opportunity Youth, and there is a particular opportunity for alignment between the K-12 system within CTE programs especially. And lastly, the language learning models can play a great role in supplementing instruction as well as automating tasks. We go into a lot of greater detail of these in the annual report itself, but Dr. Anderson said I was limited on my time that I had to present,

[00:21:36] so that said i'm happy to answer any questions that you may have thank you and i will wait for our colleagues to put their placards up so we can have those conversations i do want to say that and some of the questions i will ask will be a little bit more pointed because this is my third time being the ace liaison and i've enjoyed every minute of it but i do want to start off by saying it's very much appreciated how you've connected the previous recommendations and i think that should be a common practice moving forward for all of our committees because it's helpful to make the linkages otherwise they come across as very separate and distinct opportunities when they

[00:22:15] really are not it's a continuum and so we are going to start with miss lady and then mr frisch thank you for this report um the question that popped in my mind as i was listening was related to ace classes um are there any that are wait listed um and do we have any data on classes that kids are now that adult learners are paying for that perhaps they were not able to access as far as county students uh i will say one one thing that pops to mind is our driver's education program so with that uh there there are often students that we have to turn away and paul

[00:22:54] can probably chime in or karen can chime in but we do have to turn students away because of a lack of instructors that is a high demand program as far as some of the other programs i think it would be better for staff to respond to that oh i am so sorry we did not introduce the staff that are here so can we just take a minute to do that sure all right so we are very fortunate to have karen williams and karen williams is um she has been our liaison uh staff liaison for the four at least the four years that i've been here if not longer and she is super super valuable and really

[00:23:30] appreciate all of karen's support throughout the my time as chair yeah thank you very much i'm karen williams i'm the director of um i'm a director of instructional services it's not on i'm on now okay so i'm karen williams i'm the staff liaison to this committee and i work in instructional services i'm a director there then we have other staff with us today we have paul steiner he's a ace administrator uh we have rich polio the director of esol noel clemenco that you guys

[00:24:09] all know her and uh slim presidio all here to support this report today oh and uh to answer the question so wait list so the apprenticeship program in particular we don't um have a running wait list but we do have high demand for our 101 classes um this year we were able to meet the demand but we're um you know that's an area that's pretty pretty busy uh and then we also have always have students ready to take as um as ken said uh ready to take our behind the wheel classes

[00:24:42] um for sure those are the two that come to mind and the question about whether or not students are accessing i mean in full disclosure i'm thinking of things like auto tech auto collision carpentry which are over capacity and we have wait lists for um how many of our former students who maybe you know they're they maybe have gotten their diploma but they're utilizing ace to get those classes now do we do any surveying to find out if that's a class they tried to get but couldn't get when they were a student i currently don't do any survey to that degree um but we do linkage with um the cte group so making sure that if they've taken a couple of classes in um they've taken

[00:25:21] classes and they're interested in continuing that as a career they can come to ace to the the apprenticeship program. And Paul has more to say. Yeah, I just like to chime in. Yeah, anecdotally, we do have students that for whatever reason, maybe they didn't have access to those programs. Maybe it just comes down to available class periods, what they're able to access. But they do come to ACE as, you know, someone who's 19, 20 or 21 to access that education so they can pursue a career in health, medical, business IT, or skilled trades.

[00:25:56] So we do see it. I don't have any numbers, but we have a robust outreach program and work with college and career counselors at every high school. And so we do get a lot of students that matriculate from the academies, but a lot of students that they did not get the opportunity in the academy, so they come to us for that training after high school.

[00:26:17] Given the work that we're trying to do about access, It'd be nice if there was a way to collect that data. Evidentially, it's going to demonstrate the need for us to do more and create more classrooms and opportunities during the time where it's free public education.

[00:26:33] That'd be great. Yeah, Ms. Leyte, I think that will really greatly benefit from the student registration system. I'm trying to find the data we had from last year, but we found during last year's report that the student registration system I believe is at least 20 years old 25 years old I was close so 25 years old so it does have a lot of limitations and we are very grateful for the new registration system and very hopeful that it will be able to fill that gap that you're

[00:27:07] referencing. Thank you Miss Lady. Mr. Frisch? Thank you. When we talk about the student registration system just want to be clear we're talking about the ACE student registration system Correct. Because one thing that I think we often talk about when we're talking about ACE and people in the community will often ask, how does this connect to student outcomes, like K-12 student outcomes? And it occurred to me as you were talking about the student registration system, that perhaps on our end, there's information that we're getting from families when they register

[00:27:40] students every single year. And if we know that a family either has limited English proficiency at home or might benefit from other coursework at in the ACE program that could probably be flagged on the student reg on our actual K through 12 student registration side and then appropriate outreach could come from ACE to let people know about available programming so that's an idea and that's a you know connecting families to better you know help their their children in our system is a direct connection to K through 12 student success.

[00:28:19] So that might be something worth exploring on that end. And the same could be said for MiFi and other devices, right? If we have families that are registering for these courses that we know will have a downstream impact on their students, perhaps, and I don't know what the expense would be, obviously, tight budgets and whatnot, maybe certain families can be eligible for those things.

[00:28:40] I don't know. And then finally, music to my ears in the marketing section. You know, it's great to hear that we're using targeted approaches to seeking out students with information that we know about class usage, signups, et cetera.

[00:28:57] And I look forward to seeing even more of that. As you were talking about the signup process and how a lot of people kind of take a detour once they get there because they're not sure how to proceed. I mean, that is a problem that many, many, many businesses deal with every single time that they launch a new interface.

[00:29:14] So perhaps we could be working with the vendor and others on better UI experiences for the folks that we're trying to get through. Or we can even put something on that page that says having trouble, call this number or something like that.

[00:29:31] But overall, I agree with Dr. Anderson's assessment that it's great to see the linkage between previous years. also think having a a report card as it were connecting the recommendations and work of the committee to the strategic plan is great and would be well received if replicated in all the other reports so overall it's also heartening to see what that kind of good work can do to lead to actual things being implemented because we often have these meetings where we just don't have a lot to show for the work of the committee and this is not one of those cases so kudos

[00:30:08] Thank you, Mr. Frisch. Ms. Seizmoeheiser. Thank you. And I appreciate all this hard work and I appreciate the report. And again, I appreciate the linkages of treaty plan. That's actually something we had in our advisory committee handbook that we've been working on. So kudos for you for doing that ahead of time. I really appreciate that. And I really, as someone who teaches online classes through colleges and runs an online program, the issues of the greater use of mobile phones to access learning platforms is real. And so I'm glad to see that lifted up.

[00:30:43] I will say I'm a little surprised when the charge is on accessibility that there's nothing in here about disability accessibility because when you go to colleges, the accessibility offices are about, in some ways, disability accessibility and there isn't anything in here, right?

[00:31:03] I think it's great to work with CTE, but what about working with career and transition services, STEP, Watt, Pulley, Davis, working with our ETRs, there's just nothing in here. And so when I hear, and maybe that's the lens that I bring, right, but how are students with AAC devices accessing our courses?

[00:31:20] How are we ensuring for putting public funds in here that these are ADA compliant? How are we ensuring that students who have accessibility needs, those accessibility needs, what's the process by which they get accommodations? And how is that process being done?

[00:31:36] I appreciate the thought about technology and making sure students have technology. I appreciate, you know, the marketing to make sure students know about this and the sign-up. But when I hear accessibility, I think that's a community that needs to be talked about. So, and that I think is the lens sometimes that we need to have on every area that we look at, right?

[00:31:57] Like when we're looking at our reports, we need to make sure we're looking at all of the communities. And I appreciate the thought about language. But if you're putting in, like, AI, I think it's great. and we've been talking about that at the college level, how to use AI to help customize learning for students, but how does that interplay with someone with disability needs?

[00:32:17] So I just think that perhaps as you look at this, that's a lens that does need to be brought to this report. I would love to have seen how are these programs accessible. We have a lot of career and transition services students who graduate from here who could really benefit from these classes, right? So when we talk about partnership with CTE, how does that partnership with CTS look like as well?

[00:32:38] So just my comments on that. So I think as we're looking at implementing, or if you're going to continue this future, I would love next year's report to talk about accessibility from that lens also. Ms. Williams, is there anything you wanted to add? Only that I agree, obviously.

[00:32:56] The ADA compliant, we do take every effort to make sure that all the ADA requirements are there. But as far as that career transition services, you know, luckily they're on my floor. So we have been talking with them more. And we also had a couple of members of the committee who were very concerned about this as well.

[00:33:12] So it is something we really do need to look at. I just was surprised it wasn't in here, right? Like I think when you talk about CTE partnership, but not CTS partnership, right? And I would have loved to see some thoughts on how do we work with ETRs, right? So make sure ETRs are aware of AIDS programming and what might be supported as students are developing those transition IEPs.

[00:33:34] It would be really great for ETRs to be able to. So I just think that's a lost opportunity when the charge is on accessibility. Thank you. Thank you for, you know, one, continuing my appointment. So I'm very proud to be representing the Braddock District, and thank you for your comments.

[00:33:51] I think as we look towards next year's report, this is absolutely something we will keep in mind. Since we did a lot of the work at the subcommittee level, I think that was something that maybe was an oversight this year. We did reference something in last year's report about accessibility from that lens.

[00:34:09] So we'll be sure to revisit that next year as well and include that in the report. Mr. Moon. Thank you, Dr. Martin. Just a few questions regarding enrollment and also budget. First of all, going to your slide number, this is a two.

[00:34:30] There's three different components under the purview of an ACE/AC. You separated adult ESOR out of adult and community education. So in looking at the page 17 of your report enrollment data, does that, it has a subtotal for ESOR, does that include adult ESOR, or is that just, okay, so there was no separation between A's number versus other T's or on that particular chart.

[00:35:08] We do track the enrollment of each line of business separately. And then the combined total is there. Combined total is there. And I'm also looking at, I think, maybe the graph for the budget financial position, which is on page 19.

[00:35:24] And I'm seeing a, for the FI24, a, you know, positive, high positive from the September in a slide, you know, slowly going down all the way down to May. And I think we were $621,000 in negative.

[00:35:46] The fact that it started from like a $750,000 positive, does that reflect the fact that maybe students registered and they made a tuition payment so our financial position was in positive and then is that is that the explanation all of our long-form classes so the apprenticeship for instance it's paid up front okay and then um we didn't get any additional payments as we went through so that's one of the reasons it's pretty it follows a pretty predictable pattern that we've had for several years there okay um and then um of course this was at the end of may so our

[00:36:23] financial position will improve by the end of this month you know it won't be the same okay so now i'm going to try to link uh the enrollment data which is on page 17 with the graph on page 19. you know we have three subtotals you know depending on the lines of business i think that's that's the way you put it uh top two categories we have one subtotal number we have adult program software we also have easel software basically do you know amongst a those three different groups

[00:37:00] which groups are self-sustaining in terms of finance versus which need to be you know funded from school system so i believe i believe it correct me if i'm wrong karen but the adult esau programs they are funded separately and they're not part of the school operating fund is that correct? So adult ESOL has some grant funds as well as tuition funds and they're actually rebounding nicely since the since the you know COVID closure so I would say adult ESOL is

[00:37:38] one of our stronger lines of business and they also are self-sustaining at this point. Okay okay so we are basically subsidizing the other two programs if the subsidizing is right I don't know that it's the right word to use. Part of the money is coming from the operating fund transfer helping with these things. The apprenticeship program, I also want to take a minute just to reference that. Even though it's part of the subtotal at the top, our apprenticeship program is also a very strong line of business, really busy, really busy.

[00:38:10] And that particular program is self-sustaining as well. Okay, thank you. Thank you. One comment One thing I want to make is obviously I have not heard from all board members on this particular presentation but it's very heartwarming to hear positive comments from my colleagues on what ACE program is doing because that has not always been the case in the past.

[00:38:35] So quite refreshing. I'm a happy board member today. That's very good to hear, Mr. Moon. St. John Cunning I have you thank you thank you for the report and I really appreciate all the work that you do I have a couple of questions in terms of your marketing is that material translated when you're doing your marketing to students Paul Karen I'll defer to you on that I don't believe that it is but I also don't have the details specifically on like some of their

[00:39:14] campaigns I got a lot of broad results at least the subcommittee marketing subcommittee got some broad results but as far as the nuts and bolts karen everything on the public web is translated for sure and then we're um most of our printed materials are also translated our catalog that we send occasionally out is not translated so it is only in english okay um another question that i have um and i don't know who could answer this question because i know that

[00:39:46] you could be an fcps student until 22 if you don't you know graduate so if in terms of trying to address what one of my colleagues was asking if there's not space for the ct courses in the school and you haven't graduated could you be taking that ace and not be paying for them i mean that may be a question to the superintendent i mean it just occurred to me that it again okay so

[00:40:18] so i know that you can be an fcps student until 22 and if you have not a solve right right so if you have not graduated and there's not enough space for some of the cte classes at the school could you take them at ace and not have to pay for them we're gonna pass this question all the way around and for or maybe we should consider that no no no let me let me clarify what you're asking Ms. St. John-Cunney, you're asking could a current FCPS student that has not graduated out

[00:40:57] utilize a CTE course through the ACE program without tuition because they can't access their home school. That seems a fairly specific question. Dr. Presidio, is that possible currently? I'm guessing it is possible but it isn't something that we've really figured out how to do very well.

[00:41:16] I mean you've got all of the issues of scheduling and transportation that a student would have to encounter one of the things that we've really been focused on and trying to make that connection between the ACE CTE offerings and what we do in our k-12 space is actually trying to partner more with our alternative school sites like Bryant and Mountain View that don't have as many elective offerings and trying to find a way to bring some of our ACE courses into those programs that's something we've just started we haven't gotten very far with that but that would be I think similar but if we had a particular student that there was really a course that they were particularly interested in in ace and we could work out the transportation

[00:41:53] and scheduling i do think that that would be something that we could provide okay which we'll also go on to just if you can explain because kind of along that same line is you talked about working with skip and i think you said the wish center and some of the course offerings can you just elaborate on that because i think that kind of follows that same line of thinking thinking if you could give us a little bit more background on that sure so i believe it's actually mostly our adult esau classes that are offered at both of them and i believe that the original mount vernon high school the discussions early on uh were to have it uh as an ace as an ace location um an

[00:42:29] adult esau location as well as having it for the other community service uses as far as the wish center i think it's a very similar arrangement um anything you want to add to that karen so just to be clear the original mount vernon high school is not opened yet it's a center right and um ace will be offering classes there when it opens in, I think, two years now. The WISH Center, we do have classes offered there, specifically adult ESOL classes, so Rich might be able to talk to that just a little bit more. But we're in constant contact with them to try

[00:43:05] to see what else we can bring to that space. Our Apprenticeship 101 and our Health and Medical 101 are both very popular classes, and we're trying to make it work there with their service provider they use Melwood as their service provider at the wish center and I think Paul and I go there at least every quarter so just to see what's needed there and see if we could help out but adult ESOL has been very successful there thank you yes the wish the wish center we have so we've had for the last I believe two and a half years we've had an adult

[00:43:39] ESOL class that's run each session at the wish center it's a collaboration it's a collaborative effort with Fairfax County Public Schools Fairfax County and Melwood and students all students come from the High Blue Valley community and it's free for all students so it's a hundred percent grant funded on the teacher side Melwood collaborates and pays for the instructional materials so do you have data that says that all those students are from the High Blue Valley High Blue Valley community do you have data just because I know that area very well and I kind of suspect that

[00:44:18] you your outreach is a lot greater than that i will double check on that thank you thank you miss dixit i had you on the list thank you for the presentation um i actually wanted to talk about couple of the things um summer enrichment camps uh which are held at the lake braddock senior secondary school my son had done that a few years ago a very well-liked program but it's not accessible like it's not an easy place to go for everybody especially for working parents and i believe

[00:44:57] that's the only place and where that program was running um so it just it took a lot of time for us to get there and you know and pick up the you know it's a half day i guess program so has been there any discussions of opening it up to other schools in the county in different areas of us we are so widespread so we can have better access for students that's my first question i'm not particularly sure which class which um camp you your child attended um ace has some

[00:45:31] limited classes in the summer we do have a fcps has some additional um summer programming so um ace uh tech adventure cam so that program is not actually offered through um adult and community education um but perhaps someone else can speak to that i think the the clarification is that ace is providing registration services for those summer programs so they support our k-12 programs by doing the registration but to karen's point the program is offered through and supported by instructional services and we would love to be able to expand to more locations it's just you

[00:46:09] know when you do that obviously your costs go up and we've had a limited budget with those enrichment programs but that might be something that we could work on in the future for sure yeah thank you it's just it's not equitable if you do just in one high school and in that one area and not everybody can go to that place the other thing is the self-paced the self-directed online courses summer schools we call it with students are able to take the entire year of classes in the summer I always felt that we had very limited FC you know programming there that because with a lot of

[00:46:48] students want to get ahead and not not all but there are students who want to ahead but they don't have those courses after I think algebra two there is not after geometry there is nothing in math for that as well so that's something has been considered or so just just to be clear the online campus I think you're speaking of again is part of instructional services and our summer programs not part of ace we have looked at our summer offerings

[00:47:24] over the years we have offered some courses and then we've had to pull back on them because there's not enough interest we do need to run those in in a self-supporting way in the online campus students pay tuition so we can continue to look at those growths right now our our main interest we see from families is for health and pe as well as some of the earlier math classes when kids would like to get would like to accelerate i know that there is some level of concern about the intensity of taking some of those higher level classes in a four-week condensed period where students often

[00:47:59] have six or seven hours of work a day so for some of those higher level certainly some of our students are capable I'm not saying they're not it's just something we have not we've been trying to really work on some of the courses we feel are more accessible in that time frame but we can certainly take a look all right so I guess my next question is going to be for this yeah so I'm looking at the summer academy the ace for kids not summer academy should say enrichment secondary enrichment is on in your website it starts from resume writing to explore a career and it's a

[00:48:36] clinical medical assistant i don't see a lot of it based curriculum there is not i guess is there a separate place where it is or i'm not looking at the right place so for our k-12 students we offer a very limited number of things. I agree with you on that. We have worked over the year to try to determine whether or not we could offer a few more classes in those areas. Again, we are tuition-based, and we have partnered now with a few vendors that some of the other

[00:49:15] county agencies use. So we're offering a few more classes this year even than we did last year. So it is kind of a slow roll. I don't like to go too crazy and offer a whole bunch of things that I'm not going to be able to actually meet the enrollment projections for so it's a bit of a slow rule this year i feel pretty confident that we'll be able to offer more classes in the future next summer okay and one of the reasons the ct thing came up many a few times already that some of the programs on like cyber security and certification they fill up very quickly and there's a wait list

[00:49:48] on them um and if they could be offered through this even online and uh instruction based either way there'll be a lot of interest there is this is like the time everybody's talking about ai and cyber security and um that programming if it comes i think i'll be a success and not be losing money on that for sure yeah definitely our partner um our it's a go partner that offers online anytime classes they they give us a lot of really great statistics and our one of our highest enrolled areas is in computer and information technology with our ed2go classes and so those are online

[00:50:27] anytime classes um most of those classes are not geared towards school-age children however they're they're geared towards um adults 18 and over yeah right thank you thank you miss dixit i will take my turn before we go into gobacks. I know there's at least one. One of the things that I wanted to talk about is regarding recommendation number one, which is to continue to investigate grants, etc.

[00:50:55] Can you speak a little bit to what are some of those current efforts to seek out grants to support these three programs? Because that sounds like this one is a little bit more outside of our controlled in the other recommendations? I currently work with the grants office here in NFCPS to look for grants that that we can apply for. Obviously we are a local education activity as part of a k-12 organization so some grants that we find we're not actually eligible to apply for but we have applied for a couple of grants in the past year or so

[00:51:35] and continue to look for those right and then partnering with that with the county department of family services and things like that to make sure that we're one of their providers for any of their workplace training so this year we're able to be a little bit more successful than in the past a couple of years we have a really robust health and medical one-on-one class that came through the department of family services as part of their view program things like that so to me that's revenue it's not quite the same as this recommendation but um it is something we look for all the time and actually uh paul's really good at looking at all the state grants available

[00:52:10] and connecting us with as many as we as we are right and i think we're pretty aware of the state grants because they're part of the budget reports that we receive which brings me to my next point um just kind of speaking to what mr moon mentioned one of the things that has been i think of an issue and Karen please jump in is while they have those grants that are pretty much provided every year it doesn't necessarily keep up with some of the changes within the division. I know one year the big issue that you were wrestling with was the fact that they had to provide the um um the

[00:52:46] salary adjustments because we had a raise for staff and that's not budgeted and so that's why sometimes there's a little bit more support that is needed from the operating budget because those kinds of changes, while it impacts the entire ACE program, it's not necessarily funded when they're put in place, even though all of those are good things. Can you speak a little bit to the catalog? I know that's been a conversation quite a bit, and you said now the catalog goes out occasionally. Can you be a little bit more specific there, please? I'm sure. Actually, I can let Paul maybe answer the question, but we have tried lots of different things here to make sure

[00:53:24] that we drive down the cost so that we can spend more money on some of our marketing efforts, digital marketing efforts. And so, Paul, do you want to speak to that a minute? Yes. I think it's safe to say we're trying to determine what our balance is between a print catalog that is significantly smaller than what we've done in the past and now is distributed along with the Washington Post marketplace. So we're saving money on our printing due to the size. We're also saving money on our distribution. But we're trying to strike a balance in terms of

[00:54:00] how many people utilize that catalog versus other things that we could do in print, maybe just a smaller reminder that would cost less. And then ultimately versus who is going to use our updated website to really just have an online presence only or do everything online. So if you look at Northern Virginia Community College. I don't believe that they do a print catalog anymore.

[00:54:27] They haven't sent one to me in a very long time. And so that's just a fully online presence and online catalog. Will we go to that in the future? That is something that is possible. But I also do get a lot of feedback from customers that they see the catalog. The catalog is an excellent reminder to go online. So the catalog is converting print media into online media or online use.

[00:54:52] Thank you so much for that and I know there's a lot of excitement regarding the new registration process because the former was quite cumbersome. I mean the different places that people had to go that made it really difficult. Is there a space in that program to identify whether or not people are registering because they access the information through the catalog or versus through some online measure?

[00:55:17] So to answer your question it's going to come down to ease or our ability to easily ask that question. like at the time of registration. The old system can't really do that. It would take our DIT department a long time to get that in.

[00:55:33] With the new system, our hope is that, ask that question, like, right? Like, how'd you hear about us? I mean, and that's like a common question if you think about all the other things you register for online. And so we intend to ask that question and many other questions are due as much as we can with the new registration system.

[00:55:51] So we will have that data point in the near future. - Thank you. My last two things, I wanted to lend support to some of the conversations from Ms. Lady and Ms. St. John Cunning regarding how can we better marry, this is not new, we've had that conversation, Ms. Valwena, how we could better marry what we need, how we can better support our students who cannot access our CTE programs for whatever the reason.

[00:56:16] How can we take advantage of this? Knowing that it's tuition based, If there's an opportunity there, Dr. Presidio, as you've described, the barriers didn't seem to be making it happen without cost. The barriers seemed more to be logistical than transportation. I would love for that to be investigated moving forward.

[00:56:33] And I just want to encourage all of my colleagues to please take a tour of the facilities. It's really worth it just seeing the wonderful work that is taking place there and how students are. It helps their livelihood. It can really be life-changing.

[00:56:49] And it could also be life changing for those of us who have students who are behind the wheel, or as my own child is doing this year, which is taking the finance course online, and I did not realize it came through ACE. It's not from ACE, but it came through ACE. So after we registered him, I'm like, oh, we're now an ACE family. So I'm very excited to be part of that.

[00:57:08] All right. We are almost very close to our time, but we can entertain a couple of gobacks. Madam Clerk, we'll do one minute. Ms. Sizemoreheiser, and then we'll have Ms. St. John Cunning. Thank you. Just as a sort of follow-up to my earlier comments, you mentioned maybe being able to talk about accessibility, full about accessibility in next year's charge. What is the proposed charge?

[00:57:32] I apologize if I missed it in the documents, but I didn't. I think it is, but I just wanted to see what it was to make sure that language is, know is there room to incorporate that language for next year or let me find the exact wording for you yeah i apologize i tried to skim through it i thought i saw it earlier but i'd like to see the wording thank you and i couldn't find it either yeah we don't we do not we did not include it in the annual report i know that that is something that is in the school the the governance

[00:58:11] manual or the operating manual for next year um that's i know miss anderson is working on And then Peck as well. So we did not include it in there as per that recommendation. That's why I thought last year's charge. But we did circulate it internally, and I know I circulated to Karen for getting to the school board eventually.

[00:58:35] But did you find it? Okay, I'm still trying to find it. While you look for that, Ms. Seismolheiser, do you have another question? Because I want to be mindful of the time. That was my only question was because if it's offered, if it was a miss this year and offered to be embedded in the charge next year, I want to make sure it's embedded in the charge for next year.

[00:58:55] Awesome. While they look, oh, you found it. All right. It is very broad. It's explore how to create greater integration between ACE programs and the K-12 system, focusing on career and technical education to create a greater pipeline of students into ACE.

[00:59:11] So certainly that is something we can include in there as part of those efforts. It doesn't specifically call out accessibility and alignment in any kind of definition, but we will keep that in mind. I would recommend perhaps, and I just heard it as you read it, so I haven't seen it, but perhaps not just including accessibility, but you mentioned career and technical education, but also career and transition services, because that's where it would be embedded with those students, because a lot of the students with disabilities access career and transition services, and because of the way we program classes, they actually have more difficulty accessing career and technical education.

[00:59:47] So I think if you could embed both of those in the charge, and you said you work on the same floor with them, I think that would make sure that it's clear that that's in there, and also accessibility. That's just my suggestion there. From a logistical perspective, our committee is not meeting anymore this term. We did vote to advance this forward to the school board for their recommendation.

[01:00:07] So I would say probably from a logistical perspective, I think that is something that the school board maybe can wordsmith. Yeah, I'm happy to make a motion to change it and work with my colleagues to do that, but it was something that was intended as part of accessibility for this year's report, and so I think it's important to make sure that gets covered for next year's report.

[01:00:25] So we can make a motion or I can pull it and send it back. That's been done before, it's been pulled and sent back to committee. So we'll figure it out. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Marcia, Ms. St. John Conning. Ms. Marcia is fine with me. So I did want to ask a question when the catalog was brought up, because I love the catalog, and I've taken classes because of the catalog.

[01:00:47] And that triggered me to ask about class. Thank you. That triggered me to think about classes that might drive up revenue that may not be the necessary skills classes for adults.

[01:01:03] Like, I took a couple of cooking classes, baking classes, and then also ask you a question about how those teachers are paid, because I do know that somebody that was paid said, just not paying me enough anymore i'm not going to do it anymore so i mean i i don't know if you've done like collected the data for some of those that might drive up revenue that are not necessarily skill-based but interest-based and that a lot of people would be interested in taking i learned how to make chocolate truffles our cooking classes remain very popular so we do have a lot our our

[01:01:37] home and personal improvement classes just for transparency here have not rebounded as as strongly as some of our work-based learning or career classes have since the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic I would completely agree with you we were you know knocking it out of the park and we had everything from knitting to cooking to you know just other classes. We have not seen a complete rebound in that area. I still think there just must be some residual effects but our cooking classes are coming back strong we also have some other classes planned for the fall and into the summer

[01:02:15] that that are doing much better we really love having our community members come into our schools and see the school from a different perspective in the evenings and things like that so we have 10 locations where we're gonna keep putting some programming there and those areas prior to the pandemic i will tell you they were our revenue base right so we could keep the tuition uh lower in some of the other classes that might be harder for people to pay for. I'd be interested in seeing that data from previously what what that driver was because I just would be interested. I have

[01:02:51] a ton of data. Yes she does. Well I do want to say thank you to our chair Ken Balbuena who will no longer be our chair but hopefully of ACE but hopefully will continue on the committee and thank you to staff. I can attest folks again from seeing them work for the last three years they are extraordinary and they go above and beyond to ensure the success of this committee and it's nice to see the thread that some of the recommendations have been acted upon that's really important i think that's what makes mr moon the school board happy because we're we're seeing the

[01:03:27] value of all of the hours that our citizens put into the work on behalf of fcps it's a different board different mindset well that's it for us folks it is 5 10. if we can have two minutes just to transition and we will start at 5 12. that means don't leave the room

[01:04:13] in the interest of time i'm going to start us i know there's a few board members are taking a bio break but i want us to start um with the minority student achievement oversight committee report um i am really happy to see a lot of the members here i know this group has done a lot of hard work and way back when i used to be a member of this group so i'm glad to see that they're still going strong so with that i will have the members introduce themselves and introduce the

[01:04:44] staff sure there are slides for that should so i'm going to just go ahead and start yes i'll go ahead the clerk or our deputy clerk will do that you should have a clicker to click through the slides Thank you and good evening. The Minority Student Achievement Oversight Committee is honored to be here with all of our members today as we strive for equity and excellence in Fairfax County

[01:05:19] Public Schools. I'm Sharonda Farish. I'm co-chair and I will give other presenters a chance to introduce themselves. I'm Georgia Becerra. Good evening. My name is Kia Craig. I'm the co-chair in waiting. We currently have 13 school board representatives on MSAOC. They're listed on the I'll give you a second to read who they are. We have nine community representatives. Their

[01:05:56] organizations and names are listed on the slides. We have 14 staff representatives. I'll give you a second to read who they are. And before I go on to this slide, if our members can stand up for

[01:06:34] all the three groupings that we just presented, it'd be great so the community can know. This slide doesn't do it justice, but it came real quick because some of our milestones. The biggest thing is our 30th year MSAOC is presented to the Fairfax County Public School Board.

[01:07:00] One of the things that I'd like to also mention is the hard, the hard, hard work this committee has done from the beginning with our founding members, Dr. Lawrence Plessy and Nancy Sprague, who is in one of the building names. It's always been built around both staff and community.

[01:07:20] the next slide is our charge as you can imagine uh last year with um with the superintendent's new vision and with the strategic plan that was something that was on our mind after the board voted on it last may uh so this is take a second to read this um and at the same time maybe for the public uh we have presented this probably to seven of the ten school board members already uh we're trying to get to the question and answer period which i think a lot will be

[01:07:52] gain from. The FCPS teacher plan describes the four pillars as what FCPS must do well to be able to reach our goals for all students. Next slide. And as George mentioned earlier, our recommendations are based off of the pillars. Each of our groups chose a focus area in which they made their recommendations. Our first is Pillar A, learning environment, and the focus is equitable algebra one enrollment in eighth grade.

[01:08:24] Our committee found that currently students identified for advanced mathematics in grade 3 through 6, they receive accelerated instruction and they have a pathway that leads to Algebra 1 in 7th or 8th grade. MSAOC's recommendation includes developing and committing to a three-year professional learning plan, which would include the creation of advanced mathematics pathways for all students.

[01:08:53] Some of the recommendations are bulleted on the slide.

[01:09:22] The next focus was advanced coursework in high school. Current data shows that 85% of FCPS seniors successfully completed advanced coursework with a final grade of a C minus or higher before graduating. As of November, 2023, there are still significant discrepancies between white, Asian, and their counterparts.

[01:09:46] This includes multilingual learners and students with disabilities. MSAOC recommendations includes evaluating the open enrollment in advanced course effectiveness, collect data to determine why certain subgroups are not accessing advanced coursework and desegregate the data.

[01:10:23] Pillar B, partnerships. A considerable challenge faced by FCPS is that of chronic absenteeism. According to the U.S. Department of Education, chronic absenteeism significantly impacts learning in K through 12 education.

[01:10:44] VDOE data clearly shows that absenteeism among Hispanic and multilingual families and students is higher than any other subgroup. MSAOC is recommending building programs for families at schools with high absenteeism rates.

[01:11:02] The goal would be to empower families to support their students' education and attendance in a culturally responsive way.

[01:11:18] I'd like to point out on this slide, there is a structure for a program, starting with a limited number of pilot programs, flexible meeting options, both in person and online, and including both learning about supporting their students and building their own capacity.

[01:11:44] Next, Pillar C, under the workforce umbrella, we have a focus on diversity in hiring, and we understand that FCPS's current demographic makeup among teachers and staff suggests that we're denying our student population and staff of certain critical benefits, including higher graduation rates, improved overall academic performance. So while some effort has been made to improve diversity hiring, the rate of turnover both on school staff and in the human resources department necessitates renewed initiatives and significant professional learning coaching and

[01:12:19] consultation cultural proficiency learning fosters a culture of inclusivity within the fcps community making it a more welcoming place for candidates from diverse backgrounds will give you a moment to look at these recommendations and read each bullet point these recommendations include hiring or identifying from an existing staff an individual to serve as diversity hiring administrator,

[01:12:55] create a diversity-oriented recruitment strategy, develop and implement diversity equity inclusion training for human resources staff, develop and apply accountability measures throughout the hiring process with clearly stated consequences to be considered, and then working with MSAOC and the Human Resources Advisory Committee to create a framework for hiring as well as increasing the human resources budget to specifically support diversity recruitment and hiring processes and

[01:13:27] practices. Pillar D. Pillar D was a little look into the future equity excellence and accountability. Obviously we agree this should be in all the pillars A, B, and C. So this was a more of a to the futurist look. As mentioned on this slide you can read is comprehensive boundary study that you guys have started to partake in with the draft and into the next steps. One area we would like to focused on or a statement from your equity policy. 1440 states the belief that elimination of barriers

[01:14:03] to access and opportunity should be considered a top and that the student and community needs and systems of marginalization will be a driving force of equitable resource allocation in all facets of division decision making. This should be your mantra when the tough conversations come for the next steps in this in this policy. Give you a second to read those two recommendations, Something that we tried to, I was personally involved in the county's redistricting, so some of the suggestions we put in here is to match what they did.

[01:14:32] Dr. Reedus talked about the geo-mapping, and I put that in there. The tipping point study that Dr. Sacco back in 2013-14 put in under the old ORSI umbrella program evaluation of where it states that once a school meets a certain threshold of poverty, it affects achievement.

[01:14:51] and also for advocacy is to be on the process of next steps with the RFP if a consultant's hired, and if not, and/or also to be a member of the community task force that win this topic. Next slide.

[01:15:07] These two recommendations between AAP and Boundaries you can also put together and you can put also exclusively. This talks about programs. Specifically with AAP services is for to the evaluation of what local level versus AAP center to where uh to a lot of our community have mentioned for many years and i've stated for many years why do we bus why do we have to bus our kids out of our communities for services has this improved yes but the local level four is not there yet so evaluation of that with aap centers and by law to make sure

[01:15:44] they're equivalent and then for the next steps afterwards of of the transitioning of phasing off of ap aap centers this is not a new recommendation out of s msaoc that had been stated before. This slide talks about the new area we end with strategic plan in terms of getting annual reports to the board for the office of strategic planning and under ORC is to have consistent reports presented to you all and also to the chief of schools is to a multi-year action

[01:16:24] plan once you get the data this summer where it will show that some schools are not meeting those metrics. What is the plan for that? This is not a critique, this is just the realities and let's Let's move from there and move forward. To look at past data is something of the past. Now let's look forward.

[01:16:44] And before we turn it over to questions, I'd like to thank several people. First of all, Dr. Presidio and Dr. King for their help the last several years, decade. We wouldn't be presenting this report every year without their guidance.

[01:17:02] MSAOC is not like other advisory committees. We don't have one department. And we're still a bunch of volunteers We're trying to learn this system where we just have the passion to make sure every child strives here in FCPS. Other members, Kim Annabar, our staff liaison, and we couldn't do that as an executive board to make sure we're on track and make sure we're meeting with the proper people to make sure we make proper conclusions, not just assumptions or rumors or stuff that we go off the cusp without proper data.

[01:17:35] On top of that, this year we've met with the CEO and the CAO, I'd like to thank Ms. Hall, Ms. Neal, Dr. Ponce, Dr. Agnew Scott and her HR team, Jay Nako, and Dr. Amy Hunter.

[01:17:54] These folks presented to our subcommittees. Like I said, we've always been a striver of making sure we get the proper information and make sure that when we come with your recommendations, we don't look like we're not talking about them. And with that said, like I said, it's been a pleasure to represent the people that are behind you and the people who couldn't show up, getting to know as family.

[01:18:17] We have one person in the background who's about to get married this Sunday, and I'm glad that he showed up today with other things on his plate. and it's James Benziger and then Wesley, and then Wesley Kang, for who some of you might know for winning his awards this year as some of the state and international representation.

[01:18:53] But I'd be remiss not to mention on that slide of milestones, people that maybe people don't remember the name, Sylvia Washington, John Johnson, Ralph Cooper, folks that have been here from fred grant andrew mcdevitt i'm trying to think of past years there's bob shaw there's edward osborne um this is something that doesn't take overnight to learn and i appreciated their advocacy over the years and their emails over the years i reached out today to my old emails and i could see dr bassi some of his words in there so that's what i go with today and we're ready to

[01:19:27] hear your questions thank you for the presentation um dr anderson yes thank you and thank you to all of MSAUC who have shown up. You guys do this every time and your efforts and energies to this work are so very much appreciated. So thank you. And thank you to you all as well. One of the things that I want to start with is the AAP service because for those of you who were on the board before, this is one of the places where I've been speaking about since we started investing as much

[01:20:02] as we have into making more what we hope to be more robust AAP services across our schools. I know that I've had many conversations of Miss Komenko in terms of how many schools continue to need access to local level four, but they are not created the same. This has been a conversation that has been occurring for a long time. Can someone from staff speak about any potential efforts that are in the works to ensure that it's not just having the comparing those programs to the center programs but even to each other they're vastly different and there's a lot of autonomy

[01:20:41] and way i think too much choice in terms of how they can each look um can someone speak to what efforts we have on this matter thank you dr anderson um we continue to meet with principals to really talk about the different models and and we recognize with local level four programs the numbers can vary greatly the number of students who have been found eligible for level four can vary from school because right now we have school choice right so some of the students are choosing to go to the center and some are choosing to stay back at um at their base school so then

[01:21:18] schools really have to look at the number of students who have chosen to stay they have to look at what grade levels and then they have to find the best model to deliver services and those models can be a full class of students who are found eligible or they could, and at the other end of that is really a cluster group where we have a group of six perhaps students in a classroom who are gaining access to the level four curriculum alongside their grade level peers. So the model can change and a lot of that is because of the number of students that we'd be serving. As far as the

[01:21:53] the curriculum goes, the curriculum expectations of having the AAP curriculum across the four levels, the advanced mathematics, all of those things remain the same. Thank you for saying that, but I think I will push back a little bit because I know in my kids' elementary school, there was a year where the staff elected to not do the advanced math at all. So there seems to be wide latitude in terms of what to do. They saw that it did not work and they went back to it. They went back to the more traditional approach the next year. But I think I'm surprised that there is the latitude to

[01:22:29] make such a decision. So I'd like to hear a little bit more. It doesn't have to be right now, but definitely in the near future in terms of what are our recommendations and what are our expectations, because that doesn't come across as very clear. The other part that I wanted to talk about is the hiring. You've made many recommendations here. Can you speak to any conversations that your group may have had regarding FCPS's position in hiring proportionately

[01:23:00] with the pool of applicants that are available? A little bit more specific.

[01:23:16] Sure. You know, person who came from teacher college, I know what everybody looked like coming out of teacher college, and I was probably one of the onlys who looked like me. Are we hiring proportionally to the number of people that are coming out of those teacher prep programs, or are we out of whack with that?

[01:23:34] We don't know that data? OK. This year's report, we're trying to learn the strategic plan. We didn't dive into the data like we used to, and some of the board members like Mr. Moon, Mr. McElveen have seen our reports, right? This isn't that Dr. Bussey thesis on data, but that's because we're trying to learn the plan and what the system was doing.

[01:23:50] But our intention and one of our recommendations is to work with HRAC for next year. If you look at our recommendations to do that, we also don't like to step on toes of other advisory committees. I know that it was brought up in early advisory committee, maybe with special education. At the same time, that's a topic that's been had with us, but at the same time, we don't feel like that we'd like to go in different lanes because it also, we do the whole system.

[01:24:13] Then to another specific, we don't have that bandwidth sometimes. Sure, and I appreciate that. Thank you, Mr. Becerra. I just want to offer that as an opportunity to dig into a little bit more in the future years because I think that's information that would be very helpful to set some context. And lastly, in this area, if you could talk about some of your recommendations, because I know often we would have one person of color in a school and that person never remains because they feel isolated and have in any community.

[01:24:42] Are your recommendations speaking about creating more cohorts of people at schools rather than having singles because they tend to, again, not remain very long for the most part? Yes, we have a focus and a recommendation creating a diversity-oriented recruitment strategy where we identify and address any potential bias or biases in existing recruitment processes and practices, also reviewing and modifying job descriptions to include more inclusive language intentionally, and then establishing partnerships with organizations that support underrepresented

[01:25:20] groups in education, as you referenced certain schools, colleges, and preparatory programs. If I could just be put on a go back, Ms. Engine Cunning, thank you. My time has expired. If I can add to that, also one of the recommendations was to the hiring of a diversity coordinator, you know, some, I think, I don't know if we label it in a report, a czar, but it's more to understand the budgetary times of the responsibility of some person to handle that.

[01:25:42] So the system, individual principles, anyone can turn to that, to that person. And I think that's something under the HR structure now that's going to be new next year, something that can be hopefully built into that or a person it is. Their realm and people can turn to miss lady. Thank you, and thank you to all of you for this amazing report As I read it, and I read it very thoroughly What delighted me is these are the things that I as an employee of the school system for 27 years have been it begging for And I will be honest, and I'm embarrassed to say

[01:26:19] There was a disconnect between what we're doing at the school level and the committee work that's happening That's related to school boards because I wasn't even aware of the work you were doing so my apologies for that but this is fantastic work. We've been tracking in Fairfax County. I don't know when we started, but it was alive and well in the 1980s when I was a student. I'm embarrassed that we're still doing it. I was incredibly excited when we created open enrollment at the high school level, and I watched kids who had been gatekept out soar. I watched our college-going numbers go up.

[01:26:52] I watched the demographics in our classrooms change. Then we did open enrollment at middle school. Again, naive me didn't realize that that didn't do away with AAP centers. We're still tracking even though we have level four. And the level four are extra special because they get to get grouped together. And so everyone knows who they are because they go from one class to the next class to the next class. And so even if you have an AAP center and level four there, they know they're not them. Enough is enough. This is Fairfax County Public Schools. All of our children deserve

[01:27:26] the same opportunity to achieve at the highest level possible i will also add and i this is something dr reed has said but the more i sit in this chair the more it resonates with me is that we are a system of schools some are more privileged than others and i am aligned in her work to make us a school system i also don't understand because i thought aap training for teachers was required and if i'm wrong monica i i understand in my magistrate district that i have more aap trained

[01:28:02] teachers at Herndon than there are at Hughes, and Hughes is the AAP center. Now, I could be wrong on that data, but I do believe those inequities do exist, and so I just want to talk about that. It's a fantastic report, A to Z, every part of this report, from the diversity of hiring that needs to be done, all the way that you crosswalked the different pillars and the needs.

[01:28:30] I just hope that we can stop talking about it and we can make it happen. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Lady. Mr. Frisch. Excuse me. Thank you for the report and all the work that went into it.

[01:28:50] I very much appreciate the connection to the strategic plan and looking for ways to plug into that work to make sure that we're actually hitting the measures that we're seeking to achieve, particularly the first two that you focus on in your report with enrollment to algebra in eighth grade you know one of the things that i first think about when we talk about equitable access to that goal is are we preparing the students early enough to take advantage of that and so the focus on the emrt's i think is uh a right one um uh you know you also identify the

[01:29:27] need for targeted training at the elementary school level and you know as the superintendent announced at our last board meeting there are going to be seven early release Mondays next year with appropriate staffing to help students who can't return home and give them a enrichment opportunity after after the early release but it raises the possibility that down the road this time might be useful for other extremely important targeted training or professional development and potentially planning time so I appreciate that too it's good

[01:30:04] foresight the other question that I have or the other thing that I very much appreciate is the talk about how we are providing access to advanced academics in in high school and I think as the superintendent gets into the course tracking we're gonna there's gonna be a lot of data for y'all to start going over that will probably lead to some very good recommendations on that front

[01:30:39] as well I have some questions about your suggestions around building capacity for families and to tackle absenteeism we've done a lot of really aggressive work at the school level to directly connect with families I don't know how sustainable that is so i'm interested in this idea of building capacity among parents can you talk a little bit more about that so as i mentioned earlier our charge was last year and at the same time we're playing catch up with what the system is doing and things we've learned throughout

[01:31:16] the process so some of it might be some of what will be work that's occurring right these are suggestions also to add on to improve the process i think someone in our committee said what is it improving that process, that production. So in terms of that, what we learned over the years is this recommendation we do stand on, but also can we add on to the family academy that Ms. Hall is doing, is to the family vision group that Dr. Reed has started up at the four quadrants of the potential 400 or will be 400 family members, two from each school, right, that will be continued next year.

[01:31:51] So these are all things that the system is doing that we'd also like to make sure that could this be built in or fit or if it is already built in, you know, to maybe a little bit more, a little bit more focused to be added on. So is it in something added separately? Could it be yes, but the intention was to see what the system is doing and what we've learned.

[01:32:10] Also, at the same time as the parent advocacy handbook that Mr. Moon and others have provided over the decades is to put that empowerment inside. and to our fault or really to my fault we've had a commitment from Miss Hall to help us that on that this year but our bandwidth was not there and but we do promise miss all that we will work with you next year to to get that going that is that is a hit on me that isn't a hit on the system but also the parent advocacy book is also takes time to to complete you all are changing the plans and other programs it changes right now yearly so that's a opportunity to empower

[01:32:43] our families. I don't think it's a hit on you George. You do so much for the school system already and I appreciate the sentiment but you are a value asset to the school division so I don't think you should take it personally. Overall extremely great work again this year. I look forward to working in the year ahead about how we can fold some of this into the work that's being done and I look forward to working with you all next year.

[01:33:17] - Ms. Dixon. - Thank you for this amazing report to the team. I did have a one-on-one discussion with you and have definitely everything you have suggested lines up with what I feel should be done and diversity in hiring seems to be a very easy target but it looks like still very far-fetched because I was looking at the number, have 50 000 hispanic students and but only 895 teachers uh or staff i should say just six percent

[01:33:53] of the the the pop the the total staff members um same thing goes with other um i think the only one we're doing is with the black is we are still consistent with the 10 of the student body and we have 8.41 of the staff members but other than that it looks like you know when students see somebody they can relate to.

[01:34:17] They respond better, they can come to school. Again, the culture, the language, everything is a barrier sometimes for those families. And I think that is where we can actually do the biggest pull is filling that gap.

[01:34:33] And we have a lot of open positions and we have a great, I guess, HR team who can work on that and put the effort in the right direction here. That's what I was gonna say. And the other thing I wanted to address is with the AAP, which we talked about.

[01:34:52] Because there are choices to go to other AAP centers, even the base schools who have AAP level four classes or teachers, students electing to go to the centers. And then the local centers are kind of dwindling down.

[01:35:07] They don't have enough even students to do like one class. So I think there's something to really look into it where we are finding that everybody wants to go to GBW and the other schools not getting enough students, even though they have the AAP curriculum, I think that is also creating a lot of barriers for a lot of students.

[01:35:31] So something to look into it, and that would be my request for the school system to really look into the AAP program as well. - Could add to that, one thing I also heard, I've lived experience, and I've talked to three principals this year, their families and their children is we don't ever mention it's always an adult parent decision making into what's best for the child but when you hear the child says mommy daddy i have to go to the school from third to eighth grade now the system wants me to come back to my community how do i

[01:36:07] blend back in how do i transition and how is that social emotional that is never ever ever brought up at these board meetings or staff as a system as a society as this fairfax county are so driven with aap but we forget what the harm it does that we have to some kids have to go outside then transition

[01:36:30] back right a sense of belonging like miss craig said miss um sizemore heiser thank you and again i really appreciate the contents of this report it's it's really wonderfully done you've got a lot of great suggestions and things we've talked about i appreciate i'll just pick up where you left off mr becerra about the social emotional impact of the students going out of there because it's

[01:37:04] something that i know i've talked about um in my previous four years on the board i will tell you my daughter went from her base school to out of her pyramid for the aap center and then back to her base school whereas the school she went out the pyramid for her the aap we didn't have local level four at the time so that was the only choice the school she went out of pyramid to for the base for the aap center those students who were based there had to then go out of their pyramid for middle school so i've as a parent i've experienced what you're talking about and we've talked about the social emotional mental health um of it i was wondering you know one of the things that the

[01:37:39] previous board put in place was funding a full-time aart at every school and i'm hearing you know from my colleagues and I think from you as well but the the inconsistency of local level four AAP and I'm wondering if there's a space for the AARTs at each school to help with that consistency if that's already being done it's just a thought that I have that I was wondering if you guys have looked into that or not so um I'll pause there and hear your thoughts on that or maybe maybe Noelle I'm not sure but it seems like that was one of the goals that we had on the previous board is to have that position at the schools to help ensure that consistency of local level four

[01:38:16] it's definitely one of the um one of the tasks of the aart they have many many tasks in their building including you know really raising the rigor for every student in that school building we do have um like continuums and and all sorts of guidance on what should be in a local level four and the aart and others principal are there to support that becoming a reality and perhaps it would be great as part of our either one of our el's or as part of street plan goal reports to kind of talk about what let me dig a little more into what the AARTs are doing what the different

[01:38:52] roles that they have and how they're supporting that consistency to ensure that we do have that just it was just the thought that I had so we funded a person in the building to do that it would be great um I love the focus on um recruiting and diversity of hiring and I think the connection to chronic absenteeism can't be overstated because students we you know we've learned so much features about students who find that sense of belonging and connection in their school tend to show up right and we also see the research on when students see themselves reflected in their school leaders and their teachers they find that sense of belonging and connection so i really think that

[01:39:28] can't be overstated the importance of diversity and hiring as one of the reasons um but i know one of the challenges and i've talked to staff about that is is even just diverse student candidates aren't even going into the teaching field in some ways right so you know it's it's sometimes even hard to find in terms of recruiting, so I'm wondering if one thing to look at is how we expand the Grow Your Own programs that we have and where we place them in schools intentionally, maybe in schools that have a larger population of diverse students that can then look into those Grow Your Own programs.

[01:40:01] I don't know if that's been looked at or not, but trying to increase that diversity teacher pipeline and leadership pipeline, so just a thought that I had around that. And then one of the things I've heard from staff in terms of diverse staff, and I think someone brought it up of I think it's Dr. Anderson about the being the one person in the building right is there some thought maybe to like I know we have our Hispanic and and black and Asian educator associations but creating like a mentor program where we match people up across schools to help provide that sort of support so just some ideas but this is a great report I really

[01:40:36] appreciate and agree with a lot of what you said in here so appreciate it thank you Mr. Moon Thank you. Thank you for the presentation, and I really enjoyed, especially the first three pages of your report. They were straightforward, you know, concise, concise, and many good recommendations.

[01:41:03] I'm sure that both will have another opportunity to talk about those, you know, individual recommendations with more time than allotted for today. With that said, I truly believe in these capacity-building programs, you know, empowering families.

[01:41:20] That's actually something that I campaigned on in the last year's election. But when I saw on the next page of that, recommending perhaps the program would start with a limited number of pilot programs of three 10-week cohorts, I don't know what the limited number is, but I believe that we do provide many programs on our school sites

[01:41:59] or even other locations to help the families. However, another little more aggressive, little more proactive approach that I believe that we should be taking is we need to go to these families where they are rather than just saying that we have these programs so just you come and we will help you to be empowered even more why don't you go to them and then really be sitting right next to them their families and help them provide them with the information they need

[01:42:37] to help their children's education help their a improve the absenteeism etc i think that's where think we should do a better job and that's me one board member at least now with the diversity in hiring i mean that's been something that's been on my mind over the last three decades mr you probably know that we made progress however very painfully slowly you know we know that but it's not just amongst teaching staff but central administration central office right here

[01:43:13] The face of diversity or lack thereof really does not reflect the face of the community. You look at HR staff, HR, which goes out to try to recruit diverse workforce.

[01:43:29] HR does not reflect the diversity of the community. I think we need to do a much better job with that. I think, I hope the doctor really, really agree with that. Totally agree, sir. And one thing is to look at your EOC reports that you provide every two years to the federal government but you do collect every year because you have to keep that data for two years that's something that the board can look at too because i don't say it lightly i don't like to make criticisms always but we do have a segregated workforce if you look at my profession so you talk about representation and and and that in that wanting and that feeling connection so

[01:44:08] i'm totally on board with that with you um so in the interest of time and this is such an

[01:44:16] important and comprehensive report. Our go backs are going to be limited to one minute because we did start late. So Dr. Anderson? Yes, thank you. And looking at the chart that I believe is on page 15, Mr. Solomon, can you speak to whether or not the, I just want to get a picture and if you don't have it now, that is okay. What is the national landscape in terms of teacher programming and candidates that come out of our schools? Are we anywhere close to that? Or can you speak to that in a little bit if you can so we will go back and get the comparative data however I will say that

[01:44:53] what you shared before is exactly correct across the nation you do see when we look at students who are graduating from traditional education programs be it bachelor's degree programs or master's degree programs and folks who are graduating from alternative licensure programs you do start to see that limited number of diversity so as a school division that's when it's an opportunity for us to get creative it's an opportunity for us to lean into and leverage programs such as grow your own programs. It's an opportunity for us to go to our workforce who may be in administrative roles or who may have 60 hours of college credit and work with them to build up their skill set. It's also an opportunity for us to tap into folks who are

[01:45:32] already here in teaching positions and determine if there's an opportunity to get them licensed in other things. So as an example, if somebody is content licensed, working with them to become special education licensed or working with them to become licensed in other things and things of that nature. It's a matter of looking at the market as what it is today, both here and nationally, and then determining what are some of those additional extra things we can do to build capacity and to continue recruiting in innovative ways. That's very helpful. The other thing I want to raise, if we do grow our own, we don't have much flexibility in terms of being strategic about

[01:46:06] where we can place teachers, do we? We do. I mean, our first job fair that we hosted this winter was for our title one schools exclusively so all of our title one principals and administrative staff had the first shot at the hiring for our very first job fair so we felt like that was really important so there are ways in which we can influence hiring practices and I'm looking

[01:46:40] forward to learning more as we continue to fine-tune our practices that is very helpful thank you for sharing that um and next i can't raise enough the mental health issue that you've just raised uh mr becerra when we have students who go into our ap centers at the middle school and then don't have the community around them and then they have to trudge back to whatever their pyramids were that really makes it difficult so having greater access can only benefits benefit us all and i did want to raise one last thing pillar two page two the disproportionality data

[01:47:14] that isn't our goal to report i don't know if you all had the chance to have access to that while you were building um the presentation but thank you so much for all of this work i can add one last thing uh which i mentioned about the diversity or about the placement uh that's another reason why you put that recommendation to work with hrac was that issue was brought up through their chair miss laverne hunson who's in our who's on msaoc like i said don't like to touch toes but we also like to work together miss lady thank you just two follow-up questions one i think that in the

[01:47:50] report it talks about priorities prioritizing schools that have greater needs um am i hearing that for example if a school is not a title one school but based on data they need more resources that you're comfortable with a different staffing allocation to those schools then because right now the staffing allocation seems to be the same if you're not title one so is that the recommendation with that we were talking more about the program and how we would start um implementing um the the

[01:48:26] programs um for absenteeism and i think that yeah we were talking about like we would look at schools overall no matter if they were title one schools for students with disabilities step programs and you look at that absenteeism rate is it a way we can do more we know the county is doing a lot We asked that, could we have a laser focus on those schools and implement interventions or programs?

[01:48:55] Also, I think a yes or no to your question. I think we're forward-looking at new things and new inventions. This is a new board. To look at that just like you do the LCI at the state level, why can't we also look at that formula here and understand that better? Thank you.

[01:49:10] And then I had a HR question, which, William, you may not know because you're new. Are schools able to trade their AART for a different position? No, thank you. No more go-backs?

[01:49:29] I will, okay, I'm going to take my turn here. I have a lot of questions, but in the interest of time, I won't ask them. Instead, I want to compliment the work that you've done. I want to say how the work that this committee does is so overarching and covers so many areas.

[01:49:52] And before we close this, I want everybody on this committee to stand up one more time.

[01:50:04] I want the audience at home and the board to look at this committee. This is what our county looks like. And whether you're an adult or whether you're a child, this is who we have to serve in our county. I commend you for the time that you volunteer and the experience that you bring to this committee.

[01:50:27] I know you are one of the largest committees because you touch so many parts of our school system. And I hope that you keep doing this work and bringing it to us because it is invaluable to us as we move forward but more importantly, it is invaluable to our students. So thank you.

[01:50:48] Ms. St. John Cunningham, if we could have a minute or two just for one off topic that deals with MSAOC, if we can present to the board. Absolutely. So make a quick, I know you all vote on your strategic, your manuals next week, and we like to say our, you know, saves me emails, saves them from emailing you, but we can tell what your proposals are to our group.

[01:51:15] We've worked together with staff for all these years. Sometimes they've been contentious, sometimes they haven't, but recently they have not. Our reports come together as one group. We all believe in having to vote at that table.

[01:51:32] Their advocacy is to keep it that way. advocacy is also to keep uh how can i say this sometimes we get into the fairfax county way and we've always dealt with the rules that any board for the three decades that with you mr moon that the board has put on us to for our membership for our report through governance i don't think we understand why the change did we do something wrong because i think we i think we've reduced reports that are very informative uh with a voice that hasn't always

[01:52:08] been there i would be dismissed if i would not advocate for every person to have a vote on MSAOC. I came into this committee where even had Dr. Bussey as a staff person. I didn't treat him differently. I understand you're going to make changes, but I don't touch on toes of FPAC. I don't touch on ACSD. I do not touch on them. So I think some of the recommendations they might have are great for their committee, but I don't think they understand the repercussions of other committees.

[01:52:42] We've asked to have a conversation with all chairs together in the room to put that on the table instead of individually right now we don't understand why the change but at the same time we will do what the board wants and we'll still produce the same way in terms of discussions about executive board elimination of the executive board would take away any of this volunteer power it'll be staff driven do i trust my staff on msaocs but i think the message you're saying to the

[01:53:17] community that advisor community a community advisor community run by a staff is not a good message in the times that we're in if we want to lend a hand to the our families to have empowerment to have a voice. I don't think that's the intention of this board, but I think it's the message that the consequences that you could have. I think it's trusting in that superintendent right now. We trust the superintendent, but if other superintendents come along, it takes an avenue, then we don't trust staff. The general comment has nothing to do with Dr. Reed, and I think I can understand the conclusion and recommendation, but when times aren't the same, we have different superintendents.

[01:53:51] I have seen this community. I've seen this area not want to be aligned. We want our own separate voice in collaborative cohesion with the people who are educators at the same token and I think it is unfair for one LT member to be responsible but we said it'd be responsible for all these reports that's why graciously invitation was sent to Ms. Neal to Ms. Hall and to others because

[01:54:27] some of these recommendations advisor committees touch on other areas but sometimes they're not in this room to hear that recommendation that's why you made it an option this year for them to come Because that's where our recommendations go and I feel it's unfair that one person has to be held responsible for the recommendations when they come back in October and November when it's not their lane.

[01:54:47] I appreciate hopefully the outreach to the new HR chief. I'll be honest, we have not had a great relationship. But that has nothing to do with you. That's the past. Right. And so I would hope that outreach and we can start that because some of the recommendations we've had for many, many years and I hear that from my members.

[01:55:09] And I take a hit to that, Mr. Frisch, because I've heard it for years. And that's where I question myself. Just collaborative advisory committees, all the same as Mr. Frischi said earlier today, is where these recommendations go. All advisory committees just go poof, right?

[01:55:28] And what we do is we get staff responding back to us. It's called a school board advisory committee, but advisory committees don't feel that the school board is doing it. It's more a superintendent's advisory committee because that's where it goes. But I know you guys are trying to change that, and I appreciate that.

[01:55:45] Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you. And I know that you've been a significant part of the process as we're trying to. It's been years in the making, and I'm really just here trying to get it over the finish line.

[01:56:03] I will say that what we're voting on Thursday is a very strong product. It's not perfect. It's a strong start. And I think that we are going to move forward. But just so you know, the committee is not removing the option to have executive boards.

[01:56:18] We just need to ensure that we follow all the guidelines related to how we publicly notice those meetings. They still will be public and all of the same requirements that we fall under. And then the other aspect is you can set up the structure of your committee in your bylaws, as I believe that you were at the meeting where we talked about that.

[01:56:39] So we are not intending to hurt the structure, and you still absolutely can invite any staff members to the committee. I think right now there was an effort to ensure consistency amongst the committees with the same general structure in terms of how many community participants were included as voting members to ensure that the voices of our nominees to the committee or our representatives on the committee still have their voice as well. And so while that may have been working perfectly with you, with you guys, it may not have been working in others. And so we're trying to make sure that we

[01:57:19] create a general guidance that will ensure that throughout. But we really appreciate your the participation and the leadership that you've shown working with all of the advisory committees to ensure that we could get it right. And so, like I said, I think that we are on a very solid track to have a very strong document.

[01:57:38] So I'm really excited about that. That wasn't in comments to the PEC committee. Thank you for letting me speak at that. That's a rarity that happens at subcommittees. It was more for the other board members who haven't been in those conversations or I don't record and give out, you know, is for the other members when you have a discussion next week when you vote, you hear it from us as a collective in this room instead of Georgia Becerra saying it.

[01:58:01] So with that, the last thing I want to say is that this committee is 30 years strong. And as you said, this is extremely hard work. You started working 30 years ago before we even knew what the word equity was in our system. So I appreciate that work.

[01:58:19] And as you said, it's hard work, but I also think it's hard work. And thank you so much.

[01:58:38] Okay. Well, thank you, everyone, for coming to the annual report presentation by the Facilities Planning Advisory Council. My name is Mateo Dunn. - I don't think Janice, Janice is on vacation, right? Does she have a designee in her absence?

[01:58:56] - Oh, hi, Jessica, sorry, you were blocked by Rechna. So we have Jessica Gillis here in place of Janice Szymanski. And then we have the chair of FPAC, Katie Herman, and Kathy Hozek, vice chair.

[01:59:16] So, Katie, go ahead. - Great, thanks everyone again. Hi, my name is Katie Herman. I am the Facilities Planning Advisory Council Chair this year. I'm joined by Kathy Hosick, who is our Vice Chair and from the Mount Vernon District.

[01:59:34] And we are just happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation for us to come and share the work that FPAC has been engaged in for the past year. Just a brief agenda. I'd like to reintroduce all of our FPAC members and then quickly remind you all of how our annual report is organized, Then discuss the items FPAC members have researched through our annual charge and discuss the resulting recommendations.

[02:00:03] Finally, I'd like to chat through our thoughts about possible annual charge items for next year. We have 13 members in FPAC. Hopefully you've had a chance to meet with your designated FPAC member this year. If you haven't, the summer is a wonderful time to catch up with your staff, with your appointees, so please reach out.

[02:00:24] will mention you know we we typically have a full group of 13 but at points this year we had a robust but mighty small team of eight so we have been we have had some vacancies in the past year that we are in the process of filling with your guidance and help for the advertisements of that so thank you the organization of our annual report includes an initial first two-page executive summary and that also lists our 15 recommendations. The main portion of our report includes a

[02:01:02] summary of each topic area and the recommendations that FPAC developed and a corresponding detailed report of our analysis is in the back with an appendix or with appendices. So this slide is showing our current annual charge that we worked through in our annual report this year. It's, you know, so to speak, our guiding light for topics that we have researched this year, speakers we've invited to our meetings. FPAC decided at its first meeting to try to

[02:01:37] concentrate on major maintenance and the renovation queue items. So we will all speak to that in a few minutes here. And then the next few slides, I've actually listed the recommendations that F-PAC has for the school board on our topic areas but I'm not going to read them individually so I'll just be providing a summary so our first topic which is one that we usually carry through each year per the charter that we have with the school board is focused on long-range planning

[02:02:12] and for us this year we focused on continuing to develop this long-range vision for FCPS through encouraging multiple different subsections that we researched and this subcommittee evaluated the effect of changing demographics and societal trends on the needs to be met by FCPS school facilities since the pandemic ended the subcommittee has focused for the past three years on on the strategic development of school facilities as much as long-term trends

[02:02:47] specifically the issues that can balance providing immediate impact while setting the stage for longer strategies and change. Additionally, this subcommittee is focused on what types of internal changes can provide better footing to adapt to future change and create a more resilient environment for creating and operating educational facilities.

[02:03:11] Next, this group develops the five targeted recommendations for the school board's consideration. For this topic, what it means for us is how FCPS can implement enhancements to major maintenance and asset management while advising the evaluation of the school facility renovation queue.

[02:03:35] Some of our previous FPAC reports have highlighted the need and rationale for additional funding for facility renovations and maintenance. FCPS has been relatively successful in obtaining capital funding for new facilities, but these These investments need to be protected by providing the associated funding to properly maintain them.

[02:03:57] Creative ways to contract and fund construction and maintenance are required to minimize the impacts to students. This impact could either be in the immediate effects of the long duration of school construction projects or the long-term effects of a 40-year renovation queue.

[02:04:15] to provide FCPS with the high quality platforms for education that students and teachers deserve. All avenues should be explored to reduce construction schedules and reduce the renovation queue. Next up is our topic of boundary, I'm sorry, school boundary policy, which we've been discussing for several years and our reports.

[02:04:40] FPAC continues to see this as an opportunity to advise and assist with the development implementation of the school boundary policies overall fpac strongly encourages fcps to finalize and adopt the proposed changes to the fcps school board policy 8130 once that's completed fcps begins the process to plan and implement the policy and strong community engagement is highly recommended. We also developed a memo in March related to facilities planning, creating a facilities

[02:05:16] planning framework, and that also provides recommendations on sequencing of boundaries assessments as it relates to other components of facilities planning. Moving on to environmental sustainability, FPAC sees environmental sustainability is an important link to other charge topics like long-term facility vision and major maintenance so this year fpac assessed how fcps can incorporate and evaluate the joint environmental task force of the jet goals and achieve greater energy efficiency and environmental sustainability through its

[02:05:55] facilities fpac recommend or condemn or appreciates fcps's growth on the get to green program in recent years and its commitment to achieve the JET goals. However, FPAC continues to encourage FCPS to track and report the progress of these programs to stakeholders and to the public on a regular basis. FCPS could benefit from recent real estate trends and look for innovative school facility planning actions that would take advantage of existing buildings in the market

[02:06:29] that may be suitable for school sites and to just wrap this up we also had a few major components of additional work that we did outside of our regular annual report development first off we provided several rounds of review and comment for the cip public engagement process which was discussed during several school board subcommittee meetings of the comprehensive planning and development committee cpdc as a reminder this framework developed by fcps staffs provides

[02:07:05] consistent frequent and targeted engagement and outreach materials for major renovations and new school construction in february during our annual retreat we kind of pivoted a bit and decided to draft two memos which i'm not sure that we've done before a kind of out of cycle to try to provide some input immediate input based on the needs of school board of the school board members on facilities planning framework which is a higher level system-wide recommendation for a comprehensive

[02:07:45] plan of action on how to plan for facilities moving forward as well as a memo that discussed kind of the pros and cons and gave some recommendations on alternative delivery methods and contract mechanisms for major maintenance and renovations.

[02:08:07] And then we closely monitored the development of the revisions for policy 8130 considered by this that you all are considering related to school boundaries.

[02:08:22] And then this is my last slide just to make a plug for on page eight of our report. We every year propose a few bullets of items that we as FPAC members feel might be beneficial to work towards next year, but we are all here for you.

[02:08:42] So if you have feedback on the listed bullets that are shown here, we would love to hear that as well so that we can be directing our attention to the topics and items that you all need us to do.

[02:08:58] And then as I say thank you for you all to have us here tonight, I also want to say thank you to staff, specifically Jessica Gillis and Brandon Soddy on their continuing and weekly assistance that they provide to us we wouldn't have been able to pull together the reports have our meetings our discussions have other staff and stakeholders come in without them so thank you thank you to them uh so if you have uh comments you'd like to make we'll keep it to three minutes if you could put up your placard vertically that would help me to call on you um

[02:09:38] rachna oh sorry miss heismar heiser rachna's fine um first thank you both very much for your hard work i really appreciate it thank you to miss hosek for coming to all of our governance committee meetings thank you for your time as well miss herman in the conversation one thing i was wondering i appreciate that your charge is is very large and it encompasses a lot so having a continual charge makes sense but one of the things when i think about fpac's work when i think about some of the work that we're doing i know dr reed has mentioned really rolling out udl and universal

[02:10:12] design of learning um as one of the big initiatives for next year um and i'm some of that i'm wondering if there's a way for fpac to help support the universal design learning work to look at how our facilities can support universal design of learning right is there a need for sensory rooms for example to help support that is there a need to really really look at how we look at our facilities to help support that work i just think it would be it would go so well hand in hand with some of the other work that we're doing so i don't want to add to your very heavy plate but I just wonder if that's something, when we look at greater energy efficiency and environmental sustainability, that would be awesome, but I'd love to have your role in helping look

[02:10:51] at how, in a universal design way, how all of our, you know, different groups can help support that work as you roll it out. So, just a thought that I had. I'd welcome your thought on whether that's something you would want to look at. Last year, in our annual report for 2022 and 2023, we, in our long-range planning portion of that report we spoke quite a bit about some of the components of school design how for example for instance wider hallways in certain areas that allow for pocket areas for gathering

[02:11:30] aren't traditionally part of maybe school design that had been deployed decades ago but it's something that you know we recommend smaller breakout areas certainly classrooms and spaces with different learning materials whether that's softer spaces other supportive areas for either quieter sections or areas that could be used for more collaborative learning um so we can dust that

[02:12:04] topic off and and bring that into the fold again for this upcoming year thank you i think i think i appreciate that i think one thing i was thinking about is as we're looking at our renovation queue and redoing the renovation queue it seems like that would be a great place to fold that in and how we look at a renovation queue right we look at so many different areas of you know as we renovate schools now you know renovation now versus 10 years ago versus 20 years ago look and our ed specs are constantly changing so i would just love this is a great opportunity as we're reading that renovation queue to kind of embed udl thought into design as well so in addition to kind of the recommendations you had before how do we embed that into that renovation queue work

[02:12:44] in the same way we've kind of embedded more sustainability goals and we've embedded um you know i just think it'd be great to put either in the ed specs or in the renovation queue work if that could be part of it i know that's helpful to you in terms of helping you know illustrate what i was thinking about but thank you for considering it i appreciate that mr frisch thank you uh and thank you for all the work of fpac i've been struggling to find a suitable uh candidate from from Providence District to replace my wonderful appointee who could no longer serve.

[02:13:20] But I do have some questions, particularly around the charge for next year. I know that people may look at this and think, why is Brookfield being singled out when we have so many projects happening, right? And I know it's because we're doing a case, or you all are doing a look at it for case study purposes to see where things might be going great or need to be improved.

[02:13:43] Can you talk about anything you've already learned or that you're hoping to really zero in on in that work? Yeah, so the idea behind Brookfield was that, you know, it's an existing elementary school that's going through a major renovation.

[02:14:03] There was an acknowledgement, I guess, maybe over a year ago that FPAC members had actually not stepped through with FCPS staff, a renovation kind of soup to nuts. so the that's where the idea for this to come came from and some of the initial things that i think we have learned is how complex at least for some of our members some of our members you know work in public facility construction sites often and then there are some of us who are not

[02:14:39] in those environments on a weekly monthly basis so for some of us we definitely had a chance to tour brookfield before any of the work started so we could see the current status of that building different floor elevations different ceiling elevations how to tie a new building portion into an old building portion and how you do that with um that's reflective and creates a better learning environment so understanding kind of the challenges that go along with these major

[02:15:13] renovations was definitely eye-opening for some of us i think in the past year it appears that staff and their and the consultants and contractors who are starting off with the permitting um that we've been able to see kind of how that permitting process has been going what staff their experiences are to get the necessary permits to keep that project moving as they need to so that's what some of our members in fpac focused on in the past year because that's that's the status of the

[02:15:50] project so it'll be interesting to see after this summer and how things progress with the project where where we go next thank you um i was also thinking as i read the report and presentation that you know where could more work be done by fpac that aligns with the strategic plan one of the ideas that i came up with and for you all to maybe chew on and think about later is reviewing our ed specs for the construction projects to see how it aligns with our strategic plan um you know how does our uh creation of restroom facilities or uh sensory spaces or

[02:16:30] um quiet spaces all the different things that we've talked about in meetings over the years that in some cases have been incorporated into the ed specs um how do those uh how do the overall at specs look from a alignment with our strategic plan point of view and whether they are missing some things that other places are doing that might we might benefit from and then additionally because you're it this is not a pejorative in the weeds on Brookfield one thing that might be worth looking at as you talked about the permitting process is what practices on the county

[02:17:09] side that on fcps side might the board work to address with our county counterparts to make this better and easier for us to move forward particularly as it relates to zoning and permits right that is not always the easiest process in the world and you know we share so many other tasks with the county perhaps fpec can come up with suggestions for the board to pursue with our counterparts along those lines wonderful thank you thank you dr. Anderson thank you an area that

[02:17:48] I'm particularly interested in that I see you've outlined in multiple recommendations is the use of swing spaces because one not only does it cut down on the length of the construction project but it also does not take you know the school and its staff and students through it have you given any thought to how could that be feasible in Fairfax County given our vast geographical footprint for swing spaces I know that's been a conversation sure so we have talked about swing spaces on and off for the past year and again I think

[02:18:22] that comes from a place of the just number of phases that these major renovation projects really do move through which is understandable these large multi-million dollar projects they take time but when there's students in the building it often seems to extend a project obviously so as part of that one of our recommendations was for fcps to consider thinking about deploying a swing space option considering if it's possible

[02:19:01] with the cub run elementary school renovation um just to pilot it honestly give it a try there there could be other additional research that could be done with some of fcps's current contractors about the cost benefits with swing spaces does that save funds on the short term because instead of a renovation project taking three or four years maybe it takes two and are there cost savings right because that's a big component of the potential benefits of swing

[02:19:40] spaces is obviously those spaces are less theoretically less impactful to students and staff but there could be a cost savings there so that would be certainly worth looking into even maybe before a pilot is executed to determine how that how that moves forward thank you actually um foreshadowed my next question which is did you have conversations about potential savings and the use of swing spaces um i want to jump to number nine a little bit where you talked about the the boundary and how your con you um the committee is recommending

[02:20:20] that fcps adopt the capacity as the primary benchmark for initiation of a boundary study can you speak a little bit more to that because at current our current policy nor the proposed has an enumerated list and i also am in support of prioritizing a little bit more clearly what is what are or could be the main drivers can you speak to a little bit more in terms of how did f-pack come to land on this as the primary factor i think we came to it from a couple different places one being that you know there are other industries whether it's public higher institutions

[02:21:00] or higher education institutions other governmental facilities planning groups that have ranking criteria systems just for this type of situation in terms of how to take all of the information about an existing site and compare it to another existing site to determine which should be prioritized those those mechanisms and those systems of rankings or comparing exist and they're

[02:21:34] used throughout many different areas of state federal local government and oftentimes a lot of those systems at a core begin with space and the allocation or need of additional space or keeping the same amount of space and just renovating within a current building footprint versus expanding right so that and that answer of whether or not additional space is needed is a huge driver in the financial component of what you're looking at for a renovation

[02:22:13] and then you know the other piece of of the capacity is that it's such a driver for k through 12 public schools in terms of whether or not you're adding 50 000 square feet to a building renovation project and costing that out or if it's a hundred thousand square feet obviously with being stewards of public money having having this be kind of at the forefront of what capacity

[02:22:46] is really needed and and how that relates to student populations in these schools we think it's very impactful thank you so much for sharing that it's kind of timely because we're going to to have this conversation on Tuesday so I'm just going to package up everything that you've said to bring it to that right and can I add something because we're talking boundaries I can't not talk um so every conversation I've been following this for a decade seems to come down to capacity we have schools high schools next to each other one is severely overcrowded and one is severely under both of those have negative and positive impacts on the

[02:23:25] student what happens to them at school right we have schools that can't field academic teams because there just isn't the capacity we just talked about in the last meeting have that robust rigor so there's a lot of things beside if you've got 10 trailers here and none here do we want kids in trailers anymore like there's so many more levels so this is like an hour-long conversation I'm happy to have with you Dr. Anderson but I just want to say that it's it's so much more than that and I don't think we have nearly enough time to dig into it but if you want

[02:24:03] to charge us with that I'm happy to look into it as far as I'm concerned consider yourself charged okay you could also throw in there as we're talking about schools and right sizing we have a configuration or sizing that I think would benefit from an additional look because we're in a new space and our current I can't remember what it is I just remember what it is for middle school which is what 1350 for six seven but there I'm sorry for seven eight but there's no language on six seven eight I would love your thoughts on this as a committee I will tell you that a few

[02:24:40] years ago Mr. Moon was on the board there was I don't know a two and a half hour meeting where you guys talked about right size schools and after two and a half hours we decided to be like well we have some that are 300 and some that are a thousand how do we fix that right so it's in that policy, but I don't know. So, yeah, I'll look at that, too. Yes, I would love that. Lastly, one of the things that you talked about here in Recommendation 12 was the open communication regarding outreach, et cetera, as related to the boundary process. I'm just wondering, with the engagement plan that CPDC and staff developed last year, do you see that serving,

[02:25:16] being able to serve as a blueprint for the communication for this process? I sure do, and I think that that framework for engagement, as it was proposed by staff when it was in development, is meant to be a living document.

[02:25:36] So as these projects step through that engagement process, if there are tweaks or additional components that should be part of the process moving forward, as the system kind of learns as it moves forward, I think that that's certainly valid.

[02:25:56] But I do agree that the framework will provide a more consistent engagement with communities, residents, parents, families. So I think that that is definitely a great, it's been a great step in the right direction for sure.

[02:26:14] Absolutely. And maybe for our CPDC chair, something to consider because that's been very well received in the renovation and construction work with our families because it's a pretty robust communication tool i don't know i can't tell what the time is last quick question because i don't want to go back on page eight you talked about a plan for robust facility renovation queue and related criteria did you guys discuss what that could potentially entail or it's just something you want to put on the table yeah it's just something that

[02:26:52] we want to put on the table as something that we can continue to coordinate with school board members as as you all want to hear more perspectives again from maybe even a different industry perspective um if if that's helpful miss lady thank you um i have a question about the same slide um and that is just because i i want a clarification that number two this has been a

[02:27:28] recommendation you've had for years i don't want to confuse the public with believing there's a timeline in the work that governance has been doing because there is no timeline but this implies a current timeline of implementation by and I'm confused by that because we don't have a timeline and so when I read your report it's in the report and your presentation it made me very nervous because it's the first I've ever seen anything in print because that didn't come from this board I just want to be clear that it came from your committee I guess I can speak to that so in the initial governance meetings that we were

[02:28:07] that I attended that is what was thrown out there and I just wanted to put FPAC support behind that it just says the current timeline I mean that's just what was thrown around it's not set in stone so I see your point it's not that this is happening but we support working to that goal if that is what is set but again that work is not done right because that's happening Tuesday hopefully maybe maybe not well there's a work session Tuesday and I'm not ungoverned so I may

[02:28:37] have missed the meeting that you're referencing. It was number two, maybe three. I don't know. It was one of the earlier ones. Okay. And that was, yes. Okay. Right. It just makes me nervous. So I'd rather see it edited out of both of these. Okay. Sure. Just because it's not reflective from my perspective of where we are. Okay. Thank you. Ms. St. John Cunning. So I have a couple questions. In terms of your renovation cues, aside from looking at the

[02:29:11] renovation of operating systems um do you did you look at renovation of athletic fields and playgrounds number one number two did you also look at the um i guess for a better word is like as new programs were added to schools did the facilities um were the facilities adjusted to meet those needs specifically i'm talking about some schools that didn't have pre-k now have pre-k but they don't have pre-k playgrounds that's my second question and then my third question

[02:29:49] was in terms of capacity um i know that we look at i looked at the cip it had you know under capacity over capacity uh and physically being in some buildings that said there was capacity i know for a fact that there is not capacity so when you looked at that is that capacity based on square footage because I just -- how is that capacity, undercapacity, and overcapacity calculated?

[02:30:15] Right. So in the CIP that's developed by FCPS staff, FPAC doesn't write that report, so the calculations of the capacity, that question might be better answered by staff, but we do find that all All of that information on capacity and square footage and how all those learning spaces are being used is very beneficial.

[02:30:45] We use and refer to the CIP that is distributed and adopted and approved by you all pretty much at every meeting. So we certainly appreciate having that information.

[02:31:01] terms of having gone through an audit of it sounded like you were talking about an audit of schools that have been recently renovated and if they're being utilized in the way that they were designed I guess what my question is in your report you address you know maintenance of buildings and having a queue for that but then there's also and renovations but I know this board has had countless speakers talk about the Woodson baseball field you know like are we looking at where it may not be a full renovation but did you consider

[02:31:39] renovation of athletic fields renovation of playgrounds so it may not be a full scope renovation and then for example I know that some schools that did not have preschool now have preschool but they don't have a preschool playground so I'm asking if you all took those factors into consideration or is that something that you'd be willing to look at um i'll say that again fcps staff are the ones who are doing the assessments

[02:32:12] of the school properties before property before site design is put together we often attend Those public meetings where input from the community on a potential school design or renovation is held.

[02:32:31] We'll often go to those meetings and listen to what the community has to say in terms of what components get integrated into a specific renovation. Because site design, I think, is usually determined by FCPS staff, and ultimately that type of project is executed by staff.

[02:32:54] So if there's an opportunity for us to provide feedback, we do, but we're just also like another community entity and residents where we may provide our feedback, but it's ultimately designed through a staff process.

[02:33:15] Seeing no other, oh, Mr. Moon. - Thank you, Mr. Dunn, just a couple of questions. Thanks for the presentation. The piloting the concept of swing spaces, there was something that's been on my mind for some time.

[02:33:37] So when the committee was making this recommendation, did the committee believe that we do have a space to accommodate as a swing space in the county? with the Cub Run Elementary renovation, it's an elementary school, not a high school, so a little smaller, right?

[02:33:59] - Right, yeah, so I think Cub Run was identified for a couple reasons. Again, it's an elementary school. It's potentially at the right time in the sense that there could be time to allow for some investigation of a swing school potential happening, that there's like enough lead time there.

[02:34:21] other thing is you know obviously school renovations are impactful to all children but i think it might be safe to say that the youngest students are might be most impacted um and then in terms of you know cub run we felt like maybe there was an opportunity for um a site potentially nearby we have not looked at sites though we don't um we haven't investigated the like the real estate trends near that elementary school but that is something that if you all or staff wants our

[02:34:56] assistance in we can take a look at that in the next year i guess that the committee must have then considered even acquiring additional space for us swing space as opposed to utilizing existing space somewhere in our school buildings as a swing space. Is that fair? And I think that's why the pilot was kind of a suggestion as a way to see what is feasible and what may not work.

[02:35:31] Obviously, the county is large and has many different types of parcels that FCPS may own or that spaces that may not be owned by FCPS but could be leased. I don't know if anyone's gotten to that point yet. We're just advocating for this initial step to consider swing spaces, maybe perform some additional research to determine if there is, you know, a cost benefit to a swing space that, you know, should be considered. So what is the CUP run scheduled

[02:36:06] to start its renovation? Do you remember? Let's see here. I forget. I'm not sure I remember off the top of my head. A few years? Yeah, I would think so. I mean, I would love to, you know, hear. Yes. It's scheduled for planning in fall of FY26. FY26. Okay. And I would love to hear, you know, steps, thought on this particular recommendation, you know, if not today, sometime, you know, from superintendents, you know, most likely.

[02:36:44] With a, I think this was number nine, recommendation number nine on your report with a boundary study, I'm trying to have a clearer understanding of what you are recommending. Adopting capacity as primary benchmark, but that's for the initiation of boundary study, as opposed to when we do actually adjust a boundary that to be as the sole criteria or the

[02:37:21] most important criteria but for boundary study to be initiated you would recommend us to consider the capacity as the primary benchmark to initiate okay yeah i i i agree that's our recommendation because it seems like there's so many problems that can be solved through addressing capacity.

[02:37:49] And the undercapacity schools know it, and the overcapacity schools know it, and it's up to us at FCPS to figure out how to help. I can think of several schools that come to mind with both of these issues. And programming, yes, is important, but if you don't have the capacity at a school, you can't offer programs.

[02:38:09] It just seems like that, and what is that percentage? don't know is it 93 is it 130 i don't know but to just look at that and say oh this school is nearing 100 capacity we need to look at it seems like we don't really ever try and fix that as a whole maybe okay i think i think i have a better hand of clear on this you know understanding i mean it's not the only one correct but once we start the boundary consider boundary adjustments

[02:38:41] than the what the governance committee has proposed you know sent over to the full board with the listing several different criteria enumerated i think there was a term used yes it does not your recommendation does not necessarily conflict with the governance committee making a list right no there should definitely be a list it can't just be capacity there's so many other factors okay okay thank you i think there was one more on my mind And I am forgetting it. Thank you.

[02:39:20] Before we do go backs, there was a mention of, you mentioned the current real estate market and opportunities perhaps for FCPS to take advantage of that. Can you elaborate and just clarify what you mean?

[02:39:36] because uh that does take money um and um and and did you have in mind that we would give up some of our properties or just acquire because the number of students is declining across well i mean we're getting back to pre-pandemic levels but i mean population growth in perfect county is not skyrocketing but yeah it seems like the current population is i want to say stagnant but has plateaued maybe and I think the real estate trend reference is in relationship to potential swing

[02:40:12] spaces that there could be an opportunity could be it may not be applicable across the county because we have such a diverse building stock in the county that there could be pockets of the county where an office a vacant office building could be leased and used as a swing space sure it would definitely require money investment to have that happen however there's

[02:40:44] quite a vacancy rate in office buildings in the county so i am not a real estate expert and we did not go into that level of detail research yet because we're just trying to advocate for a pilot to start the ball rolling to see if it's even worth moving forward with swing spaces as a regular solution potentially for renovation so swing spaces is one option and the other is

[02:41:16] you know sure you all have already done a building repurposing with bailey's upper middle upper upper upper middle upper sorry that building was not used as a school previously fcps acquired it and renovated it into the wonderful school building that it is today and knowing that there is a vacancy in office space and office buildings in certain parts of the county this could be an opportune time that if the chips fall correctly from a financial standpoint that those buildings

[02:41:56] could be a benefit to the building stock of FCPS. Yeah, thank you. One of the things for the charge for next year, I might suggest in my individual capacity, is we have notionally on our planning agenda for multiple years probably the largest capital investment in perhaps decades, which is a Western high school from scratch, which we don't have land for, don't have a building for but we do have cub run and you mentioned there's a renovation project

[02:42:36] and it's been suggested by some that cub run could be the site of a western high school but there's also a question of do we need a western high school and i guess school boundaries will inform that um but given that the title of your committee is facilities planning advisory council and this is the largest capital investment for facilities planning it seems like this would make sense for you guys to look at and come up with how can we do this in the most cost-effective way without depriving um given that we have a 42-year renovation cycle investing in a western high

[02:43:12] school would take money away from direly needed renovation projects in other parts of the county and so that is something that might be considered another possible charge for consideration is Franconia Government Center is being, you know, given over to development for affordable housing.

[02:43:36] And we certainly have some real estate that isn't being used as schools, administrative centers, or perhaps just not being used at all in a productive manner or underutilized. And, you know, looking at what Franconia Government Center is being done and what has been done in D.C. and elsewhere across the country,

[02:43:56] where, similar to Fairfax County, there's a dearth of affordable housing, would be beneficial for consideration by FCPS, for use by, for rent, rental to county employees and FCPS employees, and further consideration is public-private partnerships.

[02:44:18] I know the staff is working on that, but that's something FPAC may also want to explore in conjunction or on top of what's been done previously. And finally, inclusion of pre-K, since we're talking education specs, eventually, at some point, federal, state, local, there will be a universal pre-K program.

[02:44:38] And so how will we be able to accommodate that into our current education specs so when the time comes we don't have to buy a bunch of buildings, but we'll already have kind of incorporated notionally how we might anticipate a flood of pre-kindergarteners into our buildings.

[02:44:55] So those are just a few suggestions for you to consider. thank you for everything you do. Okay, go backs. Ms. Seizmer, hi, sir. Would you like to go ahead, Mr. Moon? I don't mind.

[02:45:11] Okay, thank you. Just a couple of things. First of all, I completely agree with you, Ms. Leidy, that at a Governance Committee meeting, that a couple of both Governance Committee members might have opined a potential timeline, but there was no formal discussion, no decision. That's not a part of a recommendation from the Governance Committee.

[02:45:31] So your suggestion for the advisory committee to clarify their point is very poignant. And with that said, as to what Mr. Dunn was saying is considering even commercial space as a, you know, convert that as a swing space, but I can go one step further, you know, there are buildings that we are using, former elementary school buildings, school buildings that we currently using as administrative buildings, you know, perhaps we could

[02:46:07] consider, you know, vacating what is there to a probably commercial building, move them, and use a former school buildings potentially as a swing space because it has, it may have a large field that students need, even the elementary school students, usually commercial sites do not come into that kind of that kind of field in the back of a building thank you ms eismar hi sir thank you i was going to share the same thing my colleague mr moon did as the chair of the governance committee we didn't direct the superintendent on any specific dates we just our part we worked on

[02:46:46] the policy so i wanted to clarify when you talk about capacity i think what mr moon said that isn't to say that we shouldn't have a prioritization list of other things if you take into account with boundaries it's just that should be kind of the driving force which are looking at a school correct because you may not like for instance let's take language immersion like as a school board member you probably know what's happening in there but even just looking at numbers is it well attended is it not like that's digging in the weeds but when you look at the cip and you see a school is 170 okay that's an issue so that's what that's the trigger is that's on paper that's

[02:47:22] knowable to dig deeper into the programming would take more work and unless you have a very vocal public coming to you and telling you that there are issues at a school you may not know right but but boundary capacity you'll know thank you so i just wanted to clarify between the work the governance is doing and what you're recommending right right and that's just across the board not necessarily specific to governance but just you know to notice when a school is growing so quickly great let's replicate that success somewhere else and then you know give people a carrot to go to so they want to go to the new school because they're going to miss what's at that school right well and again and then the other question i had when you talk about swing spaces i think

[02:48:02] it was just brought up it's easier to do in a more rural area right that has the spaces and this is beyond our capability but i would love to find some way and perhaps it's through the planning commission perhaps it's through some of your advocacy when we look at all these commercial real estate buildings that are empty could those be used and i don't know how much work it would take to you know with zoning and other requirements run at spaces to be used as swing spaces or not but obviously we don't control those buildings right we don't own them so we don't have the ability to use that space without support from somewhere else um and so i think some of this is a greater conversation of if we want to use like what we did with bailey's upper converted office

[02:48:40] space there's zoning laws that are required right there's there's you know requirements by law in terms of what's required to be within educational spaces so i think this is probably a larger conversation involving many of our partners in terms of what does the school of the future look like how do we address some of these space concerns in the western high school whether we need one or not we'll it will tell but from everything i'm seeing from the over capacity across the western side i imagine we'll need something what i'm very interested in maybe potentially using some of these more unusual creative spaces is for creative um ways to provide education some people on the board have talked about performing arts magnet school that

[02:49:18] That could maybe be used for an adjacent office building next to a high school, right, or for another STEM academy. There's just lots of opportunities, I think, that I would love to see FPAC kind of dig into a little bit about when we're looking at creative ways to provide education, how can creative spaces support that?

[02:49:33] So just a thought as you talk. Thank you. Ms. Anderson? I just wanted to mention a few things related to the conversation that we were just having about the push around the county to create more affordable housing opportunities.

[02:49:49] I do anticipate based on watching when development happens how quickly it's sold I don't think that we can necessarily count on the fact that the county's population is going to drop particularly as we are pushing for more affordable housing options what we are likely going to see is an increase in population once those once those opportunities are available and then what would happen is we're going to have even tighter bottlenecks at the schools where they could they're potentially over capacity already. So I definitely think that we need to anticipate some of those types of things as much as humanly possible.

[02:50:27] And we're doing a good job of tracking zoning requests or, you know, development requests that are going in. But we do need to continue to work with our partners in the county to ensure that we both know when it's going to happen and that we can be as we know that those development opportunities are happening, that we can be responsive. And that's one more reason why I do think that having a five year review on our on our boundary policy or some sort of cyclical review is going to be extremely important moving forward. The other thing that I would say about swing spaces that would be really interesting to look at is whether or not we could do cluster renovations. If we

[02:51:04] could get one swing space kind of ready for a school, particularly like an elementary population to be able to come in and then you could renovate several schools around at the same time in the same locate rough location, then would be a way that it would be a cost savings and we could actually just kind of move kids in and out which i think is what prince george's county is has done in several of their spots so i do think that it's an opportunity that we should be looking at particularly as commercial housing is available um or commercial properties are available i will say that we are also seeing

[02:51:42] the redevelopment of some of those commercial areas into housing which is going to significantly impact our schools so i am i am encouraging the rest of the board to pay close attention when we get those notices um as to when when renovations are happening in your area or you know when development is happening so that we can kind of keep a close eye on populations of different schools uh seeing no further oh dr thank you i'm so glad that you raised that because my question was going

[02:52:18] to be i think you mentioned it a little bit here but you didn't really fully talk about some of the potential benefits of the p3 i know that fpac has done significant work you've visited you've had guest speakers as you know multiple times if you could speak to the potential of that partnership for those of us who may not have been in those conversations because it would really lend i think some credibility to what miss anderson had just talked about regarding a swing space that's not just going to be utilized for one school and then you know moved and then not be used for many many

[02:52:54] years how can we maximize and speed up the number of schools that are renovated using that p3 if you can speak to that i'd be appreciative of it i'll do my best p3s are a very extremely complicated and each system is its own separate entity in terms of how it's financed how it's driven the contracting mechanisms behind it but i will do my best at a high level so p3s i think for k-12 public schools tend to be very beneficial when there's a high influx of a needed set of

[02:53:32] renovations not maybe not just a couple but multiple buildings with renovations or several new schools that need to be constructed and there's a lack of a fund a multi-million dollar fund to sustain that work and p3s are a financial system that helps get those projects up off the ground and running so the a lot of the positives of of what we've heard regarding p3s for public

[02:54:07] schools are the efficiency of the contracting allows for faster renovations it allows for projects to get kick-started on a accelerated rate as well so there's a lot of significant benefits to the the schedule enhancements that can be found some of the potential cons are depending on how you set it up it can be a very complex project system that also relinquishes

[02:54:41] some control to the p3 entity meaning that some of the schools that are renovated the public school system doesn't get to decide what kind of carpeting or flooring gets put in that's decided by the p3 and and the design team so those are some of the major positives and negatives there are some other positives in the sense that it can these p3s are very um flexible in the sense that you can set them up for smaller projects maybe just two renovations for different schools or you could

[02:55:19] do a whole suite of 20 schools it depends on the level of risk and the amount of money and funds that are going into into the program itself trying to think i think there's definitely some components of the financial aspects of how quickly these things are you know paid off and how that's done but those are all very specific to each p3 agreement and can you speak to the schools the school divisions that have engaged in p3 sure so it's our understanding from just talking to a

[02:55:58] couple people in the industry that houston had done it for one or two buildings there's a school and one of the philadelphia school districts but the most of the examples we've heard were from Prince George's County in Maryland and that they had done a significant P3 program that I think actually involved multiple P3s as part of their planning process. Thank you. So I'd like to thank Katie Harriman and Kathy Hozek for

[02:56:34] presenting and with that I think the presentation is concluded. Thanks. Thank

[02:56:46] you. We'll take a couple of minutes of a break while we have a new team. Could I get At both members' attention, let me call Human Resources Advisory Committee presentation

[02:57:26] into order and to co-chairs, Mr. Bambaka and Ms. Hanson, are you ready?

[02:57:42] Good evening, everyone. I am LaVarine Hanson and this is Leonard Bambaka. We are part of the Human Resource Advisory Committee co-chairs. time we were here last year I was the chair and Leonard was helping me out so last year I couldn't spell HR this year I'm trying to spell it okay and with that we recognize that we're the last one here and we really really need your

[02:58:17] undivided attention because if we don't get that we'll be back here next year So we want to make sure that that's not the case. You know, Ms. Anson, we are under no time pressure, so you have an unlimited amount of time.

[02:58:35] So no other presentation coming after us. Okay, so next slide, please. Next slide. So here's our school board charge, and our charge was made up based on the previous year up to include some new changes.

[02:58:53] THE NEW CHANGES, AND I'LL GO THROUGH IT, IT SAID IMPROVED PRACTICES USED BY FCP LEADERSHIP AT SCHOOL AND DISTRICT LEVELS FROM THE LENS OF A PROFESSIONAL AND BUSINESS ACUMENT, OKAY? WE WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT THE DATA THAT WE'RE USING, THAT THERE'S SOME INTEGRITY, WE WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT THERE'S DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND AT A NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LEVEL, AND WHEN ALL OF THAT IS DONE, we want to be recognized as a very competitive organization system that has the compensation that

[02:59:32] every individual that's working within fairfax county public school can say that they are being compensated based on where they live and stand next slide now i but i do want to go back to that we had some change in personnel and this was a transitional period for us so just bear with us this this charge may not totally align with where we were working through to get to here this year

[03:00:05] we wanted to stay in line last year so our last um school board liaison miss megan mclaughlin she wanted us to focus more on the compensation piece so that's how we got here okay so next slide please. So our agenda. Our agenda talks about how Human Resource Advisory Committee governance. This committee is governed with the compliances of one, the new and we thank the school board for their new governance document that we did provide comments on. Our bylaws, our strategic plan, we wanted to make sure

[03:00:43] that we're in compliance with that and more importantly, well not so much more importantly, more importantly, our charge as well. So that's how we're being governed by those documents and those doctrines. The bottom line up front, we want to make sure that everybody understands very clearly what is being controlled and who is influencing it and what is being influenced. The rationale for change and impact. We did a lot of a lot of work in nine months

[03:01:16] in a transitional period and we found some reasons for change but the previous year what we did we went back and said hey what are we doing that HR needs to stop doing what are some of the things that HR needs to continue with and what are some of the things that they need to modify and with those three areas we came into play and we saw a whole lot of things that needed to be done

[03:01:46] Okay, good, bad or indifferent. We recognize those things. And with the recognition of those items, you'll see a laundry list of those things that we are recommending this year for change. We have some proposed recommendations, and some of these recommendations are win-win situation.

[03:02:08] They're win for HR, and there's a win for the school board. We've just taken little chunks at a time because we recognize last year we may not have gotten any wins coming out of the school board. We do not know what the wins were.

[03:02:25] And so we want to leave here today understanding that I recommend it wind, that you will bobble your head north and south and say that those are some good winds. Okay. The next thing is school board action. We will have some actions for you as well. Okay. So next slide, unless there are some questions on the previous slide.

[03:02:50] hearing that questions the human human of human resource advisory committee we are small and mighty we've changed with considerably we've had two liaison a school board liaison and we can't thank mr. moon he's come in and he's sort of you know keeping us straight and to focus on our charge so we do appreciate

[03:03:16] that we've had a HR staff person that left we do miss dr. Wilson I mean Agnew Scott we miss her quite a bit we welcome mr. Solomon mr. Solomon came on the last day and we can't wait to see all the great things that he's going to do so as you can see this list of the staff working together with our committee like I said Leonard is the co-chair and I am the co-chair as well. We have in back here you can see

[03:03:55] we've got a power pack audience as well. Thank you our Minority Advisory Committee Chair as well who's here to support us. Mimi Dash. Mimi please raise your hand. We all know Mimi.

[03:04:14] mimi keeps us straight we have stephanie she's not here tonight lawrence webb he's not here anita guthrough guthrough branch is here please raise your hand um dion is not here janet o'lair o'lair and angela thompson those they could not be here as well however we do have nisha we call Anisha Cairo, she's here. Haley Runsome, he's here. And Jean Marie is here as well.

[03:04:48] And these people have been very devoted and dedicated to HR. So I do not want you to take them lightly, nor us. You may not see us in your face every day and every night, but I can guarantee you they are in the community. HR has asked us to volunteer on efforts when you call job fairs we're there when you call working on documentations we're there when you call out asking us to participate at the um what honor uh the honorary honor the honorary celebration we're

[03:05:26] there i may not have been born with you but i was there i heard mr ryan say that but i'm we were there so we've been out in the community and we have been with hr hr has been putting together some efforts that we recognize that need some elevation and that elevation is we'll go to the next slide like i said the bottom line up front hr's problem is and i'm going to throw this out

[03:06:00] it's communication communication communication communication getting the word out about all of the great things that they're doing but at the same time understanding that they are doing some shiny object things and some of those shiny objects are keeping them from doing the work of the people so we want to make sure that they are doing and talking about and have the right people with the right job description doing the right jobs at the right time so that they it that the

[03:06:37] community understands the essential work that hr is doing and the essential work that is is required of them and i will give you a prime example mimi has made this uh her marching order she's very compassionate about this as it relates to benefits being removed out of hr with benefits being removed out of HR, HR continues to get those calls. HR continues to get information asked of

[03:07:13] them. HR is trying to do the work that HR is supposed to be doing, but the community in some instance don't know that benefits is not under HR. So now who looks bad? HR looks bad. And that is not the case you can go upstairs on the second floor if a individual came into the building and went on the second floor and they saw hr they will still see benefits under hr so are they wrong to

[03:07:49] assume that they are to to get their information under hr i would say no so we need hr needs to do a better job of getting out there letting people know and we are trying to do that for them we're trying to be that voice, okay? We are trying so hard to make sure from a candidate care, and that's one of the things that the Office of Talent Acquisition has put in place.

[03:08:18] How do you help individuals that are calling on a daily basis? Am I going to be hired? Is the onboarding people ready for me? Where do I go? What do I do? I'm not preaching. I'm just telling you these are the things that we're getting and because we're getting this hr is currently trying to put out the fires with the number of individuals that they have to put out the fires who may not necessarily be the right people because the job description does not align with that person so

[03:08:55] those are the some of the things that we are working towards and making sure that every individual that comes in the door when i talk to them and i want to thank mr moon again because mr moon has brought on this young lady named michelle bay michelle is a virginia tech student who has come into the h.r office and she has moved stuff by leaps and bounds stuff that i was doing myself it would take me all day michelle did it in 15 minutes i'm embarrassed to say but she did

[03:09:30] it in 15 minutes we had over 300 and some people to call and email to make sure that they will be ready for june hiring to be on board in august these are the kinds of things that a lot of people don't know about so i want to make it very clear there are a lot of things that are going on that's good there's a lot of things that are not so good and i truly believe it's because they're either misaligned not the right people and job description that need to be revamped with that

[03:10:08] i'll go to the next slide please these are some of the changes so let's look at these changes these are the areas that we recognize that need um that are impacting hr as well how do you attract and retain qualified and new current employees hr has a fast-paced effort these are this this is from our lens looking in okay they are trying to attract and rate and retain people i don't

[03:10:43] necessarily see a strategy. I see them trying to make things work, trying to get in and you probably saw this in the in the report. I am a former military, so I use some of the terms that we use in the military. They're trying to get butts in seats quickly and at that time at sometimes you are missing the quality and the qualified teachers and professionals that need to be in those seats and in those schools in front of those students long-term investments it's got to be

[03:11:23] people processes and technology miss dunlap has done an awesome job i mean she has brought on some technology that a lot of people in the community are not trained on yet but training needs to be a part of that platform and it just does not stop in in that office training development office needs to be a part of that or that that structure okay continuous improvement and competitive compensation and systematic reviews of job description she's working on that and she's

[03:12:02] done an awesome job in making those happen but more to be done you're talking about 900 some job applications that she was trying to get through the system okay so when my minority advisory chair says that he had problems with HR. He's absolutely right because HR didn't have time to work on those issues. They were trying to put out other fires on a daily basis. No different than any other department, but I do know that he was trying. I am not buying, I'm not drinking the

[03:12:39] Kool-Aid only, so don't please think I'm just trying to drink that Kool-Aid, but what I am trying to say they have a marketing branding and communications problem however if you see indeed in and the dmv there is a bus that's going to ride by that's a new thing a bus is going to ride by and it's going to say fairfax county public schools that's something you didn't know that some people don't know yet but our community on route one will know it they will be appreciative

[03:13:19] of those things. So we thank you Miss Hardin for for making that happen because now all of those teachers that are HR is trying to get in from other countries when you talk about diversity hiring they have diversity hiring and when you talk about centralized hiring I know people look at me like I have 12 heads this is Laverne Henson talking this is not the school board talking this is not hr but when i look at people that are calling and saying i want to know how do i get there i've got all these licenses now i've got all of this and they're running from school to school

[03:13:59] trying to get interviews if there was one centralized place for the first first year candidates as opposed to these young young right out of college running around trying to find a good fit place well in the army we say we know you know what we're going to make it happen we're going to give you mentors we're going to give you coaches somebody that's going to stay with you through the entire process and i think that would help out um customer response time the customer

[03:14:37] response time was pretty bad it's getting better it's not there yet but it is getting better um the removal of benefits we talked about that collective bargaining miss martinez has made an absolutely great effort and doing great things and we had people on our committee that was supporting that effort and helping her with collective bargaining so our entire team has been working in every aspect when you talk about mr franklin jones we've got people that are

[03:15:12] supporting him as well. So we're doing all kinds of things. Exit and stay interviews is a problem. Where are the interviews and who's interviewing? So outdated technology. Leonard, are you ready for me to turn it over? So with that I'm going to turn it over to Leonard and he's going to give you a little bit more detail as it relates to the technical aspects. Thank you Leonard.

[03:15:41] Thank you. So as for now that we've gotten the big picture and what we were working with and the challenges that we were trying to face, we want to take a look at how we structure ourselves in order to meet the charge. That charge again is provided here which is to improve practices used by the leadership at school and district levels through the lens of professional and business acumen with focusing on the topics that are listed here and also as it relates to compensation. It's a very expansive charge and we had to

[03:16:15] organize ourselves in order to be able to manage that. We broke up into subcommittees. The first one was employee rights and responsibilities. Portrait of a workplace. Portrait of a workplace previously communicated as Employee Bill of Rights as a way of recognizing not new rights that are out there, but to be able to recognize what FCPS can and should be standing for.

[03:16:40] that are already in the regulations, things that, as Laverne was saying, should be a win-win for us, sort of the low-hanging fruit, part of the culture of compassion, culture of connection. Classification and compensation, it was the next committee working on implementing systematic and cyclical reviews with a strong classification and compensation budget.

[03:17:04] One of the things that we recognize all along is about the capacity of HR. has not grown with the school system over the past 20, 30 plus years. It's still operating like it was off in that small office over at the Plum Center with the same staffing. And yet the system has grown to become not just larger but also complex with many new pieces, new components, moving in directions that we never anticipated it would. So that's part of what we recognize and that's part

[03:17:39] what we were talking about what we what we're talking about in the report and then external that's the internal aspect of it is compensation and competitive standings i'm trying to find compensation the whole compensation picture to recognize what we're doing well what we're doing right how we communicate it out to also find other means of compensating or assisting our employees Some of it involves directed funding, others of it may be in the form of services, and we list some examples, and they're just meant to be examples in our written report.

[03:18:19] So, for example, housing is a huge issue for people coming in. We know that there may be opportunities in order to be able to come up with specific units for people who would not otherwise be able to afford that. But at best, we would be able to meet only the needs of a small handful of people, given the limitations that we've got.

[03:18:40] Perhaps a referral service that we could have either in-house or through a contractor may be able to help out. Out in the community, people with places to lease would be happy to rent to people who are vetted through the school system, who are professional educators, either in the classroom or on the operational side.

[03:18:59] Those are just some of the examples. other examples are within our written report. The other aspect of this is the nature of the compensation. There's always a competitive, an unnecessary competition between COLA and STEP and both meet very particular needs. So COLA is there in order to be able to drive up the year one numbers so that we can recruit people. STEP, however, is a major retention tool or conversely disincentive for people who are career teachers who people who we want to go ahead and move from as you have in the cabinet outside from the five-year tag

[03:19:38] to the 10-year tag to the 15-year tag and that's really what we need to be focused on I just saw that today that's an amazing to display and that really should be our focus so those were the committees those were the committee assignments and how we broke ourselves down okay so we move towards the proposed recommendations so we implement the employee rights and responsibilities more as we've been putting it out portrait of a workplace what are the standards of support that we need to put out there to let our

[03:20:14] employees know that they are valued let our employees know that if something doesn't go right that it doesn't have to stay that way there's there are people that they can be talking to in their expectations match or surpass the the salaries of surrounding counties, to keep an eye on that and to target that to where we're really looking after. Mid-range in particular, mid-range and early hires. Again, how do we get that early hire to the five-year mark to the ten-year mark? Once we get them that far within our system is proven with this benefit structure and the retirement structure

[03:20:48] that they've got a lot of good reasons to stay on. And so that's where we go to talk about the implementing the employee retention system through more creative methods of accommodations and investments. We move to implementing a systematic cyclical review. This is our process to make sure that our job classifications that we have within the system are accurate, they're competitive, and that we're not trying to make things up as we go along with ad hoc

[03:21:23] requests there we've we've been receiving updates about expansion of the HR program for that that we hope we'll be able to address the validity of the classifications that are in the building that what HR thinks they're staffing is what the site managers are actually using the people for that it is scalable as the organization continues to even if it doesn't grow to become more complex because it will and to position ourselves for future growth and diversification this this leads to establishing a strong budget dedicated

[03:22:02] to classification and compensation so that we can better respond to marketplace changes and maintain our competitiveness I have to say our talent acquisition team has done an amazing job really reaching out to people there are opportunities they're out there all along pick up opportunities I'm hearing And that Montgomery County, for example, is in a position of de-staffing a fair number of employees, if I'm correct in that.

[03:22:27] That's a tremendous opportunity. That is usually not the type of thing that's announced in advance that we should be swooping in on to try to take some -- to try to let people know in neighboring systems that there is -- that they can have a home here in FCPS. And then the final recommendation on this page is a consistent review of compensation policies and regulations to ensure practice equity so that we can enhance the pay equity for external candidates and our internal employees and to be transparent about that process.

[03:23:01] So moving forward here, there's a few things that we're looking at that we're asking of the school board. Number one, we seek an approval to move forward with a portrait of a workplace campaign. And be able to, if it can't go forward the way it is prescribed, it's a perennial issue.

[03:23:22] It's been out there these past four years. The need is still there. If it wasn't there, it wouldn't be surfacing as much as it is. So we want to be able to continue to pursue that in order to be able to come up with something that is that win-win.

[03:23:38] Again to go back to what I said before, to make sure that everyone knows that FCPS is a welcoming place, not just for new hires, but for our current hires as well. Consider explicit methods of employee retention through other means of accommodations and investments.

[03:23:54] So we already have, for example, a strong relationship with Apple Federal Credit Union. That type of relationship with other third-party entities could be supporting our employees. We've enhanced our EASE program, for example, for employee assistance.

[03:24:11] There are other resources that we could be looking at. While this was not specifically looked at through our processes, those are just examples of ways that we can support our current employees. Looking forward to revise the HRAC charge to implement reality we kept on bumping up against.

[03:24:35] With regards to the specifics of the charge, we don't see a need to massively change the charge. It could be substantially the same. We would like to be able to continue focusing on the workplace climate and be able to focus on retention and engagement of our employees so that engaged, motivated employees with a greater degree of professional autonomy are amazing multipliers, force multipliers to use the military term, within a school setting.

[03:25:08] But one of the things that we ran into that was a source of frustration is that HR is just one department, and yet when you're looking at the employee experience, it's impacted by instruction. It's impacted by benefits. It's impacted by professional development, operational divisions, even the discussion that was here before about facilities, all have a place in communication for that.

[03:25:32] So we've just been dealing with, to use the metaphor, the ear of the elephant, and yet There's so much more that needs to be happening. And again and again, we're saying, well, we're HR. Well, HR, yes, in a sense, that's our base department that we work through, but we need to be able to talk about some of the things that are really part of the daily experience of our instructional and operational employees.

[03:25:58] So for example, I get an opportunity, I work at Annandale High School in a retired capacity, I get to see firsthand some of the frustrations that people have, some of the successes that people have. And these are related to things that have nothing to do with HR, but have everything to do with the climate in the building.

[03:26:16] And so we need to be able to look at it more expansively, bringing more people in a room and being able to do more than just help -- I say just in quotes -- than just help HR do its job better, because HR is itself very much limited in what it can do.

[03:26:33] It will send out the guidance, and then that's it. It's up to other entities in order to be able to see these things through. So that concludes our prepared remarks related to the report, and we'd be happy to take on any questions.

[03:26:50] Thank you. Thank you. That's exactly 30 minutes. We started from 7.20, and we have one hour. So 30 minutes for Q&A and comments, starting with esteemed chairman, Mr. Prisch. Thank you. I'm not going to ask a question, But I do want to say, as people know, many of our employees have voted to collectively bargain.

[03:27:11] And so that's a new reality for our school system. And we need to be very careful as a board and as a school division that we march forward in that reality and don't violate anybody's NLRB-driven rights as employees.

[03:27:29] AND SO AS WE TAKE THESE RECOMMENDATIONS AND THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF ANYBODY ELSE AROUND STAFF AND WHATNOT, WE'VE ASKED DIVISION COUNCIL TO PREPARE THE BOARD WITH AN UPDATE ON HOW BEST TO PROCEED ON THOSE GROUNDS.

[03:27:45] AND SO THAT COLORS THE CONVERSATION A BIT IN TERMS OF THESE RECOMMENDATIONS AND OTHER COMMITTEE'S RECOMMENDATIONS AS IT PERTAINS TO STAFFING. But from a perspective of looking at this year's report, it's great work, and particularly I think the focus on what more we can be doing for retention and recruitment as it relates to our competitors I think is something that is going to be an evergreen issue that we need to continue to address.

[03:28:17] But again, I'm hesitant to make any commitments short of us being fully informed of how this board will operate in that new reality.

[03:28:35] Mr. Bunbaka. And your point is absolutely well taken. Collective bargaining, now that it's been approved, it's always been on the horizon, is now very much a part of the processes that we're going to be looking at. And we find that it's going to be an amazing opportunity for both labor and the school board to be able to work around the table.

[03:28:58] Mimi Dash has been there back when we had collective bargaining, and I've had an opportunity to serve on collective bargaining inside, too. It's about setting your priorities. It's about recognizing your parameters, and it's about being able to go back to your constituency with maybe a little less than they were asking for, but recognizing that you're a voice at the table. Having said that, really, I don't mean to interject other than to say, and in addition to that, what happens inside of that process and what is legally permissible to happen outside of that process, because you could run the risk of violating somebody's rights, and that's the very last thing we want to do. And I just wanted that to color

[03:29:35] kind of a piece of this conversation. Completely. What we're looking at with the portrait of a workplace is basically an encapsulation of what is already out there. The research has already been performed to be able to say, look, these standards that we're listing are already within our regulations.

[03:29:55] They're already part of our practice. They're already part of the letter and the spirit of what we do. So it's more of a communications piece to be able to say, we value you here. You have opportunities, you have rights, and you have reasonable expectations that are supported by regulations. We recognize that before anything new could be coming in there, any new rights or any new entitlements in there, that would have to go through the entire process of NLRB parameters and through collective bargaining. But we think, we feel that there's

[03:30:32] already enough out there in existing regulation and existing practice to support and move forward. Thank you Mr. Chairman. I have a Dr. Anderson to be followed by Mr. Dunn, Ms. Dixit and Ms. St. John Donnings. Thank you. I think my initial question is along the same veins. When we first got on the board we started talking about the employee rights and at that point there were some legal issues, not issues, there were some concerns and I think that you went back and there was another iteration and then we did not see it again for years and now it's come up and similarly to what Mr. Frisch has

[03:31:11] said, I'm wondering where does that now live in the world of collective bargaining and how will these be merged? So that's just a question to be raised and perhaps for legal to give us further information about. You talked a little bit about Addendale High School, which you retired from and have been working full-time since that retirement, and that it's not necessarily always compensation, but there's some climate issues that could be remedied in order to create a better working

[03:31:42] environment. To what extent does HRAC review the climate surveys that are completed by the school's staff and parents on a yearly basis? I just wonder if that could be another source of information just to help inform future recommendations, because it's supposed to be reflective of what staff and community believe are happening in the school and I will say we have not gone over that this year in previous years we've been given a presentation on it it's been

[03:32:21] a very it's been a very large overview without really an opportunity to go into topic by topic what's been happening this scope of it is also massive and so we just don't have the bandwidth to to really work with that but the climate surveys are helpful I will say that on the part of staff in the buildings there's always that skepticism a degree of skepticism and a degree of survey burnout and so as we ask these questions people ask is this really going to be confidential will this come back to me and why do I have to spend my valuable time answering yet

[03:32:59] another 30 question survey and so that's why it's difficult to get to tease out meaningful information with this and I definitely appreciate that I wonder if this could be a part of your upcoming charge charge where you investigate what could make sense because without the data there can be no action but there are so many obstacles to providing that data so I'm wondering if your committee can have a conversation or maybe make that part of your charge in order to see what is timely that inspires confidence that it is confidential and will not require

[03:33:33] 30 minutes to give your feedback because we cannot not have it I do have a couple of questions about a couple of items on page six one of the bullets talked about only 55% of positions meet criteria considered good for hiring new people I don't know what that means can you give me a little bit more

[03:33:53] information about that component if there there was on the recommendation

[03:34:23] number two on page six question and as I recall this was a this was a survey response that came out among current employees and so it means that it's it's it speaks to a softening a bit bit to what you were just talking about before softening of the support that people have or the confidence that people have

[03:34:59] that this is a good place to bring new people into oh got it got it thank you i think i misread that entirely i appreciate the clarification and my second question um was on page nine where you talked about increasing affordable housing slots granted to fcps what do we have that's occurring at current what what is happening in terms of affordable housing for our workforce and i don't I don't know if that's a you question or a Mrs. Solomon question.

[03:35:32] So we did do some research on affordable housing. We did go into the community. Matter of fact, we even went into the faith-based community looking for affordable housing, such as like the police departments and those kinds of things and trying to find that.

[03:35:50] So my ears perked up considerably when you were talking about those buildings, those facilities that could be used for those areas. We do recognize that there are going to be, I think it's 100 new candidates that are going to come in from different countries.

[03:36:07] So we will, yes, Mimi. Do you want to just come to the mic, otherwise we can't hear? You can't hear me? It won't be captured in the recording. Fairfax County provides housing, affordable housing, mostly for police and fire.

[03:36:27] And we were told that the county gets five slots out of that. Okay. That's actually new information for me. I didn't know we had anything. So when you mentioned increase, I want it from what? But that is almost nothing. Right.

[03:36:45] Yes. For the whole county? Yes. You know, they built that affordable housing across from the government center. And it's mostly fire and police. And our county of CPS gets five slots. That's what we were told by the Reported to us. I'm I don't have that information myself. I'm just giving you what was reported to us. Thank you You know, there are multiple

[03:37:18] Apartments over there. I don't know how many apartments there are, but I mean there are a whole lot I would say that they're at least a hundred Well, you're familiar with it. Also, please I just heard that there was around a hundred and I heard we had a few But I didn't know how many sources and we were similar to what you're done. I think that's pretty pathetic

[03:37:43] Well, this is a point where a few years ago now with the county when we were having a joint meeting that I know several of us raised, including myself, in order to do what we could if it wasn't going to be in compensation, but in places like this, this is not at all what I was hoping for, five out of 100.

[03:38:06] So I see it as a space for advocacy with our counterparts, with the Board of Supervisors. But this could be something that we can provide that is not directly tied to the compensation package to make Fairfax County more attractive.

[03:38:22] Because we know how hard it is for our staff to live here. So I'm definitely going to put a double stars next to this one for further conversation and advocacy. Thank you so very much. Thank you, Dr. Anderson. I think that's one of the things that might help us, for us to ask from the county exactly what they're allowing us. Because I have heard something completely different from that, is basically we cannot give any number. We cannot assign any number to our first responders even. There's a legal limitation.

[03:38:58] Okay, with that said, I have Mr. Dunn to be followed by Mr. Dixit. Thank you for your report. Having been a COO of a $2 billion agency, I know HR is at the very heart of an excellent performing organization.

[03:39:15] It was mentioned that HR staffing has not kept pace with the growth of FCPS. When we did our school board orientation, the prior head of HR had said that, in her view, HR was severely understaffed compared to industry averages.

[03:39:34] When we pressed on that, it seemed we were, that in general public school systems are below the industry average that she had cited, but we're well below other school systems. Do you have any specific data points that you can share and any views on by how many people do you think we need to hire or by what percentage we need to increase the HR workforce to meet the needs of our employees?

[03:40:00] The specifics on that go past my pay grade. I would definitely refer that to Mr. Solomon as a follow-up question, but I will note that anyone who's been in the county for a period of time has seen that the HR has really been triaging and doing the best they can.

[03:40:17] The people working in HR are stretched to a point of inefficiency, and that's not taken away from them, but it's really difficult. You don't have the cross-coverage that you need. I learned last year that there was only one person at the time to cover all ADA requests for the entire county, that you have situations where people are basically, that you have staffing positions that have been difficult to fill.

[03:40:45] So, and just from the client end of it, we know that teachers and other support staff who have a limited amount of discretionary time during the day to call HR have to then deal with longer than normal hold times because of this so what happens is you have HR which is in the private world would be a cost center is really not in a good position that it wants to be to support the profit centers which is which are our sites so but that would definitely be a further inquiry we don't we're not in a position to make a recommendation on that but we can do the research to find do you have a view on whether it's understaffing or

[03:41:24] inefficient standard operating procedures and do you have a view on on whether the HCM project to integrate kind of a one-stop shop for software will make that situation better? We've been getting presentations from that, and Ms. Dunlap has been doing an amazing job and doing a lot of hard work on the operational side within HR to make things more efficient.

[03:41:54] The entire HR department has been more cohesive and more responsive than we've seen in many, many years with the resources that they have. So we have only good things to say about where they're going or what they're trying to do, but they can only take that so far. So we saw a great MSAOC presentation earlier, and I believe that our workforce should reflect the diversity of our county.

[03:42:21] Do you have, does your committee have any recommendations on how to increase the effectiveness of our recruitment, Having been in organizations, traditionally the go-to strategy for large organizations is you go and you recruit more at HBCUs and MSIs.

[03:42:38] But it seems like it's not working sufficiently to get our diversity up to where it should be. Do you have any suggestions for new tools or strategies to become more effective in that regard?

[03:42:52] So one of the things, and I think I'm not sure was that Dr. Reed said this. I'm not sure if you said this. HR is targeting like SPEDs at some of their job fairs. They've targeted instructional teachers. They're targeting different communities. They've targeted HBCUs. They've gone to UVAs, all of the different communities.

[03:43:20] Matter of fact, Ms. Harden, you know, correct me if I've missed out any community. I think the doctor, I mean, Mr. Moon even indicated to us to make sure that we were tapping in into the Asian community. We were trying to tap into those communities.

[03:43:37] We were trying to tap in more of the Hispanic community. So all of these communities are being tapped. And like I said, they're even going, you know, Australia, I think it was Australia, some other different countries that they're going to. So they're trying to bring that diversity into the school system, but it's up to the principals to make these hires.

[03:43:59] Okay, so that's where, just a second please, just a second, Mimi, just a second please. So they're trying to make these hires. You know, I've had several people to call and say, hey, I've done all of the work, but I need a sponsor.

[03:44:17] And the sponsorship is not something that FCP is doing for other places, okay? So those types of diverse hiring mechanisms are not happening. So if we can come up with a sponsorship, I'm telling you, every day there are several calls about, hey, I have a master's in this, I have a Ph.D. in this, and I have all of these credentials and qualifications.

[03:44:46] I just want to teach. One guy said today, I'm sorry, it took you all too long, I'm going to Loudoun County, they'll accept me. So at the schools, sometimes they're, you know, principals, teachers, they are up to here, trying to do the instructional piece, and at the same time do the hiring piece, and that is impacting them, you know.

[03:45:16] So we have people that are actually going outside of FCPS because of the long term and getting an interview. Have you heard from employees, like, much discussion about the burden posed by student loans and heavy student loan burdens?

[03:45:36] I have not heard anything on that. Thank you. I would like to inform the board that it used to be the workforce that would sell Fairfax County public schools.

[03:45:52] That is no longer the case. Most people who teach in Fairfax County do not recommend it for their own children and do not. Yeah, I know that's, but you're disagreeing? Oh, okay. Well, my experience has been that they're telling their kids not to go into teaching and they won't pay for them to go to college. You're hearing it too, Ricardo?

[03:46:20] I'm sorry nobody is telling their kids to go into teaching and you know that it used to be that we were very proud of our profession okay hold on thank you okay well I'm sorry I didn't I don't know what I said then that made you all disagree with me anyway oh not just Fairfax no teaching in general I'm sorry I'm sorry so for example I'm going to use myself as an example

[03:46:55] I can't go to the job fairs. I can't in good conscience tell people to come into teaching because I was disrespected as a teacher. And most of our staff has been disrespected, overworked, and we all know underpaid. And it just, we need to do something about the climate.

[03:47:20] And you ask about a charge, a new charge for the committee, that might be something that, Because nothing, those climate surveys have been done. I've been retired 20 years. I think they were done while I was still teaching. And nothing changed.

[03:47:40] Nothing changed. So thank you for listening. Thank you, Mr. Ash. Mr. Don? I have more. So we have, as Mimi said, I would be very interested in terms of a new charge, just having some kind of analysis of the, what I call the administrative burdens on teachers, which are anything outside of educating the kid in the classroom. You know, it can be trainings, it can be meetings, it can be anything that takes away from classroom planning time, anything that is not geared towards what they joined FCPS to do on a daily basis.

[03:48:17] We don't seem to have quantitative data on that, but anecdotally, every conversation I have is, it's not about money it's about uh i'm being pulled in every direction and i don't have enough time to prepare and focus on the kids i'm also interested in learning more about pacing pacing guides where some teachers feel that you know kids are at different places and kids who fall behind they don't because they have to keep at a certain pace to meet the curriculum throughout the year that um you know they can't ever catch the kids up right and especially in the post-pandemic

[03:48:52] environment um that that's very concerning uh we we have we're overweighted on instructional coaches underweighted on ias and that's because we have we bring a lot of young teachers so something else i don't know if it's the same uh is should we bring in more mid-career professionals which is on one of your slides you know seasoned teachers rather than new teachers right um we seem to train a large number of teachers and then they just go elsewhere um so uh those are just a few of the Subjects, I'd love to get some data on and get some research on and and a couple things to the most recent point the

[03:49:32] Again, and again, we can see that the more that the staff are engaged the more the staff feel that they have an autonomous voice The greatest job satisfaction they will have and they would degrade the productivity But there's going to be some give-and-take that's going to have to happen because when you tell when you have

[03:49:49] A site as large as a high school and people are moving in slightly different directions in there. How do you maintain your cohesiveness? So that's one of the challenges. Going back to the earlier point about minority hiring, this had come up in a couple, two years ago, where the role of, again, another tension between your site managers and the county needs.

[03:50:15] The county wants to be able to go ahead and improve the level of diversity within the schools, but at what extent, at what point is there intervention into high school that may be tilting towards not having that? And so you have the site manager, your principal, I'm talking about autonomy, that they want to be able to hire to bring their right people onto the bus, but are these really meeting the diversification needs of the diverse needs of the county?

[03:50:45] And to what extent do you have a central overlay on that? I'm bringing up problems, I'm not bringing up answers. But that has been a point that this committee has addressed in previous iterations. Thank you, Mr. Mbaka. We have about five minutes left and I have three people on my list and we'll see how that goes.

[03:51:05] Ms. Dix, next. So, we get one minute each? You get your time. You get your time. No, I'm just kidding. I don't have a lot to say but I did want to say thank you so much for this presentation I had the honor to serve on the HRSE Committee 2015 for a year.

[03:51:25] That was my first school board experience serving on advisory committee and it was a great experience. I did want to say that there's a lot of things you are addressing about accommodations and investments in our staff. And I just wanted to know how can we do that as a school system?

[03:51:45] can we get them lower mortgage rates by negotiating with the bank or you know with some like credit unions just like you were saying earlier we have relationships can we get them you know they can look pay lower tax sales taxes or no sales taxes when they're buying something as some benefits which we can give live extra perks to for our our teachers also for the closing cost we talked about down payments if those are things to eliminate some of the barrier

[03:52:23] for housing also a lot of teachers live on rent in Fairfax County could be have a subsidized rental agreement or maybe just like earlier somebody mentioned that we could give assurance to the homeowner that these are the teachers, very reliable community and they pay their rents, they're not going to be a risky tenant for you, and then get a lower rate on rental rates, some kind of agreement.

[03:52:58] if those tenant land or not land or homeowners can get some sort of subsidy I'm just thinking this out like because we always say we want more salary for our teachers we want to get more you know benefits from the super but in the budget and sometimes it's not the money isn't there we tried very hard this year but which we could get to the six percent we thought about so what are the other ways have you guys looked into that I know you touched on it but I just I just came up with some

[03:53:30] more ideas Haley he's in his committee they did go after some other areas you know looking at the housing and one in particular but here was one effort that was in it's in Dumfries Virginia what they're doing is if you participate in the voting process if you go out and help with the voting, elections, they're paying people's taxes, okay, like about, yeah, property taxes, yes.

[03:54:02] So not for the entire year, like two months or something like that, or one year or something like that, but they're paying those taxes. And Dumfries is the town. It's the town. No, I was just yeah the camp and it's that's out of Prince William County so what I was just saying that that was an innovative way of doing some things just like she's she's suggesting you know and what other other ways that may require that could also be done for example if you had a partnership with Realtors one of the

[03:54:41] biggest barriers to renting is the application fee and you may have to put in five or six different applications for rent only to find out that has been turned down. If there was a way of working with realtors for our new employees coming into the community saying we've worked with this realtor, this is somebody where we have a relationship where we can reduce or eliminate those application fees, then our new employees are not paying out of pocket to get turned down again and again. There are things that can be done. One of the cautions that we got in the committee was that anything that is in a form of remuneration is taxable. So we need to be careful about how we would structure that in a way that

[03:55:21] would not give us the, that would not mitigate the value of what we provide. Your taxes go up. Thank you. We have, I know it's 8:20, but could you have just a few more minutes for Ms. St. John Connings? Thank you. I have a few questions. In terms of, I know you said you're working on this, and despite what happens with collective bargaining HR is still going to have to respond to customers and so I'm curious about what you're doing to improve the customer response times and this is coming from

[03:56:00] someone that's been in the school system and seeing the frustration of people not getting quick response times or accurate information I'm just going to do all my questions at once also what are you doing to increase the exit and state interviews and what are you doing with that data, because as we're talking about a shortage of teachers and we want to retain and recruit, that data would be very informative to us. The other thing you talked about was hiring minority, you know, having reflective staff, particularly I know lacking in the

[03:56:39] Latino population, and you talked about going to Australia, and I know we've got some robust partnerships with people with other countries but are you going well I know we're going to Texas but are you into New Mexico Arizona California because you know we don't have to go out of the country to find Latino communities Puerto Rico you know we have to look at at our geographic United States to get those populations and are you going to those teaching schools in those states to recruit more Latinos.

[03:57:17] So just to respond to the first question about customer response times, I know that Micah Dunlap's team in ESO, the Employee Services and Operations team, they are actively looking at those customer response times as it stands right now.

[03:57:37] One of the questions that was asked or one of the thoughts that was asked at the beginning of this presentation was the staffing of HR and how it's structured. And in terms of how it's structured, one of the things I will say, just from an observation standpoint, is there is a high level of volume that passes through any human resources office in any K-12 institution anywhere in the United States. And part of what that means is when we think about those areas of human resources that are high volume, that are high traffic, like a call center or like a welcome center, those are the areas where you want to be very mindful of staffing so that you can respond as people are coming in for support, as teachers

[03:58:16] are trying to get directed to the right places or as other staff members are trying to get directed to the right places. So in terms of the customer response time, that's something I'm working very closely with Micah on because I want to understand what our staffing levels are currently, what our systems are currently to better respond to customer inquiries as they come in and what we may need to do and what it may need to look like, not only from a staffing perspective, but also from a systems perspective in that specific area. And then in terms of the question about hiring staff who are reflective of our student population, the research is very clear. Our students benefit

[03:58:54] significantly from teachers and other staff who look like them, have had similar experiences with them, all of those things. Our Office of Talent Acquisition, of course, is recruiting locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. One of the things I want to work with them on very closely is getting a sense of and an understanding of where from where we're recruiting and a big part of that when we zoom out is looking at well what do our student populations look like and when we really zoom out what are we seeing in terms of employees who are reflective of our student population who are separating what do we see in terms of our employees who are reflective

[03:59:31] of our student population who are coming to the school division what are those gaps and is there an overlay between our student populate our minority student population and our minority teaching population so in other words are we seeing those teachers teach at those schools all of those things um i do need to defer to miss hartman as it relates to the exit and stay surveys

[04:00:03] you know before before she did that i'm gonna ask you know dr ria you want to speak i just wanted to clarify and i did uh clarify with miss hartman but we have not traveled for anyone listening we are not we have not traveled to australia well i mean it just it may be something but i just want to clarify because i we may have people that think that who are listening so no there was no conference no trip to australia so i just want to clarify that for anyone listening thank you so much i was going to go to australia with a horrible step just kidding and before i talk about exit and stay i'll also add on that this

[04:00:40] This year, we did do a concerted effort to expand our definition of diversity. Diversity is not just the race, ethnicities, but we wanted to make sure that we put a platform in place that was going to do outreach in our local communities and with community partners in terms of recruitment.

[04:01:01] So we procured Circa Jobs, which is part of diversityjobs.com, and they do a scraping, pulling from our website and they distribute our job postings regionally to targeted diversity focused employers so that's anything from organizations that focus on sex gender differences for those that are military a wide range and it's also given us some data to see who's actually clicking on and coming back to our brass ring platform to apply for jobs.

[04:01:38] So I wanted to make sure you all had that information. That was something that was new this year. In terms of exit and state interviews, again, I've only been here just about a year. And so, therefore, I haven't dived into all of the information.

[04:01:53] But we have done training with our administrators on how to do exit interviews. It's been supported by the Office of Employee Relations, and I'll let Franklin kind of speak to that. But we know that there is opportunity there for us to use this data to support administrator and really customizing the cultural tactics that they use in their school.

[04:02:17] We know that the state is not a one size fit all. It really is about the culture that's at the school while we all have overarching beliefs and and activities that we want to have throughout the division. We also recognize that when we look at school data and particularly turnover, I'll sidebar for a second and say we looked at turnover so much this year that we actually did a targeted effort and who we wanted to support at our recruitment activities. So it wasn't just by chance who we invited to job fairs, it wasn't just you know circumstance or happenstance on who we want to give additional support in terms of our targeted

[04:02:57] recruitment efforts we looked at those schools that had turnover rates that were higher we looked at the demographics in those schools and we made concerted efforts in our placement of people who were coming into the organization into those schools so that being said we know that there's There's additional work to be done with the data that we are collecting, and I'll turn it over to Franklin.

[04:03:20] Yeah, you can speak a little bit about what you all have done in terms of training and support. Thank you for your time. You don't always have to. Yeah, I know. Thank you. So this year, one of the things that we focused on is retention in the sense of adding additional collaborators to support probationary teachers.

[04:03:42] any teacher who got a conditional reappointment they automatically get a collaborator but for teachers who started struggling at some point during the year when the principal called to say I'm having a performance problem with this person as opposed to treating it like a potential dismissal we added a collaborator to focus on helping the teacher improve so I think you see in the results in terms of the number of people who came to the board for non-renewal this year the efforts. The people who came were people who shouldn't be teachers, just to be honest with you.

[04:04:18] But we're talking about two people out of 15,000 on evaluation, and that is because of a tremendous effort on the part of the staff refocusing on not just evaluating people, but on developing staff. So retention starts with developing people, making them comfortable in the skill set that they have and in the job that they have and so that's been our focus and hopefully we can continue to build we've been very fortunate with some of the retiring principals some of the retiring teachers

[04:04:52] who want to come back and be collaborators we thought that when the tutoring program came in to existence and they offered the tutors more money than our collaborators i'm not calling any names we thought we would lose collaborators but we didn't the people who want to do collaboration and mentoring want to do collaboration and mentoring and so we are so fortunate that the people who are retiring want to come back and who are staying in the area and support and so that to me is a program that I think that we are definitely going to try to continue to

[04:05:29] build into the coming years so I just want to commend Franklin and Sandra and the team they have really worked hard this year in terms of trying to be transformative in our approach and relationships with staff and look at more of that coaching and inspiring rather than the you know driving and it's just I think it's beginning to show some real promise so I just want to add my support to that okay thank you so much anything else yes I do have one more

[04:06:04] question in terms of climate and culture which was spoken to a lot here and you did touch on the fact that you're looking at schools that have high turnover rate again from someone that's worked in the school we we know that each school is its own kingdom and the climate and cultural lifetime is driven by leadership and so my question is are you working with leadership when that climate and culture is not something that is conducive to the staff there and the teachers and the other thing you talked about was you know the exit interviews like having those exit interviews with people on site which sometimes I think might be very uncomfortable for some people so do you

[04:06:41] have a mechanism you know if I'm working for a leader that I'm not happy with I'm not going to be honest with that in that exit interview I apologize I should have stayed so presently the staff can either perform the exit interview with the principal at the school or with the performance specialist assigned to my office we have two that we want to put into place this coming year that will allow an employee to do a stay survey if you will at any point in the year to

[04:07:19] give us continuous feedback we want to load it on the staff connect so we can get continuous information my staff some disagree with me because they believe that people will just complain and it'll be a tool for people to complain I say yes and no I would rather know what you're thinking because I can only fix the things that I know about so we need a tool that will give us continuous information so we can then respond as opposed to everybody's up in arms and now they're all upset now let's let's see the trend building so we can

[04:07:56] anticipate and respond with a thoughtful meaningful response yes and if I could Just to add, we would be remiss if we didn't recognize not just the members of the committee but the staff members from HR who were with us every single meeting in there.

[04:08:16] And the conversations that we had were this candid, were this open, and we could really talk about solutions as well, too. So that's what I mean about the responsiveness and the turnaround in the approach of HR. We've had a very collaborative approach. And we would be remiss if we didn't recognize the support that you've provided.

[04:08:35] Okay. Thank you. I want to thank the work and service of the co-chairs for the committee and your presentation and answering, you know, engaging in this conversation. With that, this portion of the work session is done. Thank you.

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