Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Date: Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 5h 1m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_zwoyV7FVg
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 2026-10-31. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:37] - 1712-D of the Code of Virginia. It is necessary for the board to certify that since the Fairfax County School Board convened a closed meeting on August 26th, 2024, and concluded on the morning of August 27th, 2024, to the best of each board member's knowledge, only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements, and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered by the board during the closed meeting.

[00:01:06] Do I have a motion? Ms. Anderson, do I have a second? Mr. McElveen. All those in favor? Ms. Anderson, Ms. St. John Cunning, Mr. McDaniel, Mr. McElveen, Ms. Marin, Dr. Anderson, and myself. That's unanimous for all board members present.

[00:01:22] Oh, and Ms. Lady for all board members present. I call on Mr. McDaniel for a motion. I move that the school board authorize the chair to execute employment contracts with leadership team members.

[00:01:38] Is there a second? Ms. Sizemore-Hyser. All those in favor? Dr. Anderson, Ms. Anderson, Ms. St. John Cunning, Mr. McDaniel, Mr. McElveen, Ms. Lady, Ms. Sizemore-Heiser, and myself.

[00:01:57] Any abstentions? Ms. Marin, any opposed? The motion passes. Okay, and now, good morning.

[00:02:16] Welcome. This morning, today, we're going to have a focus on our legislative advocacy and our legislative program. Then we will take a break for lunch as scheduled at 1230. Then we are going to turn a bit more to state matters, not just on the legislative focus, but on what's happening with the state and the governor's direction regarding the accreditation and accountability measures and standards that the state Board of Education levies.

[00:02:45] So that will begin at 1:00, and then at 2:30 we will turn to secondary grading. So first, the legislative program. So for those for whom this is the first time, or the public, the legislative program is basically the guidance that the school board uses to advocate to our elected officials, both at the state and federal level.

[00:03:05] Because we're dealing with education, it's mostly state level, and that's our General Assembly. That's the House of Delegates and the Senators. So we will be working with our legislative partners. We have a scheduled breakfast with them in October.

[00:03:20] It's a public meeting where we will brief our delegation of those elected officials that represent Fairfax and then come January when the General Assembly goes into session, we will do all we can to make our voice heard so that legislation that passes is beneficial to our students, staff and community here in Fairfax as well as in Virginia.

[00:03:40] So this document becomes not only our guiding document, but it's also really useful for the members in elected office and their staff because as they're busy working on a number of bills and things, they can look at this document and know exactly where Fairfax County Public School stands. So at this time we're going to talk about, today we're going to talk about this draft. It's an update. It's always shared publicly. It's on our website.

[00:04:06] And every year it gets updated based on legislative updates as well as the intentions of the board. So this conversation is going to allow us to talk about where we see we want to update this document. I have with me, or with us today, our Legislative Liaison for Federal Matters, so on the State Matters, as well as Mr. Ryan McElveen is also our Liaison for State Legislative Matters, and Dr. Riccardi Anderson is the Board's Legislative Liaison for Federal Matters, which we'll also talk to today, so I'll turn over to her to as well share any remarks. Thank you. Very briefly, I think it's important to identify and to

[00:04:43] state that this is the 25th legislation legislative program that Mr. Molloy has helped this division craft. So it's a quarter of a century worth of work and it's going to be interesting to just kind of see the arc of that and a little bit later on we are going to be speaking about how do we prioritize these points because there's a lot in the program but there are some issues that are of higher priority and so we bring those issues into a one pager there will be a one page for the legislative part i'm sorry for the federal program and one page for the state program so we will have to winnow down all of the things that are going to be introduced

[00:05:24] today so as you are listening to the presentation please start to identify those things that are so key that we do want to bring to that one pager because that's the cheat sheet for when session is occurring so without any further ado i want to turn it over to mr malloy all right thank you very much good morning everybody i'm pleased to be with you today to talk um and i apologize in advance rather extensively um about the uh the board's legislative program but also uh to provide you with some i think some key and necessary background information in terms of uh kind of

[00:06:04] where where we are as a school system the legislative process and where other school divisions are so without further ado I will I will jump right in make sure I'm okay so just to give you an overview of what what I plan to cover just a brief overview of what my office the Office of Government Relations does for FCPS a little bit of background information about the Virginia General Assembly, the Virginia Board of Education, and other school divisions just to kind of set the context in terms of where -- how our conversations at the state go and who our

[00:06:44] partners are and those types of things. A little bit of information, and I tell you this would take multiple work sessions to get through fully, but just some real high-level information about state education funding, Local Composite Index, which I'm certain is a term that you all are very familiar with.

[00:07:03] And then we'll go into the actual conversation about the legislative program itself. We did have one-on-one and two-by-two conversations with all of you, which I very much appreciated. We're going to go through some of the themes that came up during those conversations.

[00:07:19] And then we're going to turn to the actual language in the legislative program, talk about the changes that are being proposed from staff, a little bit of an update on JLARC, and then a little bit of an update on off-session studies. Alright, so my office, the Office of Government Relation, we serve as a liaison between the school system and state and national policymakers. We are active in legislative and policy debates at both the state and the federal level. Obviously far more at the state level, we'll talk about that a little bit more than at the

[00:07:54] federal level but we're involved in both. And one of our primary roles is really to engage with policymakers to make sure that they are fully aware of the potential instructional fiscal and operational impacts of the choices that they make in terms of policy, in terms of budget, in terms of legislation. So it's really kind of an informational role to make sure that our policymakers are engaging in those debates with as much information as they can in terms of potential impacts on students, on staff, and on communities.

[00:08:32] We don't do this alone. We are one office. We rely on the expertise of everybody within FCPS. All of our information comes from staff, but we also work a lot with outside organizations and groups.

[00:08:50] We work closely with Fairfax County staff. In fact, we have a joint legislative position. all hold a joint legislative position with both the with you all and the board of supervisors which we'll talk about in a little bit but we work with them very closely during the general assembly session and in the off session there are about roughly 15 school divisions who have somebody who does something similar to what i do for fcps in other school divisions so we work closely with them um so we're you know have a much broader broader reach than just fairfax county

[00:09:24] Legislators and then we work with a lot of the the larger education and local government organizations I just gave you a couple of examples here of the groups that we we will work with and engage with on a very regular basis The advantage that they provide to us as a school system is they have a much broader view And they have a much broader reach so they can they have contact with Legislators that are outside of the Fairfax delegation. It's not that we don't But it means something a little bit different when a statewide organization comes to you to talk about a particular

[00:10:01] Policy issue then it it does when an individual school division or or locality does The the bulk of our work and I don't want to say the bulk of our work because we're busy throughout the year But the the the silly season as it were is during the actual Virginia general assembly session If you remember from civics 101, Virginia has a part-time legislature It meets for a 60 calendar day session in even years and a 45 calendar day session in odd years We're coming up on an odd year. So we're gonna have a 45-day session

[00:10:42] Just to give you some context about how much we do and how quickly that goes that's 60 calendar days During last session over 60 days there were 3,500 bills and resolutions that were introduced and debated and voted on So you can do the math as to how many bills that is per day, which is a ridiculously large number There were about 500 pieces of legislation that we were able to identify last year among those 3,500 that had some bearing on FCPS And when I say that, it's not just education legislation that we pay attention to.

[00:11:19] We pay attention to legislation dealing with transportation and employment and employee benefits and other types of things that can impact us as not just a large school system but also as a large employer. So there's a lot of legislation gets dealt with each and every year.

[00:11:39] Last year, so you've got, it's roughly a 60-day calendar session is nine weeks. during last session, they completed work on every single bill, or they looked at every single bill in its originating chamber within the first five weeks of session.

[00:11:59] So, you know, consider looking at 3,500 bills, not just over a nine-week period, but the first look at each one of them had to happen within that first five-week period. So you can get an idea of just how quickly these conversations go at the state level.

[00:12:20] As for our Fairfax General Assembly delegation, we have a very sizable delegation that's far larger than any other jurisdiction. We have 15 delegates who represent Fairfax in part or in whole, and seven senators. That, again, much larger than the next largest delegation, but something to keep in mind is that 15 is 15 out of 100 voting members, and seven is 7 out of 40 voting members.

[00:12:50] So it's still a small fraction of the totality of the General Assembly. So in terms of what I was talking about with working with other organizations and other school divisions, get an idea of why that's important, is because to get to 51 votes or to get to 21 votes, you need people to come with you.

[00:13:11] In terms of where our legislators actually sit, we have a number of our House and Senate legislators who are chairs of committees. But they're not chairs of the committees that we pay the most, the closest attention to, which would be House Education, Senate Education and Health, House Appropriations, and Senate Finance and Appropriations.

[00:13:33] Those are all chaired by legislators outside of the Fairfax area. In terms of committee membership, of 22 members on House Education, we have one representative on the House Education Committee, and we have three representatives out of 22 members on house appropriations and you can see house education and health two out of 15 and the one that we have the highest proportion of Fairfax members is Senate finance and appropriations I believe that there was an attachment as part of the agenda item a separate document that went through all of our legislators and

[00:14:10] where they sit we don't we don't necessarily need to refer to it but I just wanted to make sure that you knew that it was included as part of the reference documents that were a included with the agenda item so the General Assembly is not the only policymaking body that has an impact on FCPS there are actually a number of them but the the other primary one that we we monitor and engage with is the Virginia Board of Education the Virginia Board of Education is an appointed board the members are appointed by the governor

[00:14:45] and there are nine nine members that sit on that board they're appointed to staggered terms so you constantly have every single year you have members come on and off the board currently eight of the nine members of the board were appointed by Governor Youngkin and as of July 2025 that will become nine out of nine members will be have been appointed by Governor Youngkin if appointments proceed the way they're scheduled to proceed in terms of when the actual members roll off of the board the current majority on the board will remain

[00:15:20] until July 2027 at that point the next the the next governor after Governor Youngkin will have had the opportunity to appoint a majority of the board but the current board the governor Youngkin's appointees will be there until July of 27 Virginia Board of Education is unique in Virginia is that it's the only constitutionally mandated board that that exists in in the Commonwealth and it holds very significant regulatory authority you're aware of the standards of accreditation I'm sure standards of learning standards of quality and and they have regulations in a vast number of other areas licensure

[00:16:00] transportation other places the board's authority is subject to legislative oversight so if the General Assembly were to pass a bill on the governor were to sign it they can require the board to make changes to the regulations or do particular things but again it does require going through the regular legislative process that that board meets formally between eight and ten times a year but they do have some subcommittees that that meet in the the interim and and so they again are kind of a year-round a year-round entity now in

[00:16:34] terms of where you all relate to other school divisions based on our 2324 fall membership we have had over a hundred and eighty thousand students that's approximately 14% of the Commonwealth's total student population so a sizable percentage. Just to give you an idea of where you fit within the regular context of the other 131 school divisions, next largest school division is half your size. Prince William has 90,000 students, so it's only half as big as Fairfax. The smallest jurisdiction in Virginia is Highland County with

[00:17:08] a little bit over 200 students. The median school division size out of the 131 is 3,800 students, So only slightly larger than one of our largest schools, their entire school divisions. So the vast number of school divisions in Virginia are very small entities.

[00:17:31] Turning to school funding, this is one that I warned you would take multiple work sessions, but I'll try my best to get through this very quickly. The vast majority of our funding here in FCPS is formula-driven. It's based on factors like enrollment, staffing, other items.

[00:17:49] A lot of that is set forth in the codified standards of quality, which set things like staffing standards in terms of the minimum number of teachers we're supposed to have, minimum number of counselors, minimum number of other types of staff.

[00:18:07] So that funding is generated primarily by formula. The state formula is equalized so that the state uses what's referred to as the local composite index the local composite index is a formula that determines the split between state funding responsibility and required local effort so you it determines of the amount of money that the General Assembly determines that goes into a the standards of quality for example the LCI helps to determine how much of that ends up being a state responsibility and how

[00:18:45] much of that ends up being a local responsibility every jurisdiction has a different LCI so every jurisdiction has a different level of responsibility for for local funding the LCI itself and I spared you the actual formula but it's based on adjusted gross income so in local wealth adjusted gross income true value of property so property values and then taxable retail sales and then it's also adjusted based on both student population and also overall jurisdiction

[00:19:17] population Fairfax's LCI in this current biennium is 0.6579 the LCI ranges from a high of 0.8 actually the LCI can't go higher than 0.8 so there's even in jurisdictions that could go higher that they still receive 20% roughly of their funding from the state but the lowest is 0.6 1.1 6 which means there that that particular jurisdiction is getting about 85 percent of their funding from the state and a very small proportion is coming from localities. In terms of where

[00:19:54] we sit with our LCI, you've got 16 jurisdictions that have an higher LCI than FCPS. A lot of them are in Northern Virginia but not exclusively and then 28 or 117 have a lower LCI than us. The median is 0.36 so you can see it's relatively it's relatively far below the 0.5 level which is kind of the even 50 50 split between state and local responsibility and and again while we've got an LCI of 0.65 it sounds like we should be getting 66 or 34 percent of

[00:20:33] our funding from the locality our last operating budget we only got about 26 percent of our operating fund from state from from state sources a few reasons for that not all funding is distributed based on the LCI sales tax in particular is one one big one that does not run through the LCI not all state funding is reflected in our operating fund some of it goes to construction food and nutrition grants other places and then the third bullet I think is important especially in the context of some of the things that you've talked about rather

[00:21:06] extensively since it was released the state does in in virtually every area under estimate the true cost of providing services this is very well documented by the by the JLARC study I will talk a little bit more about that as as we as we get to the recommendations and JLARC update but that's another significant factor about why our local our local funding is is higher than the LCI might imply and it's just because when the state calculates the cost of

[00:21:43] doing business and other factors they tend to underestimate how much things truly cost. All right so that's by way of background so now in terms of your state and federal legislative program you have a conversation annually about your legislative program and the program itself details your positions on a wide variety of topics. One thing that's important to note about the program is it is is it's essentially a perpetual document it does carry over from year to

[00:22:19] year until you all as a board at the board table make a decision to make a change in it and that's kind of what we're here today to do but there are a lot of standing positions that have been issues in Virginia for years and years as an example the JLARC report in 2023 didn't tell us all that much different than the JLARC report in 2002 told us in terms of flaws in the state funding or underfunding areas so you've had a position about JLARC and you've had a position about state underfunding for that entire duration a couple of other

[00:22:57] components of the program which again I've included as part of the agenda item but we're going to need to talk about separately one is you all do hold a joint position with the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors this year is a little complicated in terms of your adoption of that position because while While you're having your legislative work session now and will actually finish your conversation about the legislative program, ideally by September 26th I believe is the date we're scheduled for final action, the county hasn't even started its conversation about its legislative program.

[00:23:33] Their first legislative committee meeting is September 17th. So what we'll essentially have to do is we'll have to sync up the joint position at a later SO YOU'LL HAVE TO COME BACK AS A BOARD AND ADOPT THAT POSSIBLY SOMETIME IN NOVEMBER, POSSIBLY SOMETIME IN DECEMBER.

[00:23:53] SO THERE WILL BE A COMPONENT JUST TO LET YOU KNOW OF THE PROGRAM THAT WILL NEED FURTHER WORK EVEN PAST THE TIME FRAME THAT WE HAVE HERE. AND THE OTHER, I THINK DR. ANDERSON AND MISS MARIN BOTH MENTIONED THIS, IS THAT AS PART OF YOUR LEGISLATIVE PROGRAM DOCUMENT, YOU'VE GOT THE BODY OF THE PROGRAM, WHICH which has all of the detail information, but every year you, as a board, decide on a set of priorities, kind of a subset of positions.

[00:24:24] So there are positions that are already existing in the program, but there's a subset that you identify each year as one that you particularly want to emphasize, whether it be for specific initiatives or just for public awareness or, you know, however you want to handle that on the advocacy side, but you do come up with that.

[00:24:42] We don't have a draft of that for you today because that really is a board conversation. So here and also as you move towards final action at the end of September, you all will go through a process of setting some of those priorities and finalizing those.

[00:25:01] So real quickly, why bother having a legislative program? I think it's a question that does get asked, and our program is admittedly long, although there there are longer in Virginia School Boards Association's program I think is 90 plus pages so there are there are longer ones the real reason to for you to do to have a legislative program really is while you are granted as a board with authority over the supervision of schools virtually everything that we do in FCPS is somehow impacted by federal or state code or

[00:25:40] regulations just just think about the even even recent issues that have come up cell phone use of reporting of accountability transportation licensure staffing those are all areas that their actions at the state level or actions at the federal level can have an impact on your ability to govern the school system so they can take the form of operational mandates they can take the form of funding mandates and they may or may not align with your priorities and the

[00:26:18] legislative program gives you an opportunity to to kind of signal where your priorities do lie and and you know in terms of whether or not things that the General Assembly you were or otherwise are pursuing are aligned with your priorities or off to the side of them a couple of other points before we move on one is this isn't a one-time conversation I know this is a formal one-time conversation that we have here at the board table but the legislative the legislative program is is in use all year round the General Assembly meets during the General Assembly session it is an incredibly useful document for us

[00:26:56] given what I told you about how quickly things move at the General Assembly level having a legislative program and having those positions kind of set forth is incredibly useful when policy debates are happening at a very very rapid clip so to be able to to weigh in on particular initiatives or particular proposals the legislative program is incredibly useful in in our being able to do that all right now turning to themes that came up during board policy

[00:27:33] conversation so on this slide what we've identified is we've identified issues and and and issue areas that came up relatively frequently during board conversations when we talk to all of you these were the things that came up on a relatively regular basis jlark report education funding was front and center of almost every single conversation we had a lot of conversation about state accountability and accreditation you will certainly have we've got a presentation coming to you later this afternoon on what the state's working on

[00:28:09] in terms of new accountability rules but that was a very common theme traffic and pedestrian safety everything from speed cameras to traffic calming to speed humps it came up during conversations expanded access to both free meals and pre-k education were a relatively common theme workforce development issues career and technical education FOIA issues so the the state requirements in terms of open meeting laws and and also you know FOIA FOIA requests so we might get those came up and then finally obviously we've got a November election

[00:28:49] coming up at the federal level education policy is definitely part of the conversation particularly the so-called project 2025 document a lot of a lot of policy proposals there that could have a very very significant impact on public education in general so those those issues came up one thing that I will say is that in terms of those frequently cited issues and concerns virtually everything whether or not in the exact detail that the conversation came up were already covered somewhere within your existing legislative

[00:29:24] program so you already had positions on JLARC funding and accountability and pedestrian safety and such so you know the good news is that your pre-existing document covered a lot of the things that were at top of mind for for board members and then I'm not going to go through this entire list I'll leave it up there for a minute to let you see you and you can see how broad our conversations were you know we we talked about in in in terms of our conversations with you all issues came up from all over the place uh that you know so there's it's not just those priority

[00:30:00] pieces that are the the common themes um but you all had a lot of other things on your mind and this also illustrates the wide reach of the state you know state influence on school divisions and also federal influence on school divisions because this is just a you know a wide a wide range of issues all right now so we get down to the nitty-gritty of the actual language in the actual legislative program so we probably have about a dozen issue areas where we made some some proposed change so you know as

[00:30:39] part of your agenda item there's two documents that are important one is is what we refer to as the strikethrough version of the legislative program so So it basically takes the 2024 program and strikes through and underlines anywhere and literally down to the word where there's a proposed addition or a proposed deletion.

[00:31:01] So that's part of your agenda item. And then we also include a table, runs about three pages, that highlights every single one of those changes and provides a real brief explanation or just at least a guidepost just so you can see what changed or what's being proposed for change in the legislative program.

[00:31:21] So those are both part of your legislative program agenda item today. In terms of the details of what is being recommended, under College and Workforce Readiness, we had some conversations, especially with staff, that the terminology that's used at the state level about work-based learning is high-quality work-based learning, so we wanted to make sure that our language aligned with with the state's nomenclature also had some interesting conversations about transportation and the transportation being one of the barriers to students being able to access work-based learning

[00:31:59] so advocating for state support there and also some credit bearing partnerships in in terms of giving students the ability not just to have a work-based learning experience but also to get some some school credit out of it under Under instructional technology, you already had a position on artificial intelligence.

[00:32:20] We just added a little tidbit in there about the ethical use of artificial intelligence. Under multilingual learners, and just to clarify why we left the language in the legislative program as English learners, that's the nomenclature that's still used at the state level.

[00:32:43] We recognize that in FCPS we use the term multilingual learners, but to switch the language over in your legislative program for policymakers who aren't familiar with it, at least in the short term, is probably going to be confusing to them. So we did retain the term English learners, but acknowledging that the terminology that we use here in Fairfax is a little bit different.

[00:33:06] The one change that was made there is additional advocacy for resources for parent translation services. That's entirely done at the local level right now, and that's entirely a local funding responsibility. So getting the state to provide some resources for that, I think, is worth pursuing.

[00:33:25] Under FOIA, as I said, FOIA issues came up. The one that we're updating here is a couple of years ago, the General Assembly made a change in FOIA laws, which ended up conflating federal privacy laws under the federal privacy rules.

[00:33:43] Virginia laws about access to student records and student information and it ended up being that the way that code was drawn up it overrode the the rules of FERPA the 40 because under FERPA we have a longer period of time to respond to requests for information then then Virginia FOIA laws allow so just to get some clarification in terms of when student records request for instance

[00:34:13] comes in, are we governed by state FOIA laws or are we governed by federal FERPA laws. Under your revenue alternatives position, the first one really isn't a change in position. You actually had it, but it was embedded and kind of buried in an existing position, so we pulled it out as a standalone.

[00:34:37] School construction sales tax referendum authority has been an issue in the General Assembly for the past number of years, and in fact, it passed by an almost veto-proof majority. I do say almost because it did eventually get vetoed by the governor, but it did get wide majorities in both the House and the Senate.

[00:34:56] So it's gonna continue to be an issue at the state level. So just wanted to pull it out and highlight it. The other one that we wanted to make sure that we highlighted was in 2023, the state repealed the state sales tax on groceries.

[00:35:12] By doing that, they also repealed a dedicated source revenue to public schools at the time they did they did backfill that revenue so it ended up you at school division didn't lose funding but during the last general assembly session the governor tried to pull that funding that kind of backfilled funding back saying that it was just a one-time temporary thing to backfill and we want to make sure that we pursue that that that becomes a permanent thing and it's obviously in the context of a multi or a multi-billion

[00:35:49] dollar budget 38.7 million dollars isn't the largest number but that is a fairly significant amount of money from the state that could be a jeopardy if the state renegs on its commitment to replace that revenue so just highlighting the importance of that. Understands of accreditation and standards of learning. You already had, and we'll talk to you a lot later today about the new state's accountability system and what they're proposing. You already had a fairly extensive position on what you as a board want to see out of state

[00:36:25] accountability that kind of covers a lot of what's already there. Where we did want to, we're proposing beefing up the language a little bit in terms of the state reflecting student academic progress so student growth a little bit more robustly how English language learners are incorporated into the accountability system and then also to have a system just in general terms that identifies the divisions that are most in need of improvement I'm sure you've seen that the headlines that under the new accountability system you know more

[00:37:01] than more than half of schools in in Virginia based on 2023 data so it's it these are just projections could be could fall into the lowest two categories of school accountability rankings in Virginia so just want to highlight that and then under student health and wellness finally on this page is just a you already have a position on on access to food but just act you to emphasize that it should be high quality and nutritious last couple of proposed

[00:37:35] changes under state legislative program one is we proposed expanding the existing position on pedestrian and traffic safety your existing position really only dealt with speed limits and this is a little bit more generalized statement that's part of the draft adding universal design as a part of pre-service training you have a position which kind of lists the things that you think should be part of a teachers pre-service training education adding universal design as a component of that funding for the FBI's wrap-back

[00:38:10] background monitoring program that for for those of you I'm hoping you all know what that is that's actually been something that's been in the works at the state level for a number of years state police is retooling its its data systems to be able to have the state system communicate with the FBI's system on background checking so instead of kind of a one-time background check it becomes more of a dynamic process so that if there is you know an employee or someone has an incident after they've been employed and after we've done our

[00:38:46] background check we'd get information about that in a more real-time fashion as opposed to having to go back and do redo a background check that is coming in July of 2025 the reason that it's highlighted for you is because there will be a fiscal component for you as a board. Right now there is a proposed $1 per person per month monitoring fee that the state police is recommending that localities pay. So that will be $12 a year for each and every one of our employees to be part of this monitoring

[00:39:20] system. So certainly pursuing state funding to backfill that I think is critical and this is exactly the time to do it since the system is going to go into effect right about the time that you get to the next the next year of the biennium and then just to highlight a couple of places where your advocacy has been successful we are able to delete a couple positions in this in this section one was related to the requirement about the Virginia communication and literacy assessment for pre-service teachers that that requirements actually been dropped and they're they're looking at alternatives and then

[00:39:57] licensure reciprocity you had asked for the state to kind of come up with a crosswalk between our licenses here in Virginia and the requirements that are out there for licenses from other states to help facilitate that hiring conversation when we have somebody come in from other state to understand that hey this this license from California or this license from Pennsylvania or this license from Georgia slots into this particular type of licensure here in Virginia so it helps to facilitate that and it's that's being taken on at the state level as opposed to us having to try and figure that out so those are

[00:40:35] both a couple of examples of places where you know your advocacy has been successful now I'm going to turn to the federal positions but I'm going to take a real quick detour I spent an awful lot of time at the beginning of this presentation telling you all about the state process and the number of legislators we had our our relationship with the federal government is completely different than that we're I mean we're a large school division we have you know I don't remember what the last number is we're one of the ten ten ish largest school divisions in all of the country we have three members of the

[00:41:13] House of Representatives that represent us out of 435 and we have two senators that represent not just you all but also the entire rest of Virginia among the hundred so you can see the view is very very different when you get to the federal level then at the state level there still are critical programs at this at the federal level title one IDEA being to you know IDEA being that not only federal rules but also federal funding for our students with disabilities critically important programs but they make up you know in

[00:41:49] contrast to the 20 plus percent that the state makes up about 1.4 percent of our operating budget is federal funds another another chunk goes into our grant funds title one and those programs actually go into the grant fund not an operating but again you see it's a order of magnitude smaller impact in terms of budgetary issues so just want to give that that context as to why we're a little bit more robust on the state side than we are on the federal side

[00:42:19] On federal positions, the recommendations we're making here, I just wanted to highlight a few of them, expanding opposition to turning federal funding programs into vouchers. That actually dovetails right into the Project 2025 discussion that I mentioned earlier.

[00:42:37] You have a position right now that opposes turning Title I into a voucher. There are proposals to turn other federal funding streams into vouchers as well, so I just wanted to make sure that was a more generalized statement. wanted to update your advocacy for for how allocations of title one funds are calculated at the federal level I I'm a little out of my depth but my understanding of the issue is there are kind of three different types of schools and school divisions some still collect data on free and reduced meals

[00:43:14] eligibility as as part of their their process there are some schools that no longer do that and they're considered community eligibility provision schools so the entire school is eligible for free meals which also relieves them of the obligation to do the paperwork on free and reduced meals and that that sums up kind of our where we are we have some schools that are CEP but the majority are not there are school divisions in Virginia and throughout the country where the entire school division is CEP so the entire school division no longer collects free and reduced lunch data there are some quirks and how that

[00:43:50] data is collected and how that data is fed into some of the formulas at the federal level but also at the state level there are a lot of state formulas that still use free and reduced lunch where our allocations are not showing up the way we would expect them to because of some of those those differences in how free and reduced lunch meals schools and school divisions are treated versus CEP schools so we've got that advocacy for native language assessment availability for English learners that's something that's already in your state program we just want to make sure it carried over to the federal program

[00:44:26] particularly because the ESSA plan template which you will learn more about later this afternoon specifically advocates or specifically encourages states to pursue native language assessment for English language learners and then the final one that's on this slide is a reconciliation of how federal graduation courts are measured versus other laws particularly special education laws which specifically carve out and allow for students to take additional time as part of their education and how that that reflects on

[00:45:01] kind of the federal system which is a very strict four-year a graduation cohort a couple of late-breaking things that have come up on on this this particular area they want to highlight for you and it can become part of your discussion when we get to the end here there are I think about three or four additional positions that I want to flag for you do we have the legislative program document itself that we can get to real quickly so the actual

[00:45:36] strike through. If we scroll down near the bottom of the, uh, the first one that you had up was the one I was looking for. Apologies for the brief detour. So if you can scroll down to near the bottom of that document, um, we're looking for the federal position. So it's going to be right near

[00:46:09] the end. No, that's the, that's the joint position. There you go. Got it. Yeah. If you go down to page 14, thank you, Mr. Chairman. All right. So the federal position starts there. If you can, uh,

[00:46:44] find position number 16 is where I want to start. Excellent, perfect. So it's kind of, this would be a board discretion one, but this was flagged for me. Position number 16 is a very, very broad statement. It doesn't necessarily advocate for or against any particular thing. It's just kind of a broad statement. But wanted to flag that one as a possible area where you might want to consider whether you keep that language or or release it. Number 18 and 19 on this same page, 18 and 19 are actually, they date all

[00:47:24] the way back to No Child Left Behind discussions, which was 2004-ish, 2002. So those are our positions. It does you no harm to keep them, but they are definitely outdated references.

[00:47:39] They're definitely things that are not part of the conversation at either the federal level or the state level. So those I think are two that you can consider in terms of keeping your program current and up to date that you may want to consider whether or not you want to keep them in the program. And then the last one, if you go down to item number 28, so it should just be the next page. This is the item number 28 is about the Children's Health Insurance Program. This one you actually you you can delete that the chip program was reauthorized and it is

[00:48:15] funded through the fiscal year 2027 so that that you know supporting the reauthorization is again an outdated term so that is one that you know we didn't include it as part of the original document but as we move towards the the new business section that's one that you can safely delete and it's your you're reauthorized through 2027 um so i just wanted to highlight highlight those uh there's no harm in keeping any of them but just in terms of keeping your program up to date those are uh those are four additional areas that we want to highlight that that might be we can switch back

[00:48:50] to the presentation we are in the home stretch i promise okay so now we just wanted to provide you a really really brief update on where we are with the 2023 jailer report obviously a huge topic of conversation during the last general assembly session there were bills introduced to implement virtually everything in the jailer report in

[00:49:25] various way shapes and ways shapes and forms the only one that passed or it wasn't even legislation that passed it was budget language that passed was adopting one of the jailer recommendations or at least a version of one of the jailer recommendations related to at-risk add-on funding at risk add-on funding is additional funding that school divisions receive based on their number of students in poverty. It tends to be a formula that does not benefit Fairfax as much as it benefits other school divisions because it focuses on division-wide percentages of students in

[00:50:02] poverty. There is a component that deals with numbers of students in poverty. I think we've we've provided and i'm sure you're aware that we have more more students in poverty in in fairfax than most school divisions have students so in terms of sheer numbers but when you look at our division-wide percentage of students in poverties we are one of the lowest percentage wise in the state but that was a jlark recommendation that was at least in in part adopted they also did adopt

[00:50:38] teacher salary increase jailer recommendation wasn't a specific dollar amount it was just to move virginia to at least the national average the salary increase last year helped to move that needle a little bit towards national average virginia hasn't reached it but it got them closer and then there were changes on english language learner staffing that were related to one of the jailer recommendations but the vast majority of jailer still remains undone what they ended up doing instead of passing legislation was they created a kind of a select committee five members from the House five members from the Senate and to go back to our conversation about where our members sit we actually do have one

[00:51:16] senator and one delegate that are involved in that conversation their first meeting isn't until September 16th so they're gonna they're gonna start their conversation on September 16th they have a report that's technically due to the General Assembly in November 1st but the likelihood is that there won't be a report as of November 1st or the reporting on November 1st will be we need more time because the committee's already scheduled the meeting in in December so just want to provide you that little brief update on what's going on with JLARC this next slide I'm not going to go through everything but I

[00:51:53] mentioned we were most busy during the General Assembly session and it's considered a quote part-time legislature but that's kind of a misnomer because the General Assembly meets pretty much all the time they may not meet as an entire body but they have subcommittees and they have work groups that meet throughout the year some of them are ongoing entities some of them are specifically set up by pieces of legislation the use of this slide here and also the report that we do on off-session studies is this is kind of our preview of coming attractions so not only are we involved in the

[00:52:29] conversations that they're having here on these policy issues but these are also a signal as to what policy issues are likely to arise come the next General Assembly session so that's why that's provided there and then we have reached the end of the presentation just to give you an idea of where where we're heading from from here on excuse me General Assembly members have the ability to pre-file, they refer to it as pre-filing legislation for the next General Assembly session.

[00:53:06] That process is already open, so members can already submit legislation for the next General Assembly session. You are scheduled, at least if all holds the way we have planned, your new business discussion of this program is September 12th, final action, you'll have finalized the program, with the exception, of course, of the joint legislative position on September 26th.

[00:53:30] And then you have a delegation briefing with our General Assembly delegation, and also we invite the board of supervisors, the city school board, other interested parties to that conversation. That's scheduled for the morning of October 8th.

[00:53:46] On the legislative side, the General Assembly pre-filing window closes by November 25th, so there's still a long time to be able to approach legislators in terms of of requesting legislation in terms of your syncing up with the county's legislative program adoption their legislative committee i mentioned they start meeting in mid-september they'll have a few meetings in october as far as i can tell from their schedule they will actually go to adoption of their legislative program on december 3rd they also have a legislative reception similar to your briefing that's scheduled for december 10th you may as well put it on your

[00:54:25] calendar now because i'm sure you will be invited to it because you are you are every year same same exact kind of conversation that you have during your your briefing um you know education funding tends to be a very significant topic of conversation even at that one and you know the county of course has other other priorities and other issue areas that they discuss we will find out the governor's budget amendments because we are if you remember we're mid midway through a biennial budget last year was the long session we adopted the the 25 and 26 budgets but the short session the 45-day session is always where they come back in and they provide

[00:55:03] budget amendments to update especially the second year of the budget so the governor's budget amendments will be released on December 18th and then on January 8th 2025 the second Wednesday of 2025 we are off to the races for a 45 day session well thank you mr. Malloy I hope you could take a sip of water after all of that this was a great tutorial in 101 and even though it's in some ways stayed the same it does change every year there's different people elected we have an election every year in Virginia so there's always somebody

[00:55:38] new in the mix so let me center us on the before we take comments just the legislative work seven of our board so being the legislative liaison I just wanted to offer a help away I found helpful to send another work of the board is what can we 12 members do that no one else in Fairfax County can do we have access to state and federal policymakers that is an asset to cultivate and maintain so as you can see from the summary of upcoming dates the experience of years past plus the undeniable findings of the JLARC report from 2023 that our schools are chronically underfunded has resulted in

[00:56:16] this board preparing earlier than in years past for the January 2025 General Assembly session you can see that despite the session starting months away work is well underway, bills are being generated, and our, you know, "part-time state legislators" are working far more than their hours. I think this board knows something about about that designation of part-time. So I also wanted to share a little bit more about VSBA, the Virginia School Board Association. So there's nine regions set up throughout the state by VSBA, and we're in the northeastern region. That encompasses 13 school divisions that geographically go from Arlington County to Stafford County, and there's opportunities to convene several

[00:56:54] times a year, and indeed I believe half the board is headed to VSBA's legislative conference that is next month in Chesterfield, Virginia, which is near Richmond, and additionally our board annually attends the VSBA convention for all school board members that's in November in Williamsburg. So it's important to attend these events and participate to hear what other school board members are thinking and doing to advance the support of our schools because as we heard, although we are the largest school division legislatively, we are not the largest representation, so this is really critical for passing favorable laws.

[00:57:26] Our Fairfax board has a VSBA delegate that has been assigned to me, and Sandy Anderson is our alternate, and our board is even more involved in VSBA because I am also the elected vice chair of our northeastern region, comprising those 13 schools.

[00:57:42] This has afforded me the opportunity to connect with colleagues across the nine regions. This summer I was in Richmond and Virginia Beach to meet with colleagues and talk about that JLARC work so we can then continue queuing up as we all go down or some of us continue to go down to be very thoughtful and action-oriented and meeting with other school board members listening and working together so with that Ricky do you want me to go ahead and start comments or did you want to add a few things just very quickly just for everybody's consideration as we're going through this and just to kind of set up how we're going to take the rest of our

[00:58:17] our hour together. As we go through this conversation, I'd like for you to please pay attention particularly to the federal issues that were raised by Mr. Malloy. I believe those were numbers 16, 18, 19, 28, hoping by the end of the conversation that we can have those deleted without objection based on his recommendation at this point.

[00:58:42] we are going to take overall comments but because this is such a thick and heavy document then we're going to try to chunk it a little bit so that we can have more of a discussion because it's easy to get lost in the sauce so this first quick three minutes is just overall comments and then we will just find our way through that conversation and our first speaker is mr mckelveen thanks so much and uh thank you michael every presentation from you is a tour de and this was no exception, first I just wanna thank you for the hard work that you and your colleagues have put into the two by two meetings and to the board for getting this process moved earlier

[00:59:22] because I do think that benefits us in terms of getting legislation on the docket for the coming year. So I thought the presentation was great as well. It's the first time that I've seen all this in one place so I think it's very helpful to reorient this new board.

[00:59:39] One comment, I think LCI at 0.65 is the lowest I've seen it, at least during my time. And so that's good news, right? So it's actually slightly higher than it was during the last biennium. It did go up a little bit, but yes, we've historically been closer to the 0.7 range.

[00:59:59] So it has declined over time, but we got a little bump going into this 25-26 budget session. Yeah, and the other just comment on the program overall is that it used to be much longer, right? And we put a lot of effort into bringing it into a more consumable range.

[01:00:20] So it's better than it was. So one question for you is you've stated that we will need to come back to the program after the Board of Supervisors looks at the joint position. that thing usually remains the same from year to year I mean without too much change I mean do you envision us really needing to do that I would I would doubt it so the I included as part of the the packet is last year's joint position it's almost entirely about funding and it's almost entirely about JLARC because we actually that that position was adopted after the JLARC report came

[01:00:59] out there may be some changes you may wish to pursue some changes in terms of kind of the tone of the position or emphasis of the position but yeah from year to year that position doesn't change substantially just because it is so centrally focused on an issue that tends to never go away in terms of state funding.

[01:01:18] Yeah I would just say to my colleagues that I think our goal should be not to have to revisit that I think just for ease for everyone and hopefully the Board of Supervisors doesn't make massive changes to whatever we come forward with. in terms of the priorities document, you've really compiled a great list from the input of all board members.

[01:01:38] And I'm glad to see that really what I envision as our top priorities are listed there. I think it'll come as no surprise to my colleagues or to Dr. Reed or Ms. Burden or Mr. Muick that among those priorities, my top priority is getting free meals, right, for all of our students.

[01:01:56] So I do hope that we can, I know that's listed in there, but I would hope that we could elevate that as I do believe that we have support from legislators. We just would need to get it through the system. And then just finally, a broad point on our board advocacy.

[01:02:17] We have never really mastered the way to get our voices heard in Richmond during session, right? And I think part of that is because it's, you know, life comes at you fast, as you know, being in Richmond, things are changing from day to day.

[01:02:34] I would like us to go back to the days of having at least one briefing from you during session. And then, and I know colleagues are passionate about this as well, just making, finding ways to make our voice better heard.

[01:02:49] And I know, for example, Melanie does a very good job about this, is raising for the board's attention, you know, during session when there's something critical we need to weigh in with colleagues at the state level on. So anyway, I just, in terms of processes, I think we need to better think through that.

[01:03:08] - So real quickly, just on one of the points that you brought up in terms of kind of legislative advocacy and the board's ability to be there, and dovetailing on some of the things that Ms. Marin was talking about. The VSBA does hold a legislative meeting in Richmond during session that gives you kind of a broad overview so similar information to what we would share from our office to you all but a lot of school boards will use that opportunity to piggyback and do office visits so that may be something that you all as board members may want to look at piggybacking on that conference because not only will you get useful information

[01:03:47] and also be able to interact with colleagues on particular issues but you also can come down and make those those visits um just wanted to throw that out as a as an opportunity that's available to you all as board members um that's already coordinated through the virginia school boards association it's a fresh followed by miss seismo heiser thank you and i appreciate all the work that's gone into this thus far um i think it bears noting for uh fairfax residents watching at

[01:04:19] home what exactly project 2025 is instead of the shorthand for it in short it would eliminate the department of education in washington it would remove all title one designations and funding it would decimate support for special education and it would remove supports for women and girls and are transgender and gender non-conforming students so just to put that out

[01:04:56] there and so i'm grateful to know that many of the provisions are addressed in our federal advocacy already as for the state advocacy and on the federal i also support removing those provisions although 18 seems like it could fit in based on the new accreditation work it seems like a slightly adjusted version of it would work in our state advocacy on the state front very much in support of the pedestrian traffic safety

[01:05:31] language that would hopefully provide localities with more control over those issues you know we're school board members constantly in touch with constituents who have issues on that front and then struggle to coordinate with our county and state partners because there's so many different hands that have to be involved.

[01:05:54] Also, I support the changes on the VPI threshold for funding that we're recommending here. For folks that don't remember last year's budget from the governor included massive cuts that would have cost Fairfax County tens of millions of dollars in VPI funding.

[01:06:10] and that is funding for our preschool students and so i think it's appropriate to increase funding as opposed to cutting that especially for anybody who's serious about moving the needle when it comes to student performance over the lifetime of a student and then of course jlark part of me wishes there was an entire section that was just jlark instead of having it kind of sprinkled throughout the document i think our joint priorities does a good job of that as it is i would note though that there was a comment made that there was a salary increase from

[01:06:45] you know last year and that's i guess technically true as long as school divisions could come up with the money to access it right and for us for people that don't know based on what you just saw in the presentation the lci we end up paying about 83 percent uh in that ballpark uh whenever there's money on the table and if we don't come up with that money generally speaking with the exception of one time during covid um then we're not able to access that money so um i appreciate the work and look forward to further conversations thank you and i'll split my comments kind

[01:07:25] into two buckets and first is sort of a advocacy bucket and second is talking specifically about some of these positions and changes and so um when it comes to the advocacy bucket i really appreciate michael all your hard work and the level of detail you put into the describing the positions but i do think it would be really helpful to make it easier for us and especially our public education allies in the community and there are a lot of them right if we kind of had a crosswalk for the board between key players positions the why and pro and con so when you look at key players we've got key players that are in the legislature now on either on certain

[01:08:02] committees or have traditionally held positive or maybe negative positions that we could then crosswalk with positions for example this delegate has been known Marcus Simon as a proponent of workforce development so therefore this position might speak well to that delegate right and as well as to our public education allies I think that would be helpful so when we're having these conversations we can speak specifically to their priorities so you know sort of breaking the legislation down into it also into act proactive and defensive stances right like we want these things, we don't want these things, and here are the reasons why, right? Otherwise, they kind of get

[01:08:40] all muddled in there. And then, again, when we highlight the major priorities, highlight key legislators as well. And then, do we have any, what's, what are we proactively looking to push as a bill? Like, I see positions, but do we have specific bills that we're pushing that coincide with these positions? Or are we just saying, here's our positions, and let us talk to you about them, and you craft the bills? Because I would think maybe something, maybe moving forward in the legislative package is here's all of our positions which are quite lengthy and here's our priority bills for this year that we want to work with certain legislators on to make it easier for them because as you said there's you

[01:09:18] know thousands of bills are doing so I think that would be helpful along with the talking points for each position that we have or at least our priority positions right like we talked about what we're advocating for but it would be great to get some talking points as to why and in a way that's easily understandable for our allies. So someone could pick up this or the package and say, oh, here's something I care about, preschool, free meals. Here's the things I can say that lift up that position. So when I'm doing my lobby day with X, Y, and Z organization, I already have these things built in. So that would be super helpful. I see I have 30 seconds left. So I'll pause here

[01:09:54] and see if you have any comments before going on. So I think it's useful to kind of bifurcate between the legislative program, which really, Mr. McElveen mentioned, the program used to be a lot longer. And one of the reasons the program was a lot longer was it had a lot of the whys. It has a lot of explanatory language. It had a lot of other things in it. That ended up being just unwieldy because by the time you get to the whys of everything that's in here, you end up with a 100-page long document. This document as it exists now, I think, is useful as a tool I think what you're talking about is kind of what does the advocacy program look like

[01:10:34] outside of the legislative program so for instance when we go to when you you have your legislative briefing on october 8th with legislators some of the specific things you're talking about in terms of the whys and everything that can be additional advocacy materials that are provided to legislators or to others at that time.

[01:10:56] So I think it's just useful to kind of separate out the program as a document versus the advocacy program or the advocacy that leads out of the program. And I think what you're describing is kind of that second stage, which really we don't talk as much about here, but becomes critical as we get to the legislative briefing, to your one-on-one meetings or whatever with legislators and as we get to the general assembly session.

[01:11:24] So there's certainly things that we do, it's just not compiled quite the same way as the program itself is compiled. - Yeah, absolutely, and I guess what I'm advocating for is kind of combining them and doing them earlier. I'm not necessarily looking for one big document, right? But I'm envisioning a binder. And the front of the binder would be our priority positions and then the package and then by tabs, here's this topic, here's some why.

[01:11:46] So that way it's not just for the breakfast, right? But we're meeting with, especially over the summer, when they have more time and we're having our coffees or reaching out, we have that to refer to. And I think that would be a great thing to kind of have as part of this that then is also used in presenting at the breakfast, but we have it with us.

[01:12:01] So just, I'll maybe go back for some of the substantive comments, but I just wouldn't find that very helpful. So I just appreciate that, thank you. - Ms. Marin. - All right, so I would like to prioritize finding ways to expedite the changes and investments that we know our students need have needed for decades the things that are really holding Virginia back from progress in all areas so to me it's all about JLARC our schools are chronically underfunded and I believe that focusing the needed funding resources of what will allow Fairfax and other school divisions to actually expedite those

[01:12:38] needed investments so in the appendix of the report it shows the breakdown of all of the funding that school division would get if they were funded at the amount that the JLARC recommendations propose using fiscal year $23 so for instance if FCPS were funded according to those recommendations just to get to average we should have received five hundred and seventy six point eight million dollars for this year alone that's over half a billion dollars we have a budget of four or four billion so what could we do with an increase of an eighth of our budget I think trying to get to that money is where we start to

[01:13:14] see a lot of other changes or a lot of other solutions possible and for me that that's where I am I'm focusing and I encourage us to focus on those JLARC results we've been given this information for the first time ever and we need to keep reminding people especially there are new school board members who are joining every year and continue to hope you know to harp on that that report I also want to be sure people know that there is no surplus in the state of Virginia, there is only unencumbered money for unfunded constitutional mandates and general assembly mandates.

[01:13:49] Just like the quote raised to our staff is only partially funded, the school division actually puts up many times over the amount of the quote raised that the state provides. So while it's a start from the state, it certainly is not nearly enough to cover what we need. As far as bills go, you know, JLARC provides a dozen recommendations and through my conversations It's looking like recommendations four and six are the ones that could be in the realm of possibility with much work.

[01:14:16] And I'm on limited time, so I'm not going to speak to those recommendations. But I think colleagues, as we go and talk to other school board members, seeing what they are thinking about these recommendations and what they think is possible. The last thing I'll say at this time is we need to continue separating out the duties of the school division and the responsibilities of other areas of government and even the private sector.

[01:14:37] So in particular, public health, gun control and gun violence prevention, keeping illicit drugs out of our communities, these are public health and public safety matters, and solutions should be led by those agencies. Safe routes to school. The infrastructure and staffing of this is a public safety matter, period.

[01:14:56] Public schools should not be charged with managing crossing guard services, with monitoring traffic calming projects and installation of upgraded crosswalks and traffic lights. I've heard that, you know, things, there's complications with the Virginia Department of Transportation. We heard about the WRAP-BAP program.

[01:15:14] That is a public safety matter. And the more we can focus on our mission to educate children for the future and let other agencies be funded to implement their work, I think the more successful we can be as a school division for our kids. Thank you, Ms. Marin. I'll go ahead and take my turn.

[01:15:30] First of all, I do want to say thank you to Mr. Malloy because we gave you a ton of feedback during the meeting managers and you were able to incorporate much of that. And it's interesting to hear some of that even come into this room that you were not able to incorporate. But I do want to bring everybody's attention to the addendum that was added that lists all about Northern Virginia legislators and their committees. This is going to be an important document to help connect to what Ms. Sizemore Heiser was just talking about. Like, who do we know that we need to talk about these particular issues, whether or not their committee assignments line up with

[01:16:05] priorities but at least they would have influence in that space um um i did want i had the same question like we are having i think an important conversation there's so many things here that are that are crucial because this lists out every single thing fairfax county wants on every single aspect of the business that we run here we cannot go into detail to all in all of it because it will make it unyieldy but I think there's some space for us to go into greater detail to our priority positions once we've decided what those are and to really make sure we flesh those out. Having said

[01:16:42] that the two things that I talked to you about before which is one we have a community when they are hearing about this they also want to help and I know we have some limitations regarding communications as a school board but I would love for you to speak to what as individual school board members we are able to do in terms of helping our community help to support some of these positions that we have so i mean i think the biggest thing is you you you are elected officials and you regularly or hopefully are regularly interacting with other legislative officials

[01:17:18] um you know whether that be at you know particular events because you know you'll be invited to the same events that other you know members of the general assembly are invited to or members of board of supervisors are invited to you know it's just cultivate those relationships you know that that's that's one of the biggest things I think that you can do is as as as elected officials is just cultivate relationships with the folks that are making those decisions you know whether it be at the state level or the federal level you know obviously a little different scope at the federal level but it's still important to keep them involved in the conversations and we do you know we do we do keep our our our federal legislators

[01:17:56] involved and and up-to-date on what you know what what's going on at the local level and how that that can dovetail in terms of conversation that they have at the federal level but I'd say that's that's one of the biggest things is just to make sure that you know you're you're cultivating that that those those relationships during the general assembly session we do provide a lot of reporting you know in terms of the bills that are out there we'll do a weekly report on various issues, trying to highlight the most important things.

[01:18:29] Those are all publicly available. We post the weekly update on our website. We post all of our bill routing on the website and we break our bill routing down by subject area so you can see kind of where they're having conversations and whether it be on the transportation side or whether it be on employment issues.

[01:18:52] So we break all of those bills. We try and take that universal 3500, identify about 500, and then take those 500 and split them up into probably about a dozen different issue areas, school finance, taxation. But that's all publicly available via our website.

[01:19:10] And a shout out to those who have recently renovated our website, I think it's going to be even more user friendly and the ability of the public to come in and find that information think is going to be greatly enhanced sure i'm going to pick up on that just to kind of um get to a final point because i don't think my question was uh registered in the way that i was hoping to when you send those weekly reports i utilize them i use them with every community that i'm engaging with during that time so that they know this is what's happening this is how it would impact your students i i i synthesize them a little bit better because sometimes they're a little bit thick

[01:19:50] but then the question always comes up from those communities which is what can i do what should i do here you've given me this information what do i tell them to do and these could be parents these are often ptas various groups but i don't think i have the definitive response and you've given me this information what is my next step well the the the broad generic answer is call your legislators right i mean that's always that's always the call to action is contact your legislators um you know that's that's the that's the biggest thing that they can do is you know we provide information

[01:20:28] other organizations provide information is just to be tuned into the issues that are getting a lot of play and a lot of conversation and then contacting folks and you know that as you said the um the the appendix that we provided that appendix is also available by the way that information is available on our website so you can go to our website and figure out that this legislator sits on this committee this legislator sits on this committee so that again is available to the public but I think it's just it's just a matter of engagement it's engagement all throughout the process it's engagement you know with legislators and you know kind of as I described our

[01:21:07] role is making it clear to legislators what the the consequence of their particular policy proposals might be whether it be a positive consequence or a negative consequence but to make make the impact of what they're considering more real I think it dovetails with what with mrs. Heisenberg's talking about in terms of you know kind of talking points and additional information as to the whys for some of this and that's somewhere you know that we can we can help assist you all with uh as we're in session but also outside the session but that's also

[01:21:44] something that i can rely on staff as well to be able to pull some of that data and just have individual data points or or you know particular talking points on some of those pieces so i think that all kind of can can dovetail together um and you know again the the legislative briefing is a public meeting we're going to have a lot of materials that are going to come out of the legislative briefing so they again they'll be available on the website so they're you know even more resources can be made available there thank you and i want to be mindful if we could keep the responses a little bit more succinct so we have more opportunity for conversation and the last thing that i want to raise is it seems as if ms eyes moheiser was just looking at

[01:22:24] my sheet here how do we create bills from these positions is there an avenue to do that there there's always an avenue to do that the caution however is that you as a quasi legislative body right because you have you have your own ability to pursue policies and and such the the balance is always do you want the state to be involved in a conversation or do you want it to remain a local conversation as an example the the the issue with cell phone use is a great

[01:23:00] example right you all and you know staff and and and you all as a board we have a policy pilot proposal in terms of how we propose to handle the issue of cell phone usage in schools the governor has issued and the Virginia Department of Education has issued a different set of guidance and and policy on how to handle cell phone use they're not completely aligned so the risk that you always run with state activity in any particular policy area is that they're going to go

[01:23:37] off in a direction that you don't necessarily support even if it's the most positively intentioned piece of legislation you've you've all seen how a bill becomes a law you've all seen you know Schoolhouse Rock a bill that's introduced is virtually never the bill that's passed so once you throw something into the legislative process you you put it at the whims of the legislative process. So sometimes it goes the way you want it to or sometimes it gets hijacked and turned into the exact opposite of what you intended. Think back

[01:24:14] to the regulations and the code section that dealt with school divisions having to have policies about transgender students. So then you're advocating that we set the parameters of what are non-negotiables for us rather than being specific about the things that we're really wanting. I think that's it. I think that's part of it. I think also part of it is to specifically identify places where there is some sort of an impediment to you doing something you want to do, right? Is there a particular law? Is there a particular regulation that contradicts where you want to be as a board and the policies

[01:24:52] that you want to pursue as a board? And those are the areas to kind of hone in on in terms of your specific bills that you want to introduce is to try and get, you know, an impediment out of the way, for the most part, when you parse out your legislative program, I'm going to say the vast majority, I'm not sure what the percentage of it is, deals with funding issues.

[01:25:17] Funding issues are a little bit different in terms of, because funding issues typically don't arise out of legislation. Funding issues are more of a conversation as part of the budget process. So they end up, a lot of the funding issues end up in the Appropriations Act as opposed to specific laws or specific bills.

[01:25:36] So that's another thing that I didn't really get into is that the process that the state uses for legislation is actually a little bit different when it comes to the budget. The budget is handled on a different timeline and also kind of in a different process than they do regular legislation.

[01:25:54] But I think that's kind of where, if you were to identify places within the legislative program, and I'll give you an example. I just had a conversation with our Instructional Services staff. You have a position in here about, and it's a pre-existing position, about allowing school boards to provide virtual driver's education, so the classroom portion of driver's education.

[01:26:19] We want to be able to provide it virtually. There are impediments in state law that prevent you from doing that. That's an example of a bill that you might want to pursue with one of our legislators to get that impediment out of the way so that you can actually pursue that particular initiative.

[01:26:36] - Thank you, I will yield the rest of my time because I was hoping we could chunk this and go through it a little bit, but being that we only have 27 minutes left, that does not seem to be reasonable. So we'll make the second round of two minutes and it will still have to be kind of open-ended and Mr. Malloy, again, if we could be sustained as possible just to allow for more discussions 'cause I know I do have several more questions.

[01:27:04] We will go to Ms. Sizemoreheiser and then Mr. McElveen. Nope, yours is down. So Ms. Sizemoreheiser and then myself, if nobody else. All right, just thank you. A couple of things just to follow up from what I've heard you say. I really, really think it would be helpful to have fact sheets, explanations, more debrief from previous sessions.

[01:27:23] I hear you, what you're saying about being careful about asking for legislation, right, because things you want to maintain in a local control. But what are people thinking at the state level that we want to either caution them from doing because it should be local control or maybe proactively give them bills so we have better control over what the bills say than being reactive?

[01:27:42] Those are some of the things that I think between April and August, right, like having some of that background would be super helpful as we meet with folks. You know, sometimes we know they're going to do something anyway, so let's try to make it the best thing possible for us, I think would be really, really helpful.

[01:27:58] As far as a couple slides, I would think, I'm looking at slides 7 through 10 about LCI, and you talk about the LCI, but you really don't explain the impact of what those numbers mean. And I think for somebody who's looking at these slides, maybe one of our public education allies, it's there, but it would be helpful to kind of put it in layperson's terms.

[01:28:18] This means that 84%, I think my colleague said it, of our funding is locality, right? This means that for 106 schools, the state funds less than 50% of the cost, whatever it may be, I think it would be really helpful to have the LCI, really a funding fact sheet, LCI, JLARC, what the federal government is underfunded, so we could show all in aggregate what is causing the underfunding of schools, because it isn't just one thing, it's many, many factors.

[01:28:47] that would be helpful. Slide 15 when we talk about what to keep things local, I have a lot of concern about putting AI in a legislative package for the state. I really think AI guidance needs to be kept at the local level so we can be really responsive to we're on the grounds doing the education, right, to the changes in AI, what our students may need, what might be best for their future.

[01:29:06] I'm uncomfortable putting that there. Similar to what you talked about with construction and sales tax along the VPI, I think it'd be helpful on slide 16 to really talk about what that sales tech means for real numbers in terms of our construction where we're behind our construction if i could just finish one more thought i won't have another go back you know we talk about our construction being you know 45-year renovation cycle or whatever it may be i think that's important to put in there that we're behind best practices and these would help us get closer to best practices in terms of our renovation cycle and the last thing with slide 18 i'm surprised that plain language isn't in slide 18 as well um i'll stop there thank you

[01:29:42] so a couple real quick things one is you are very helpfully building out the materials that we're going to provide during the legislative briefing we will we will take your suggestions to heart and we will create some fact sheets i'll send an email if you want yeah and and that's fine i mean we typically do but we'll we'll make sure that we we flesh it out and have that available um on ai when you look at the the your existing position on ai it's basically i think the the position says

[01:30:15] what you say which is don't be overly restrictive in terms of the use of AI at the state level there is there is actually a working group right now that's looking at potential restrictions on AI and during the last legislative session there was a bill that would have would have essentially eliminated the ability to have localities to use AI both local governments and school divisions to the point where it would put things like Google and Microsoft products in jeopardy because they have ai components uh you know it may not be as as as obvious as chat gpt but they

[01:30:51] do have ai components to them um so your your legislative position is definitely aimed at it not being restrictive at the state level so that that's the in in terms of the languages there it's not intended to be state restriction it's intended to be if the state's going to opine on it that they'd be less restrictive thank you miss mayor yeah just to close my reflection points i think

[01:31:17] You know, it gets really overwhelming. There's so many topics that we're passionate about and then things move so fast. So again, I'm really glad that we're doing this work ahead of time. And we didn't get to go through the expected changes, the red lines, but they're there for your consideration. And we do want to stick with that timeline of getting the legislative plan, you know, voted on, adopted. And so we have it in hand for that October meeting with our delegates and senators.

[01:31:41] so again you know for me I'm trying to what can we do the biggest bang is for me as Jay Lark and especially when we're in session how do we trying you know I find that it's usually something really specific has come up and so I'll reach out to an elected and we'll get like a quick communication going and then it's on to the next thing so I really try to upload the work before the session I think that's our best bet so so thanks again for everyone for doing

[01:32:09] this early. Thank you, Ms. Marin. I'll take my turn. I want to kind of talk about some of the issues on the federal legislative positions. I have to say I'm a little bit less optimistic just because of the sheer numbers and we know how slowly that machine moves. But nevertheless, there are some things that I think we could still highlight. So I would like for it, if it's not possibly you, then maybe Ms. Burden, who I know is here. On page 14 of the actual draft positions, the first set of that speak to IDEA can you speak exactly to what is it that we do receive and

[01:32:47] have received over the course of the 25 years in which we're supposed to be receiving IDEA which is supposed to be 40% what is our typical allocation so I actually can speak to that unless you have a burning desire to jump up here so our when IDEA was adopted in 1975 the promise was is that 40% of the cost of IDEA essentially would be covered by the federal government federal government has never come anywhere close to that the closest it's come is almost 20% but not quite to 20% and I think the

[01:33:19] number right now is about 12 to 13 percent for us in FCPS for fiscal year 25 it's about 9.5 percent so we get about 41 million dollars from from our IDEA allocation that's the number that's in the FY25 budget that's only about 9.5 percent as opposed to the 40 percent. If we were to get up to 40 percent there would be an additional 127.9 million dollars so again a substantial amount of additional funding resources coming from the federal government to support our special education.

[01:33:56] Our overall special education operating budget is about 750 million dollars so you see how that kind of plays in the context of what we get and then from the state we actually interestingly enough receive more from the state for special education students than we do from the federal government that had promised to pick up 40 percent of the cost the state allocations about 68 million dollars a year. Thank you that's very helpful that you have that if you could package that up you know on a document it's just so we have that handy for us to have the discussions because those are the numbers that i'm hoping that when we do have um conversations you know with those five

[01:34:34] people at the federal level that we can just continue to push that similarly if you can provide the same information regarding the impact aid because we also have not fully realized that yes so impact aid our current allocation of impact aid is about four million dollars the way the impact aid formula works at the federal level just in broad strokes is if impact aid is not quote unquote fully funded they will prorate funding to jurisdictions and the proration is based on the overall percentage of impact aid students on total student population as i mentioned

[01:35:13] with that risk add-on and our numbers of students in poverty versus percentage of students in poverty we're we're a low percentage jurisdiction even though we have a significant number of students that are impact or that are affected by impact aid so we get 4 million if impact aid were fully funded based on the federal funding formula it's about another 20 million dollars that we would receive from impact aid so again you know probably 20 of what what we would be allocated based on how the state formulas are the federal fund formula are calculated thank you again if you could just

[01:35:49] wrap that up so we have those numbers ready to go and my last question is regarding position seven of that section um the complexity of how the cep is now calculated so we're not receiving the frm numbers as we have done before the cep before the introduction of the cep this may be a question for um miss burden uh more than anyone where do you see are some gaps that are more hurtful to us with this calculation if there are any do we benefit or are we at the disadvantage if it's calculated

[01:36:24] through cep versus straight frm i'm not sure what you're asking position seven says that we support the title one part a allocations to be based on student enrollment and free and reduced meals because right now we have a lot of our students we're not completing those applications because we're being captured through the cep and that's being calculated through direct services to the state is that a disadvantage to us or an advantage or is it not even a point

[01:37:00] because I think there's some missing things there right there's a multiplier that they use I don't think it harms us I don't think it's not advantageous it's probably the same it might be a little bit more advantageous to it but they use a proxy number for the CEP that is generally at the same or more than the free and reduced would have been in previous years much appreciated miss Anderson I just wanted to dovetail first thank you I know that this takes a huge amount of work um I just wanted to dovetail a little bit particularly since

[01:37:37] we are using a consistent document over years I wanted to offer a perspective this is kind of what I do for a living is taking information that's really hard to read and putting it in a format that people can understand I think that we have experts in Fairfax County related to some of this stuff that would be very advantageous to us creating either infographics or something visually stimulating that would be things that we could include in fact sheets it could be included on the website so that it gives us a place that if somebody is asking a specific question we can point to what's coming actually

[01:38:14] from the division not just what we can explain as individual board members so i definitely think that it's worthwhile. I also would love when you recommended removing number 28, I actually think we just need to reword it and make sure that we share our ongoing support of consistent funding for that within the federal side. So I don't think that we should just be using it for advocating for what we're looking for. I think it's also advocating for what we want to stay in place.

[01:38:46] and so i do think that there's moments we're in in throughout that we can have that kind of language i think that the the general format is of information is awesome i just think it's so dense that it's hard to read and so i would love for us to see and and coming from my other world i understand that there is a certain format that is expected in in certain legislative communities I do know that the that that is shifting as design becomes more acceptable and affordable, and so I definitely would like us to to pursue creating this as a more visually attractive document that's easier to digest.

[01:39:23] So I think that there's a combination of form and content here that is extremely important to make sure that people are actually reading it, particularly if we are creating a consistent document year after year. As we as we create the fact sheets, we will definitely take that into consideration as we build those out one of the one of the tasks that is going to remain is for us to then elevate all of this information into what are our top priorities if you look at last year's agenda

[01:40:02] last year's program there were five state priority issues and there were eight federal priority issues so miss marron and i will be getting together with you all to review what we had last here and to pull what we've heard from this conversation she will handle the priority issues for the state and i will handle for the federal and my timeline is in the next week to have those conversations with you just so we can have something tangible to bring to the whole group and still meet the timeline that ms baron will be going over we will however after the board of

[01:40:39] supervisors um begin their work in mid-september and completed a few weeks later we'll have to come back and have a short conversation and not sure what forum that will take to determine what our joint positions are and i know that mr malloy will be very helpful in helping to synthesize the things he's heard from us as essential and the things that are being heard from the board of supervisors so we can get to that joint position so looking at the timeline we've got this week in

[01:41:15] the long Labor Day weekend ahead of us then we've got the following week and then that week of September 9th that Thursday September 12th is when we were posting this as a new business so that we could keep with our timeline to approve it publicly on September 26th and then meet with our delegation on October 8th so that means that perhaps as you're observing the Labor Day holiday If you could look at these proposed changes and think about the strategies, if you could come back next week and share those with our staff, with Mr. Malloy and perhaps myself.

[01:41:49] We've done this in other with other projects where we have the members share their input with staff. Staff puts it together. Mr. Malloy, we can engage and then turn around a revised product so that we can get that posted. chair do you have any thoughts on this process it's a pretty tight timeline but it's also we also know a lot of what's already been raised for your review in addition to whatever else you want to raise i think what would be helpful is to identify deadlines that we can put into the

[01:42:25] calendar so that board members are aware maybe with like a 48-hour window for reminding people that their feedback needs to be into michael and y'all by x date and that they'll get a draft for consideration on this date and we'll vote on it etc we do have next steps that we've sent out and so the next step document because of the holiday on friday and monday the deadline to enter next steps for board members is tuesday and then the deadline for board members to show support

[01:43:00] is next friday well i will be reaching out the week of 9 8 to 9 13 to talk about the federal priority position so please um alert your staff assistants that we will need a little bit of time to have that quick discussion because it's a much shorter component of the program all right are there any other burning questions mr malloy is there anything else that you need for us to know before we adjourn here the i think the only thing from our perspective because obviously we'll turn

[01:43:35] this around is on those few issues that we highlighted on the federal side um and it sounded like yeah there was there was a bit of a difference in opinion as to whether or not they we want to want to consider deleting them or revamp revising them we're happy to do whatever but just in terms of some guidance that would be helpful so let's just go ahead and do that i i heard um some discussions over reworking number 28 so we'll let that stand i also heard some discussion at least one um of maybe reworking 16 so we let that stand and so without objection we will delete 18 and 19

[01:44:12] since those are obsolete positions on the federal we just need to give him some guidance or we could put it there that's fine so somebody will i'll add those there for removal and the reworking whoever wants to rework it can just give some language there is there anything else um we will just continue to hone in and to push the idea that we need to make sure that we're having conversations productive conversations with our colleagues whether it be the advocacy

[01:44:51] meeting that's coming up next month and vsba let's make sure we have this in hand so we could talk to people so we could coalesce and form coalitions that we can advance some of these positions miss marron i think that will do it um so it looks like we are in recess for until one o'clock when we will convene on a different topic thank you okay we will go ahead

[01:45:23] and convene for our 1 p.m session on time way to go so now we're going to shift the conversation and presentation to a different matter of state uh information and this is the virginia department of education's accreditation and accountability process systems there's been quite a lot of movement just even in the last month of what's happening at the state level. The State Department of Education is led by governor's appointees as well as the State Board of Education is led by governor's appointees. They held some

[01:46:01] listening sessions over the last year and over the summer in July. We were on recess. The Board of Ed voted on some changes to how schools are held accountable for educating students. The Board of Education tomorrow at the state level will be voting on additional aspects of this. As of yesterday, I did not see a full agenda with detailed materials posted by the state. In dovetailing this is communication that's come from the state on how the state is reporting and releasing data on previous performance, and the superintendent did release a letter. She sent it to state leadership,

[01:46:39] including the governor, about the untraditional ways in which that data had been shared just last week so we have a lot of very current information that this board has not yet had the chance to really delve into because we have been on recess like most of the rest of the commonwealth so we will begin with a presentation from staff and then we will have lots of time for discussion and questions thank you all right well thank you very much uh miss mayor for that setup i think that was an excellent setup i would uh just add we're of course excited to have this opportunity to discuss a little bit about the State Board of Education's process in

[01:47:15] revising the standards of accreditation and accountability framework because, as you mentioned, this is very timely. The state has been working on this process for over a year, but like many things in large bureaucracies, I think the process has been quite complicated and pretty opaque and difficult, I think, for community members to understand.

[01:47:33] So one thing that I just wanted to say up front that I think is really important for for our community to know is that FCPS has taken every opportunity afforded to us by the State Board of Education to provide comments, whether they're oral comments, written comments, to try to influence the decisions that the board will ultimately make with regard to the revisions to the standards of accreditation.

[01:47:55] And we've tried really hard to represent this board's policy priorities and positions, but of course, that's outside of our control in terms of ultimately what this new system looks like. So what we'd like to do today is provide the updates that we do know about what's under the proposed plan, and then provide you with some additional information about the timeline and process.

[01:48:17] We won't actually know until probably at the earliest, the end of September, what the final revisions look like. So again, there's a number of steps in procedural votes that will take place before we get a final version of the new standards of accreditation, but we've got a pretty good sense of some of the major components it will be shifting and changing.

[01:48:38] So we've got a team here to help with the presentation and first I wanna thank Michael Malloy for all of his work, his boots on the ground, advocating for our positions and trying to influence the board's decision making process and then Bettris Huffman who's our director of assessment and does a lot of work on accreditation and accountability particularly as it pertains to technical issues and interfacing with the state and looking at what the impact of those policy changes will be for us here.

[01:49:05] And then Marie Lemon, who's the assistant superintendent in the Department of School Improvement and Support, whose team really provides the support to schools that might be struggling with any particular issues related to school performance. So hopefully we'll be able to answer any questions that you have this afternoon.

[01:49:22] And to kick us off, we'll turn it over to Michael to get started. - Sorry about that. So today we're gonna go through what we know about the state accountability framework.

[01:49:41] This slide just gives you an idea of the timeline of the discussions that the state has had. While the timeline goes all the way back to September 2023, the process really didn't start to kick off in earnest until about March of '24. That's when we started to see the very specific information about what the new accountability system might look like.

[01:50:01] It's notable that we're looking at the possibility of wrapping of wrapping this up by September of '24, when they're really kind of their first real conversations and real details about the system happened in March.

[01:50:18] The typical regulatory process in Virginia takes somewhere between 12 to 18 months, if not longer. So you can see that this has moved at an incredibly rapid pace. This is one of the fastest rulemaking processes that I think anybody's ever seen at the state level, terms of from kind of first position to actual final adoption. A couple things to highlight in here. Obviously tomorrow the board is meeting and they're finalizing a few things. The things that they're specifically finalizing are the ESSA plan. So this is the federal accountability

[01:50:54] plan sent to the United States Department of Education for their approval. The reason why it's important for the state accountability framework is because the ESSA plan fleshes out a lot of the details that are included within state regulation with some additional information and some additional details about how the system is supposed to work.

[01:51:15] So the ESSA revisions, even though it's not part of their formal regulatory process, is still an incredibly important piece of their conversation. And then right now there's a final comment period open on the state regulations.

[01:51:32] actually closes on September 25th and then you can see that the September 26th is the date that they've targeted for kind of finalizing everything that again is pending the United States Department of Education's approval of the plan I think in the the agenda item for tomorrow they mentioned that they had already been in conversation with USD and it made a couple of tweaks to the plan based on feedback they'd already received so there's already been some conversation but that this just gives you an idea of where where we are in the process and where we kind of have to to go Michael if you I apologize we just go

[01:52:11] please just go back on that last slide just to make that last point again with the State Board scheduled to vote on adoption of the plan on September 26 but these changes not taking effect until a year later so just want to make sure everybody in the community understands that right and it will will highlight that as well but the accreditation ratings that we that we as a school system will be receiving in the next few weeks is going to be based on the current system it's not going to be started based on the new system the new system and the new rankings and the new the new ratings at schools will receive won't happen until after the end of this upcoming school year they're going to

[01:52:50] use the data from this upcoming school year as the first year of data that they will input into the process they've done some projections or some kind of backtesting on older data but the first time we will see new ratings on this new system won't happen until the fall of 2025 excuse me may I suggest that every time the State Board of Ed is mentioned we say the Virginia Board of Education just so no one confuses that we're talking about this local school board I think that would be helpful thank you so this slide is here just as a refresher

[01:53:27] of what the current accreditation and accountability system looks like. It is it's based on elementary schools and middle schools are accountable for six different indicators and high schools are accountable for nine different indicators. Schools are assigned either level one, level two, or level three, but just based on on their particular achievement. Again this is the system that exists now and this is the system that we will be receiving our accreditation ratings on come in the next few weeks and whenever we're expected to see that there are three levels of accreditation there's fully

[01:54:04] accredited so every every indicator is either at the top one of the top two levels a school can be accredited with conditions if it has one or more indicators that are at the lowest level and then accreditation denied is much more significant multiple indicators at that level three at that level three standard but it's a single system that's primarily based on the items that you see here student achievement absentee a chronic absenteeism college career and

[01:54:34] civic readiness dropout rate and graduation and completion so one of the proposals or one of the reasons that the state board has said they want to revise the accreditation system is they want to bifurcate accreditation which they're referring to more as statutory obligations and focusing on operational compliance and keeping that as a separate thing but then creating a separate system for school accountability that's only based on kind

[01:55:12] of school performance so what you see on this slide is this is what will be the new system of school accreditation interestingly in the name of simplification school divisions will actually be receiving multiple labels because it will receive an accreditation rating which will remain the same as it is now fully accredited conditionally accredited and accreditation denied but it really doesn't dovetail with one exception with student performance it's much more in terms of do you have the right policies in place at the local level you know compliance with the standards of quality making sure you

[01:55:50] have the right number of teachers based on codified rules so really this is much more of a compliance system which will sit side by side with the new accountability system but it's probably going to cause some confusion in the public because there still will be a schools will still be considered fully accredited conditionally accredited or accredited denied which is what everybody's used to but we will also receive a separating which I'm going to hand it over to Bettris to kind of walk you through how that's going to work. Thank you Michael.

[01:56:26] So as Michael said the bifurcation of the system means that in addition to the accreditation rating we'll be measuring a school's performance and identifying what supports they may need need based on that performance. So the concept is to allow this part of the accountability system to be really support focused, to be around transparency for the public about how schools are doing and ensuring that schools are receiving the types of support that they need in the areas that they need.

[01:57:02] A big difference, there's a whole lot on this slide and we'll go through it in step by step as we go along. So we'll have a chance to dig in. But in that kind of central part where you see those performance components, 100 points, a big difference in this system compared to our existing system is you saw what michael showed in the current seven or nine indicators if a school has a single indicator that's a level three red their entire school is accredited with conditions in this system it's a point

[01:57:41] value system so we've got elementary schools middle schools and high schools each being measured through different elements of mastery, different elements of growth, or graduation for high, and then different elements of readiness. So again, we'll look at those in a little more depth, but it's more of a holistic view of the school through those different components, as opposed to a make it or break it for each individual indicator being weighted equally.

[01:58:12] Additionally, those 100 points broken down be used to designate a overall school summative performance category so the school may be distinguished on track off track or in need of intensive support we will still be identifying schools under the sf federal identification system so a school may have no needs they may have needs for student groups or overall school needs and so the naming conventions we'll look at again a little more closely all of that will help identify what supports the state office of school

[01:58:49] quality may be providing to marie and her team over in department of school improvement supports and what grant funds schools may be qualifying for so we have at the elementary level to look at a little more closely 65 or 65 points within the elementary school will be based on mastery 25% on growth, and 10% on readiness. Just as a quick note, the term mastery has been selected by

[01:59:22] the state to use in this context as an effort to really highlight the expectation for all students to meet or exceed those grade level expectations and additionally through growth then be working toward progress here the the readiness indicators for reading for math and for science will be based on the sol and vap all of those will use a weighted index currently a student passes the sol or is proficient on the vap assessment or they're not passing or failing in this new system a student

[02:00:02] will receive points in the index toward mastery based on their level of performance pass advanced will receive maybe a 1.25 i believe it is 1.0 for a past proficient etc so we could in a very very high performing school conceivably have greater than 100 achievement in the mastery area though that'd be an unlikely scenario but conceivable if all students were in the past advanced component English language proficiency is still being measured using WIDA in the current, just like

[02:00:40] the current model is. And then for growth, we're shifting from our current progress table model to use VVAS, which is the Virginia Visualization and Analytics Solution. And it's an expected growth model. It's a rather complex model, very different in an area where we know that we'll want to provide professional learning for our school leaders and staff as well as of course information for you and the community to understand what is expected growth but rather than a simple straightforward amount of growth that every student is expected to meet the each individual

[02:01:19] students expected growth is based on their test history and how that relates to the performance of other students with a similar test history. So it's a complex model that's put together by the consulting group that is behind the Virginia Visualization and Analytics Solution and will be used as part of this model. Readiness, chronic absenteeism, no changes in that system, but now this will only be 5% in the final elementary school rating. However, the first year it will

[02:01:56] actually be 10% because that very last component, the performance task for grade five, is not yet available. That has been to be determined about what that task will be. It needs to be developed, normed, and then rolled out to school divisions to begin implementing. So for at least that first year, chronic absenteeism will be 10%. Moving on to middle school, we have same reading, math, science and english language proficiency progress same vivas for growth though the waiting totals

[02:02:33] are ever so slightly different and then for readiness looking at advanced coursework that's coursework for advanced math student access to advanced math in middle school and another performance task that is to be determined so again in that first year the with lacking that performance task advanced coursework and chronic absenteeism will be bumped up and they're waiting to make up for that difference to reach the total 20 points high school again has some changes

[02:03:06] mastery is more or less the same here for readiness we have the six-year extended graduation rate to include applied studies the federal graduation calculations as i believe the this board has received in previous presentations it does not include the applied studies diploma by in in standard so this is a modification of the six-year federal graduation rate and one difference from the current graduation and completion index is that it would not include

[02:03:42] those other types of completion like a high school equivalency or ged like a certificate of completion or credit for students who are still enrolled and continuing to pursue their diploma even after that six years the ready for life 3e framework is new and is replacing the current college career civic readiness index there's similarities but they're very important differences you'll also note that 25 percent of the total waiting for high school

[02:04:15] it's the biggest single element influencing a high school's outcomes. So we're going to look at it a little more closely on the next slide to go into a bit more depth just for your understanding and where we are now for that understanding from the state. The last piece, again, the federal graduation indicator is a four-year adjusted cohort that does not include applied studies diploma, only the advanced and standard. Looking now at the high school 3E

[02:04:48] framework. The 3E framework is defined with three E's: enrollment, employment, and enlistment shown here. Within this framework, an individual student can receive points in one of those areas or in multiple areas. So, for example, a student who is achieving at the highest level in each of these three could conceivably receive up to 3.25 points for that student other students of course would

[02:05:23] receive maybe points in only one area for the enrollment area is mainly focused on students reaching college level coursework so the focus for enrollment is college level coursework starting at the bottom level of points within that at a 0.5 students who are taking an AP exam as advanced placement exam international baccalaureate exam a Cambridge exam or CLEP exam students taking that

[02:06:02] exam or completing a dual enrollment course with a C or better would receive 0.5 a student who has one to two of those scores that are at the qualifying score to receive college credit so an AP exam with a score of four or above for example and those the specific scores are laid out in some of the board documentation the state board documentation excuse me and up to two dual enrollment courses 4.75 one point moving up to three credit bearing college scores or three dual

[02:06:42] enrollment courses and receiving a B or better, and then a 1.25 for an associate's degree while in high school. The employment section is focused on students who are receiving credentials in high demand and high wage occupations, and these are defined by the Virginia Office of Education economics. CTE completers are a component of all three of these, and a CTE completer is a student

[02:07:18] who has completed, who has passed a sequence of CTE-approved courses. So for example, nursing one, nursing two would be an approved sequence. Students may pass multiple CTE courses that are not in a sequence, but for all of these points within employment, it must be part of a sequence. So the point five is for those completers who have also earned a state-approved industry credential any state-approved industry credential so that could include generalized credentials like the work-based

[02:07:54] readiness exam or workplace readiness exam thank you wrs point five seven point seven five points is for students who are those completers but have an industry credential in a high demand field so that might include an example of a student who received on the high demand list from the Virginia office of education economics perhaps they received a credential in self-serve or serve safe which is for food services high demand occupation necessary for the economic success in Virginia

[02:08:31] but not necessarily a high wage occupation right so that's the difference there and then a one point for a cte completer who has that credential in a high demand and high wage occupation this might be for example a student who earned a credential in an hvac area where we know hvac practitioners are going to be receiving some high wages the enlistment area is focused around students who are earning the qualifying points on the armed surfaces vocational aptitude battery

[02:09:05] or ASVAB and those subtests that make up the armed forces qualification test which is the AFQT abbreviation you see there. So a score of 31 is the minimum entrance for military enroll enlistment a score of 31 earns a 0.5 a score of 50 to 64 is 0.75 and then points of 65 or higher for one point you'll note at this time the JROTC coursework is not part of this and it was part of

[02:09:41] our current system that is something that the state board is considering for possible future inclusion but it's not currently there so that's something just to be aware of finally I believe all of that all those points that a school has earned elementary school middle school high school looking at their mastery their readiness or graduation and growth those have added up to some level of points out of the total of 100 and then you'll see here that if that school

[02:10:18] is at a 90 points or higher they'll receive the distinguished performance category a school of 80 80 to 89 will be on track 65 to 79 is considered off track and then 65 or below 65 is in need of intensive support and you'll notice in the table that each of those levels reflects the degree of support that the school can expect and our offices in Fairfax County can expect from the state's

[02:10:52] office of school quality. Again those that overall performance for the school the school's overall student the overall students and then for student groups will be used to help identify the federal ESSA identification status whether that's based on the student group for targeted or additional targeted support and improvement or for comprehensive support and improvement there are

[02:11:21] two important footnotes on this slide one that a performance category will be lowered by one level when a school is identified for targeted support and improvement or additional targeted support and improvement based on the outcomes of student groups so for example a school might be on track based on their points for their overall school but if a specific student group is scoring in that

[02:11:54] lower five percent across the state so so very low performing that would then lower their rating from on-track to off-track for their overall school. Additionally, when a school division has 40 percent of their schools identified for comprehensive support and improvement or additional targeted support and improvement or has 10 or more schools who are comprehensive support and improvement, then that local school board must enter a member of understanding with the state.

[02:12:33] currently fairfax has no schools identified for comprehensive support and improvement we currently have one school identified for additional targeted support and improvement so we're well below those thresholds that are identified for the memorandum of understanding and anticipate that we would continue to be even under the new system though of course we are eager to see how the how the data is playing out i'm turning it back over to michael okay so

[02:13:08] to wrap up you know the details of what we've just seen remember that those are not what we've just presented is not finalized it's our best information as of right now the state board is meeting tomorrow and they're going to vote on some of these components so some some of the pieces will become locked in and then in September further pieces will be locked in so history has shown that there hasn't been a lot of movement between when something has been presented and when it has been finally enacted as part of this process.

[02:13:42] It's been relatively static. There have been some movement, but not a lot. So we don't expect to see a lot of change, but that's why we attend the meetings to make sure that that's actually the way things run. This slide just details in terms of advocacy that we've performed here in FCPS in terms of the entire process.

[02:14:03] We've attended multiple in-person listening sessions. We've submitted written comments, we've presented oral comments at various stages of the process. Those comments, and I think you've seen copies of each one of them, those comments have predominantly focused on how the system incorporates special education students and English language learners, but not exclusively.

[02:14:29] There are a couple of additional issues that we've highlighted. as you saw in terms of how they're weighting mastery versus growth is that it's -- this system is extremely heavily weighted towards mastery, towards, you know, passing a test.

[02:14:47] And it's -- growth is a component, but it's a relatively limited component, less so than I think the current system accounts for growth. So it's very much based on student performance on high-stakes standardized assessments a couple of other areas that we've we've identified one has to do with it how English language learners are incorporated into the system currently an English language learners achievement scores on content assessments don't count towards a school's content assessment overall score until that students received 11 semesters of

[02:15:26] English language instruction. This new system will drop that all the way down to three semesters. So students will be English language learner students will be included in the accountability system and their scores will be counted towards their schools far faster than is currently the than is current practice.

[02:15:47] That also kind of runs in the face of all of the research and the timelines in terms of the amount of time that it takes a student to acquire language and especially to acquire language levels sufficient to be able to deal with content, so that the assessment isn't simply measuring their language proficiency, that the assessment is actually measuring their content knowledge. That research runs from anywhere from four to seven years, so eight to 14 semesters. So you can see that moving down to three is going to include students far, far faster than right now.

[02:16:26] Another component that we've identified as of concern is how the state is gonna handle parents who refuse to have their students involved in the assessment process. Right now, if a parent says, no, I don't want my student to be assessed on the state assessment, that can count against a school division in terms of participation rates, 'cause the federal standard is you have to have 95% of your students participating.

[02:16:51] but that failure to actually participate in the system doesn't count on the achievement side or the accountability side. As far as we can tell, and again, I think it may still be up in the air, but it seems as though the intent of the state right now is to count students whose parents refuse to have them participate as having failed the exam.

[02:17:17] So actually count on the content and accountability side as well as the participation side. So obviously a significant change in how things are handled. It's a small proportion of our students, but it's still something that's of concern that an issue that has nothing to do with that student's actual content knowledge could be considered as having been a failure because of a choice that a parent rightly chose to exercise.

[02:17:49] And then this is kind of revisiting the table we showed you at the front of the of the presentation as we've mentioned repeatedly the board the state board is going to meet tomorrow they're going to adopt their ESSA plan they're going to also adopt some of the weightings that Petrus walked through in addition to that and this is this is also important for this accountability conversation is they're also going to kick off their process of updating SOL assessment cut scores for the math and reading SOL assessments that will be administered to our students come spring so by

[02:18:27] springtime the cut scores for those assessments will be changed and if you've read anything and you've seen any of the the rhetoric that's come out of the state is there's a concern from the governor's office and and the department board that Virginia's cut scores are too low that Virginia cut scores are somehow artificially low whether it's based on a comparison to NAEP scores or others so the overwhelming likelihood is that that assessment cut scores are going to increase so at the same time as you have an entirely new accountability system you're also going to have assessments which have possibly higher

[02:19:05] higher standard to reach for students to be considered having passed happening at the same time I mean that that's a huge nugget in and of itself right there that we need to be aware of and and Michael mentioned you know really two years ago when the state was making some of the initial claims that Virginia's scores were too low, they tried to do a comparison study to NAEP, really misinterpreting, in our view, about the NAEP scored scale in terms of proficiency. So, you know, we shared that feedback at that time, that we thought that that analysis was flawed, but that continues to really be relied upon.

[02:19:44] So the last couple of waypoints, as I mentioned, there's a comment period that's open for the state regulations closes on September 25th. September 26th seems to be the target date for finalizing all of this at the state level again pending USED approval.

[02:20:01] Fall of fall of 2024 we will still be receiving accreditation results based on the old system. We won't be the accreditation results that we're going to receive in the next few weeks will be based on the current system not on the new the change will be though is that we will start to collect data for the new accountability system in this update this this already already commenced school year so this is where the first data that will feed into their model will come from spring of 2025 is their projected timeline for finishing that

[02:20:39] work on cut scores which will be in time for the administration of the math and reading SOL assessments in the spring and then come fall of 2025 that's when we would see the first results and the first school performance assessments based on the new system so it's we're still about a year out from that and i think that closes us out that was a whole lot of fun um thank you um we'll just get into the comments because i know there's so many

[02:21:12] of them uh miss lady followed by miss anderson okay i actually took my hand down thank you miss Anderson followed by mr. Frisch okay so I have lots to talk about here but um and and none of it's very nice so um I guess my first question is if students can receive points if you look at the slide nine if they can receive points from multiple categories am I understanding correctly that we could provide safe surf or surf safe which I am very familiar with um and also the

[02:21:49] ASFAB series and that would actually account for points for most of our students. I think that's a point of clarification that we're still seeking. In the current model, the completer sequence that goes into that CTE completer does not have to be connected to the credential in order to receive points for CCCRI. In this new model, that's not a detail that has been articulated that I have

[02:22:20] noticed in any of the state boards work sessions and presentations. So I know there are several of that level of detail that they have they have admitted are going to need to be worked out as we go but I think that is an important important question. But just again regardless in order for that for the employment category to count at all the student must have the approved sequence of CTE courses in addition to the credential whether or not the credential is related but for the as vab

[02:23:00] series that is true we could indeed provide that keeping in mind the amount of testing that students are already being required oh i fully and completely understand the other thing that i was wondering is whether or not because actual enlistment to the military isn't included here have we um contacted any of our service like service folks that we work with on a normal basis related to grtc to explain to them what will be happening we have not from my office or michael's

[02:23:32] office uh the state board's work session last month they said that they had been in communication with the military community for feedback on the system and that's something that would be important for us to continue as well especially since they've indicated that they're in they're willing at least to consider expanding that enlistment element for the future um the other question i had is if i'm remembering from the briefing this morning is that there is a legislative component that comes in here because it's very concerning to me that this is going to be put in

[02:24:11] place in the fall when we have a new governor. And so I guess my question is, is there anything that can be done legislatively to pull some of this back so that it's not able to be put in place? So the answer is theoretically yes. As I mentioned, the actions of the State Board are subject to General Assembly oversight. However, in order for that to happen, the General Assembly has to pass legislation and the governor has to sign it. So in order for the legislative oversight to override anything that's being put into place

[02:24:48] here it would require agreement between the General Assembly and the governor you'll also remember from my slides that I have mentioned that eight of the nine members of the State Board have been appointed by the current governor so I'll let you draw conclusions from there and then my question is how many schools are currently under VDOE or how many divisions are currently under MOU with the state and I assume that means the entire division would be under MOU with the state correct yeah the the current the current system and I think the the

[02:25:24] projected system would be it's the entirety of the school division that would be under a memorandum of understanding is that a floor is the 40 percent of floor or a ceiling 40 percent is that you'd have to have at least 40 percent of schools identified for targeted support so you'd have to have 40% of your schools performing so I'm trying to figure out if 40 is that so because we have significantly more schools than most people do is that mean that it's 25 of our schools yeah yeah the ATSI additional micro targeted

[02:26:04] support yeah thank you but it's 10 or more for the for the comprehensive support okay I guess my my biggest question and I'm not expecting an answer here but is what the intention here is of creating a more convoluted system that actually pits parents against the schools even further which is it seems definitely the point however it's I constantly tried to think of think to myself of what why a reasonable person would be doing a certain thing before for just making assumptions.

[02:26:43] And so it's hard to process some of this for sure. I guess my other baseline question, then I'll pass on for now, I may need to go back, is which classes at the middle school level are determined to be advanced?

[02:27:01] - Yeah, so in the model that has been laid out, it would be students who are taking a high school credit bearing course with that end of course test. So in Algebra I, Geometry or Algebra II, taken or well yeah taken during the literally nothing that we've determined to be advanced coursework in middle school except for college even though there are college implications for some of those kids to be taking college level courses that will not be counted by the colleges that they've been taken because we've heard from our colleague that that's also an issue that happens is that kids that are taking advanced coursework at the middle school level some

[02:27:37] colleges are not accepting that coursework as part of their high school transcript so that kind of is a problem if we have state schools that are doing any of that and Ms. Lady definitely can speak to that better than I can so just again nothing that I'm expecting a response from. Thank you Mr.

[02:27:57] Frisch and then Ms. Seizmo Heiser. Thank you um interesting presentation given that we just recently found out that Virginia is the best place in America for business because of our public schools in Virginia. And certainly, I have to operate under the assumption that the VDOE and the governor have every interest in partnering with us to make sure that our students succeed.

[02:28:24] To that end, I'm wondering if they've given any indication in what you've seen thus far from them, whether the governor would be holding a press conference to announce the results of these new standards in 2025 before sharing the information with the school divisions, of course.

[02:28:39] I guess that was a rhetorical question. Because for people who don't know, that's exactly what happened with our SOL data. So when we think about playing politics with our schools, I think that's the kind of behavior that we'd like to avoid.

[02:28:56] Is there any indication that with these new standards, there's any phasing that will be taken into account so that we can guarantee better performance of our schools or increased funding regardless of whether or not a school is in need of additional support because of performance so I think there are a couple ways to come at that one is there's definitely some discussion about support however most of the discussion that's happened about support seems to be on the administrative side of the ledger as opposed to the funding side the state board has has rightfully

[02:29:35] said it has no say over state funding levels that's a general assembly and a governor's issue they can they can make recommendations have they made recommendations to my knowledge they have not they have focused they can't yes in fact they do annually through their standards of quality or biennially they'll update their their their recommended standards of quality to the General Assembly for the General Assembly to consider whether or not to adopt so there's definitely a mechanism for the board to the state board to

[02:30:07] provide that looking at this data about the MOUs it says or divisions with ten or more schools identified for the comprehensive support. What about a school division that has less than 10 schools? So one clarification that I, reflecting, did not share clearly in my original presentation is that classification of comprehensive support and improvement under the revised ESSA

[02:30:41] plan and our old essa plan is only title one schools but they are identified by level so the lowest five percent in the state of elementary title one schools the lowest five percent in the state of middle school title one schools and the lowest five percent in the state of high school title one schools those would comprise again the lowest five percent so a small number across the state those would comprise the comprehensive support and improvement so if your division had 10 of those title one schools in that lowest um five percent within their school level that would

[02:31:20] be what would get you there then the lowest five percent of all schools in that category all type one schools in the state and so you probably have the same problem bearing out there that you have with title one schools to begin with which is that they're probably schools on the bubble that get no extra support um and just one other note to your funding question earlier any of the schools that are the targeted support and improvement and additional targeted do not have to be title one schools their performance their rating is identified based on comparing that student group to the outcomes of the comprehensive support and improvement so again low performing for that student group but those schools are not necessarily title

[02:31:59] one schools they might be but they might not be any of those schools targeted additional targeted and comprehensive are eligible for grant funding federal grant funding through the school improvement grants the sig grant funds which school office of school improvement support or department of school improvement support overseas i just want to go back and add one other detail on your really good question about if there would be additional funding now again we're speculating on what's going to happen here we don't have all the details but historically we have not gotten additional funding when there have been issues of school quality identified at the state level.

[02:32:34] What we get is more unfunded mandate and more work that has to happen at the school. So which means that our resources which are already not average compared to the rest of the country are stretched even thinner. That's right. So it's administrative tasks like creating more improvement plans or participating in more meetings with the state improvement team and so I mean I think those are really good questions that we need to continue to raise to the state board. Let's talk about the MOUs for a second. This has played out in other states, has it not? Isn't this happening in Texas? I think the situation in Texas

[02:33:11] is different because the Constitution of Texas is different than the Constitution of Virginia. If you remember back during the Bob McDonnell administration, there were proposals for the state to actually take over quote-unquote takeover schools and those were ruled unconstitutional because local school boards have a a constitutional authority to supervise their own schools.

[02:33:33] So the state couldn't simply come in and take over. A state MOU, and my colleagues might be able to talk about this a little bit more in detail, but my understanding of a state MOU is it's much more of an administrative process, whereas there are improvement plans that are developed, and they're not developed only locally.

[02:33:50] As part of the MOU, they're developed in conjunction with State Board of Education and Department of education personnel so it's not simply a local plan they the state kind of has to sign off on some of the improvement plans but it's not as it's not an analogous situation to what's happened in Texas where the state's actually stepped in and taken over individual schools and replace personnel that's that's not that's not being envisioned and I also think it would be debatable as to whether or not that would be constitutional in Virginia are the MOUs agreeable by both parties we don't know to that level of

[02:34:30] detail? I ask because the next logical question is what types of things can be included in that MOU if it's not agreeable to both parties? Is it relegated specifically to the issues that lead to accreditation or can they, can somebody who maybe has a set of values that are counter to a community insert their values on that community? I mean, I think that's another excellent question.

[02:34:52] I mean, we don't, we haven't received any of those details so we can only kind of go off of past practice. In the past, I mean, the state would give you basically the template, right? Like what needs to be improved, the areas of improvement, the types of measures that you would need to be able to demonstrate, to demonstrate improvement. So I wouldn't anticipate anything different than something that's state directed as opposed to collaborative agreement. But that assumes that this administration wants to be collaborative. So I, that's my point. Again, I'm making assumptions, but I wouldn't assume it would be a collaborative agreement. I would assume it would be directed one way. I was pretty sure that you all said they were voting on this tomorrow. They're voting on

[02:35:29] elements tomorrow, but the September 26th meeting is when they're scheduled to make their full adoption of everything. What they're voting on tomorrow, and Michael can give better details, but largely is what's going to be contained in the state ESSER plan and some of the performance metrics. So they'll have all of these things that we don't have any answers for straightened out in the next month? No. So they're going to vote on it before they've straightened it out. Could you imagine if we try to do something like that here? I don't know. I'm just beside myself because I look at the experiments that are happening across the country in public education, particularly in

[02:36:04] places that share the governor's ideology, and you are seeing a teacher shortage like, unlike anywhere else in the country, people flocking away from the profession. That's the last thing we need in Fairfax County or anywhere else in Virginia. Thank you. Ms. Seismolheiser, followed by Ms. Lady. Thank you.

[02:36:26] I'll pick up where Mr. Frisch left off in saying that this seems like, when I look at the big picture and I have lots of specific comments too. When I look at the big picture, one of the big things I see missing from these accreditation standards is anything about social studies, right? And when No Child Left Behind was passed with a significant focus on reading and math, which is important, don't get me wrong, it had an outsized impact on schools offering arts, offering music, offering electives that aren't high career. And I'm not looking for you all to take, you know, to answer for video. I'm just sort of making the statements, right? And social

[02:37:04] studies it's no secret that there's been a battle over the accurate teaching of history and all of a sudden video II is not measuring any unless I'm missing missing something here any assessments around social studies right this also reads to me like really redefining what high school is supposed to be if two of our accountability standards are around the the three E's you talk about are around the 1.25 on earning an associate's degree or a certificate in in a high demand field, then we're no longer teaching high school, we're teaching college, right?

[02:37:39] Because since when is high school accreditation based on earning a college degree? 'Cause that's how I read that, right? That's setting a school up for failure. High school is not set up to teach college degrees. Yes, we have access to college courses.

[02:37:55] We have, you know, through our AP and IB programs, we absolutely should through dual enrollment. Those are great pathways for those who are academically gifted or academically interested. Absolutely, we should have that. But when I look at high school, it's a way from multiple pathways to success for kids to find themselves.

[02:38:11] And we're going back to No Child Left Behind, which decades of data has shown to fail. The other thing I see missing from here is any... Can I just add one other point to the point that you're making on the earning of dual enrollment credits? We're also under licensure requirements that teachers have to have a certain licensure requirement to be able to teach that college-level course that would be a dual enrollment course with the college or university.

[02:38:40] And many of our teachers don't have that master's degree in that content area. So again, the licensure requirements given to us by the state don't even allow us the flexibility to teach some of these courses. Basically, if I hear you correctly, what you're saying is we don't have the licensed teachers because the licensure requirements to teach the courses that we're not getting accredited on.

[02:38:59] Yeah, that's correct. That's another complicating factor with this. You know, and then the other thing that I, I mean, I'll say I'm a college professor and I work with industry a lot. The thing I hear often from industry is the need for students to have communication, critical thinking, collaboration, teamwork. That's missing from here also. And in fact, it seems like it's even less space to do that because we're so focused on giving kids a college degree, at least an associate's degree. I shouldn't say a four-year degree, but an associate's degree, which is a college degree, before they walk out the door.

[02:39:31] So, I think we really need to engage, again, I keep going back to this, engage our partners. I don't think our families, our partners have any clue about these big picture impacts, how this is a no child left behind, and there's all of these sets, and I know this is new, so I understand that you are trying your best to kind of get to sort of synthesizing this, but we've got to do a big push here on the impact of FCPS, on the impact mostly on our students.

[02:39:58] Music, arts, social studies, critical thinking, the skills that our companies say and colleges say our kids need are de-emphasized here. So I know my time is almost up. I wanted to make these big picture points because I want to know, like, I want to partner with the state on making sure our students are set up for success.

[02:40:15] And this feels like this is setting schools up for failure instead of setting our students up for success. And I would love to go back. Ms. Lady. Thank you. If they're not going to look at the PowerPoint, can we pull it down?

[02:40:32] It's just one ask from a virtual participant. a couple thoughts um i know that uh one of my colleagues brought up a couple things related to um asvab um you know i did share with dr reed uh you know last spring an idea that i wanted to on the day of the sat test day for seniors that we allow seniors who are interested to take the asvab instead of that so they're not pulled from instructional time i'd like to investigate that further whether or not it leads to you know enlistment or anything else it is an outstanding

[02:41:10] aptitude test and we have no other aptitude test we only have interest tests and so that's just one idea i want to throw out there i know it's a busy day but right now i believe a high percentage of our seniors just don't come to school that day and so it would be one way to offer an alternative and also you know get some points so while i could sit here and critique the state because that's pretty obvious um that this is sort of not where we should be and in 2024 around assessing our schools and our students instead i'm going to try to work the

[02:41:45] problem um can i think the beginning in 2025-26 um which has to start happening now in is is that like prince william like arlington like louden um at least some of them if not all of them World History 1 to 8th graders. They offer Earth Science to 8th graders. And we've only been offering math and world language. And just as a point of clarification to my colleagues' comment about colleges and world language and also mathematics courses, there are colleges, one in particular University of Delaware, that will not count anything that takes place in middle school.

[02:42:24] So when they have a minimum requirement of three years of world language to apply to Delaware, if you start in eighth grade or seventh grade you have to take three years at the high school level um it's not the majority of our schools but it's some of them um i also um want to reiterate uh um what um sloan said regarding licensure teachers have to have 18 hours at the post uh you know graduate level at the graduate level in their discipline a lot of our teachers have masters in special ed they have masters in in leadership they have masters in blended online learning they have masters in things that actually make them better teachers because they're experts already

[02:43:02] in their content um and i know that we're working on creating pathways for teachers who want to get those 18 hours but again the burden is on us to try and create relationships with places like mason and underwrite that which is a cost uh to us um my other question or maybe this is my first question other than comments is um are we are we partnering with other divisions because you know one of the the things that we wanted to see happen with the JLARC study was to see all of our centers and delegates partner around the state so that everyone's fighting for the same thing.

[02:43:38] Are we working with other schools who are going to be negatively impacted by this, especially when it comes to multi-language learners, especially when it comes to the special ed population, so that it's not just Fairfax, you know, sort of saying, "Hey, you know, raising a red flag around how this works with our student population, but around the fact, hey, this is a challenge for most of the schools of Virginia and their student population.

[02:44:02] So I guess that's my main question. - So in part, the answer is yes, other school divisions are engaged. We've had, I think at the working sessions and the work groups that we attended, and also where we've provided public comment, there have been other school divisions that have provided public comment, some of which are similar.

[02:44:26] I can't speak to what other school divisions have done. Some of the public comment opportunities have been more behind the scenes, so I can't speak to what they've done. I know that VAS, VSBA, some of the larger organizations have spoken at most state board meetings, talking about their concerns with the system, and I think they would share most of the concerns that you all are expressing here, so they've been expressed there.

[02:44:51] So yes, there has been some engagement. guess my thing would be for office of communications perhaps to work with others so that when we put a statement out it's not just fairfax counties hey this is how this is you know impacting our kids or but instead this is collectively the feeling around all the north virginia school systems or however many that can sign on and do some sort of public you know statement is what i'm asking about thank you miss lady we'll put you for a go back if you have further statements Ms. St. John Cunning, followed by Ms. Marin.

[02:45:23] - Thank you. I'd like to thank one of my colleagues about all the MOU clarifications, 'cause that was something I was going to ask. In terms of best practice for multilingual learners, what is the standard knowledge of how long it takes to acquire language, a new language?

[02:45:45] - No, that's a great question, thank you. So the research is pretty clear that it takes between five to seven years to become fluent and proficient in a second language. When you look at our testing data, and we typically share this information when we put forward our goal reports related to the strategic plan and other accountability reports, when you look at our multilingual learners in Fairfax, when they have that five to seven years of time, they're outscoring the division overall averages and state averages in all testing categories.

[02:46:16] So, again, I think the research is clear, and it's validated by what we see here in Fairfax with our own students. They just need that additional time to become proficient in the language. The reason I ask that is because, according to this, it's three semesters and they're going to be counted.

[02:46:39] That's 270 days for someone to become proficient enough to take a test in another language. And that student may be proficient in the content that is being offered because of their previous schooling, but they can't demonstrate that.

[02:46:59] If you ask me to take a test right now in Chinese on how to make enchiladas, which I'm very proficient at, but if I have to write it down in Chinese, I'm going to fail. And I'm just beside myself at the fact that this is what our state is doing and not taking into consideration the talents that many of our multilingual learners in our very diverse community bring.

[02:47:26] From the work that I've done in the past 26 years, I have seen many of our multilingual learners go on to become doctors, become teachers, become business owners in our community. But if we are going to measure them by the standard that this state is putting forward right now, they're going to be perceived as failures.

[02:47:49] And the message that we're sending to our students and to our families is that they are failures. And I'm just beside myself at this, not to mention many of our students that also there's the intersectionality of some of our students that are multilingual and are special ed students that need a little bit more time.

[02:48:12] Educating children is an important priority for our communities. And partnering with our state should be something that helps lift our students and helps make the work that our employees and our teachers do every day is supported. And this goes counter to all of that. I really am just beside myself.

[02:48:49] Before I can share my thoughts and questions on specific aspects of this plan, I must begin my comments by addressing the sheer absurdity of Governor Youngkin's accreditation and accountability changes.

[02:49:08] The implications for how students learn is antiquated, and I am disgusted at how the governor is reverting our public education system back by decades towards a high-stakes standardized testing model as a measure of learning. The new system is designed to over-identify schools as failing in their goal to educate students and painting an inaccurate picture of public education in Virginia. This is the conservative agenda purported for decades.

[02:49:32] This was most aggressively enforced during No Child Left Behind, the predecessor of ESSA that we have now in the early 2000s. This is a way to delegitimize public schools so that conservative elected officials can move money for public schools for all to vouchers for parents to choose some other schools that will magically appear as choices in communities. And yes, this is what's happening in Houston from as far as I can tell and what I've been following.

[02:49:57] Houston is actually, if you remember, where former President George W. Bush was from. It's also where NCLB emanated. Houston is ground zero for high-stakes standardized testing. To suggest a memorandum of understanding for a failing school, that is what's happening in Houston.

[02:50:13] Researchers call it the most bizarre snake takeover that they've ever seen, and something like that, the snake taking the reins of a district is something reserved for major academic or financial scandals, of which we have none. Further, the source of this change is so flawed and narrow that it's without real merit, focusing on NAIT, where we have a few hundred students participating, and not even accounting for the chronic underfunding that doesn't even provide the baseline investment for education for people.

[02:50:41] And this process to create these changes has been -- it has been and continues to be opaque. And those of you on the board, you know for me, the process matters. It's been rapid. It's one of the fastest rulemakings that ever happened. It's not been transparent. Votes have been conducted during summer recess when school boards and other education professionals are largely unavailable.

[02:51:01] Unlike our board where we post agendas days in advance, the materials that the State Board of Ed is voting on aren't even available. And appointed, not elected leaders are making this change about matters of local operation of education. The Virginia Board of Education is so focused on this system, yet they have said nothing about the reality of chronic underfunding for the baseline of education.

[02:51:22] This is important and troubling for two reasons. If the state wants a new accountability system, that will take time and money to change. Any system change takes time and money. No funding is discussed about this, and yet the data systems will need to be changed. Assessment design and evaluation has to change. And secondly, students are not receiving a baseline of funding needed by all measures of best practices per the state's own report. So the VBOE is negligent in addressing chronic underfunding, and it has neglected its duty, while it spins up a new system where the purpose is to tear down public education. Ultimately, Governor Youngkin is gambling with the success of our public schools with this new accreditation

[02:51:57] and accountability plan. I'll have additional questions on my next turn. Thank you, Ms. Mayor. I'm going to go ahead and take my turn. I think I've agreed with every single thing that has been said so far. This is just, as you were explaining what's happening, it's like one punch, then another, then another. The knockout punch for me will be that we're going to have more SOLs to be taken next year. We're just in this untenable place, but I do want to raise a couple, a few questions, but I want to raise something else. This is going to happen.

[02:52:31] We are not going to stop this train. What we can do is kind of look ahead a little bit to see what can we do i see a space for us to one elevate this in our priority legislative program to raise this to our priority list i see two for us to continue with the engagement i have i've always signed up for video vdoe direct since i was a principal i continue to receive them i attend all of these webinars i engage whenever there's an opportunity to give feedback i have given feedback on so many things as i've been on this board i i see a space for us to increase that

[02:53:05] kind of activity that kind of engagement maybe um i i don't know how other people organize their lives but perhaps um staff can be a little bit more diligent in ensuring that the board knows that there's an opportunity for feedback on item x y and z this is our position this is what you could say this is what you could send this is an email that you could go i'm not always able to make the public meetings but anything that is in writing or webinar i'm always present for those So I'd like for us to be more activated there.

[02:53:39] I'm going to ask some questions. If you don't know the answers, that is okay. But it's just wonderings that I have. Can you speak a little bit, if possible, regarding the rationale of how the three categories are distributed across the three levels?

[02:53:54] I'm trying to figure out why we have an increased level. Like the mastery is decreasing as we go across as we go higher, and some of the others are decreasing. Any thoughts there? And if you don't know, that's okay, too.

[02:54:15] The intent as articulated in the state board's conversations was to try to find a balance to represent the learning and the opportunities available at each of those levels.

[02:54:30] The most similar are the elementary and the middle school. They're very close in those weightings, 65 for mastery versus 60 for mastery, 25 for growth versus 20 for growth, and 10 for readiness versus 20 for readiness.

[02:54:49] And then, of course, the shift for high school, there's a requirement from the federal government to include graduation as a separate component. so the decision was to substitute graduation in place of growth at the high school level which actually replicates what had happened under the old system so I don't have a good answer for you in terms of the thinking though you know there was some effort to try to find a balance that would reflect the learning and the experiences for each level knowing that there there are very different learning experiences in elementary versus middle versus high but also trying to ensure that each

[02:55:26] had a spectrum of elements that would reflect that learning through those different components. Thank you. And there would be no surprise that I'm asking this question, but are these various weightings applied to how we describe middle school or high school or to particular grade bands? For example, will a sixth grader in a middle school be under the middle school weighting and a sixth grader in elementary school be under that elementary school weighting?

[02:55:59] I would like to go back and double check on that. And my recollection from a couple of months ago in the state board's conversation was that it is based on the actual school designation, not the grade level. So in that case, an elementary school sixth grader would be counted with elementary versus a sixth grader in a middle school. So that's my belief. And I'd rather double check on that to be sure.

[02:56:25] I will wait to get that from you. What is the personal student accountability factor? Because currently we know the accountability belongs to the school and the school system. Is this different here? Okay.

[02:56:44] Thank you. Sorry. Yeah, it would be exactly the same as it is under the old system. It's the school accountability. Thank you. We were kind of side barring a little bit. I've worked in systems where opting out of an assessment was also penalized in the way that this is pending to be. And so we will have to get, I think, a little bit more creative and maybe do things a little bit differently in order to encourage greater participation in these assessments, no matter what we think of them.

[02:57:15] a zero it will literally just tank the already absurd positions that we are in and that's my time i'll put myself on a go back you just go down the list again um well i believe sandy anderson had a comment next okay so from the brief look that i just did i believe that there are five school divisions that are that are currently under mous with the state um i was not able to determine which ones so if we could do some research on your side to figure out what those are and see whether or not we can get a copy of the mou that's in place so that at least we know

[02:57:55] what it looks like and what we're dealing with that would be very helpful um i do wonder whether or not there are any how many other divisions in the state have more than 10 schools that are considered title one i assume that we're one we're probably the school system that has the most title one schools yeah so it would be it would be very interesting to determine because again this seems very targeted directly to us and i'm just interested um along with my colleagues remarks i would like to make sure that we're educating our communities as to what this information means

[02:58:34] particularly as we as we endeavor under you know grading and other changes that are happening i think that we need to make sure that they understand that the school accreditation is um is out of our control in some ways like we're obviously going to continue to do the very best job we can to educate students in the way that we have been and so I just the other thing that I would ask is that I that I went on the state board page and realized that the VVAS is being actually published this fall so they have a piece of it to my other colleagues point they have a piece of the accreditation standard that hasn't even been published yet and so I would ask

[02:59:14] that you help our board stay on top of that when it actually does get published this fall so that we actually understand what what the data is gonna look like so i'd appreciate it thank you uh miss rusher seismohyser thank you um so i just had some specific questions and again like my colleague if you don't know the answer i completely understand seeing as though this is coming up very quickly from the state and obviously they still have many pieces they haven't figured out yet or coming down the pike um so when you said there's a six year extended graduation with applied studies and it does not include applied studies can you explain

[02:59:52] little role what you mean by that sorry for that confusion um the typical federal graduation indicator uses only those diploma types that the federal government recognizes which in virginia based on the way we've defined our diplomas only includes the advanced studies and the standard diploma so for the um the component that is graduation that's i believe 15 just for itself that is a four-year rate it is just the advanced and the standard diplomas and i'll also throw in

[03:00:29] as the federal rate it does not allow for sliders so it's four years from date of entry that's why the six-year rate is being included as kind of the substitution for graduation completion because it gives those additional two years kind of sort of approximating what we would see with sliders. So basically, right now, and this is part of what's in our legislative package that we added this year, is that for under IDEA, legally, students with special education are allowed to stay in

[03:01:05] public education until 22. However, under the federal standards, the federal government dings any school for the students who don't graduate with the standard or advanced upon within four years and that those two federal laws are inconsistent with each other because you're You're punishing schools for giving students the rights that the federal law gives them.

[03:01:27] And so the state has allowed for what's called sliders, which is for students who qualify under IDEA for the extra four years of school. They've not counted it against the schools in the past. So what I'm reading from this is this 15 percent graduation performance component punishes the schools for allowing students their rights under IDEA, essentially.

[03:01:48] I mean, I would add our multilingual learners to that as well, right? And when you think about those two populations, that's over 30% of the students in Fairfax County. So thank you, Dr. Presidio, for adding that. So I just wanted to make that clear for the public out there, right, that what this is doing is punishing schools for giving multilingual learners and special education students the rights that they're required to give them under IDEA, which is federal law, which the federal government also punishes them for.

[03:02:17] But the other thing I wanted to bring up is this six-year extended graduation rate only gives half that time. Because under IDA, they're given four more years. So it's eight years, not six, if my math is right. And I'm pretty good at math. So I just want people to understand, this is punishing schools by letting students access their rights under federal law.

[03:02:41] That's a huge problem. And if I could have another go back, I have many more questions. I just wanted to really put that point out there. Okay, I will take a turn, followed by Dr. Anderson. Just pull up my questions.

[03:02:57] So I do have some questions of the superintendent and staff. I've lost them. I have them. Can someone speak to what it does, what it takes to change responsiveness to changes in a state's accountability system at our level, like speak to what has happened in the past when changes have occurred, what you'd expect to have happen in terms of like timeline funds needed in your best estimates? Well, I really appreciate that question. I think we're probably going to need to get back to you on that, but I mean, just the conversation we've

[03:03:36] been having here, you can see how complicated this entire system is, right? So, you know, how are we going to get all of our teachers, all of our administrators, all of our support staff up to speed on what we're even talking about? That's going to be a significant investment of time, you know, maybe not dollars directly, but I mean, time in terms of lost opportunities to be focused on other things like our strategic plan goals and some of you know the core initiatives that we have around inclusion and other things in the school system so I mean there's huge opportunity costs associated with this but I can't quantify those right off the top of my head.

[03:04:08] Okay and of course our work to implement the Virginia Literacy Act of the governors of which we are investing loads to make it work super well. I'm wondering what the superintendent staff think about chronic absenteeism as it's presented in these new systems because we have done a lot of work in this last year and now it's all but gone in this new system. Can you speak to that?

[03:04:36] I mean it's still counted as a piece of it but we'll still work for chronic absenteeism and I think with the state's flexible learning plan it's really helping us overall ensure even more. that's like a tier three support but I think overall tier one you know just the outreach we've done to our community to understand how important it is to be in school I think we will continue with that well thank you the impression I get is that the governor made chronic absenteeism really important for one year and now it's no longer as important and that to me signals a very flighty

[03:05:12] view of what it takes to educate students in the long term I'm wondering if the superintendent or staff could talk about any way that they see these changes in accountability and accreditation would result in improved achievement and learning how could any of these proposed changes results in improved changes improvement in learning i am not able to envision that any of these changes will improve teaching and learning well that's a big statement right there um is there a crosswalk between the current system and the new system in

[03:05:45] terms of what align what gets removed what's been added we don't have that at this time uh and that is something that certainly would be very useful as we are communicating those changes to all of our school leaders division leaders and you as we move forward so if that's not something that the state provides a draft of then that is something that certainly our our teams can provide and are

[03:06:15] there other states who have the same or similar bifurcation of systems like this proposal we're up here saying we're not sure and um let us get back to you i will give you more time than the state board of it has given us um are there any supports that the state has said it will provide other than signing an mou what are those supports to your knowledge sorry thanks uh i have executive

[03:06:55] director here with me stephanie drawled when a school is identified for tsi we do get some minimal funding for instance last year schools that were identified as TSI are receiving grants around $49,000 each but they they come from the federal government through the state to us okay thank you very much next we have Ms. Dixit who has not spoken yet I believe followed by Ms. St.

[03:07:23] John Cunning thank you thank you for the presentations I'm not feeling very well so i apologize i was not trying to talk a lot uh because of my throat but i wanted to make comment that um being this um this is happening and we we're still learning about this change i'm just wondering uh whether we have to redo this again with the new changes i think this question was raised again uh do we have to spend all this time and effort knowing things might be changing again

[03:07:58] in november or some of it and the other thing i wanted to say is uh that we have to get our community involved uh and again all my fellow board members have said that i will be talking to the community i represent and also with my friends and neighbors anybody i can talk to is how there is a significant um you know uh this is like a planned uh attack on our education system and FCPS so that is something I think we need to start doing from right away and get our voice

[03:08:33] you know moving up higher so that's all I have to say thank you thank you Miss Dixit feel better we have Miss St. John Cunning and then Dr. Anderson so I'd like to ask staff or our superintendent in terms of other states that you would say successfully accredit their school systems like use a measure that is considered a good measure? I know you might not have the

[03:09:10] answer, but I'm just asking. You mean in terms of what a model accountability system might look like in terms of where? I'm not sure that there's an answer to that. I mean, I know that this system as it's been designed has drawn very heavily from Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee. It has a lot commonalities between systems that are in those states why does that not surprise me um so the question that I have for our staff and our superintendent

[03:09:49] is is there a way that Fairfax County public schools can develop an accreditation system themselves to post next to what the state norms are because I don't think that there's a realistic presentation and we just go with what the state is saying if a student that has had 270 days to learn a language is going to be assessed and is going to fail and that's going to ding our schools

[03:10:27] then that's not a realistic expectation and we all know that I would love for our state Education Board to take a test in a different language after 270 days of trying to learn that and I would love to accredit them based on that can we develop something like that is that possible because I think that our public needs to know the truth and needs to know the reality of what is happening in our schools and the reason I say this is because I have worked in our schools for

[03:11:04] 26 years I was not a teacher and I'm telling you the work that teachers are putting into our students and staff is incredible and for them to look at these scores and for our public to look at these scores and say that they are failing is something that I just don't want to see happen. I think that you're spot-on Miss St. John Cunning and I think that part of the challenge right now is for better or worse what we have is what we have for accreditation and

[03:11:39] accountability and when the rules shift so abruptly with no on-ramp no off-ramp no explanation no impact analysis in terms of how this is going to benefit our students, our educators, our families, particularly at a time where we're still coming out of a pandemic and working to accelerate learning. And, you know, without, I just think that adds another layer of expectation, a whole other body of work to explain when really it

[03:12:14] would actually be such a time as this that we should double down on supporting our students, staff and families in accomplishing what we've long said is important to accomplish, which is, you know, a world-class education, not add this other layer of work to explain a whole new system that isn't even completely thought through, explained, or described for us in terms of its positive impact. I don't know if we answered Ms. St. John Conning's question. She was asking for a parallel system. Like, I know we could report on our progress, but these are so convoluted. I'm not

[03:12:52] sure how well i will let you speak to that but if you could answer that part of her question so for federal accountability we can't create our own federal accountability metric i think in fairfax county we know what we value and we certainly that's our goal reports right that's what our community has said is important and that scorecard is a scorecard we're going to be publicly accountable for thank you um i'm just going to pick up on that because as you all know when this first came out my first thought went to the schools where we have the highest numbers of multilingual students that are already trying to come out from under crushing scrutiny not even

[03:13:30] scrutiny it's just inaccurate perceptions they are not going to be able to get out from under this and this is most of the schools that i represent where really great work is happening but because we have these draconian measures no one learns a language in 270 days and to show mastery to it it's just going to continue to let those families believe that these schools are not doing the right thing so it is really incumbent upon us i and i want to agree with what miss lady said earlier we're here we're in this box for right now we're not getting out of it it's how can we do the best that we can

[03:14:06] and one of the things that we can do is one ensure that we are continuously putting the message out regarding what our schools are doing so that our parents do not lose faith because they're going to see these markers for the next foreseeable future so i have a couple of more questions that i want to ask in my last 50 seconds and looking at the chart that says the ready to life the 3e framework the enrollment is there a possibility here or at least this is how i'm understanding it if we have a student that is one of those high achieving students as you described could they actually

[03:14:40] bring up the average of a school yes that is that is possible under what has been described again caveat that the final business rules or you know the details of how the calculations will be made have not been finalized and i you know to mr frisch's point i don't believe will be finalized even in september when they vote on the final package and that i worry about that because that means that in an effort to have what is a a good look that we might and i and i hope we don't fall

[03:15:15] into that trap we might put our attention and in certain students and then not in others so that does cause me a little bit of a concern i know we could sit here and talk about this for the next two hours we have more questions and we have answers and lots and lots of emotion but it is 2 30 and we do have a third part of our work session today so we will take a quick five minute break and then we'll transition into the grading policy we want to thank you all for your time this is not going to

[03:15:44] be our only opportunity for discussion thank you Dr. Presidio and team all right folks we are going to get started if we had anybody around the table one two three four uh we have yes we have people around the room it appears right so we are going to go ahead and get started firstly we want to say

[03:16:20] thank you to all the staff that are here um and very quickly i'll make some comments and um sizer miss um size size more hyzer miss sizer um we'll also make some comments before we get started just really help to set context because this is just an introductory conversation to help inform future work to come but in terms of how we got here um back in july the board approved the motion

[03:16:54] to suspend the work of the secondary grading advisory committee temporarily and and to pause in the adoption of additional recommendations regarding grading and to develop a clear charge for that committee to update its recommendations for secondary grading practices to align with the newly revised policy 2418 and the 2020 in the strategic plan and to also communicate to staff the grading changes distributed to middle secondary and high school principals and teachers in june

[03:17:29] to be implemented for one year only pending the revision of the policy 2418 and any subsequent updates to the recommendations of the board once it assumes its work and to also present the secondary grading advisory committee's updated recommendations to the school board in a public meeting no later than may 1st so this is 2025 and for implementation in the next year so this is kind of the initial step where we really get to build understanding where we really

[03:18:03] get to delve into what has the committee done so far and what will it mean to inform the revisions of the policy that the board will be undertaking in short order i don't want to take too much longer but did you want to add anything else no i just i think you summed it very very well um and if it makes you feel any better we use heismore in my family so we could just use that one so um but really what we're really looking for today is is two things one a chance for the board to really learn a little bit more about grading practices and fcps and research and best practices so thank you to to the team for putting together that background information as well as have a chance

[03:18:41] to it's really focus is learning but then also to give a little bit of initial feedback that will then be taken to the governance committee as we look at our policy so there's no um point of action coming out of today but it's just to get a sense of um traditional grading standards-based grading what's happening in our schools and and help provide guidance for a path forward - Residio, please take it away.

[03:19:06] - All right, well, good afternoon again, everyone, and I wanna just start out by saying thank you to Dr. Anderson and Ms. Sizemore-Heiser for all of their work and the meeting manager meetings to prepare for this. They put in an extraordinary amount of time and effort to make sure that we really had the right information to inform the board's discussion today as you continue to think about possible changes to the grading policy, so thank you for that.

[03:19:30] I also wanna introduce Michael Gillespie, who is our senior manager for secondary curriculum. And he has been doing a phenomenal job supporting the secondary grading committee work. And he's just a little afraid that he might come to be known as the grading guy.

[03:19:48] But he's a lot more than the grading guy, but he's certainly put in a ton of work on this. And then Noel Clemenco, our assistant superintendent for instructional services joining as well, who has supported this effort a lot. So you can see the work session outlined today. We're really just going to provide some background information, context really around our current policy context, research, and then talk a little bit about where we've been as a school system discussing and making policy changes related to grading in the recent past.

[03:20:17] So with that, we'll just go ahead and jump in and get started. And I wanted to just mention, because I think there's some confusion sometimes when community members talk about our grading policy, it really is composed of three different parts. not just one thing the first part of course is our grading policy the specific policy 2418 and the board did make some minor changes to that back in december of 2023 changing the grading scale slightly but that policy of course is supported by a regulation which has very specific language in the regulation about making sure that our schools and our teachers don't deviate from the guidelines

[03:20:56] that we have around grading practices that are specified in the secondary grading and reporting guidelines. And that's a document that is now available on the public website. It's quite lengthy, it's posted on board docs to support today's discussion. And that goes into about 30 pages of detail talking about the specific policies and practices, what's allowable, what's not allowable when it comes to secondary grading.

[03:21:19] So I think it's just important when we talk about policy, there's actually three components that make up our policy context related to secondary grading. So we want to talk a little bit just to ground us in where we've been with grading. And this is a brief timeline and history of changes to grading practices in FCPS that have occurred over the last 15 years.

[03:21:42] Just real briefly, I'll touch on a few of these things. The timeline starts all the way back in 2009 where there were some minor changes made to the grading scale itself, moving from a slightly more compressed grading scale of grading ranges, where you might have an A, for example, they were seven point ranges, where an A might represent anywhere from 93 to 100.

[03:22:04] At that time, FCPS changed the grading scale and put that more in alignment with the traditional 10 point grading scale, where you've got 10 points of difference for an A, 90 to 100%. I think the bigger thing that happened in 2009 was the weighting of courses, so adding grade weights to honors courses, advanced courses including AP and IB and dual enrollment courses as well then that followed in 2015 where we actually had a grading committee similar to what we've been doing in the last two years that looked at our practices across the division with the goal of creating greater

[03:22:38] consistency and at that time the committee put in a few practices as new requirements in the system we required reassessments of major assignments major summative assignments for the first time We capped the amount that homework could count in the gradebook to 10 percent.

[03:22:55] And we capped the maximum amount that any single assignment could count for at 30 percent. So the attempt was to try to get some more consistency over some of those core practices at the time. Around that same time, we adopted the portrait of a graduate. And in 2016, we did a lot of work to come up with a learning model, an instructional framework to really support the practices and the outcomes that we would need to have in place to support the outcomes for students related to portrait of a graduate outcomes.

[03:23:23] And we talked a lot at that time about assessment and really trying to move away from an over-reliance on tests and quizzes and thinking about other ways that students could demonstrate their understanding, performance-based tasks, projects, presentations, for example. And then in 2020, of course, we were in the middle of the pandemic.

[03:23:42] And as some board members I'm sure would not like to recall, but will recall, we did a lot of work on policy adjustments at that time. And our school board rep, our student school board rep at the time, Nathan, really had a lot of advocacy, did a lot of work with students in the school system to look at some temporary policies that would support student learning.

[03:24:01] So for example, that's when we implemented our no zero policy. We had a temporary policy that we put in place where students could earn a no mark instead of a failure in a particular course. And we capped our late work penalty at 10%. So as long as students made good faith attempts to turn in their work, the maximum penalty that they could be deducted was 10 points.

[03:24:23] In 2021 then, as we started to come out of the pandemic slightly, we revised some of those pandemic grading policies, but we did keep the no zero policy and we kept that late work policy, capping the penalty at 10%. And similarly, in 2021, our high school principals really did a lot of work together trying to think about ways that they could really understand some of the practices that were happening in different schools, learn from each other, and really study best practices. And they thought about grading at a pretty deep level. And that informed a lot of the work that we did as a

[03:24:58] committee starting in school year 22-23 and then in school year 23-24. So we're going to detail what those changes were over the last two years here in more detail. So you can see, I think, when you look at that timeline that, you know, we have had regular or at least periodic work that's been done on secondary grading over the last 15 years.

[03:25:18] Oftentimes that work was really establishing kind of the floor or the minimum expectation, as I mentioned, putting in place, for example, the requirement that there would be a reassessment policy regardless of the school and classroom that a student might be learning in. But there was a lot of teacher discretion that was left in our policy framework at that time.

[03:25:38] And I think that's created a lot of variability and a lot of inconsistency that we've heard in many of our school communities about over the last two years that's really informed the work that we've been trying to do to become more coherent and more consistent in our practices across classrooms and schools. So one of the major inconsistencies that we wanted to point out is the idea really about the use of traditional grading systems versus standards based grading systems.

[03:26:06] And you can see from this chart that there's a wide variety of practices happening in our schools. So what we've tried to do here is to be able to illustrate the type of grading system, whether it's standards based or traditional, how frequently that's being used in different contexts.

[03:26:22] So when you look at that first column, the use of these practices school wide, you can and see that we have four of our 28 high schools that are using a standards-based grading system across the school, so in all of their classrooms in the school, but we have six schools that are using a more traditional grading system across the school, but I think what's more interesting probably is just the middle column, to be honest with you, is the large number of schools that have a mixture of either departments, teams, or teachers using either standards-based or traditional in the school at the same time.

[03:26:58] So really, if you look at that, 64% or 2/3 of our schools have a mixture of standards-based grading and traditional-based grading systems in their school. I would say that sometimes this might seem like a little bit, at least to me personally, a little bit of almost a false dichotomy because I think at the end of the day, it's more about the practice than the system because no matter what system you're in, you could still use a particular practice.

[03:27:24] And we'll talk about that a little bit as we go through these slides. I think this is maybe a little bit of an oversimplification. For example, a school that might find themselves in that traditional grading system might still be using a rolling grade book, which would probably more typically be associated with a standards-based grading system.

[03:27:42] So it's not always as clear as it might seem, but that at least gives us a little bit of the lay of the land about where our current practices are right now. So what are some of the differences then between traditional and standards-based grading? You know, when you think about traditional grading systems, grades are generally reported by the assignment type when you look in a grade book.

[03:28:03] So you'll see, you know, how did a student score on a particular test? How many points have they earned on homework? Are there projects that they've earned particular points on? But in a standards-based grading system, the grades are not really aligned by assignment type. They're more aligned by the learning standard, right?

[03:28:19] The standard of learning that we want a student to be able to master. So for example, if you think about maybe like an English class In a writing unit and you look in a teacher's grade book, you might see something representing, for example, the ability of the student to write a persuasive essay and to be able to provide evidence to support their claims.

[03:28:37] That might be something that a student is graded on. Similarly, you might see something about like a student's use of literary devices in a narrative type of writing assignment to be able to really develop characters or events in a particular narrative writing task.

[03:28:52] On the traditional side, I think really time is one of the big kind of factors when we think about traditional grading systems. Grades are more bound by time, meaning we think about the grade book, for example, closing at the end of a quarter. So when things are done at the end of the quarter, you have a grade for that quarter.

[03:29:10] The next quarter, you have a grade at the end of that quarter. At the end of the year, those grades are all averaged together. But in a standards-based system, it's less time-bound, and grades and learning really accumulate over the course of the entire year, not quarter to quarter, and we don't average the grades in that way.

[03:29:26] Similarly, when we think about reassessment in traditional grading systems, because those grade books would tend to close at the end of a quarter, students' opportunities to reassess and learn something or demonstrate their standard of learning on a task really closes at the end of that quarter.

[03:29:43] But in a more standards-based grading system, you might reassess or be able to demonstrate your learning at any point in time. So those examples that I gave a second ago about writing, You might not be very good at supporting your claims with evidence at the beginning of the year, but by the end of the year, you might have mastered that, and your grade could be raised to be able to reflect that at the end of the year because your gradebook wasn't closed during the first quarter, for example.

[03:30:10] On the traditional side, sometimes when we think about formative assessments, those are typically graded, right? So we might have quizzes that would be graded. But on the standards-based side, you might have a formative test that's not graded in is just really meant to provide students with feedback to make sure that they know where they need to continue to grow to be able to master those standards.

[03:30:31] So maybe instead of a quiz, you might have a pretest in a standards-based system that allows you to kind of have a sense of where your level of mastery is currently, and that's preparing you for better success on a summative assignment. And then finally, in traditional systems, oftentimes there's more of a combination or use of non-academic or non-cognitive factors, so things like participation, effort, maybe attendance or being in class on time and being prepared, those things sometimes are built into the grade, whereas in a standards-based system, we're really looking at a student's academic mastery of the content standards.

[03:31:08] What can a student do and what do they know versus those non-cognitive or non-academic factors? But I want to point out that our current grading policies Really, this is kind of a non-issue because we don't allow, generally we don't allow those non-cognitive factors to be built into a student's grade anyway, so this doesn't really pertain as much to Fairfax.

[03:31:29] But if you think about these different grading systems, that would be maybe another distinguishing point between traditional and standards-based. So what are the strengths and limitations when we think about the different systems? Well, for traditional systems, I think a big strength is it's familiar.

[03:31:44] You know, many of us went to school in more traditional systems. It's something that is familiar to us and we might as parents not understand standards-based grading as well because we didn't experience that as students. I think in traditional systems, you also have a pretty good understanding of your progress at any one point in time.

[03:32:05] You know what your grade is at any one point in time whereas in a standards-based system, you might not have had an opportunity to really demonstrate mastery yet. You're gonna have future opportunities so it's probably a little bit less clear or could be more confusing about your current status in terms of what your grade might be at any one point in time.

[03:32:25] Also, I think strengths in traditional grading systems, you kind of get that sense that it's more time-bound, but it doesn't mean that the system can't be innovative. You can still do things like use a variety of assessment tests in a traditional grading system.

[03:32:44] So even though it's got the word traditional there, it doesn't mean that you still can't be innovative or more student-centered in your use of practices within that system. Now in terms of limitations in traditional grading systems, I think sometimes what happens is your grade basically gets all compressed down into like a single grade, right?

[03:33:02] So if you look in the grade book, you have a sense of what your grade is, but it might say 85% is what my grade is in Algebra I right now. But what it doesn't tell me is what do I not know or what have I not yet demonstrated that would allow me to get an A in that class.

[03:33:18] So I think sometimes masks a little bit or confuses what students have already mastered and what they still need to master. And I think sometimes it really, again, I think there's a potential limitation with the fact that it's really time-bound and it's not as flexible as other grading systems might be.

[03:33:37] So when we think about standards-based grading systems, potential strengths and limitations, of course, exist here as well. On the positive side, for strengths, there's a lot of opportunities for teachers to really align their grades along with their planning, their instruction, and their assessment, and really take a holistic view to student learning in the classroom.

[03:34:01] Sometimes I think you're able, in a standards-based system, to provide more accurate information to students about what they know and what they're able to do and where they still need to improve, and it does separate those achievement factors from non-cognitive factors. a little bit easier. But again, that's not really an issue and doesn't really apply for us in Fairfax under our current policies. But one benefit that I think we really want to point out is the ability to give that actionable feedback to students in a standards-based system. Because when a teacher is able to demonstrate to a student that they're working on a particular learning standard and they've only been able to demonstrate a certain level of mastery, but it's very clear what they

[03:34:39] still need to do to go to that next level, that feedback can often motivate students and engage students to continue to work and not give up on the particular learning task, and they still have the ability to, over the course of a year in a standards-based system, demonstrate that they've learned that the gradebook, for example, might not be closed at the end of a quarter. Now, on the limitation side, though, standards-based grading often can be characterized, I think, by just really the innovation or the newness of the system, and it's unfamiliar oftentimes, I think, I think particularly to families and to students, and it can be confusing.

[03:35:17] So communication, clear communication is incredibly important. But also I think sometimes in standards-based systems, there's this idea that perhaps it's decreasing motivation for students to do some of those formative tasks like homework, because if that's not going to be graded or not going to be graded at such a high rate, then some Some students might say, well, why would I bother to complete that assignment, right?

[03:35:44] So that's another challenge in the standards-based system. So where does that leave us in terms of, you know, if we've got about two-thirds of our schools with teachers doing different things, we know what the traditional system is, but if a school or a teacher or a team was going to start with standards-based grading, you know, how would they do that?

[03:36:02] What would that process look like? And typically, it would really start with going back as a team, hopefully, with your collaborative learning team and looking at those content standards that you're responsible for educating your students around and really designing your curriculum units so doing the planning around those standards designing your instructional delivery and strategies that you want to use around those standards designing assessments that are going to measure student learning related to those standards and being able to communicate to students they're standing and provide actionable feedback aware about where they need to to improve to be able to demonstrate mastery

[03:36:41] on those standards. And of course, there's a lot of different setup that is required in a teacher's gradebook to be able to communicate that type of information. And then of course, there's the need and the ability to make sure that the parents in the community and caregivers and families are very clear and understand how to interpret that information as well.

[03:37:03] So a lot of communication, a lot of collaboration, think would be hallmarks of schools that have done standards-based grading work well. So we also wanted to talk a little bit about what the grading research says and I will say upfront that grading research is probably another one of these areas in education or in social science and just in general that we don't have really as much information as we would like to have. We particularly don't have a lot of quantitative research. We have more qualitative research research in this area when we think about grading research, so we've got a lot of, you

[03:37:40] know, beliefs, experiences that show up in the research base, but we don't have as many quantitative studies comparing the outcomes on one system versus the outcomes on another system. But with that being said, I mean, there's definitely research in the field around grading.

[03:37:57] And first we wanted to just share a little bit on traditional grading practices. And historically, really, with traditional grading practices, we see a lot of variability across teachers, teams, and schools when we think about the use of traditional grading practices.

[03:38:12] And a lot of that, I think, comes down to, and this bears itself out in the research base again, about your beliefs, right? So for example, how much should participation and effort really be included in a student's grade? There's not a clear quantitative, you know, research study that would tell us exactly what that should look like.

[03:38:30] So a lot of that comes down to the teacher's priorities in terms of establishing an effective classroom environment, their experiences working with students and their beliefs about that. Additionally, when we look at traditional grading practices, it's a little bit disappointing, I think, to point out perhaps that there's not a strong correlation between the grades that students earn in their courses and how they perform sometimes on standardized assessments.

[03:38:59] We gotta go back one here, or no? All right, actually, I apologize, I skipped one. There we go. So the other piece around traditional grading practices, again, is that mix of non-cognitive or non-academic factors.

[03:39:20] Again, there's a lot of variability around that, as we said. And research has also found a lot of variability in terms of how those are weighed in the classroom. And then there's been a lot more emphasis, I think, in traditional grading research around how heavily weighted summative assignments are.

[03:39:38] So those end of unit tests, assessments, how much those are weighted. And then following additional research on traditional grading practices, I was mentioning the only moderate correlation to standardized test scores.

[03:39:53] But I did want to point out that one key indicator in the research base is the importance of feedback and how much a difference feedback can make, not just in students' motivation, but their ability to really achieve high levels and demonstrate their mastery at high levels in the classroom.

[03:40:10] So then I want to look just briefly at research on standards-based grading to see what the research base says here. And similarly, there's a lot of overlap with what we see in the research on traditional grading practices. We don't see studies showing strong correlations with standards-based grading practices and standardized test scores.

[03:40:30] Again, I think there's a lot of different reasons for that. I mean, teachers are grading on different things than what standardized assessments are measuring. I think we just had a good discussion about some of the limitations of measuring school quality on standardized achievement results.

[03:40:45] So it's not necessarily surprising that we see that. But there is one recent study from last year that looked at the impact on student learning of standards-based grading systems, demonstrating a pretty significant increase of around 40% increase in student learning within a standards-based grading system.

[03:41:05] But again, that's just one recent study that we have to validate that. Additionally, we do see in standards-based grading systems when we look at teachers' beliefs and feelings about systems that many teachers will report that taking that holistic approach from unpacking standards, really doing your unit planning, your lesson planning, your assessment design can create learning conditions that better meet students' needs.

[03:41:34] And students and families oftentimes, when they first experience standards-based grading, might be a little bit unclear of the expectations, it's unfamiliar, but over time, there's often the feeling and the belief that the information that students and families get about student performance in a standards-based system is a little bit better than it is in a traditional reporting system.

[03:41:59] And then finally, as I was kind of mentioning, that transition, I think, to standards-based grading systems, again, requires a lot of strong communication and collaboration within a school. And if that communication is lacking in any way, it definitely can lead to feelings of confusion and frustration.

[03:42:19] But over time, oftentimes, students and families do feel that they're getting more positive information in standards-based reporting systems. So that's, again, for what it's worth, little bit of background on the research base and we just wanted to kind of finally mention that and I think this is self-evident but any change to grading systems and grading practices really requires a lot of leadership within a school oftentimes from the principals and administrators but from teacher leaders as well and it takes time implementing something new is going to take time and there needs to be adequate opportunities for communication

[03:42:56] and professional development when we're asking people to implement new systems within a school. So with that, we wanted to transition a little bit more to, you know, that's what the research base says, but, you know, what did we find out over the last two years working with a variety of stakeholders as part of the grading committee?

[03:43:14] And we've got administrators, we've got teachers, we've got students, we've got parents and caregivers on that committee supported by central office staff like Michael. And I think we're learning a lot from our local context about the beliefs and practices and what's working and where areas of challenge are within FCPS.

[03:43:32] So one of the things that we did as a committee this year is to really try to tighten up and clarify what our beliefs are. Because a lot of the research again pointed back to variability based on beliefs. So we wanted to make sure that we've got a clear sense of what our values and beliefs are when it comes to secondary grading practices.

[03:43:51] And we've articulated those in what we're calling our secondary grading guiding principles. And I just want to mention these briefly, because I do think they're important when we get into the policy adjustments that we've made here in just a few minutes. So the first thing is that, you know, grading practices in FCPS, we want to make sure that they're encouraging continuous engagement in learning and deeper understanding of course content.

[03:44:16] So we don't want to be incentivizing things that would cause a student to lose motivation or lose engagement. And we'll talk about examples of what that might look like. We also want to continue to make sure that grades are based on student achievement, what students know and are able to do, their content knowledge and the skill proficiency that they're developing in the course.

[03:44:35] Also grades need to be very responsive to individual learning needs and we've got to use the information that we're getting about student performance over the course of the year to really drive the additional supports that students would receive to be able to achieve at the highest possible levels.

[03:44:51] It's also very important to us that we've got a variety of assessment methods and we're We're doing a lot of work around UDL in our system right now. That work is really kicking off in earnest this year. And at its core, it's about removing barriers for students and creating flexible opportunities for students.

[03:45:09] And when we think about assessment, having more than one way for students to demonstrate their learning is really important. We can't just have students demonstrating learning through tests. So we've gotta be thinking about other ways for students to demonstrate learning, whether it's through projects, presentations, reflections, All of that's critically important.

[03:45:27] And of course, whatever practices we're using, whether we're in a standards-based system or a traditional system, it's paramount that the grades are clear and a student's status in a course is clear to the student and to the family. So that is one of the most important guiding principles that we have, as well as providing opportunities for ongoing feedback and opportunities for improvement in learning.

[03:45:53] And then to close out, We've got to be more consistent in our practices across within schools and across all of our middle schools and high schools in Fairfax County. So with those guiding principles in mind, we've been working for two years as a committee, starting in the 22-23 school year, really trying to get more consistent in our practices.

[03:46:16] And in 22-23, two of the major issues that we really looked at was, were around the grading scale in particular. So you might recall prior to that time, we had two different grading scales that we allowed, the 100-point, more traditional grading scale, and the 4-point grading scale.

[03:46:34] And that was a key area that we looked at. Another issue that was popping up in conversations in our communities was around the use of the no-zero policy that we had in place. So the grading committee did a lot of work that year, but, you know, it takes time to get up to speed.

[03:46:49] So, you know, we were doing a lot of research. We were engaging in conversations with stakeholder groups. So we really took action coming out of last year in those two areas, or excuse me, coming out of the 22-23 school year in those two areas. And the first was around the implementation of a single grading scale.

[03:47:05] So we did make the decision to require all of our schools to use and all of our teachers to use a single 100-point grading scale. And we communicated that that needed to be in place no later than the 24-25 school year. And then we did make the decision to reintroduce the zero when students were making, if students were not making reasonable attempts to complete assignments on time, teachers were allowed to give students a zero.

[03:47:33] And that was based on feedback that we were receiving from a number of stakeholders, our teachers and some of our families. So we started to gain some momentum after that. And I think we did a lot more work in school year 23-24 last year. And we were continuing to receive a lot of feedback from our communities about areas that were of concern or confusion. And Dr. Reed, we worked together to provide this grading committee with a charge that really looked at six particular areas where we were hearing the most points of confusion

[03:48:08] and concern in our school communities. And we want to walk through each of these in detail and talk about the policy adjustments that we made based on the recommendations of the secondary grading committee. So to jump in with that, I guess I should just point out again that a lot of work that the grading committee did last year was really focused around a deep dive, having focus groups and engaging in conversations with the multiple stakeholder groups that we have.

[03:48:36] And Michael and his team led 70 different focus groups across our schools, which is a tremendous amount of work, but it did really allow us to get a lot of deep, actionable feedback and hear from the different perspectives of our different stakeholders. So with that in mind, kind of thinking about some of those broad trends, there really was the desire for greater consistency.

[03:48:59] So for example, a majority of our staff, our students and our community members, wanted greater consistency in a number of different areas, particularly our grade weighting and our reassessment practices, and we'll talk in detail about those in just a second. So there was a desire for greater consistency, but there wasn't always agreement around consistency for which practice we would use, right?

[03:49:24] So for example, grade book type was one of the areas that we looked at. There wasn't a lot of necessary consistency around which grade book type, if we were gonna go to one grade book type, would people prefer? So that's always a challenge. And then I think the combination of schools using different practices is really important to think about when we look at the feedback that we receive from our stakeholders.

[03:49:45] So for example, schools that were using a rolling gradebook might have different opinions and thoughts about reassessment than schools that were using a traditional gradebook might have. So that combination of practices is important to keep in mind as well. So the first area that we looked at was around reassessment.

[03:50:05] And the policy update that we put in place for this year was to require reassessment up to 100% on summative assignments. So those big end of basically quarter assignments, oftentimes tests, they might be papers, they might be projects, is a general rule.

[03:50:24] We would say that many teachers might have two of those types of tasks in the course of a quarter. Now, when we looked at kind of how did we arrive at the 100, the first place we have to start with is the variability that we had previous to that.

[03:50:41] So prior to putting this policy requirement of 100% reassessment in place, we had the ability for teachers to make decisions to reassess somewhere between an 80 and 100%. So some teachers in some schools might only allow students to reassess up to an 80%, whereas somebody else in a different context might allow students to reassess up to 100%.

[03:51:07] Could be the same class, but in different schools you might end up having different policies, and that was a huge variation that we really wanted to make sure that we addressed. When we looked at our focus group, again from the different stakeholder participants in terms of the support, the majority of all of our focus groups really supported up to 100%.

[03:51:30] But we do recognize that reassessing up to 100% also does create additional workload for teachers. So we've put in opportunities in place where there's some flexibility for how a teacher might do that reassessment. They wouldn't have to necessarily reassess a student on everything all over again.

[03:51:49] If they demonstrated learning, let's say on 90% of the assessment, and there was 10% that they hadn't demonstrated mastery on, they could just reassess on that 10%. They also could choose to add those types of reassessment opportunities into future assessments. So there's different flexible ways to get at this, but I don't want to not recognize that there are workload issues and workload concerns with the reassessment policy.

[03:52:16] The second area that we looked at was category weighting. So here, we're really looking at the different types of categories, summative versus formative types of categories. So on the summative side, again, we're looking at those products, tests, papers, projects that would be completed on the formative.

[03:52:34] We're looking at those things that are more process-oriented, like completing homework, completing quizzes, for example, perhaps in a class. And we had a lot of variability in this area. We had some schools that were balancing the formative and summative in a way that they were weighting those summative categories at like 90% of a student's grade, and the formative at 10%, because remember, we have the requirement for homework to count in a student's grade up to 10%.

[03:53:06] So that 90-10 balance versus a school that maybe was balancing that out at 60-40 summative versus formative. So there was a wide variability in category weighting. So looking at really the feedback from our community stakeholders, again on that right hand set of bullets on the slide, you can see we didn't have real good consensus, right?

[03:53:29] Depending on your perspective, finding that balance between summative and formative really varied. So when we looked at staff preferences, for example, there was more of a preference to weight more highly on the summative category, around 80% summative.

[03:53:45] When we asked our students and our community members, they wanted to weight more heavily on the formative, right? Counting formative like up to 40%. So there was no perfect answer on this. We worked through the processes really with the committee to try to develop consensus and we landed on 70-30.

[03:54:02] 70% category weight for those summative tasks, 30 for formative tasks. And there is another ancillary component to this, which is we then of course needed to update the maximum amount that any single assignment could count for. So again, if we're thinking in a teacher's grade book, many teachers might be giving around two summative assignments under our former category.

[03:54:25] If you only had 30%, then that was gonna make it a little bit more difficult for you to figure out the math in your grade book. So we did increase the maximum amount that any single assignment could count for, up to 35%. So that was the second category.

[03:54:41] The third area was in the number of assignments, and the policy update that we put in place for this year was to lower the minimum number of required assignments from nine to seven. And the reason for that is that will allow teachers, hopefully, to be able to give more actionable and more detailed feedback to students because they're grading a smaller number of assignments.

[03:55:05] Now they can choose to give more assignments than that if they want to, but we really looking at the research base around the importance and the impact of high-quality feedback, wanted to be able to incentivize the ability for teachers to give high-quality feedback and also thinking about balancing out workload.

[03:55:21] As we look at some of these other policies, like we just looked at with reassessment that maybe are increasing workload, this was another way to try to balance out teacher workload a little bit. So that's the third area. And then the fourth area is around gradebook type.

[03:55:38] So here we're really looking at the difference between a quarterly gradebook, again, that gradebook where at the end of the quarter, the gradebook is closed. You start new at the second quarter, for example, and at the end of the year, you're averaging those quarterly grades together.

[03:55:55] In a rolling gradebook, you're not closing the gradebook at the end of the quarter. You're continuing to have the ability for students and teachers to go back, reassess things from prior quarters. So you might be in the fourth quarter again and you want to reassess students on that writing standard, you could do that.

[03:56:12] There's nothing preventing you from being able to raise a student's grade that they earned in the first quarter based on what they're now able to do and demonstrate in the fourth quarter. So that's kind of the difference between the quarterly and the rolling gradebook. Now when you look at, again, the distribution of use of gradebook types across the school system on the left-hand side, that first bullet there, you can see again that our schools are really split in the types of grade books that they're using. 56% of our schools are using the rolling grade book. 27% of our schools are using the quarterly grade book currently, and then 17%

[03:56:50] of our schools are using both types of grade books within the school. That means maybe, you know, certain teachers or certain departments or certain teams might be using one type of grade book. others are using another type of gradebook. So again, we've got about a two to one usage of rolling gradebooks in terms of our current state right now.

[03:57:10] There has been, I think, a lot of appreciation in the schools that are using the rolling gradebook from students to be able to have those maximum amount of reassessment opportunities, but others sometimes give us opposite feedback that sometimes you might have had a bad quarter and you want to put that behind you and you want to start fresh.

[03:57:30] So there's different perspectives, again, on how we think about these things based on our experiences. All right, the fifth policy update that we put in place for this year was around the use of letter grades for entering scores. So we do have the ability, instead of entering a number in the gradebook, to enter a letter grade into the gradebook.

[03:57:51] And that makes a lot of sense in situations where teachers are doing rubric-based assessments and rubric-based grading, for example. So again, on that writing example that I gave, you might have a rubric that talks about the different levels of mastery that a student would need to be able to demonstrate, how much evidence they would need to be able to demonstrate to earn a particular score, and that could be entered directly into the gradebook as a letter grade instead of points.

[03:58:18] But we had some situations that were kind of puzzling to many of us where some teachers were giving an assignment where they calculated points on the assignment and then put a letter grade into the gradebook. And that was creating situations where I think there was a lot of confusion for students and parents.

[03:58:35] So, for example, and this might be a non-example, but, for example, in a math class, if you earned 86% or 86 points on a 100-point test, instead of entering 86 points in, a B is entered into the gradebook.

[03:58:50] Well, the problem with that is that's either deflating or inflating your grade because you were graded based on points. Now you've entered this B in there. The student who only got 80 points on the assignment is getting the same grade as the student who got 89 points on the assignment.

[03:59:07] They're both getting a B. So we were getting some concerns and confusion from some students and families around that. So the policy update is we are gonna continue to allow letter grades to be used, but only when the assignment has defined levels of proficiency, right?

[03:59:23] So like that example that I gave with the rubric, A score of four, which would be an A, equals this type of evidence. It's not a range of points, it's an overall score. And that makes some sense and there is some information in the research base that actually it's easier oftentimes for teachers to give high quality feedback when you're using that type of rubric-based assignment as opposed to really getting into the discrete amount of points that a student earned.

[03:59:52] So I would point out though, well, I think that's true. Like everything, when we talk about grading, a lot of this is discipline-specific and context-specific. So in math, that might not make as much sense as it might make in language arts or in performing arts, for example. So in those types of content areas, standards-based, rubric-based grading might make more sense than it might make in other content areas.

[04:00:14] All of those things can be worked around, but if we're just thinking at a general level, sometimes I think the discipline and content area matters a lot. And then finally, we looked at the use of the zero because we had implemented that policy at the beginning of school year 23-24, and we wanted to collect additional feedback around how that policy adjustment was working.

[04:00:36] And for this coming school year, we are maintaining the ability for teachers to assign a zero on assignments if a student has not made a reasonable attempt. And I think there was pretty good stakeholder feedback and support across many of the stakeholder groups for retaining that policy, but there was feedback that we needed to do a better job really explaining what a reasonable attempt was because it was feeling a little too perhaps arbitrary or discretionary for teachers in some of our schools so that's one of the things that we've attempted to do in our grading guidelines that are updated for this year and then finally

[04:01:13] we just wanted to share you know what are other school systems doing i think it's always helpful to kind of know what the context is so as part of the research we reached out to other school divisions around the country but for this slide we've really focused on 10 school divisions kind of in the dmv area and around the state of virginia that are other large school systems so contained in the benchmarking of course are districts like loudon prince william arlington montgomery county maryland baltimore county maryland virginia beach so other large school divisions that are that are regional here and it's interesting because there's a lot of variability

[04:01:51] in all of our benchmarking districts as well for example all of those divisions either encourage or require reassessment but again the level of reassessment that they set it at the threshold varies so seven allow for a reassessment up to 100 percent three allow it only up to a particular score which varies across those divisions when we think about category weighting three of those school systems set category weighting at the district level similar to what we've done or you know for this year at 70 30 but seven of those divisions leave it up to the schools

[04:02:30] leave it up to the teachers or the teams when we think about the number of a minimum assignments that are required required each quarter six of the divisions do not set a minimum number of requirements one school division sets it at nine like where we used to have it and then three set it higher than nine, and then none of the schools that we researched here have any explicit policies around requirements for a particular gradebook type, rolling gradebook or traditional gradebook. So with that, I tried to go through it as quickly as I could. I know it's been a long day. We have posted some other resources that hopefully will be helpful

[04:03:10] to our community members, policy, the regulation, and then our guidelines are have been available on the web for quite a long time as well as the full committee report that we shared with the board earlier in the year and the research citations from the research that we did so i'm happy to turn it back over to our meeting managers and open up some discussion great thank you very much and thank you for all your hard work and your team and your partnership as well so we'll go ahead and turn to our colleagues we have about an hour and five minutes and we'll start with miss marron

[04:03:41] great i am so glad that we're talking about this this has been a policy that i've asked the board to review for many years. The approval that happened in December was just pretty cosmetic regarding the grading scale. So this is where the first opportunity that I've ever had as a board to discuss this in depth. So I have a few categories of thoughts. One of them is the policy work. And, you know, this is a policy matter of the board. And a strong policy will depend on our understanding of the practices. So I appreciate understanding the practices that are being shared. But it's our duty to update this policy. And so it's

[04:04:20] It's also a governance matter. I want to understand if my colleagues agree with the guiding principles that are presented on page six of the report, which is what the staff has adopted as guiding principles, but to me as a board, we're supposed to set the values of what our grading system is supposed to achieve.

[04:04:38] So that's one question I have. Then it seems to me that in each of the six focus areas, gradebook type, gradebook weighting, minimum number of assignments, reassessment, use of letter grades, and use of the zero, of those to me seems like policy areas which are currently now I'm not sure they're defined in actual regulation by the superintendent I think they're in this and this was posted and I'd like to understand more what this is I mean I've read it but like is this being used is it in place that's a question for me but again I do think the board should be working on the policy on those six

[04:05:15] focus areas that seem to have risen to the top of ISD's priority list I also think the vernacular matters there were a bunch of references to policy update none of this is policy that has been shared it's great stuff but it's not it's maybe regulation but it's not in regulation it's just in the report so and then we get to the guidelines and directives and that's where we get the whole murky shall may guidelines directives I mean this is how we ended up in this place so I really do think that policy and regulation need to be clear. My priority is to reduce variation among classes within schools and

[04:05:52] between schools that advantage some students and disadvantage others. I also think my priority is that implementation has to be thoughtful, timely, and humane. I've experienced two schools going through grading change practices in my recent tenure and the implementation was totally different. And I think that we could even equate it to how we do boundary work. In our boundary policy we set that changes can't be made too frequently and that we phased in certain students and I would say for grading changes there needs to be consideration

[04:06:26] for our upperclassmen who are working on a resume for college or life after and then we've changed the scoring system. We were just talking about how we didn't want that from the state like we can't do that to our students not to mention the mental stress that it causes them. So I think there needs to be a communications plan for whatever comes of this work and then hopefully that grading system will stay for a while and we won't need to do a whole re-up so I'll leave it at that for now and I welcome any feedback or responses to my questions please yeah let me just say you had a lot of great points so I'm

[04:07:03] just going to respond to one and then let's continue to you know discuss if you've got more specific questions but I just again wanted to point back to this slide because I think you've got a really good point about the level of confusion in the system between policy regulation and guidelines and really the way our current system works and it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be improved and can't be improved right but the way our current system works is we have the policy which is really high level then we have the regulation listed here where you see the language that points back to the guidelines saying teachers should not shall not deviate from the practices in the guidelines so the guidelines are required

[04:07:41] but because those are the guidelines but because they're farther removed from the policy and the regulation we definitely understand how that could create more confusion and probably leads to more variation but I just want everybody to know in terms of the expectations it would be that those guidelines are followed in all of our classrooms thank you and I'll put you on for go back if you like miss Anderson so I'm possibly dating myself but I was actually an upperclassman when we changed to a plus minus system which did significantly

[04:08:17] affect everyone's GPA and it was a very pivotal like problematic moment across the county for a lot of us. So I have a couple pointy questions I'm going to ask. I'm just warning you. So the first thing that I have is does standards-based grading work for all classes? I know I warned you.

[04:08:42] No I mean this is it's a great conversation. It's hard for me personally and this is just me to create this bifurcation or dichotomy between standards-based and traditional because, again, it's more about the practice than it is the system because you might take something from standards-based that would more often be found in a standards-based system but still do it in a traditional grading system.

[04:09:07] So reassessment is one example. We require reassessment no matter what type of grading system you're using in FCPS, but it would more often typically be found in a standards-based system. So I think when we ask that question, the part that I always come back to with schools when we're talking about these things is what specific practice are we talking about and drilling down, not just saying standards-based or traditional, but what's the practice we're talking about and does that work well in all content areas, right?

[04:09:36] So for example, let me give you an example what I'm talking about first Okay, so my concern is when you're taking about when you're talking about non-traditional academic classes So you're talking about theater you're talking about band you're talking about any of those things art really I mean if your summative assignment in an art class is to create a piece of pottery There is no way that you're going to be able to necessarily allow reassessment up to a hundred percent It's just not it's not feasible in their realistic nature of our courses, and I don't want to see these these types of important classes for our students be

[04:10:13] Manipulated into a grading practice that just for the sake of a great practice So I fully and completely understand the the intention behind what we're doing And I also think that we need to have that conversation fully in order to actually understand what the real-world implications are because i have a i have a student in a band class right now that's taking a ton of tests that are created solely to meet this requirement because you can't redo a performance you get one shot and so there is no opportunity for a change in that and what it's done is it's

[04:10:47] turning him off of that environment that used to be a happy place and i hate in a moment where we're already in a dearth of kiddos in the fine arts i am particularly concerned about this approach if it's not being done thoughtfully which i think that maybe we are missing that connection with with teachers in those areas that they can understand how this looks for them in a way that's in a real in a real way so that's one thing second i am a little concerned about our complete dismissal of non-cognitive skills as you may know i in my other life we i work heavily with

[04:11:25] a program that solely we have an academic portion of it but it solely focuses on non-cognitive skill development because of those kiddos missing that in other areas so i would hate to see us lose any focus on non-cognitive skill building because anyone that's ever taught in a classroom understands that it's far more i mean mastery is important but it's far more of just showing up and doing the work is part of it. So I don't want us to lose all of that part of high school and what's really important. And then the last question I had for you right now is rolling grade book,

[04:12:01] is that semester or year long? That's year long. Okay. I cannot tell you how strongly I disagree with the rolling grade book year long. And the only reason that is, and I know I'm going to run out of time. The only reason that is, is because those kids give up fourth quarter because there's nothing they can do to change their grade because the teachers stop taking assignments from the first quarter so they never go back and do it so although we have it in the punitive in the penalty aspect of a rolling grade book we actually don't have it in the skill development that's happening

[04:12:35] so in practice a teacher can't go back to first quarter and have them redo assignments it just doesn't work in the in the course of the year let me put you on a go back i'm happy to mr frisch thank you so picking up a little bit where miss anderson left off um i'm curious um it seems rather arbitrary how we ended up with um you know 70 30 60 40 whatever based entirely off of what

[04:13:09] people thought it should be like one survey said it was 60 40 another survey said it was 80 20 so we landed in the middle that just seems like an an odd way of choosing a number well i mean i I don't disagree with you, which is why I tried to be transparent about that on the slide, right?

[04:13:30] I would say, though, a lot of that comes down to, again, if you're really thinking about, it comes down to your beliefs a little bit, back to Ms. Anderson's point, right? Like, if your belief is that the grade should only reflect what a student knows and is able to do, then you would fall on the continuum that a grade should really be like 90 or 100% summative, right?

[04:13:56] But if you believe that there are other factors that should be factored in, whether they're, you know, tests or assignments or projects along the way that are more formative in nature, then you're going to want more of a balance there. So it does become really complicated, and there's not like a clear research study that would say one is better than the other, right?

[04:14:15] A lot of it comes down to what are we trying to do? What do we want the grade to reflect? Do we want the grade to reflect what a student knows and is able to do? That's the most important or the only thing? Or do we want it to reflect other categories as well? There's not research, but it feels like we're running headlong into standards-based grading.

[04:14:38] I mean, the presentation, the charge of the committee, what the committee has done thus far, all indicates that that's what we're moving towards, is a complete shift to standards-based grading for everybody. Is that not what we're doing, what it seems to be happening here? Well, what we specifically said coming out of the committee is that we wanted to pause the expansion of any standards-based grading in FCPS, which we did do in school year 24, 25, and we did that before the board's motion.

[04:15:05] So we recognize that there's variability and there's things that we need to norm around and that we need to figure out, like, again, with your direction as board members, where we want to be as a school system. We already have a lot of people doing a lot of these things in our classrooms, and again, for me, it's about the particular practice as opposed to the category label.

[04:15:25] So how do we get the right policy around category weighting, right? That's a really important question. And the reason we focused on these six areas were because these were the six areas that we were getting feedback from teachers, from students, from caregivers, right, that were issues of concern.

[04:15:41] So that's why we dug into these six areas. I don't know if we got the 70/30 right. That's something that, you know, once the committee restarts this year that we would need to continue to look at and get more feedback. Is that the right mix? Is that the right balance? Or should we be somewhere else with the category weighting?

[04:15:57] - How was the feedback solicited from educators? - So I don't know, maybe Michael, you might wanna talk about that a little bit more. The main thing that we did last year were those 70 different focus groups that had different stakeholders. So do you wanna talk a little bit more about that? - And when you do describe it, could you tell how those people were selected for the focus groups?

[04:16:15] - So broadly, we made the decision to look at a subset of schools because that would allow us to really dig in deeply and sort of understand what was happening at the school and then also get perspectives from different groups of people at the school. In terms of staff, we open up the focus groups to anyone.

[04:16:33] And so the whole staff was able to come if they wanted to. So we really were sort of there and allowed for people to come in during their planning periods and speak to us during that time. So held those groups open pretty much all day for each school and a lot of people to come in and check.

[04:16:50] So there's a little bit of self-selection there, but-- - One of the things that kind of stands out me in that is that in a in a school building you're going to have a significantly higher number of educators around core subject matter right as opposed to the one or two or three people who do something special a choir band orchestra theater you know other music classes so perhaps another way of gathering feedback would be in the specific topic areas that somebody might teach because to miss anderson's point i see and i've heard from plenty of people

[04:17:30] who struggle to make this work for their classes because it's not designed for their classes um to miss marron's point i agree the guiding principles seem like something the board should be considering for its policy work um and um you know as to the non-cognitive skills i think one of the points of the portrait of a graduate was to make sure that those things are seen as important because what do they do right they set these kids up for success post high school

[04:18:04] and you know i think they are critical skills for success in an occupation or in college or trade school whatever after graduation and if we're not going to continue to lean into the project or to the portrait of a graduate skills um certainly if we're going to continue leaning into it it certainly should be part of the assessment um of the students so i would love to just jump in i think a lot of great points were made and having led this work back in two seven 2016 a lot of the things that we're talking about the reassessment the percentages that all came

[04:18:43] about like in 2016 so what this committee's been doing is tweaking and refining those trying to bring people closer together and because even though we tried in 2016 to get a lot of consistency we did but schools still had a lot of room we left a lot of things open for teachers and we're still getting a lot of concerns around that so the some of these things like you said we're headed for standards-based grading you know maybe super fast most of these things have been in place it's just been iterating. I completely agree that we could take a step back and look at the fine arts and performing arts and see what's working and look at it from that lens. The other thing I want

[04:19:22] to say about the grades and the whole separation of the cognitive actually happened in 2016. There was a lot of talk around kids getting credit for extra credit for bringing in tissue boxes, right like lots of things that were going into grades that were not really demonstrating their math grades at a but how much of it was because they brought the tissue box in they brought a pie in on pie day right those kinds of things we were trying to eliminate those kind of factors that really don't show that students know and are able to do mathematics but instead we've replaced that

[04:19:56] with endless retakes so endless retakes for them to demonstrate that they know the math right i I mean, I recognize the separation of different kinds of subjects, but I just want, you know, the idea behind this. And there's nobody around this table who, well, I shouldn't say that.

[04:20:13] Lots of people in this room 100% care about Portra for Graduate. We've never put any system in place to actually report to students, to parents, to anybody about how students are doing on those factors. And if a student is showing collaboration in mathematics, like, that's great.

[04:20:30] It's not, and the student gets a B on the report card. it's not really telling anybody that they're great at collaboration. I would love to see a system where we're actually giving students, parents, and feedback on how students are moving in the ways we want them to in portrait of a graduate skills.

[04:20:46] It's not very transparent when you get a B on your report card, if that's about math, or if it's about portrait of a graduate, if it's about what it's about. So we've tried over the years to say that grade represents what a student knows and is able to do in mathematics.

[04:21:02] So though it's devaluing, it feels devaluing when we talk about it in this way, that wasn't the intent. It wasn't that collaboration isn't happening. It's just that grades are really hard to represent all the things we'd like them to represent. I hope that helps. How open-minded were we when we entered into these conversations with educators when it came to things like rolling gradebook and retakes?

[04:21:25] Because those are two things that we hear about over and over and over from educators. Was there a predetermined that these are continuing and we're just here to talk about at what level? Or was it open-ended conversations?

[04:21:43] How guided were these conversations? Yeah, so we definitely designed the questions to be incredibly open-ended. So in general, we asked sort of a question about consistency. Do you feel like this should be consistent? And in that case, we weren't asking, do you think rolling gradebook should be consistent?

[04:22:02] We were asking, do you think gradebook type should be consistent? then if you if you answered yes to that question or that question which one do you have a preference towards which one you would see so that allowed us to hopefully you know parse it out a little bit and see okay and in some cases it was it did work out that there was definitely a an interest in greater consistency but there might be variation in terms of which practice they would want to see within that so we were able to break down the data a little bit better that way due to the

[04:22:25] open-endedness of that want to go back mr frisch maybe thank you um miss lady miss lady are you there can you hear me now we can hear you now go ahead can you hear me now we can hear you miss lady okay well doing my best here um in terms of um formative assessments there were teachers that were always giving formative assessments but they just weren't graded and so i just want to have

[04:23:03] some clarity there that now they're required to be 30 percent in the grade book um and i and the benefit in many ways is that parents when they peek into a grade book they can see progress whereas before when they weren't counted they weren't seeing progress doesn't mean I agree they should be counted 30% or just making some clarification I also want to make the reiterate the point this my colleagues have made about sort of basically non-cognitive skills you know we have more and more parents who are paying privately for cognitive executive functioning skills being taught to their kids this should be a part of our curriculum because I know when I worked

[04:23:39] tj they taught all of that the first quarter of the ninth grade because these kids never had to study before um so we need to think about how we can do that without grading behavior but we've got to figure out how to do some assessment of that um the other thing is the rolling grade book you know i know early on when we were adopting this at chantilly that there were students who did very well at the beginning and then they could never maintain that grade because it really benefited the kid that needed to go to to improve versus the kid who tried to maintain a level of accomplishment that a traditional grade book was that they that matched them better i'm not advocating for

[04:24:18] traditional grading i'm just making the point um and wondering um whether or not um my colleague miss anderson has a great point about a semester-long rolling grade book um versus a year long rolling grade book um so and then i i do think we need to look at standards-based uh instruction based on discipline uh especially in the arts um you know as a matter of uh you know as an example um so i think those are just my thoughts for now not really any questions um i just know

[04:24:50] this is a um you know this is not an easy uh thing to tackle and i just want the as board members to realize um what should be policy and what should remain operational um and i'm i'm a little leery that that we might be crossing a line with this particular example like i could see us in policy saying all schools will have rolling grade books all schools will be on a hundred point scale um but i can't see us personally and maybe i'll get there determining the reassessment the category

[04:25:25] weighting i think those are operational that's just my initial thoughts thanks thank you miss lady um seeing no other speakers for our first round we're going to go to dr anderson and myself

[04:25:38] and I'll go to go back. So I have you down, Ms. Sandra. All right, thank you. I'm going to try to organize this because I have lots of thoughts regarding grading. It's one of my passions. It's a place where I had the opportunity to lead this work in Loudoun County. Half of the books that you have listed, I have in my house. So I'm going to try to organize it and keep it succinct. What I believe in when it comes to grading, I think grades should reflect what is it that we're trying to teach. That's the whole reason regarding standards. It has to be standards based. Anything other than that, just really muddies the waters. Having said that, I think elementary has it right. You have your

[04:26:13] standards. How are you doing in the academic area that you're supposed to learn? And you have the work habits. There's a whole separate grade for that in elementary. And it means a lot. I have had places where with my own personal children where the effort in the work ethics has been stellar and maybe the other side wasn't. And as a parent, that communicates something to me.

[04:26:35] we have completely released that at the secondary level. I think there's an opportunity for that to be returned. It doesn't have to be muddled. These are two different things. Hate to say it, accountability and accreditation, they're separate things. Yeah, I couldn't resist, even though it hurts. I also think that the decisions that we make, they have to be more research-based. We all have feelings about things. And much of this research, it is qualitative, but it is still research that is based on scholarly work.

[04:27:08] I always, it hurts. I don't just cringe. It really hurts my body when we're making decisions based on just feelings and preferences. Those are always going to be there. It doesn't mean it's the most effective, the most practical thing to do.

[04:27:24] So I just wanted to make sure that I raise that. The other thing when it comes to homework, I think we're definitely getting a little bit closer. homework very often if you're grading it you're grading the efforts of the supports that are available for that child at home a child who has me as a parent is going to get great as the homework and a child who you know has a different circumstance who knows it's not because that child wants less it's not because that parent wants less it's just a circumstance so i really don't believe in grading things that are coming out of the home you could however evaluate it for

[04:27:59] completion so you give honor to the work but not necessarily it's a grade that will either overly inflate or deflate your um your grades um non-negotiable no i have one more uh my last big belief is that learning is not time bound i think we fool ourselves into thinking that it has to be completed tuesday because what happened when you gave us the first report miss dr presidio we give you feedback we said try this think about that and you went and you read it again that's the real life work and standards-based grading allows you to be like more of a coach

[04:28:38] move your arm this way go up go down rather than just oh you've got an a go forward that doesn't mean anything in the actual work oops i need to go back i didn't get to my non-negotiables thank you and i'm not as organized as dr anderson and i also have lots of thoughts on grading um i know dr priscilla you're not surprised because i've probably had 20 different meetings with you and dr reed on grading and in fact when i was chair we did a work session on grading in november 2022 so this has been a conversation for many many years but with this

[04:29:15] board for a while um the first thing i think i want to say is that you know i think i understand your issue or difficulty of bifurcating standards based for traditional base right because they're just different grading practices and i think some of the reasons these six elements came up for this grading committee is because there were elements that often relate to standards-based grading that were put in sort of in i'm going to say ad hoc leave i know there's some thought to it in different ways by different schools and that created some of the concern that got you to this grading committee so and i think you know we've heard the consistency of how different some of these things are implemented but they do often come out of standards-based grading philosophy so it's hard to

[04:29:51] say they aren't standards-based grading that led to this because it is right it's elements of it having said that i do think the important for the board looking at a policy the important philosophical question really is are we just going to focus on mastery i.e knowledge or are we going to look at knowledge and skills that's how i've sort of looked at this over the last two years of many conversations right and you know standards-based grading the way i'm understanding it really breaks down standards and looks at content knowledge right that's what the standards are and that's what i've heard you say do they really know math do you know how to do this math

[04:30:30] that's what we're focused on that's knowledge i my focus has always been sort of philosophically leaning towards we want to graduate students with the knowledge and skills to be successful on whatever path they choose to take and i understand the point of it's hard to assess skills like the executive functioning skills and soft skills but assessing and giving motivation for students to develop those skills are not necessarily the same thing and my concern and And some of these things we're doing is we're de-motivating students from gaining those skills.

[04:31:03] And I think as a college professor, I'll tell you, I have seen the disservice that does to our kids. And while I agree with what Dr. Anderson said, we gave you feedback, that wasn't the final. That was a formative assessment you gave us, not a summative. This is the summative. And so there's space for formative assessment feedback without putting the pressure of a summative assessment in retakes.

[04:31:23] So I think, you know, there's space for feedback without having it to be the high pressure, high stakes of a summative assessment that doesn't necessarily fit with all of our different types of programs. So I think philosophically, what we need to look at as a school board is what is our philosophical goal for our students?

[04:31:40] And if we're looking for knowledge and skills, tissue boxes, sure, right? But to Dr. Anderson's point, completing homework, there's a lot of executive functioning skills in completing homework. Getting it correct is different, completing it. So I think we need to figure that out in governance and then figure out which of those practices support that philosophical direction.

[04:31:58] But right now, I feel like this move to standards-based grading is devaluing and demotivating the development of soft skills. And that is my biggest concern about where we're headed. And I want to sort of take it back and take a pause. I will obviously need to go back. You're welcome to comment, but it's just kind of my philosophical thinking.

[04:32:15] I see no other first round, so I will go to go back, starting with Ms. Marin. I'd like to know what educators think. What do educators think about what needs to change and what's currently in the reporting guidelines?

[04:32:35] Do more educators like one thing more than another? Well, I think, again, it kind of depends on the practice we're talking about. When Michael and the team ran the focus groups, they, you know, collected feedback on particular practices.

[04:32:53] So I don't know. Do you want to go through some of that maybe? Would that be helpful? I don't know. So just focusing specifically on staff. Yeah, the teachers themselves that are using the grading practices.

[04:33:09] Yeah, so in general, I would say that teachers also expressed interest in consistency, maybe not at the same rates as students and community members. If I go kind of issue by issue and the ones that we have kind of qualitative feedback on, or sorry, more quantitative numbers, they, the teachers that we talked to generally preferred preferred rolling gray book to quarterly gray book.

[04:33:39] In terms of reassessment, they agreed that they would, they felt like there needed to be more consistency in reassessment, and about 60% of the teachers that we talked to preferred that to be up to 100% versus about 37% up to a certain score.

[04:33:57] Number of assignments was one that there was a wide variety of opinions, and there were a lot of, we had an option for I'm not sure, and there were a lot of I'm not sure on what the minimum should be. And that might be indicative of kind of teachers' current practices and whether or not the minimums are an issue to them or not currently.

[04:34:12] And then in terms of category weighting, that one had like, they had about 45% of the teachers felt like that should be more consistent. That was the highest number, about 33% said they should, thought it shouldn't be, and then 23% were unsure. And then of the teachers, when they were asked to sort of think about which percentage they preferred, It was 43% to 33% were more and thought it should be mostly summative.

[04:34:37] Okay, thank you for the data. The input that I've received, not from a ton of teachers, but it's been pretty consistent teacher to teacher, is concern about the assessment, the reassessment being 100%, and concern about things like projects that are not easily repeated, ID projects, oral exams, months-long projects.

[04:34:59] The 100% for retake, that's been an issue even before I saw a version of this report, even just among parents and, you know, class to class or students. But from the teacher's perspective that I've heard, that potential workload is exorbitant.

[04:35:14] And I know you mentioned some possibilities, but it just, I've got some really great feedback that I can share with you that I've been holding until today. So, and just taking into account the variety of assessments that teachers use that don't lend themselves to retakes.

[04:35:31] Also, one thought that I've had is, does learning drive grading or does grading drive learning? And I don't know if that distinction matters, but that's something I've been wondering as I've learned and seen things roll out this last year. And if grading is based on beliefs, then the board is tasked on codifying the beliefs as we've been elected to reflect the community's values.

[04:35:54] You know, just like we probably codified that instructional materials shall be diverse Well other boards might not believe that and they might make very narrow exclusive materials available to children So does this board believe that there should be a rolling grade book or not? Are we qualified to make that decision?

[04:36:10] I'd probably want to learn some more I also saw in the report there were a lot of times where it says several places are overly subjective and again That's where I think we step in There is an operational aspect to this, so I would want to see our chief of schools involved in this because then the regional assistant superintendents are going to have to make sure about the implementation.

[04:36:32] And I have other things to, yeah, well, okay, I'll just leave it at that for now. We don't have a lot on go-backs. We may have time for another round if we see how it goes. Yeah, Ms. Anderson? Okay, so I wanted to clarify a few of my statements now that the rest of my colleagues have had a chance to chime in too.

[04:36:55] I taught at the college level for 14 years, English. And so a core part of my philosophy was giving students chances for reassessment. But my rule always was that you got a certain percentage of your grade based on what you turned in.

[04:37:10] So that way kids wouldn't necessarily just turn in something with their name on it in order to get the opportunity to retake it. They would actually give it a real attempt. I am very concerned with the 100% 'cause I know from my experience the kids that actually are going to go for the 100 percent are probably not the kids that need the time to have a ton of reassessment they're they're likely the kids that are just going for the higher grade um and which isn't a bad thing i i respect that a lot but giving them some sort of limit means that it doesn't have teachers that are regrading papers that are already as just to get

[04:37:44] to the 100 so that is that is an aspect of it um dr presidio you said something and i don't think that you i don't know that you meant to say it the way that you said it but i am concerned that it does seem like that the goal is to have grading match the standardized test results is i know i don't think that that's what you meant but it did come across that way when we're talking about standards-based grading and it reflects in the standardized testing so i i do get concerned and i wanted to give an opportunity to go ahead and clarify that so that it didn't that it didn't come across to parents that way no thank you for that i appreciate it and we've all

[04:38:22] We've all been here a long time, so yeah, no, I appreciate it. No, I was just highlighting some of the things in the research base because sometimes that's one of the questions that we get is like how aligned is what the student is actually doing in the class and the grade that they're getting in the class aligned with their outcomes on standardized tests, whether it's SOLs, AP, IB, right?

[04:38:43] And the question is, depending on the test, it varies a lot, right? Because different tests are measuring different things. I just wanted to make that point that a grade is a lot more than a single point in time score on one test. And sometimes I think people get confused when they don't see that alignment and that correlation as tightly as they might expect to see it.

[04:39:03] - Okay. I do think that we can look for consistency across disciplines, not necessarily across schools. So that if we're looking at fine arts and things like that, as long as there's consistency across the way that the fine arts teachers are implementing grading, I think that works.

[04:39:19] And I also definitely agree that it's going to require strong leadership at all of our schools in order to move to a standards-based approach if that's where we're really going. And so I have seen some principals do that very effectively and others not be as successful. And so I would want us to make sure that they had the skill set to cheerlead for their staff.

[04:39:39] Would you like another go back? Thank you. I don't see anybody else. So Dr. Anderson and then myself and then Ms. Marin. I don't see her hand. Ms. Lady, did you want to go back? I don't see her hand up. We'll go ahead. We'll get to it.

[04:39:54] All right. I just want to go now to my second set of comments, which are my non-negotiables. My non-negotiables is to have that consistency across our schools because it was really difficult to explain to parents why one school graded at 90-10 and another was at 60-40.

[04:40:11] And I do agree that there should be a carve out for certain disciplines because how we evaluate math is not in the same way that we evaluate art or photography is kind of what I had here. the rolling grade book versus a closed grade book it yeah there's a lot there to unpack i don't think i have enough time in one you know minute and a half because if you have a kid that did not do well at the very beginning of the year you could be chasing that the whole year and still not make it up or if it's at the end of the year i don't know how i feel about that but it is

[04:40:47] one of those things i think needs to be unpacked a little bit more um one of the things that i want make sure that we articulate and I failed to articulate this earlier is how important grading is for our students and their families. It is really important because it has a lot of implications for post-secondary work. We're talking about college acceptance. We're talking about scholarships.

[04:41:12] This is not something to be taken lightly because the impact to our kids are very very long lasting and I don't want us to lose that measure because at the end of the day when they're leaving our schools to go into these competitive universities they are looking to see what do they know they are looking to see have you mastered algebra have you mastered calculus whatever it is that your path is taking you to one of the things that I would love to have a question be answered for me is how do you see this system maybe it doesn't have impact with IB grading because we

[04:41:50] so many of our schools that are IB you can jump in but we definitely have kind of worked side by side with them as they're trying to think about how this will work for them we have a IB specialist who's been meeting with with different administrators and different IB coordinators to make sure that that they can do the things they need to do for IB within this context so it's not something that we need a different thing it's just helping them to understand what this might look like for the way that they assess. I've run out of time so I'll wait for my next go back. It's okay I'm sure I'll

[04:42:29] need another one too. So some more specific questions one of the things that on slide 16 it mentions that teachers like standards-based grading because it allows for more purposeful planning and assessment and I'm very confused because that seems to confuse teacher planning and preparation with assessment methodology and I don't know like we've had the SOLs for a long time i am sure i'm positive we've had standards in our curriculum well before we implemented positive standards-based grading and i am positive that our excellent teachers have been doing purposeful planning and assessments around how to teach those before we implement standards-based

[04:43:08] grading so i guess i'm confused why a specific benefit of standards-based grading is teachers get to do purposeful planning when that's what i thought our clts were for before we did standards based grading so could you help me understand that a little bit well i'll start and we're using the term standards-based grading but you know prior to using that term our grading has always been standards aligned our teachers teach the standards the tests the quizzes all these things were made up of the standards right and standards-based grading they're still aligned to the standards but they're actually reporting out on the standard so if i'm looking at my grade book and i see that

[04:43:46] all of all of you have grades and there's a's and there's b's and there's c's that's different than and looking at my grade book and seeing that where you all are on standard 2.1 or 2.3, does that make sense? Like the grade book actually, you have finite data on students based on that standards-based grading that allows you to be probably more targeted in your planning.

[04:44:06] I'm making an inference there, Michael, you're welcome to-- - No, I mean, I was gonna say the same thing, but also it's not just in the grade book, it's on a particular assignment, right? So at the end of that planning cycle, we've already given the assessment, Now we're getting all of the results back.

[04:44:22] In a standards-based system or a standards-aligned system, right, now we can talk about what standards did students do well on in this assessment, which ones did they not do well on, and how might that have been linked to either the assessment that we designed or the instruction that we delivered. Again, it doesn't mean that you can't do that in a standards-aligned system.

[04:44:40] You can. That's why I'm saying there's more blurring sometimes, I think, across these lines of traditional versus standards-based. But I think that's the big issue is you're having more, potentially more purposeful conversations about the standard as opposed to the score at the end of the day that a student might have earned.

[04:44:57] I get that. And I hear you. I guess what I'm trying to say is we've had standards aligned. We've had some sort of curriculum. You could still have those purposeful conversations, right? So it's not really a benefit of this system. It's a benefit of how we do our conversations. And even though whether it's standards aligned or whatever underlines our grading, there are materials that show where the students are in that, right?

[04:45:16] So it's how we assess and report that assessment as opposed to how we train teachers in planning for things. So I just, and it was slide 17, not 16, my apologies. So I just, you know, I just want to be really careful to really focus on the assessment methods because that's what we're looking at in grading for governance, right?

[04:45:32] Not the teacher planning and preparation. And so the other thing that I wanted to, you know, talk a little bit about when we look at the key differences is in traditional grading, grades are more bound by time, it says in your slides. And it also talks about formative assessments receiving feedback, but generally not graded in standards-based grading.

[04:45:54] Talk about bound by time. Is that because of the traditional, the quarterly gradebook or the due dates? What do you mean by bound by time? Yeah, more the gradebook in the sense that you're closing that opportunity to demonstrate the learning at the end of that quarter when that gradebook closes, as opposed to on a rolling gradebook that's open over the course of the year, you can demonstrate your learning on that standard different points in time, not just within that nine week order.

[04:46:21] - I guess I'd be curious to know the data of how many students actually demonstrate knowledge on a quarter one standard in quarter four, right? Like how often does that actually practically happen as you're moving on to learn new standards? I guess I'll put myself back another go back.

[04:46:39] I've got lots more questions, maybe those come in governance, but we have a little bit of time left, so I'd like to use some of our time. I think we just have you and me. All right, well, that's it.

[04:46:55] It's just us. We'll do one more round and then. Okay. One of the things that I wanted to kind of bring back into the conversation just for consideration, I know the ship may have sailed on this, just the work on assigning the zero.

[04:47:12] Definitely, if a child is doing absolutely nothing, I think there's a space for it. But we do have students who are attempting to do something. And receiving a zero on one assignment and perhaps receiving a good enough score on other assignments really makes it impossible for that child to pull themselves out of the hole.

[04:47:34] So I don't want to lose the opportunity for it to not be such a deterrent to a child, a student who is trying to work and to be accomplished. One of the things that I wanted to ask was, we talk a lot about the stakeholders.

[04:47:52] So I'd like to have a greater clarity, not just for us in this room, but also for those who may be watching this at home, who was involved and how many of them were involved when we're talking about the stakeholders. I know you said people were invited and some came. Quantify those for me.

[04:48:07] And where were these people from? Central office, were they all middle school folks, high school folks, region five, region six? Because it does matter.

[04:48:24] Sure, absolutely. Yeah, so when we were looking at schools to sort of include in the process, we definitely wanted to provide us different experiences, different grading practices that are being used. And we also looked for opportunities to balance that across sort of geographic regions.

[04:48:40] I think ultimately we had, I want to say we settled on I think four high schools and three middle schools and had about anywhere from like 100 to 200 people of each group at each school. So we talked to staff, students, and then also community members as well.

[04:49:00] And again, we focused on focus groups because we felt like when we looked at survey data in the past on this, it's sometimes hard to know what you're looking at without knowing which specific practices you're attaching it to. So even something like rolling grade book, we might get two different answers to how people feel about that, depending on how the reassessment policy in that school is working.

[04:49:20] And so we do have situations within this data where some people are like, we love rolling grade book, here are the reasons why and then we would go to a different school with a different set of practices and they would say we really don't like this the way that it's working right now so rather than trying to aggregate all that and really trying to understand you know how do we feel about rolling gradebook in general we really tried to dig in so that we would understand um you know clearly where like what the practices were that they were referring to when they gave us that feedback thank you i appreciate that but i think i'm struggling a little bit to see how these seven schools were representative of the nearly 50 schools that we have that fall into the secondary

[04:49:56] grading umbrella and this goes back to a point that we talk about over and over and over again when we talk about data we have to find a way to to make sure that it's data that we could really rely on I don't disagree with that at all just one point I mean we tried to find schools that were representative in different ways right schools that were doing different things so things that we knew about the school are they doing more standards-based grading are they more traditional, have a mix of schools, geographic diversity, right? So we tried to do that as much as we could, but it's, you know, definitely could be improved, I'm sure. Thank you. And because this is an opportunity to kind of build some understanding to help inform what we're going to

[04:50:34] be doing at the policy review stage, I'd like to get some understanding on how did the committee itself weigh the impact and preferences and the research that they found? Because there was a long list of research that the committee reviewed, which I was very pleased with, but how did that get managed?

[04:50:55] Yeah, so with on the committee itself, we recognized that we were going to encounter a lot of data even before we got to the research, or vice versa, and so we worked to -- people tended to work within smaller groups so that they could really look in and look at not just sort of the quantitative data, but also really dig into the words of the people that were being recorded within the focus groups.

[04:51:17] So different, we created groups within the committee that allowed them to dig into each of the topic areas and then had specific meetings where they would really spend dedicated time going in and looking at really reading the data closely and doing similar things for research.

[04:51:33] We tended to synthesize the research just because there's only so many, you know, 30-page studies that a community member, you know, that anyone wants to read really at four o'clock in the afternoon. But we did, so we did some of that work for them to help them sort of see the synthesis of that.

[04:51:48] Thank you. Maren, did you want to go back? Sure. Thank you. Given the late time of the day and I was just doing something else, I'd like to know what our next steps are going to be. And I know you're going to talk about it procedurally, but this is just such a big, important matter.

[04:52:04] And this is also one of those things where I really crave input from the superintendent about what her recommendation is in this space. You know, I appreciate the work that's gone in to do this, but just like our boundary work, like, we got to do this.

[04:52:20] we gotta fix it. Some students have been really impaired this last year through some changes and I wanna be sure that changes are not disrupting students' hard work and planning as they look to graduate. So I really would like to hear more, especially from the superintendent about your intentions for getting something really concrete and consistent.

[04:52:46] - So I think the path forward is charted, right? The board is gonna review the policy and take it to the governance committee, I believe about November, in which case I'll take that policy and present a charge to the grading committee to continue their work to be done, I think we said by May 1, so that we could turn that around with principals and staff to be ready. Maybe I'm getting that wrong. Was it May 1? I think it was May 1.

[04:53:14] And then that becomes the grading policy and practice that we start the upcoming school year with. So if the Governance Committee in November relays to you, well, a directive to us, I mean, I don't want to waste, you know, two months.

[04:53:32] I don't know what more I could convey to you. Like, this is, again, one of those things where I'd like to hear what you think. What do you recommend be the grading policy? Because, again, I'm not the expert. I'm learning, and I could tell you what my community thinks, but at the end of the day, should we have a reassessment policy of 100%?

[04:53:50] What are the benefits and drawbacks? Should we have a rolling grade book? There's a lot of subjectivity, too, in these guidelines that really open it up to teachers. And while I appreciate the autonomy of teachers, not when it comes to grading. So I just don't want to have a circular conversation.

[04:54:08] And if there's something to be prepared for that November governance meeting, I would like for that to be worked on so we can then deliberate it. I don't know what other members of the governance committee would like to add. Dr. Wood, did you want some comments?

[04:54:25] Well, I mean, I think that whatever the policy, I think it's going to be more than one meeting in governance would be my guess. So whatever that policy is, I don't know that I have a clear understanding of what the board's expectation is for that policy. But whatever it is, we're going to turn it around, provide it to the grading committee, and come back May 1, depending on what the policy says.

[04:54:48] I don't know if it's going to be required to come back to the board again or where it's going to go following the grading committee. Like I said, it'll be determined by the policy, and then, you know, we enact it as we would any other rule that the board approves.

[04:55:05] I think governance is meeting several times, September, October. It's due to go to the board vote by November, but governance is meeting, and I think our chair knows more the time, but at least a couple times a month in September and October. Okay, so so I'm clear so from now to November the Governance Committee will develop the draft Which will then go to the board for work session discussion?

[04:55:28] That's that's my understanding is that it goes and then the board votes on it by November to turn it over to Dr. Reid to then work with the grading committee or however She will to then implement it is my understanding. That's what the motion I believe had read I was just about to say that the motion That's why I tried to reiterate it at the beginning of this meeting But I read it really quickly because it is so long it has about five parts that articulate each of these when the governor's work is supposed to be completed what happens when it's done it reactivates the secondary grading committee they have to complete their work by a timeline of may so that we can have further communication it's pretty

[04:56:08] lengthy because it hits on these points okay thanks for clarifying i'll just take one last turn i know it's late and there's lots of conversations but really i think one of the things that we're looking for going forward is feedback from you all in terms of what questions and information the staff can bring to help the governance committee then formulate a policy that oversees, you know, kind of gives you the guiding principles, right, for then what you can create grading practices and regulations around. So on that end, I will just say that I think what I'm

[04:56:44] seeing from both of these conversations and what I'm hearing a lot from my community is the importance of consistency but to miss Anderson's point consistency that allows for different disciplines to be able to teach how they need to teach right like there's a consistency of expectations but it doesn't mean that guitar assesses the same way as English as math is right so how do we allow for the uniqueness of disciplines with consistency of expectations in a building um I'm hearing from my community real concerns about skill development I really am like It's not just me who's saying this.

[04:57:20] I'll be honest. I've seen it with my own kiddo. We do this with special ed kids a lot, and we have for a long time, where we devalue skill development in favor of learning. But I'm hearing real concerns from my community around how do we make sure kids know how to turn something in on time. Because at work, you do need to turn something in on time.

[04:57:37] As a lawyer, if I missed a court filing, I'd probably lose my case or might get fired, right? Like, these are skills. So how do we allow for both mastery and skill development, I think, is something I'm hearing from my community. And maybe it's not within assessments, maybe it's somewhere else, but that's a concern that people are lifting up.

[04:57:53] How do we make sure we give kids time to get mastery and know what they're mastering without putting undue workload on teachers? Like, how do you find that balance with reassessments? And with the grade books, I think there's a lot of split between the rolling, but I think some of it is the implementation, right?

[04:58:10] We've talked about SIS and how grades entered in SIS and our SIS capability. i think we need to understand how do we make sure those implementations don't then trip students up where their grades are accurate reflections um you know and i'll just say i think i'm the biggest concern that i'm hearing is things being rolled out without proper understanding of how to implement and what's happening from the community and also i've heard that from staff and that leads to this inconsistency and that's what led to what we're here so we really need some guiding principles that staff recommend that address community concerns around mastery skills giving kids a

[04:58:47] chance to demonstrate mastery without devaluing or demotivating executive functioning skills that's what I'm hearing and Dr. Aniston everyone will go back yep just kind of also to clarify certain things because I do agree with how Ms. Marin started the conversation is how we started the conversation with you throwing up around the terms policy guidelines guidelines appear to be optional i could use them or i could not use them so i think it's really imperative that not only do we revise the policy as we've all discussed but we also codify whatever it is of those operational guidelines into regulations because that's where they live elsewhere it's the regulations that say

[04:59:26] this is not an optional way of doing things and these guidelines are also going to be what i think should offer the consistency even of practice outside of the grading you then have just the report of how it's done you'll have teachers that have nothing in schoology until the end of the quarter and you have those that are putting it in as they go along giving parents more feedback i see that living in some of those regulations um i i also envision in my mind's eye really a report card adjustment at the secondary secondary level to really speak to some of those non-cognitive

[05:00:01] skills that must be reported on but not in the content itself there's content and then there's work habits and we have to force ourselves to think differently and to bring up some of those really useful and effective practices that we tend to use at the elementary level but then we release when we get to the secondary secondary level when we know our kids need to continue i liken this to note taking our kids don't know how to take notes because they just get given a slide deck and then go forth and conquer that's not the most practical way of doing this so i will stop here

[05:00:37] but I do want to say Miss Setlow has the document that's just for us to gather feedback to help inform the work of the governance committee. I think three of us here are on governance and and Miss of course Miss Lady as the chair of governance I thought we had five oh and Miss Dixon so just because we've had so much conversation while it's fresh please provide your thoughts your beliefs your non-negotiables and the things that are essential to um add to that governance to that policy so that we could begin to wrestle with it

[05:01:12] so we'll have a product that is more reflective of what this body is wanting to do um at the earlier in the process thank you everybody thank you staff for your hard work and like i said please provide your feedback and the governance will take this from here so i know it's a lot to wrestle with we appreciate your time thank you everybody this meeting is It's adjourned.

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