Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Meeting, Thursday, October 24, 2024

Date: Thursday, October 24, 2024
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 4h 5m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUecAU7StFk
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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[00:04:52] - All right, good evening. This October 24th, 2024 regular meeting of the Fairfax County School Board will now come to order. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance followed by a moment of silence, a performance of the National Anthem by the Glasgow Middle School Trio under the direction of Caleb Caldwell.

[00:05:08] That will be followed by a special performance by the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Namaste Club under the direction of Patricia Lister in honor of Hindu American Heritage Month.

[00:05:21] - Pledge allegiance.

[00:06:09] Brown stripes and bright stars. From the grass we watch.

[00:06:34] Birds so gallantly.

[00:08:58] Another round of applause for all of our amazingly talented students.

[00:13:32] And item 2.02, announcements. Dr. Anderson has submitted a written request to attend tonight's meeting virtually because of a medical conflict. She's located in Annandale, Virginia. All those in favor of approving Dr. Anderson's request.

[00:13:48] Ms. Marin, Ms. Dixit, Mr. McIlveen, Mr. McDaniel, Ms. Anderson, Ms. Seismarheiser, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Moon, Ms. Lady, Ms. St. John Cunning, and myself. That is unanimous. Dr. Anderson, will you test your microphone and camera?

[00:14:04] - Hello. - Hello. We hear you loud and clear. Thank you. - Thank you. Please note that we will be officially honoring Veterans Day with a proclamation at the November 14th, 2024 regular meeting when we will also be celebrating our new Purple Star Schools.

[00:14:23] Veterans Day is celebrated on November 14th each year and we honor those who have served in the United States Armed Forces. If you would like to review a copy of the agenda, please see the back of the auditorium to obtain copies of any items being presented tonight. reference the QR code on the agenda or on the website fcps.edu slash school board slash board docs. Tonight's meeting is being broadcast on channel 99 and live streamed on the website fcps.edu slash tv slash ch99. Agenda item 2.03 student athletics and activities month proclamation. I

[00:14:58] call on Miss Lady for a proclamation. Whereas National High School Activities Week was first proclaimed by Congress and President Ronald Reagan in October 1983 in recognition of the significant place extracurricular opportunities have in the growth of our high school students and how these programs and experiences help students to learn to set and achieve goals, to organize their time effectively, and to enhance the social skills that are needed to enjoy and succeed in life. And whereas the National Federation of State High School Associations expanded this week of National Activities Month in 2012 to properly celebrate the contributions and benefits students experience by

[00:15:35] participating in athletics and activities such as speech, debate, music, drama, and other student groups. And whereas Fairfax County Public Schools stresses the importance of providing a well-balanced activities program to augment the learning activities in the classroom and provides opportunities for student growth and enrichment in a variety of extracurricular areas including athletics, student government, safety patrols, performing groups, journalism drama general and special special interest clubs and honor societies now therefore be it resolved that the Fairfax County School Board does hereby proclaim October 2024 as student athletics and activities month

[00:16:14] in recognition of the many achievements by students participating in school athletics and activities in the generous contributions and efforts of the athletic coaches and trainers club sponsors student activity staff parents faculty and school communities who support them Is there a second? Second. Mr. McElveen. All those in favor for the proclamation?

[00:16:36] Ms. Marin, Ms. Dixit, Mr. McElveen, Mr. McDaniel, Ms. Anderson, Ms. Seismarheiser, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Moon, Ms. Lady, Ms. St. John Cunning, Dr. Anderson and myself. That is unanimous. Congratulations. The proclamation passes. Agenda item 2.04, Annandale High School 70th Anniversary Proclamation. I call on Dr. Anderson for the proclamation.

[00:17:03] - Good evening, Annandell. I am so sorry that I was not able to be there in person to read this, but I'm very excited about it nevertheless. Whereas Annandell High School was established in 1954 in Fairfax County, Virginia, and has served as a cornerstone of education for the Annandell community for seven decades, providing generations of students with a strong foundation for success in academic, personal, and professional pursuits.

[00:17:37] And whereas, since its founding during a time when President Eisenhower's Adams for Peace program inspired the school's mascot, the Annandale High School has embraced a tradition of academic rigor and extracurricular success.

[00:17:53] It has grown and evolved alongside the community it serves, adapting to change in population, educational needs, and societal shifts. Today, Annandale High School proudly reflects the incredible cultural diversity of the region, with students representing over 66 countries and speaking more than 59 languages.

[00:18:17] This diversity has garnered national attention, with Annandale being celebrated as a model school for diversity by President Bill Clinton, and whereas Annandale High School has played an instrumental role in shaping students and to compassionate community-minded individuals devoted to making the world a better place.

[00:18:41] The dedication of the faculty and staff in this mission is evident in the positive impact their students have had on our community. And whereas Anandale High School boasts eight active honor societies and numerous academically oriented clubs, as well as a distinguished international baccalaureate program offering students an opportunity to engage in an academically-challenged curriculum that promotes critical thinking, research, and a global perspective.

[00:19:16] Whereas, Annandale High School has been recognized by the Virginia Department of Education as a continuous improvement exemplar, and Annandale is the only high school in the Commonwealth of Virginia to be named a Model PLC school.

[00:19:32] And whereas, Annandale High School's arts programs have flourished, providing students with opportunities to excel in visual and performing arts, including award-winning music ensembles, theater productions, and art exhibits that inspire creativity, passion, and self-expression.

[00:19:53] Annandale's orchestra director was recently honored with a Grammy Award for Educator of the Year, which is a testament to the school's commitment to fostering talent and excellence in its staff and students alike. And whereas the Annandale High School Adams athletic teams enjoy a proud tradition of success instilling in student athletes the values of hard work, teamwork, perseverance, and sportsmanship while competing with determination and honor in regional and state level competitions across multiple sports.

[00:20:30] And whereas Annandale High School has made community service and leadership a central part of its educational mission with each student organization, club and initiatives that, I'm sorry, with student organizations, clubs and initiatives that encourage students to take active roles in bettering their community and addressing social issues.

[00:20:54] Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Fairfax County School Board honors Anandale High School on the occasion of its 70th anniversary of providing educational excellence and enrichment opportunities to students and the community.

[00:21:09] Is there a second. Second. Mr. McElveen all those in favor of the proclamation. Miss Marin. Miss Dixit. Mr. McElveen. Mr. McDaniel. Miss Anderson. Miss Sizemore Heiser. Mr. Dunn. Mr. Moon. Miss Lady. Miss St. John Cunning. Dr. Anderson and myself. That is unanimous. The proclamation passes. Congratulations. Agenda item 2.05. Fairview Elementary School 125th anniversary proclamation. I call on Miss Sizemore Heiser for the proclamation. Thank you. Whereas Fairview Elementary School was founded as Fairview School in 1899 on Ox Road in Fairfax County near the Fairfax County Courthouse

[00:21:47] and within sight of the former St. Mary's Catholic Church where Clara Barton first practiced nursing. And whereas Fairview located in the Braddock District and the Robinson Secondary School Pyramid is one of the oldest schools in Fairfax County with the original frame one-room building having been described as so drafty that a former teacher quote "frosted her feet while standing at the blackboard, unquote. Whereas Fairview was first served in 1928 by a Fairfax County school bus,

[00:22:20] which at the time was a market wagon drawn by two horses. And by 1932, enrollment had increased enough to warrant a second room, and then a 20 foot by 20 foot addition costing $374.80. And whereas the original building was replaced in 1939 with a four-room brick school with an auditorium, and office space, a kitchen, cafeteria, clinic, teacher's lounge, library, and three new classrooms were added in 1952. A second edition completed in 1965, adding a library, administrative suite, special instruction room, and five more classrooms, and seven more classes were added in

[00:22:57] 1965. And whereas the entire school was renovated in 1979, the cafeteria and the library enlarged, the gymnasium built, and air conditioning, and an elevator were added. Another 21-room addition was constructed in 1984 to accommodate residential growth and a brand new renovation was completed in 2001. Whereas today Fairview Elementary School led by Principal Samantha Goldstein and staff encompasses more than 83,500 square feet of instructional space on more than 14 acres of land

[00:23:31] serving more than 750 students and whereas Fairview Elementary School has adapted to the growing community around it while serving as a focal point for families and maintaining a small school atmosphere in which students, caregivers, and staff feel a strong sense of belonging and nurturing while embracing an individual approach to learning.

[00:23:52] And, whereas, Fairview is known for active volunteering and robust involvement through its parent-teacher association, its collaborative style of teaching, focusing on a student-centric environment in every classroom, and instilling critical thinking and problem-solving in each of its students.

[00:24:09] Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Fairfax County School Board hereby recognizes the 125th anniversary of our beloved Fairview Elementary School and congratulates its school staff. Is there a second? I second. Ms. Anderson.

[00:24:24] All those in favor of the proclamation, Ms. Marin, Ms. Dixit, Mr. McElveen, Mr. McDaniel, Ms. Anderson, Ms. Seismore-Hyser, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Moon, Ms. Lady, Ms. St. John Cunning, and myself. Any opposed? Abstentions? That is unanimous with dr. Anderson away from the table the motion passes agenda item 2.06 hindu american heritage month proclamation I call on mystics it for a proclamation namaste everyone whereas hindu american heritage month is observed in october a month of

[00:24:58] Significance importance to the hindu community as it coincides with major hindu festivals such as navaratri and diwali It is a time to honor and celebrate the contribution of the hindu american community to the cultural economic and social fabric of our nation and whereas Hinduism one of the world's oldest religions dating back over 5,000 years continues to grow and flourish in the United States enriching our communities with its teachings values and cultural heritage the vibrant festivals and traditions celebrated by the Hindu community including Diwali and Holi have become an integral part of

[00:25:36] of the broader cultural landscape embraced and enjoyed and embraced enjoyed by people from all walks of life and whereas virginia and fairfax county is the home to a significant hindu-american population representing the diverse ethnic background from countries all over the world hinduism is the large third largest religion in the world and over 1 billion followers worldwide and millions in the united states our nation has greatly benefited from hindu-american especially through Vedanta philosophy, Ayurvedic medicine, classical Indian art,

[00:26:12] dance, music, meditation, yoga, and literature. And whereas, Fairfax County Public School proudly acknowledges the invaluable contributions of the Hindu American community to our society, including in the areas of business, science, technology, medicine, politics, education, sports, culture, and arts. Hindu Americans share the entrepreneurial spirit of America and contribute to Fairfax County economic vitality growth and well-being and whereas prominent Hindu Americans include civil rights lawyer Vanita Gupta who served as a United

[00:26:48] State Associate Attorney General physician Vivek Murthy currently serving as the 21st US Surgeon General Technology Executives Sundar Pachai currently CEO of Google and Alphabets Satya Nadella who is the chairman and chief executive office of Microsoft Reshma Sujani a leading activist and the founder of non-profits Girls Who Code at Moms First, author, producer and television host Padma Lakshmi, journalist and medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, Indra Nooyi, who's a former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, State Senator Suha Subramaniam from Virginia, 32nd District,

[00:27:27] and our very own school board member, Rachna Saiz-Burheiser, who was the first Hindu American elected to the Fairfax County School Board and inspired others to follow her path, and whereas Hindu Americans have long championed value of peace, compassion, tolerance, exclusivity and service, which aligns with the highest ideals of Fairfax County in the broader United States. The Hindu American community contributes continue to contribute to the betterment of local communities through charitable work, education, outreach and active engagement in public service. Now, therefore, it be it resolved that the Fairfax

[00:28:03] County School Board hereby proclaims October 2024 as a Hindu American American Heritage Month to encourage all the Ferfuska County residents to participate in the programs and events hosted by our schools and community as we celebrate and honor the rich heritage of enduring contribution of Hindu Americans. Is there a second? Second. Mr. McDaniel. All those in favor of the proclamation Miss Marin, Miss Dixit, Mr. McElveen, Mr. McDaniel, Miss anderson miss sizemarheiser mr dunn mr moon miss lady miss st john cunning and myself all those

[00:28:41] opposed abstentions that is unanimous with dr anderson away from the table the motion passes i'd like to welcome all of those in support of the hindu american heritage month proclamation

[00:28:55] to please join the board for a photo at the front of the dais i would like to welcome all of these

[00:31:47] those in here of support of the fairview elementary school 125th anniversary proclamation to please

[00:31:53] join the board for a photo at the front of the dais. I would like to welcome all of those

[00:33:27] here in support of the Annandale High School 70th Anniversary Proclamation to please join

[00:33:31] the board for a photo in front of the dais. And I would now like to welcome all of those

[00:34:25] here in support of Student Athletics and Activities Proclamation to join the board for a photo

[00:34:31] at the front of the dais. That's the last photo for the proclamation.

[00:36:00] Agenda Item 2.07 Exemplar Awards and National Blue Ribbon Award Recognition. I call on Dr. Reed for recognition of the 2024 Exemplar Award and National Blue Ribbon Award schools. Thank you, Chairman Frisch. Tonight we are honored to recognize schools that have received special recognition from the Virginia Board of Education and the United States Department of Education for student achievement.

[00:36:24] The Exemplar Performance School Awards recognize schools that exceed board-established requirements or show continuous improvement on academic and school quality indicators. To achieve the 2024 Exemplar Performance Highest Achievement Award, a school must earn a state accreditation rating of accredited and meet the following benchmarks.

[00:36:48] Achieve Performance Level 1 for reading, mathematics, and science based on the student pass rate, which does not include growth measures, for the all-students group in the school as well as for each student group in the school. In addition, for schools with two student groups, there is no more than five percentage points between the lowest performing group and all other students in the school and for schools with three or more student groups there are no more than ten percentage points between the lowest performing group and all other students in the school and they must achieve at level one in the chronic absenteeism graduation and completion index and dropout rate school quality indicators

[00:37:27] there are two Fairfax County schools that earn the Board of Education highest achievement award sankster elementary school with principal allison jankovich and her staff and thomas jefferson high school for science and technology with dr ann bonitavis principal and her staff so congratulations on earning this award so we're going to i think recognize you with pictures and a plaque when we're done reading through the exemplar awards uh in their totality

[00:38:06] So to earn the exemplar award for continuous improvement, a school must earn a state accreditation rating of accredited or accredited with conditions and meet at least one of the following criteria: that the school demonstrate an increase in the combined rate for math, reading, and science for each of the past three years, with a total increase across the three years of 10 points or more; that the school demonstrate an increase in the combined rate for two or more student groups in reading and math for each of the past three years with a total increase across the three years of 10 points or more and that the school demonstrates an

[00:38:43] increase in the graduation and completion index for each of the past three years with a total increase across the three years of four percent or more and demonstrates a decrease in the dropout rate for each of the past three years with the total reduction across three years of 15 or more of the first year's dropout rate So we have three Fairfax County schools which received the 2024 exemplar award for continuous improvement.

[00:39:12] And these are John R. Lewis High School, Alfonso Smith principal and his staff. All right, I see the Lancers are in the house. So well done Lancers. Also we have South Lakes High School with Carlos Seward as our new principal.

[00:39:36] And it's my understanding, We also have Kim Retzer in the house, our principal from last year, so go Seahawks. And finally, West Potomac High School.

[00:39:53] The Wolverines are still awake, and Jessica Stottson, principal, so congratulations on earning this award. That's a tremendous achievement, and just a reminder that our data is not just numbers, about those numbers reflect the child and each and every child that i just very proud of the work you all have done so finally tonight it gives me great pleasure to announce that one of our schools has received the high honor of being named a national blue ribbon school for 2024 by the u.s secretary of education miguel cardona so congratulations to spring hill elementary school

[00:40:31] and principal amy briggs and staff for this prestigious recognition i'll tell you that that is an achievement so congratulations spring hill and the mascot eludes me what panthers okay all right thank you thank you all right the national blue ribbon schools award program is administered by the united states department of education and serves not only as a symbol of an exemplary american school but also as inspiration for schools across the nation this coveted award affirms the hard work of students educators families and communities that are creating

[00:41:10] safe and welcoming schools where students master challenging and engaging content for 2024 the u.s department of education recognized 356 schools nationwide and only eight schools in virginia spring hill elementary school is being celebrated as an exemplary high-performing school which puts it among the top performers in the state as measured by state assessments to be recognized as a national blue ribbon school a school must have achieved at least one of the following criteria achievement for the all students group in the top 15 percent of all public schools in virginia

[00:41:47] in reading and mathematics based on every student succeeds act or the essa pass rates which do not include growth measures and achievement for each individual student group in the top 40 percent of all public schools in virginia in reading and mathematics based on the essa pass rates again congratulations on earning this award panthers well done and if i may add our principal amy briggs is also a graduate of her elementary school so it's pretty special are you saying she's

[00:42:24] a graduate of spring hill wow that's incredible all right so this concludes our awards recognitions for this evening we congratulate the principals administrators teachers support staff students drivers, food service, maintenance facilities and their families of all these schools for the academic successes and hard work.

[00:42:46] We're especially pleased to see schools recognized for their high student achievement and for their consistent gains in academic achievement, as well as their efforts to reduce absenteeism and dropout rates. Thank you all for your hard work and congratulations to these well-deserving schools.

[00:43:02] Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Reed. i would like to welcome the spring hill elementary school community recipient of the 2024 national blue ribbon award for exemplary high performing school to please join the board for a photo at

[00:43:18] the front of the dais i would like to welcome the west potomac high school community recipient of

[00:44:52] the 2024 exemplar award for continuous improvement to please join the board for a photo at the dais

[00:44:58] i would like to welcome the south lakes high school community recipient of the 2024 exemplar

[00:46:18] award for continuous improvement to please join the board for a photo at the front of the dais

[00:46:22] i would like to welcome the lewis high school community recipient of the 2024 exemplar award

[00:47:25] for continuous improvement to please join the board for a photo at the front of the dais

[00:47:29] i would now like to welcome the thomas jefferson high school for science and technology community

[00:48:47] recipient of the 2024 exemplar award for highest achievement to please join the board for a photo

[00:48:52] at the front of the dais i would like to welcome the sangster elementary community

[00:49:44] recipient of the 2024 exemplar award for highest achievement to please join the board for a photo

[00:49:50] at the front of the dais this concludes our pictures for the exemplar and blue ribbon schools

[00:50:55] gen item 3.01 community participation the next order of business is community participation we

[00:51:37] welcome all community members who are here and those who signed up to speak this evening additional information about signing up to provide comments at school board regular business meetings and public hearings can be found in the school board's website during the sign-up process community members acknowledged that they were informed of the school board's expectations for proper decorum when providing comments. These expectations are also available online and with the printed agenda and meeting materials in the back of the room. We ask audience members to be respectful of one another. Shouting and outbursts will not be tolerated. Please hold your applause until the conclusion of a speaker's remarks. Audience members may not join speakers at the podium and should remain at their seats including when recording video or taking photos. We're grateful

[00:52:16] for those who have come to speak to us today and thank you for your cooperation. School board members will be listening but not responding madam deputy clerk please call the first speaker sunai gupta hello my name is sunai i am a junior at mclean high school taking dual english i've been falsely accused of plagiarism involving copy and pasting content as well as 100 as well as a 100 ai writing

[00:52:52] score on an essay assignment i'm currently appealing with nova i used my separate essay planning document document paste into my final with permission from my teacher the class teacher and assistant principal both knew about the planning document and refused to mention it to me No, but furthermore, I was flagged for having 100% AI likelihood on my essay according to originality.ai.

[00:53:19] My previous fully in-class completed work have all been falsely flagged as 100% by this site, as well as the grammatically incorrect phrase, chicken nuggets are very Chinese foods, tasted over several times. False positives should not dictate my or any other child's punishment.

[00:53:37] It has been a very painful process to get the factual evidence from my teacher and assistant principal. I've been tossed around to FCPS FERPA, who in turn is tossing me to NOVA. The McLean teacher and assistant principal both know this wrongful accusation but are reluctant to fix it.

[00:53:54] This way the school can destroy a child's career. Why would one do that? This is a wrongful accusation, and I need this to be fixed. It originated at FCPS and should be fixed at FCPS. Please don't throw me around to someone who's harassed and intimidated with this wrongful accusation.

[00:54:14] Cindy Walsh. I was going to talk about library books, but I have a new topic instead, and that topic is school security.

[00:54:38] I'm going to compare Fairfax security to the border and voter ID. The door on the school building is like a wall at the border. The school locks the door for safety and security of students and faculty. The border of the United States is completely open. To compare, it would be like a school that is not just unlocked, but no door at all.

[00:54:56] The school office asks the parents to show an ID to know who is in the building. The United States should show an ID to know who is entering the country. An election officer should see your ID to vote as well. If we can all agree there should be a locked door on the school, we can also agree there should be a secure wall at the border, and we can also agree that you need an ID to vote.

[00:55:17] We can also agree that everyone of all races can get a driver's license to enter a school. That argument that a person of color cannot get an ID to vote is absurd. The national security, as well as school security, both matter. Not every parent is a criminal, and not every illegal immigrant is either.

[00:55:35] But in both cases, we want to know why you came.

[00:55:39] vote Donald Trump 2024. Shelley Arnaldi. Shelley Arnaldi. Sherry Cuffell. Good evening, Dr. Reed

[00:56:16] and school board members. As I observed over the last three years of attending school board meetings, I've seen woke ideology in the form of DEI and transgender issues creep into our schools, not just in Fairfax, but all over the country. It crept in, but now it is heading like a locomotive straight for our children. When one becomes an adult, one can do whatever they please to their own body, but stop coming for our little ones who would probably choose a piece of candy over a hundred dollar bill. Little Johnny doesn't understand the concept of money because he is six,

[00:56:52] yet you think he can understand what it means to change his identity? His little mind is still growing and developing. I left substitute teaching in Fairfax County Public Schools because I could not agree with the required training that goes against my Christian values. I now work at a private Christian school who knows the difference between boys and girls. They acknowledge that there are only two genders, male and female, the way God created them. This school truly cares about the well-being of children from their hearts to their minds to their souls. Sometimes I wonder how much you guys really care for our children as much as you do for your own ideology, as evidenced by

[00:57:31] Chairman Frisch swearing on a stack of pornographic novels available in our high school instead of swearing in on the Bible. But you know who does care about our children? Donald Trump. He loves his family, especially his kids and his grandkids. When he gets elected to president in two weeks, I hope he abolishes the Department of Education. We do not need big government and teachers unions dictating what our children should be learning. Hopefully there will be a trickle-down effect to the school board. I honestly do pray for all of you, and I pray that you will come to know the God who created you and desires to have a relationship with you through Jesus Christ.

[00:58:09] may god bless you and may god bless america tyrone santos um just a quick observation when i when my oldest son started going to school i noticed you guys changed christmas break winter break said oh maybe government is opposed to religion but and we can celebrate hindus ramadan all kinds of religions but can't say christmas break gotta say winter break and

[00:58:44] things like that so i don't know maybe there's a double standard there that you all need to check out and the second thing my friend I heard you guys are not allowing her video to play because it's profane and I'm pretty sure the profane part she's just reading from a book in her high school good enough for or it's bad enough for your ears but good enough for our kids I mean that's what we're fighting against her get these get this smut out of the high school library out of school library shouldn't be there so what I really came to talk about was I send my son to school every

[00:59:21] I'm a single dad I gotta work so I feel like I'm sending him into a war zone where our values just don't align at all like I am really I love the truth I think only good comes from the truth and I send him to the school and you guys tell him force him if somebody's trans you gotta lie to them I just don't think lying is good and I don't agree with it and uh but maybe lying in this case I've never heard of a instance where lying is actually good for somebody so I I wish I could send them to private school which um brings me to my point about school choice if your budget

[00:59:59] for public schools is which I know it's actually a lot of money it's like 19,000 plus per student what I ask for you guys to do is do some kind of a voucher system where I could take like 5,000 that you're spending on my kid to send them to your school send them to school I want to send them to you guys keep the 15,000 or 14,000 that you spend on other kids um just consider that if you're having budget problems I mean I would take that deal all right thanks have a good night Anmesh Gupta.

[01:00:43] Hi. Good evening board members. My name is Animesh and I am here to highlight like workforce credentials and false positives at McLean High School. I would like to highlight two issues that I experienced in McLean High School.

[01:01:02] There was a false acquisition on assignments due to McLean administration's ignorance and false positives and lack of human empathy when dealing with ADHD and recovering health sickness my child is accused of using AI to generate his assignment however his planning draft document and the Associated School supplied editing video which is pretty long shows otherwise it is an harassment so why the false acquisition intimidation and exaggeration based on the facts at hand

[01:01:39] I'm requesting that this false acquisition against my child be fixed Since FCPS teacher at McLean created the issue they have the evidence they should fix it why the child has to suffer two weeks and plus is impacting his sleep studies and everything else and crying I mean there is a limit I'm also requesting that the McLean administration be forthcoming with the documents and facts and next steps to the appeal including the timeline currently it's a harassment with McLean administration they're just closing the issue and saying redirecting to the FCPS

[01:02:18] FERPA and then FCS SPERVA after two days are directing it to NOVA I mean we are like it's it looks like a third world country where you're being stepped around like a magical chair requests that McLean administration should not accuse a child without the presence of a parent or a garden and factual evidence they should students should only be cited on factual evidence just not like

[01:02:44] thin hair. Cole Mallard. Good evening, Dr. Reed and Fairfax County Public School Board. My name is Cole Mallard. I'm a Vietnam vet, a radio broadcast journalist with the Voice of America,

[01:03:18] now retired, a Fairfax County taxpayer for over 50 years, and the father of three children who attended FCPS schools. Today, our daughter does not think she'll be able to send her children, our grandchildren, to FCPS due to the sex education curriculum and, most recently, obscene books.

[01:03:39] We also have major concerns related to human trafficking and sex trafficking as detailed in the January 22nd resolution. Nothing further from the FCPS school board on this. Recently, FCPS refused to deselect a number of obscene books, including "Long Boy" and "Gender Queer", depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct in violation of federal law, including five books upon which FCPS Chair Carl Frisch took his oath of office in December of last year.

[01:04:14] You have created a tangled web of sex ed and grooming, putting students at greater risk of being trafficked, because as you stated, human trafficking is an unperceived threat to FC students. It's on track to eclipse drug trafficking by revenue generated, evidence that criminal organizations such as cartels are targeting Northern Virginia as an especially lucrative market.

[01:04:41] Student victims have been identified in every FCPS high school, some middle and even some elementary schools. A sickening example of grooming is socio-emotional learning survey in which middle schoolers are asked, how many people have you had sex with in the last three months and sixth graders in emotional social health watch an intense sex trafficking video where victims are forced to have sex with up to

[01:05:08] 30 customers a day this type of video should not be shown to pepin chuma thanks so much um i'm a ferris county resident a graduate of langley high school which is an excellent high school unfortunately is being disserved by the current principal who has been an abject failure in almost every capacity some folks here talked about sexual predators that's what this

[01:05:46] issue is - I'm sorry I didn't talk about sexual predators they're supporting a sexual predator but the sexual predators at Langley High School are of a different note the principal there has allowed to two people who are sex offenders to be hired cultivated created a culture of allowing this to occur in our schools not keeping our kids safe and there's no accountability for her actions somehow inexplicably instead of firing her which is the only thing that should have been done an investigation firing she's been hired promoted a classic example of failing up and instead of firing her which she should have done which should have happened

[01:06:23] this woman is now going to be in charge of 36 schools 37 000 students and even more concerning is when the school board two members here representing region four braddock and springfield in announcing her promotion indicated that she had credentials that she has not earned the principal of Langley High School is not a doctor despite the comments and the introduction that she was received as she was misrepresented to the people of your two magisterial districts.

[01:06:52] There is simply no excuse for her continued role in Fairfax County Public Schools. There is simply no role for the lack of oversight that this school board and this superintendent has shown and there's simply no reason why she is not gone immediately and that the students of Langley High School are not protected.

[01:07:15] George Becerra. Good evening, Dr. Reed Chairman Frisch and school board members. I want to talk to you tonight about transparency and new business item 8.01 As much as we hear sometimes in this auditorium about this board not being transparent two recent actions I feel have improved this misperception first You have added video recordings of all your committee public meetings This will stop from people saying you are meeting behind closed doors

[01:07:53] And to now they potentially staying home behind their closed doors at the same time all these meetings are now held in room 1600 in gatehouse. This room is more welcoming to the public than other rooms previously assigned. Second is your public display summary of Superintendent Reed's performance evaluation in board docs. This is the first time I've seen any board do this. I have no doubt this was made easier by Superintendent Reed's openness towards this accountability. This summary also gives the board a public reason of what is usually answered in the third year of FCPS superintendents term which is is either to extend a contract or not.

[01:08:25] But tonight's new business item, oops, sorry, foaming out. This board will have this opportunity at your next meeting on November 14th. Early indications are that an extension will be made to June 30th, 2028.

[01:08:45] This seems like a logical extension date. This would hold Dr. Reed accountable to the potential boundary changes submissions in 2026 where currently her contract ends. This also allows if a new superintendent is brought in 2028 for them to have an opportunity to create a new strategic plan during their second year.

[01:09:02] after a first year of getting to know the system. This new strategic plan will start as the current one ends. Smooth transition and no hiccups. Also, if I can be selfish, I don't have to be on top of the vision of a new superintendent because my daughter will have graduated several weeks prior to Dr. Reed's contracted knee. On a separate matter, as we are approaching Veterans Day, I'd like to thank Dr. Reed and this board for having the goal of making FCPS a purple star division.

[01:09:24] Over 13,000 military kids attend FCPS schools where their parent or parents are making sacrifices we can't even imagine in this world we live in. you very much. Stacy Langton. It's been three years since I came here to tell you to get rid of the pornographic books in our school libraries. You didn't like my message, basically tried to shoot the messenger. The assistant superintendent said she likes to read them to her kids as bedtime

[01:10:03] stories and you all kept the smut. Chairman Carl Frisch even swore in on all the books I challenged last December as a way of giving me and the parents a big middle finger. I exposed a book called " Queer: A Graphic History" which includes the disturbing practice known as "pegging."

[01:10:19] Pegging is the reversal of the gender roles where a woman wears a dildo to screw a man anally, and it's taught to our kids here as though it's normal. You know who else loves pegging besides you guys? Sean P. Diddy Combs, the rapper who sits in jail right now in Brooklyn for the drugging and raping of men, women, and children as young as nine. He just loves pegging according to a book written by the mother of his three children: America has had enough.

[01:10:47] We are sick and tired of fighting with you woke libtards on the school board. We are tired of the elites and their woke mind virus destroying and raping our children's minds. So on November 5th, we the people are going to walk into the voting booth and we're going to vote for President Donald J. Trump. And a millionaire gets the same number of votes as a person without a job.

[01:11:06] The people see that the elites have ruined our lives. The people see that the elites hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. So on November 5th, Trump's election is going to be the biggest F.U. ever recorded in human history, and it will feel good.

[01:11:37] - Chair Frisch, that was our last public speaker. - Thank you, agenda item 5.01. Nope, excuse me, 4.01, student representative matters. I call on Ms. Sawant. Thank you, Mr. Frisch, and good evening, everyone. Tonight, I'd like to share student perspectives regarding the new grading policy from the recent superintendent's advisory council meeting.

[01:11:57] Students deeply appreciate the time and effort that was spent regarding revising the grading structure to standardize formative and summative categories, 70% summative and 30% formative. While this consistency is beneficial, the weighting doesn't work effectively in all classes, specifically depending on the subject that's being taught.

[01:12:15] One student mentioned that in math class, like calculus, the 70-30 split can be a challenge. Most of their grade comes from summative assessments like tests. However, the daily homework and classwork they receive and spend most of their time on falls under formative assessments. Since these are only 30% of their grade, students who might do well on daily assignments that they spend most of their week on but struggle with the few tests or experience test anxiety from the three or four summative tests in the summative category don't overall reflect their grade.

[01:12:44] For example, one student mentioned that she had 20 grades in the formative category category that was classwork and homework for math tests, but only three in the summative category. However, in a CTE class like STEM engineering or game design and development, the 70/30 weighting works well because most of what is done in class is leading up to a final summative project where everything builds up to that project, and it's appropriate to weigh heavily on the summative grade. While this weighting works great for some subjects, what I want to bring to your attention is the differences in the type of work that's done depending on the subject that's being taught. Now, with all that being said, summative assessments are allowed to be made up to 100%. In our student group, several

[01:13:21] students were appreciative of this policy, but some had some concerns. One student at McLean High School, and I quote, said, retaking to 100 removes the pressure from exams, but for many of my classmates, as well as myself, it also removes the motivation to study, because I know I can just make it up. This creates a pileup of retakes, adding stress for both students and teachers who have to administer these retakes and then grade these retakes as the new unit and the new content is still being taught. It puts students behind not only on the previous test but the current one as well. Additionally teachers must balance teaching the new material while also grading and ordering corrections

[01:13:59] for any student who wasn't able to make up to a hundred no matter the score that they got. In our discussion with this region students suggested capping retakes at a lower score such as 90 instead of the current 100% and the previous 80% 80% because it would still offer the opportunity to improve without turning it into a battle for perfection and make teacher workload more manageable.

[01:14:21] On another note, I'm very excited and the students in the Superintendent Advisory Council are as well about the new course offerings that are proposed on the consent agenda tonight. Oakton has recently added Spanish for fluent speakers and SAC delegates have talked about the interest this has garnered at Oakton, so I'm so happy to see that Spanish for heritage speakers for honors will be offered in school next year. Also there are several pre-professional and CTE classes that are adding an extra weight in studio art, cloud computing, cyber, and pre-professional musical theater. So that's all very exciting stuff and I know that more students will be taking these

[01:14:56] classes now. I also saw that AP seminar is now being proposed as a graduation requirement which further supports our advances we've made in the strategic plan and supports portrait of a graduate. With course offerings in mind I want to circle back to AVID. AVID is currently only being offered in 15 high schools right now, but Oakden's AVID program, which currently has four sections, one for each grade, has earned students in over $800,000 in scholarships last school year. I strongly believe that AVID should be expanded to other schools as well. Speaking of Portrait of a Graduate, applications for the Portrait of a Graduate Presentations of Learning Secondary Advisory Committee are now

[01:15:35] open and this is a student-driven initiative to collect student feedback and portrait of a graduate experiences, evaluate the current attributes, and explore possible academic incentives in the future. Students can apply at tinyurl.com/fcpspogpol, and I also have more information in the link on board docs.

[01:15:53] With all this being said, I just wanted to mention how honored and grateful the Superintendent's Advisory Council was to host the regional assistant superintendents and discuss all of the issues and questions we had about what goes on at our school this week. It's these discussions that will help push student advocacy and change in FCPS.

[01:16:11] Let's end first quarter off strong and to those who celebrate, thank you. - Thank you, Ms. Sawant. Before we move on, I do want to congratulate. I received board on doing such a great job together today.

[01:16:32] So well done everyone, well done. And thank you for the course correction. There are reasons things are not in scripts, right? All right, stay tuned everyone.

[01:16:52] For what reason? We're working on that, we're working on that. you could tell her as a sidebar I could miss Maren yes thank you I really appreciate the comments of our student board rep as always she is right on top of the topics du jour our grading committee our governor's committee is working on grading I am too excited about the course offerings I just want to point out though they're not yet approved because they're on the new business part of our agenda so I just I love your your eagerness but I just

[01:17:31] didn't want people to think that they were already in place so next next time will make it happen. Okay thank you. Thank you Ms. Marin. All right agenda item 5.01 action item certification of closed meeting compliance. In order to comply with section 2.2-3712d 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 October 24th 2024 to the best of each board member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements and only such

[01:18:06] business matters as were identified in the closed motion the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board during the closed meeting do I have a motion Mr. McElvain do I have a second Mr. Moon all those in favor Miss Marin Mr. Dixit Mr. McElvain Mr. McDaniel Miss Anderson Miss Sizemore Heiser Mr. Dunn Mr. Moon Miss Lady Miss St. John Cunning Dr. Anderson and myself that is unanimous agenda item 5.02 action item amendment to the strategic governance manual

[01:18:39] regarding proclamations I call on Dr. Anderson for a motion thank you I move that the school board approve the changes to the strategic governance manual as detailed in the agenda item attachment is there a second second Mr.

[01:19:00] Dunn Dr. Anderson would you like to speak to your motion yes I would oh sorry I'm clicking a little bit too much yes I would like to speak to my motion I know that I have sent probably no fewer than four emails to the board about this but I wanted to highlight a couple of things that I think are important and a couple of things that I believe we need to have some further discussion on.

[01:19:27] The gist of my change that I initiated is to remove the school anniversaries from the allotments of school board members. I think wholly we agree on that. Other things that ended up happening in the course of addressing that are just some formatting issues, which you'll see largely, and just some restructuring, just to provide some greater clarity.

[01:19:51] I do believe because we have a number of schools that are experienced or enjoying their anniversaries in any given year, I would like very much for the board to consider a formatting that is similar to the approach of VHSL Honors, where we have all of the schools come and we offer their awards in one night rather than peppering them throughout the school year.

[01:20:16] 'cause I think as a single magisterial member, I have probably eight schools this year enjoying a school anniversary, a significant school anniversary. Another issue that I think should be a discussion that I'm hoping folks provide their opinions on this evening is the definition of magisterial, because in my amendment, I have offered that those school anniversaries be presented by a magisterial member, And I think there's some conversations that could be had for us to codify whether magisterial means in the magisterial district

[01:20:55] or by the member that has the most students of that school. And lastly, I do wanna say thank you to those who provided feedback over the course of the last few weeks as I worked on this.

[01:21:12] And oh, and the last thing that I didn't speak about is the change of the timeline by which we provide the proclamations to the staff for the school board to provide their feedback, just moving that timeline in order for us to be complete with the process and time to invite individuals who would be honored by those proclamations.

[01:21:40] At current, we have no more than two days to do such, and it's been a challenge to have individuals and groups be able to come to our school board meetings to receive these proclamations within that timeline and I think that's it for right now thank you thank you Dr. Anderson Mr. Dunn would you like to speak to your second uh no thank you thank you Mr. Dunn Miss Marin I propose an amendment go ahead and state your motion I propose an amendment in the section of the document that is posted on board docs titled individual school board member proclamations in the first bullet

[01:22:20] where the following language is used in replacement of what is officially offered So in recognition of a current event outstanding student teams ensembles and publications in accordance with guidelines of school board proclamations recognizing outstanding student teams ensembles and publications and FCPS staff members.

[01:22:38] Is there a second. Second Miss Lady. Miss Marin would you like to speak to your motion. Yes I think this was just an omission by mistake. We certainly want to include the board the opportunity to recognize our wonderful staff members when occasion arises. So this will just include FCPS staff members as as able to be recipients of a recognition.

[01:22:59] Thank you, Miss Marin, Miss Lady, would you like to speak to your second? Not more than to echo Miss Marin that we do need to have the opportunity to recognize our fantastic staff. Thank you. Seeing no others, we'll vote on the amendment to the motion, which would include the staff provision here.

[01:23:15] Can we put the motion on the screen, please? Or the amendment on the screen, please. So again, we're voting on the amendment to this motion.

[01:23:43] All those in favor of the amendment on the screen. Ms. Marin, Ms. Dixit, Mr. McIlveen, Mr. McDaniel, Ms. Anderson, Ms. Sizemoreheiser, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Moon, Ms. Lady, Ms. St. John Cunning, Dr. Anderson and myself. That is unanimous. Moving along, we will go back to the amended motion now. I have Ms. Sizemoreheiser.

[01:24:03] Yeah, I just wanted to mention, I think I was the one that raised the question about defining magisterial and I do think it's important because what I don't want to have happen going in the future is us having a disagreement about who the, if we're going to codify that the magisterial bring the certain thing we need to define what that is I know I think I received an email yesterday or today I'm being asked if I want to offer an amendment and be perfectly honest in the day I didn't have time to come up with an amendment make all the phone calls I didn't think it's fair to bring an amendment without that but I do think we should define magisterial my my

[01:24:38] personal preference would be to define it by a student number population because I think that's how we generally use my distilled for everything else so I don't if I can do it without objection to define magisterial or I'm happy to offer an amendment. I just didn't have time to put that together in a day. So I just want to make that comment.

[01:25:02] Thank you, Ms. Sizemore-Hyser. Mr. McDaniel. Yeah, my question was around how do we define the magisterial member because there's one school that I would argue does not apply to where it physically sits, which is TJ. So how are we going to define what we do with TJ? And if it's by student count, that might get a little sticky. So we need to have a discussion around TJ as well.

[01:25:24] Thank you Mr McDaniel. Miss Dixit. Miss Marin sorry. Apologies. Yes I just want to advocate to be sure that the board receives in a timely manner the updated membership numbers which will designate where students are and that these could shift so that everyone is aware that September 30 is when the membership gets due I believe and we usually have received a breakdown of the number of students per school.

[01:25:57] So I guess it would be the majority or what not but kind of mathematical to designate. and would have to be reviewed each year thank you miss baron miss sizemarheiser sorry mr mckelveen sorry we're a little shifted over here um first of all i want to thank um dr anderson as well as all the folks who brought um comments on this forward uh coming back to the board uh i found this um proclamation process to be overly restrictive um in some ways it still remains

[01:26:33] that way but uh i think this is very appropriate i know that last year i brought two proclamations both of, one of which was for a publication, another was for students. And I just, there's so much going on in the district that we need to be flexible and provide for honoring all the people who deserve to be honored, so this is an important step.

[01:26:57] And on the issue that Ms. Sizemore-Heiser raised, I am certainly supportive of having the magisterial bringer of proclamations be the one who has the most students in the district.

[01:27:12] Thank you. Thank you Mr. McElveen. Ms. Anderson. One thing that Dr. Anderson and I spoke about when we were working on this earlier this week was the fact that if we did this like we do VHSL we would not need to worry as significantly about which magisterial district schools sat in in order to do the anniversary.

[01:27:33] that is one aspect of why utilizing the process that we already have set forward for those events would be helpful here particularly if we did at the beginning of the year for all schools that had their anniversary in that year thank you miss anderson i'd like to direct people to the motion uh miss Sizemore heiser you have a go back i'm so sorry my hand is up i'm sorry i missed you uh dr anderson then miss Sizemore heiser no it's fine um i know it's a little challenging virtually i i am in full support for us to codify um how is it that we uh how we um

[01:28:12] define magisterial but i'd like for us to maybe have some clarity that it would only be for this process and for the proclamation process alone and not outside of that because as it stands um the TJ school that was raised by Mr. McDaniel I am the magisterial member for TJ because it sits in the Mason district I do not have the largest percentage of students at TJ and I would not want that to be different but if we're talking about the proclamation process I think we also need to

[01:28:48] make sure we carve that out and I appreciate what Ms. Anderson has just shared if we're going to Have the presentation take place differently then that becomes smooth because we all just generally take turns and to present those Recognitions, but I would want to make sure we are limiting it to proclamations only not a larger definition Thank you. Dr. Anderson. I'm going to take a turn really quickly and maybe we can push the conversation around the magisterial to another date because

[01:29:22] We have a follow-on motion that would delay the implementation of this until January that gives the board plenty of time to talk with each other To kick the tires on all of these different facets that have been brought up by other board members about TJ about populations versus location I mean I have some high schools where I represent a larger percentage than the person whose School it resides in so Or whose district it resides in so it's just a little unique, right?

[01:29:48] I also have some high schools that are not in my district that I represent a larger percentage of than the ones that are in my district. There's no rhyme or reason to it, right? And so I think that this is something that we can tackle between now and January when this goes into effect.

[01:30:07] Ms. Sizemore-Heiser for a go back. Well, I appreciate that. I think perhaps we need to memorialize that in a follow-on motion that we will define that because I don't want to be back here in six months having battles over who gets to do this because we didn't define that.

[01:30:29] This is part of why I know some of you probably get sick of me hearing it's important to have space to have these conversations before we get here. And there's always a balance between efficiency, right, and it's just these are the pieces that's helpful sometimes to tease out in work sessions or retreats or committees.

[01:30:47] But we always don't have the time to do everything in those areas either, So I understand there's a desire for efficiency sometimes. So I would be uncomfortable voting on this without some sort of direction that we would define this because as we can see I have at least two schools I can think of if not more that are in the Braddock district where Miss Anderson has the majority of students the Springfield district representative.

[01:31:09] So this is something that directly impacts my district and Miss Anderson's district and there's a significant overlap between Braddock and Springfield in that way. So I do think, and this is really important to define, because I don't want us to continue to have to tweak this.

[01:31:25] So I would suggest that we at minimum do a follow on motion. I'm happy to bring a motion today to say it's, I don't have a strong preference, but we just need to pick one. So maybe we can make a follow on motion that it would go to Peck to determine Magistrilo versus physical location to bring back to the board for a vote.

[01:31:47] I'll let board members sidebar. The motion has to pass before we can take a potential follow on. So there's probably a few minutes where this can happen in the next few minutes. Miss St. John Cunning has not had a turn yet. Go ahead.

[01:32:02] - So basically I just want to say that magisterial already has a definition and if we're gonna, it doesn't matter what word we use, but we represent magisterial districts that are governed by location. So we can call it anything else.

[01:32:20] That's just the only thing that I wanted to say. - Thank you, Miss St. John Cunning. - Dr. Anderson. - Thank you. I just wanted to make sure my understanding of the followings that are to come, and maybe I could wait on that, will not necessarily put off everything that is being presented tonight until January, just one small section.

[01:32:45] So I just wanted to make sure that I offered that because I wouldn't want for their misunderstanding before we take this vote. - Thank you, Dr. Anderson. - That's it. - Thank you, Dr. Anderson. Ms. Lady.

[01:33:01] - Yeah, I guess as I'm sitting here listening and I'm looking at some of the audience can actually answer this question probably, but how quickly can we get TJ's base school in real time? Because I don't know that it's noted in a way to pull it from CIS. Does anyone know how to answer that question? I know we know based on who's accepted if people leave. We could certainly identify the district location for students who are enrolled. Is that what you're asking for TJ?

[01:33:37] But that would be by their base school not necessarily by their magisterial district by residents Well, because we're engaging in boundary work, we're gonna be able to we'll have those. Oh, that's right We have the new technology. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Well said ma'am. All right Seeing no others we will vote for the motion that is on the screen All those in favor of the motion on the screen as amended miss Marin, mr. McIlveen mr. McDaniel miss Anderson

[01:34:11] Mr. Dunn, Ms. Lady, Ms. Sejan Cunning, Dr. Anderson, and myself. All those opposed? Abstentions? Mr. Moon, Ms. Seismar Heiser, Ms. Dixit? Will the clerk read the vote? The vote is 9-0-3. The motion carries. Thank you. The motion carries. I call on Ms. Anderson for a follow-on motion.

[01:34:37] I move that the proposed changes to the governance manual will be adopted with the following conditions. Changes to the creating or the guidelines for creating proclamation section will go into effect starting January 10th, 2025. And changes to school anniversary recognitions will be retroactive from the start of this school year.

[01:34:57] So 2024-25. Is there a second? Ms. St. John Cunning. Ms. Anderson, would you like to speak to your motion? When I spoke with our clerks about how this would be implemented, we did quite an extensive dive into the calendar to determine what the best number of days was for all of the different timelines.

[01:35:18] And what we determined is that it would be best to start after the first regular meeting in January because that's the first moment that it's a regular schedule moving forward. So that was the reason for the for moving it to January 10th so that would be the first day that any new proclamation would be due in that for that next meeting and then I just wanted to make sure that the what everything was retroactive for this year so that people who had already brought forward proclamations didn't have them count against their their to thank you Miss Anderson Miss St. John Cunningham would you like to speak to your follow on motion second just to echo what Miss Anderson said I agree.

[01:35:57] thank you miss Sizemore heiser sorry I'm gonna speak after this following motion well was there space to speak to still this topic after this following I wanted to I mean yes sorry my mic wasn't on mr. Dunn I I turned off my light I didn't catch that mr. Dunn I'm sorry I was sidebarring thank you oh dr.

[01:36:35] Anderson thank you just for clarity I just wanted to ask the clerk if they could put that section on the screen the guidelines for creating proclamations it four bullets again just wanted to be clear in terms of what is it that we are going to be voting on in this um in this follow-on which I will be supporting thank you Dr. Anderson seeing no others we will vote for the follow-on motion that is on the screen all those in favor of the follow-on motion on the

[01:37:13] screen Ms. Marin Ms. Dixit Mr. McElveen Mr. McDaniel Ms. Anderson Ms. Sizemoreheiser Mr. Dunn Mr. Moon Ms. Lady Ms. St. John Cunning Dr. Anderson and myself that is unanimous the motion uh carries Ms. Sizemore-Hyser I call Ms. Sizemore-Hyser for a motion thank you um I would like to make a mo a follow-on motion to refer this to committee to come back in time for a vote before the implementation date of January 10th 2025 for a clear definition of magisterial for this governance

[01:37:47] manual section is there a second I'll second it Mr. McDaniel all right there's a motion to refer to which committee back to public engagement committee to return to the board with a plan for addressing the magisterial question Ms. Anderson the only thing I would do want to speak to is that this section related to um related to the guidelines for creating proclamations does not impact which magisterial district so that that was a clear a clarification that Dr. Anderson was

[01:38:26] trying to bring forward is that the clarification that portion is in a different section of the the governance manual, so we can absolutely still send it to PEC to move forward. I just want to make sure that up until that point, we're still going to have this gray area related to magisterial. I'm sorry. I violated parliamentary procedure by not having the sponsors speak to their motion. Ms. Seizmerheiser, would you like to speak to your motion? I think this whole conversation, which is taking a lot of time for what I think is not really that big of a deal issue, and I don't even have strong feelings, is why I just want to kind send it to committee that so we just have clarity and then we can move on

[01:39:03] regarding that as one of my colleagues mentioned there is a definition of magisterial which is geographical and what I didn't understand and I put an email on asking the what I asked was the question what is what's what are we intending by magisterial for this I didn't get an answer back other than a suggestion to bring a motion which implied to me that we needed to have clarity because if there was clarity I would just got an answer and this is the definition of magisterial so I just think it's for ease we send it to peck and if they want to stick with the same definition we already have that's fine i i'm but i don't want

[01:39:38] it we have spent three years continually bringing this same section of the governance manual back to the board and i don't want to have another reason to do that i'd like to just get clarity and be done with it thank you miss sizemore heiser mr mcdaniel would you like to speak to your motion no all right the motion on the screen would request that peck return to the board with a suggestion on dealing with the the um magisterial question all those in favor miss dixit mr mcdaniel miss anderson miss sizemarheiser miss lady miss st john cunning and

[01:40:11] myself and mr dunn all those opposed mr moon mr mckelveen miss marron and dr anderson abstentions will the clerk read the vote all right can you please take that vote all right um we will redo uh the vote all those in favor of the motion miss dixit mr mcdaniel miss anderson miss sizemarheiser

[01:40:50] mr miss lady miss st john cunning and myself all those opposed mr moon mr dunn dr anderson miss marron and mr mckelveen will the clerk read the vote uh the vote is eight four zero the motion carries thank you will the clerk confirm whether they were referring to the initial vote which was

[01:41:25] eight or the second vote which was seven five we're not voting again sorry it was seven five thank you the motion carries agenda item 5.03 action item election results certification and exclusive bargaining agent recognition i call on mr dunn for a motion i move that the school board

[01:42:01] certify the results and recognize and certify the fcf psa as the exclusive bargaining agent for the administrators and supervisors bargaining unit is there a second second mr mckelveen mr dunn would Would you like to speak to your motion? I applaud the ability or I applaud this as a momentous occasion for FCPS to engage in collective bargaining with our administrators and supervisors and it's a continued step forward in treating our administrators and supervisors as equals with whom we will engage

[01:42:37] in bargaining for pay and working terms and conditions to ensure that FCPS provides a world-class environment in which every employee can feel valued and part of the governance of our school system. Thank you Mr. Dunn Mr. McIlveen nothing further.

[01:42:55] Thank you. Mrs. Seizmorheiser. Light is on. All right.

[01:43:11] Sorry. All right. Seeing no others. We will vote for the motion that is on the screen. All those in favor Miss Marin Miss Dixit Mr. McIlveen Mr. McDaniel Miss Anderson Miss Seizmorheiser Mr. Dunn Mr. Moon Miss Lady Miss St. John Cunning Dr. Anderson myself that is unanimous congratulations the motion carries agenda item five point agenda item 5.04 action item amending policies 1705 1710 4450 and 4510 and the strategic governance manual to

[01:43:46] address protected rights of exclusive representatives i call on mr fresh for a motion i move to address protected rights of exclusive representatives by amending school board policies 1705 1710 4450 and 4510 and amending the strategic governance manual as detailed in the agenda item is there a second i second mr fresh would you like to speak to your motion yes uh to put this very clearly we just voted to confirm the selection of a bargaining unit by our principals and managers

[01:44:20] and this step is in furtherance to a previous vote of the board to confirm our other bargaining units and obviously when a system for the last half century has been meeting conferring to come to agreement on all sorts of employee matters and we shift to collective bargaining our policies and our governance manual must also shift and so I appreciate all of the staff effort that went into these updates to and to ensure that we are not only following through on the spirit of our

[01:45:00] collective bargaining resolution but abiding by uh federal labor relations laws and regulations uh to ensure that our employees are duly represented by the representatives that they have chosen uh for negotiating and collective bargaining uh so uh it's very straightforward in that regard and i appreciate all of my colleagues uh for uh their support on this effort Ms. Dixit, would you like to speak to your second?

[01:45:28] No, I just agree with what Mr. Fischit said. Not seeing any lights. Oh, Dr. Anderson, I'm sorry.

[01:45:48] Okay, I'm so sorry. I had some issues with the audio, was trying to get that on. I just had a question as I previewed much of the policies. Perhaps staff can speak to who would fall outside of some of the committees and, I guess, gatherings as identified in policy 4510 and 4550 because not every employee group is covered by collective bargaining what is the avenue for those groups to engage with the board and with

[01:46:25] staff with the superintendent so good evening dr. anderson and board currently with the certification of FCF PSA this evening for administrators prince principal supervisors and administrators all of our full-time employees are now represented by a union FEU represents our licensed and instructional license instructional and operational employees as well as our hourly contracted to

[01:47:01] include our bus drivers food nutrition service workers and our parent family liaisons the only employees now that FCF PSA has been certified that would fall outside of this are our hourly employees who are not full-time employees those employees do not receive benefits and if they indeed chose to gather and ask for some kind of meeting with the board or the superintendent, they would be able to do so because they do not have an exclusive representative.

[01:47:38] Okay. Thank you. That's very important because I think there needs to be clarity because I believe all of us have been asked questions of employees in terms of how they can engage with us. So I think it's important to have clarity that for just about most of FCPS employees, those who are now represented by collective bargaining units will need to go through that process in order to engage on issues and mr smith can you clarify is this every single issue that exists that must go

[01:48:14] through that channel or are there other issues to which even groups that are covered that are part of collective bargaining units can engage the board and the superintendent about separately so the the resolution that was passed by the board focuses on compensation which would be wages benefits hours and working conditions those issues would be then represented by the exclusive representative which are now two feu and fcfpsa and for more clarity we will wait until we are able

[01:48:51] to bring collective bargaining agreements or cbas to the board for approval before we get into the details of those things that we can and cannot or shall and shall not engage on thank you much appreciated and the last thing that i wanted to raise is while there will be some other things that are not part of the collective bargaining table which we will hear from you about in the near term. I do think there was some space here for us to reconsider the committee, the HRAC committee. I think we had an opportunity to perhaps engage in some more conversations to

[01:49:31] figure out how we could pivot in lieu of eliminating the committee entirely. Thank you. Mr. Moon. Thank you, Madam Chair. You know, last time the board decided to send a letter out to HRAC, I didn't support that. As far as this particular motion is concerned to the extent that motion includes deserving HRAC, I would not be able to support because I still do not agree with

[01:50:05] the manner in which the board made a decision to deserve HRAC and the notion that there is nothing that HRAC could contribute to the work of the board related to human resources issues within FCPS I simply do not agree. Seeing no other speakers I'm going to go ahead and call for the vote of the vote which is on the screen. All those in favor. Ms. Marin, Ms. Dixit, Mr. McElveen,

[01:50:41] Mr. Frisch, no I'm sorry Mr. McDaniel, Mr. Frisch, Ms. Sizemore-Hyzer, Mr. Dunn, Ms. Lady, and Ms. St. John Cunning and myself. All those opposed. Mr. McElveen, Mr. Moon, and Dr. Anderson AND I BELIEVE THAT.

[01:51:00] WOULD THE CLERK READ THE VOTE? THE VOTE IS 9-3-0. THE MOTION CARRIES. THANK YOU. AGENDA ITEM 5.05, ACTION ITEM, STRATEGIC PLAN GOAL 1 REPORT, STRONG START PRE-K 12 PRESENTATION AND VOTE.

[01:51:23] I CALL ON DR. REED FOR A PRESENTATION ON STRATEGIC PLAN GOAL 1. SO GOOD EVENING AND I'M THRILLED TO BE HERE THIS EVENING, CHAIRMAN FRISH AND MEMBERS OF THE BOARD TO TALK ABOUT GOAL 1.

[01:51:51] And as you recall, on October 8th, the board held a work session on the Goal 1 report. And tonight I'll be sharing some highlights from that report. If you're watching from home, the Goal 1 full report is posted to board docs.

[01:52:07] So I'm sure it'll be a great read either this evening or later this week. So just as a reminder, the Goal 1 report is our strong start pre-K-12. I'll just wait till we could advance thank you and so goal one recognizes that we could go to the next slide please well one recognizes that all students need to have a strong start for their educational journey and has six

[01:52:42] measures which are on this slide tonight I'm really going to be highlighting information from measures a B and D as you know we did review other measures during the work session and again the full report is on online so first we're going to take a look at our multilingual learner progress towards English proficiency and this is measure D of this goal so each year our current multilingual learners are assessed using an assessment called the WIDA access and this monitors their English language development the WIDA assesses reading

[01:53:21] writing, speaking, and listening. And students have to make to find progress, excuse me, in all areas between two years of WIDA ACCESS scores to meet the state standard for progress toward English proficiency. So this is really exciting data for us. When you look at year-over-year with Fairfax County and the Commonwealth, as you know in 22-23 we were lagging just behind the Commonwealth proficiency average however this past year we did gain seven

[01:53:57] percentage points and are now above the Commonwealth of Virginia which is sitting at 53 percent and we're at 56 percent so we're really proud of the work of our educators students and families in achieving some significant growth this slide shows the percent of multilingual students that met the state standard progress toward English language proficiency and when compared to the baseline which is our prior three-year average we saw an 11 percentage point increase in multilingual learners meeting the state standard and as you look across the board across all categories of multilingual learners

[01:54:36] there were improvements ranging from 4 to 12 percentage points so we're very excited about that work and honestly it wouldn't be possible unless all our departments work together so we had a variety of different departments our schools our region offices that all worked together to meet these goals and I think this slide may be more than any this evening demonstrates what's happened or what's possible when all the arrows start to line up and move in the same direction we're really able to begin to get traction and I believe we'll continue to move to support our multilingual learners when you look at

[01:55:15] the growth target chart our success range of course is our target and our yellow line here is our actual so given that we exceeded our target we are within a standard deviation above our needed projected data point to hit our 2030 strategic plan targets so again we feel very positive about being on track and look forward to the amazing work ahead and again some of the things that contribute to this we've ordered multilingual support text with our basal

[01:55:53] curriculum and we're looking at home language texts as well in middle and high school moving forward so just a lot of excitement and very proud of our of our work in that area we again remain aligned and focused in these efforts So I want to highlight a few of the strategies that we used last year, and we'll continue using this year, which is on the next slide.

[01:56:24] Thank you. We're going to continue using our appropriate what we call ELD services and our multi-tiered system of support. Our Office of Multilingual Services works with schools to identify solutions and develop plans to support our long term multilingual students who continue to have academic challenges.

[01:56:46] And we're also continuing to support current teachers by looking at adding a multilingual endorsement to their license through the practice test, which allows more teachers to teach multilingual courses and enhances the instruction of those who remain in classroom settings.

[01:57:04] And I want to remind our board that our most recent data from Dr. Rich Polio was that I believe 89% of our staff are instructing a multilingual, at least one multilingual student. So it really, I think, is a huge advocacy point for all of our staff to have strong multilingual instructional pedagogical skills because really all of our staff are engaging and I think very effectively with our multilingual learners.

[01:57:35] As I mentioned earlier, our new K-12 basal resources have multilingual instructional materials for the very first time ever in our school division history, actually. Our Title I and multilingual offices have established something called the Explorers Program.

[01:57:54] And this has provided explicit multilingual instruction to 389 elementary multilingual students at seven Title I schools. that was a huge summer undertaking and we're very excited i think about the progress that that work has set us on during the 23-24 school year which was last year our multilingual services and title one office provided professional development to approximately 300 teachers in research-based classroom strategies to support language acquisition and proficiency in grade

[01:58:29] level standards that's an exciting undertaking and honestly an ambitious effort that will continue finally our multilingual services and office of school support facilitated data-driven strategic scheduling and programming conversations with 28 schools to identify and implement programming that match the specific needs of multilingual learners in their school each of those strategies our best practice research-based strategies and they account for the differences you see this evening in our student performance this year

[01:59:06] we're going to introduce four new strategies these four as first as part of the project momentum model schools with less than 50% of our multilingual students making adequate or expected we did growth they have developed an improvement plan and will be monitored and supported throughout the year and additional professional development will be provided nine middle schools and six high schools will be piloting a digital multilingual resource resource in addition to the use of new basal resources and this will support language

[01:59:43] acquisition and familiarity with the WIDA access assessment format I think the more our students can practice in the format of the assessment the better so Our Multilingual Services Team has received training in a research-based approach to scaffolding instruction and provided turnaround training for secondary English and language arts, mathematics, as well as mathematics teachers this school year.

[02:00:09] Finally, one of our goal innovation teams is focusing on multilingual learner success to identify additional strategies that will be featured in future goal reports. So lots of excitement for multilingual students, and I think the combination of the skills and interventions we provided last year with our new plans this year, we're really looking forward to seeing some exciting data next year.

[02:00:35] Now we're going to shift to our inclusive pre-K early childhood experiences, and what I also need to say is we're going to realize that pre-K is linked to higher graduation rates and attendance at post-secondary education which again are also connected to goal 5 our own data shows significant differences between students who have and those who have not had a pre-k experience both on their fall and spring readiness assessments so before we take a look at that data I would like to provide a little background information I think it's important to note that

[02:01:14] currently Virginia is not one of the states that has universal pre-k it is a family choice however we know there are a number of barriers to accessing childhood programs our Fairfax County pre-k programs serve students with IEPs and students with economic or other case educational risk factors during the 23/24 school year 25% of kindergartners had completed a pre-k program through fcps or fairfax county virginia preschool initiative the virginia preschool

[02:01:50] initiative is state-funded and it's designed to provide high quality preschool education at risk four-year-olds who are not served by the federal head start program so in looking at our chart this slide shows a three-year trend of pre-k experience the blue line which is the top line represents students accessing pre-k outside of FCPS the yellow line represents students

[02:02:22] accessing pre-k in FCPS or Fairfax County VPI programs and the gray line represented students without a pre-k experience so the data shows that both the number and percent of students without a pre-k experience is declining while the number and percentage of students receiving a pre-k experience within FCPS or outside are increasing, which is good news. FCPS is legally required to serve students who have an IEP, particularly in the early childhood programs, and approximately one percent of the budget for these

[02:03:00] programs comes from federal dollars, and the majority of funds used to provide these programs are local. For this school year, FCPS will also claim VPI funding to support programs. FCPS receives state federal and local funds to provide programs with students with economic or educational risk factors.

[02:03:22] All of these monies are somehow braided together and currently FCPS funds just over 60% of the budget for these programs through local dollars. So let's take a look at our data. It looks again that when families register their children for kindergarten they complete a pre-k experience form that provides fcps with information about their students pre-k experience and based on that information we see that 78 percent of

[02:03:58] students who enter kindergarten with a pre-k experience in the 23-24 school year this is a four percent increase from the adjusted baseline so 78 percent entered kindergarten with pre-k experiences a year ago it's also important for us to examine trends that we are seeing with kindergarten registration so as we walk through these slides or this slide left to right the far set of bars on the far left are kindergarten registrations over three years which are on a slight decline the

[02:04:35] second set of bars are the total number of kindergarten students registering without a pre-k experience which is going down that's the direction we want it to go the last diet the third set of bars show the number of kindergartners that are registering who are economically disadvantaged from baseline year to last year we've seen a 36 percent increase in this data point so of our registering kindergartners 36 percent more of them are economically disadvantaged that's a significant data point finally you can see

[02:05:13] in the fourth set of bars that the number of economically disadvantaged kindergarten students who are without a pre-k experience is actually increasing as well and that's a concern so the total number of kindergartners is not growing however there are more economically disadvantaged kindergartners and more economically disadvantaged kindergartners without a pre-K experience.

[02:05:39] And I think that's where we have some concern. Another way of looking at this data is the growing need to examine our application and waitlist data for income eligible programs. As you can see from this slide, FCPS is seeing significant increases in the number of income eligible applications for the Pre-K program, which is typically serving four-year-olds.

[02:06:06] We're also seeing a significant increase in the total number of income eligible students served by the FCPS Pre-K program. So on the left, you can see income eligible applications are at the highest they've been over the last several years, but we're also serving more income eligible students than we have.

[02:06:25] Unfortunately, we're also seeing an increase in the number of eligible students on the waitlist actually over the last four years increasing from 61 to 304 it's a five-time increase so this chart shows our progress towards serving income eligible three and four year old students who apply for pre-k programs so while we saw an increase in a steady increase over the last several years we saw a bit of a decline this year and to increase the percentage of income eligible students served, FCPS will need to continue to expand access to pre-K

[02:07:05] programs for these students. We're also monitoring our Child Find data and Child Find is the process of identifying children that may have potential special education needs. With the exception of 2020-2021, which was our COVID year, the referrals for Child Find have remained relatively consistent. FCPS has seen growth in the number of referred students who've been assessed and the number of students found eligible, this growth is important to monitor as it relates to

[02:07:37] potential expansion needs to support students with IEPs and as it relates to inclusion targets for pre-k. We cannot maintain a wait list for students who require an IEP. So within our pre-k goal, we're focused on both pre-k experience and ensuring those pre-k experiences are inclusive.

[02:08:03] So as you can see from this data, FCPS, we have made progress toward meeting the state targets for VDOE Indicator 6A. However, we're still not at the state target. We actually have made more progress in the last year than we have in the prior couple years.

[02:08:23] However, we have room to go. And as the number of students with IEPs served in FCPS early childhood programs increase, we must also ensure that they're adequate seats to serve students without IEPs in order that we're able to meet our state targets for Indicator 6A and ensure that programs can be co-located to allow for inclusion.

[02:08:45] The 23-24 data has not yet been released by VDOE. I also want to talk for a minute about what we're seeing with regard to fall kindergarten readiness as it relates to pre-k experiences. Just a reminder that FCPS uses three screeners to assess kindergarten readiness at the beginning of the school year and these screeners are in the area of reading, mathematics, and executive functioning. To be included in the data students had to participate in all three screeners and students had to meet benchmarks on all three to be

[02:09:21] counted as meeting the fall kindergarten readiness standard. These screeners were the phonological awareness literacy screening or PALS for reading the early mathematics assessment system or emas for mathematics and the child behavior rating scale cbrs for executive functioning during this year the 2024-25 school year we will administer the virginia language and literacy screening system the vowels to kindergarten students in place of the PALS it's kind of catching bells instead of bells okay um so this chart when compared with the adjusted baseline

[02:10:00] data overall fall kindergarten readiness declined by two percentage points which did not represent a statistical statistically significant difference only two student groups were significantly different from baseline reporting the students with disability group declined by five percentage points and the 504 plan student group declined by 11 percentage points it's important to note that the overall number of students with 504 504 plans when considering this data which is a very low and honestly less than 30 the

[02:10:39] baseline is a two-year baseline because there were only two years of data available we do have at the time of these assessments the kindergarten student WIDA screener assessments had not yet been reported therefore multilingual data is not included in last year's baseline data student 504 plan information included students who had a plan at any time during the school year the recalculated baseline data only includes students who had a 504 plan in the fall so that might explain the balance or the baseline changes so when

[02:11:17] looking at kindergarten readiness by pre-k experience we see significant gaps between those who had and those who didn't have a pre-k experience as you can see last year 69% of all students regardless of a pre-k experience met the fall readiness expectations however 76% of students who had a pre-k experience met the grade level expectations in the fall compared to only 39% of students who did not have a pre-K experience.

[02:11:47] And we can realize that while readiness didn't change significantly from baseline for all kindergartners, the readiness for students without a pre-K experience was significantly lower, nine percentage points compared to the baseline, which really signals to us that we may be seeing a widening gap of readiness for students with and without that pre-K experience, which is troubling since the number of students, again, that are in the financial, lower financial situation or economic hardship is increasing.

[02:12:21] So when compared to the baseline, students with disabilities overall had significantly lower percentages of readiness. And given the high rates of pre-K experiences, 91% for students with disabilities and a lower rate of kindergarten readiness on this metric, it's clear we need to investigate ways to further strengthen existing readiness efforts.

[02:12:44] And again, I think one of the key strategies here is greater inclusion. So that's just the basic strategy here. Finally, this slide shows the annual growth targets for kindergarten readiness, and they're shown here.

[02:13:01] The dark blue line represents progress of approximately 3.5 percentage points each year. That means in 23-24, we would have expected to have a 74% increase or 74% success rate compared to the 69% actual.

[02:13:18] So we've created similar targets for each student group based on their starting point in relation to the final targets, two of which are on this slide. Again the full report that's attached in board docs provides a chart detailing these targets.

[02:13:35] So we're looking at the strategic improvement effort here to focus on early childhood experiences, so I'm going to highlight some of the strategies we've used to address access to inclusive preschool. Two of our biggest strategic challenge in this area have been adequate funding for pre-K and the ability to co-locate programs to support inclusion.

[02:14:01] FCPS continues to advocate at the state and federal level for pre-K funding as well as working with our local fairfax county partners to support access to pre-k all elementary school renovations and the currently approved cip for fy 25 through 29 include at least two pre-k classrooms in the capital project scope and we have made investments in early childhood classrooms including 2.1 million and 26 positions in fy 25 to support inclusive preschool expansion we're

[02:14:37] going to need to continue expansion of this program in the spring of or summer of 2025 we plan to open additional early childhood programs in kingstown oh fairfax county plans to in kingstown and at the original mount vernon high school um so i think fairfax county has some plans uh to open preschool programs we are here in fairfax county uh strategically strategically placing new early childhood classrooms to optimize available inclusion opportunities to the greatest extent possible and it's really important that

[02:15:15] we think about our VPI dollars to provide as many inclusive classrooms as possible it's really important to co-locate programs with typically developing peers with our early learners we currently have used three different inclusion models this year depending on staffing and existing location we have the single teacher the paired classroom and itinerant models and data is being collected throughout the year to inform modifications for improvements as FCPS continues to expand inclusion to meet the needs of the community we're also

[02:15:53] partnering with James Madison University and George Mason University to offer a pathway for current FCPS staff to earn an early childhood special education endorsement or a dual endorsement in early childhood special education and early childhood education this would support a pipeline of qualified educators for our early childhood program which is necessary as we expand fcps staff coordinates the enrollment process and exchanging waitlist information with fairfax county to ensure that students can be served

[02:16:30] whenever possible last year the fcps pre-k program implemented several high leverage strategies to support multilingual learner success that will continue this year. One of the things that I had a chance to see was our new basal material being used in some of our FCPS early childhood classrooms with multilingual learners.

[02:16:52] And it's so important that we have really a rich research-based curriculum for our youngest learners. And again, promoting deeper levels of inclusion will really support higher levels of learning for our youngest learners. families who are on the current wait list for fcps programs or those that exceed the income threshold for fcps programs are directed to other offerings which include we play early literacy the hippie program bridge bridge to kindergarten and the family literacy program um it's uh there

[02:17:28] was our great programs though not really a full substitute for a robust inclusive preschool program we will be introducing three new strategies this year and these new strategies will allow us to collect additional data at the time of kindergarten registration we're going to be looking at piloting an early childhood tier one executive functioning curriculum in five schools which means approximately 225 students across 21 early childhood classrooms will participate in

[02:18:06] that data will be collected during this pilot year with the goal to expand use in early childhood classrooms next year which is 25 26 a goal innovation team focused on the availability of inclusive pre-k will identify additional strategies that will be presented in future goal reports so in terms of wrapping this particular goal report up want to share that we've made we can go to the next slide, please. We've made significant progress in multilingual learner growth, and we

[02:18:42] continue to recognize the work necessary to hit our 2030 targets. We've made positive strides toward pre-K experiences. However, we do still have gaps remaining, especially for our economically disadvantaged students. We did see the gap in fall kindergarten readiness widen, but again, predictably I think between those who've had a pre-k experience and those without and while we continue to expand seats for our income eligible students we have to also realize that we must continue our inclusion goals and we need

[02:19:20] to have students in head start and VPI placements in classrooms with our students who have IEPs we also are going to further examine the kindergarten readiness efforts and continue advocacy and partnership partnership efforts in order to address gaps in our pre-k needs so mr chairman this concludes this evening's goal one report thank you dr reed ms seismor heiser will get us started i'm struggling i'm struggling mightily

[02:19:55] with this one because i want to first commend you and your staff so much on the multilingual progress that is phenomenal an 11% increase in and English readiness it's it's just unheard of and 12% I believe the it's just phenomenal so I just economically disadvantaged I believe so I I love it I want to reward you I want to support you on that so please know the first half of this report you have my unanimous thanks and praise and support okay I also understand there significant funding issues Jay Lark showed us this preschool isn't funded I

[02:20:34] understand there's a lot of challenges there however we have 130 plus preschool autism classrooms and I do not and I've asked for six months what the plan is for inclusion for those classrooms and what I've heard and maybe I'm mishearing but what I've heard is if those kids are ready and what we know about inclusion is if we have a high bar of ready they'll never be ready especially not in that two three and four and so I will be a no on this report because there's a hundred and thirty classrooms with six to eight

[02:21:13] students per classroom and no plan all right do you dr. Presidio have a comment on the plans for yeah preschool autism classrooms yeah and I mean I appreciate the size more hyzers point on this and the urgency around it and certainly her advocacy for us to move as quickly as we can we are in the first year of our inclusion pilots for all of our preschool programs we have about 45 percent of our

[02:21:49] income eligible students participating in inclusion classrooms learning with students with disabilities nine of those classrooms are packed classrooms that are participating in that pilot but obviously we have a long way to go but But our goal is to get to full inclusion within the timeframe of our strategic plan.

[02:22:10] We are working with a consultant who's providing us with additional support around developing our longer-term strategies for inclusion. But to Ms. Sizemoreheiser's point, we're at the initial stages of that plan right now.

[02:22:26] I appreciate that. And you know, I've been talking to you all about this for a couple years now. My concern is around the word participating. definition of what participating inclusive access participating is different from classroom to classroom and that is what I my point I was making earlier and while we do need to tailor it of course but what we have what I have heard being described for inclusion for preschool autism classroom is not inclusion and that is my the and I understand we're new and but I will also put this and you know I've been saying this for a long time that we've got to

[02:23:03] look at program delivery and your data point here of like 90 plus percent of special education students who access preschool and have low levels of kindergarten readiness goes to my exact point of program delivery we're not doing it right because otherwise the outcomes would probably be a little bit better I understand these students may have higher needs walking into it so I wouldn't necessarily expect the outcomes to be the same but that's a big discrepancy there and I've talked about the fact that some of our programs the

[02:23:35] Preschool autism class was set up in the late 1990s, as they call it, right, the 19th century, early 2000s, right, my son was in the second year ever of this, which is how I know this, and I don't know how much it's been re-looked at or tweaked since then, and so I've tried, I just can't vote yes for this, and it breaks my heart because I want you to know that this is good work, and the work you're starting to do on inclusive preschool is finally, finally, amazing work.

[02:24:06] But we cannot leave out 130 classrooms from the actual definition of inclusion. So we need to look at what participating means. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Ms. Sizemoreheiser. Mr. Dunn. I was wondering, I was looking at slide 17, and I was looking at some of those figures for entering students.

[02:24:31] If you do the math, 46 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged, whereas FCPS advertised on its website, right now in our total student population, it's 35%, and then 30% of the students entering kindergarten are multilingual learners, but FCPS says right now total population is 21%, so those are significant increases, and I'm just wondering if the students entering kindergarten now are reflective of demographic changes that are going to be happening, continuing increases in the number of economically disadvantaged

[02:25:10] students and multilingual learners or if those percentages change over time to more like what the current percentages are? That's a great question. I think what we're realizing is that I think well clearly it's reflective of the kindergarten demographics because that's what we have here. I think that it is possible I know that over time students exit the multilingual program so that could account for lower percentages division-wide depending on when that

[02:25:47] when that occurs but I think it probably is reflective of a shifting demographic so if I mean if that's accurate then we are perhaps years away from becoming majority economically disadvantaged we have a number of schools that currently are I know but on a system-wide basis that would be a fundamental shift in the paradigm of our education system yes on slide 11 you speak about professional development that is provided to to teachers and I was

[02:26:24] wondering if you could just elaborate on what types of professional development is provided and it references strategies that promote English language development in content area settings can you just elaborate on sure and can we put slide 11 up please one of the things that we've talked a lot about very recently are GLAD strategies and not so much PSYOP which is a sheltered classroom model but we are certainly using those strategies and I'll ask Dr. Polio to add just a little bit more to that to

[02:27:03] be a little descriptive for you Dr. Polio so sure so the strat the specific some of the specific strategies that we're using in those classrooms and and we're introducing and want to introduce to all of our classrooms are for example just simply using visuals more for students you know visuals on the walls visuals in the text that they're reading we're also using we're implementing sentence frames and sentence starters conversation frames and conversation starters in all of our glad classrooms as well as this is a very quite simple strategy that we want to make sure that all teachers are using uh in fairfax county public schools as as dr reed mentioned we have you know

[02:27:42] know almost all of our teachers are teaching at least one multilingual learner I could go into there's other strategies but mainly focusing on oral language and oral language development is crucial to have as much talk as possible in all of our content classes so this is what we're looking for as we enter classrooms whether it's a kindergarten classroom or biology classroom we want to see teachers peer-to-peer talking and teacher to student talking as much as possible. Thank you. I was wondering if you could speak about, you mentioned

[02:28:17] on slide 10, that on the fourth bullet that you are offering ESOL practice test prep to certified teachers who wish to become ESOL endorsed. I was wondering beyond test prep, is there anything being provided in terms of continuing support or coaching to teachers who do become ESOL certified? Because You may pass a test, but whether you are provided, you know, lesson, you know, support for lesson planning or demonstrations or just a mentor or peer who can advise you in the implementation of those strategies.

[02:28:53] Great question. And I know Mr. Solomon is working on a NEA, has a micro-credentialing program. So we've looked into that between Mr. Solomon and Dr. Polio and their department. but either one of you could take the mentorship of newly certified.

[02:29:15] - Sure, I mean, and that definitely falls in our office's purview. So you're exactly right. I mean, there's the test prep is to essentially the practice test covers both classroom strategies, but also some linguistics in there. A lot of the prep that we do is on the linguistic side.

[02:29:33] The classroom teachers that come into the ESOL, come from say a classroom content classroom into an east hall position we offer them coaching just as kind of just as you mentioned so there we consider them first-year teachers just like as if they were a first-year teacher and our office is out working with those teachers who are first-year ESOL teachers throughout the county so we make sure that we're not you know leaving them with just assuming that they've passed the test and they know exactly what to do with students it's really a multi-year process to get our students I said, our teachers to be really strong with their multilingual learners.

[02:30:09] And on slide 17, I noted that the percentage of black students entering is 81%, which is on par with most of the other populations with the lower percentages for economically disadvantaged Hispanic and multilingual learners.

[02:30:31] That's the first time I've seen a chart from FCPS where black students are achieving on the same level as white students and Asian students in terms of, you know, achieving significant gains.

[02:30:47] And I think that's a wonderful data point, but do you have any insight into that data point? Like, could whatever strategies applied there be applied to multilingual learners and economically disadvantaged and Hispanic students? So I think one of the lessons that we talked about today with high school principals, and forgive me for the circuitous answer, but one of the things that we realized and that we were working to discuss is that the number one predictor of post-secondary success is really the academic intensity of the course-taking pattern.

[02:31:22] It wasn't racial demographics. It wasn't GPA or tests. it's the simple access to high rigor coursework taught well and when you think about this it's simply the access to pre-k experiences in this case that are quality pre-k experiences that as long as students of any of demographic have that access they're going to do well and so our role is to make sure that when we talk about excellence equity and opportunity that every student each and every student has access and opportunity

[02:31:57] for high quality instruction with high quality curriculum. Thank you, Mr. Dunn. Mr. McElveen. This is such an important discussion. I really appreciate having the opportunity to have it with this board.

[02:32:15] And I want to first off thank you in particular, Dr. Reed, for making sure that this discussion of pre-K was included as a priority in the strategic plan. I know that was a debate in the prior board. And it's so critical that it's here. and I do want to thank the prior board for them getting this to this point.

[02:32:34] I also do want to take a step back and acknowledge the work that's gone into this over the past decade plus, particularly my colleagues Tammy Koufax and Pat Hines, who really got the board focused on this issue at an early date, and certainly Mr. Presidio, who has carried the torch.

[02:32:53] So I think we all know that we can get the biggest bang for our buck when it comes to having strong and inclusive pre-K programs. One thing that surprised me in this report was the comparatively small wait list that we have.

[02:33:13] And Dr. Presidio can correct me, but I recall this being upwards of 1,000 students at one point. So wouldn't this be, shouldn't we hold this up as a big achievement that it's just at 300 and 300-some students now? Yeah, I mean, I think you're right.

[02:33:30] It's good that the wait list isn't as long as it's been in the past. I think, though, the issue in terms of the fluctuation and the differences over time, there's a number of factors that go into that, right? Like even the time period that we were looking at on this particular slide, like you saw the wait list being smaller the first year after the pandemic.

[02:33:51] And I would suspect there's probably reasons that maybe many parents weren't ready to send their children, you know, into school for the first time a year out from the pandemic. so there's a lot of different issues and factors that go into it i think what i'm most excited about is that the last two years that the board has passed a budget to increase the number of pre-k classrooms by 10 classrooms each year and that's what we need to continue to do is find those strategies to be able to create more access points for our students so that they don't end up on the wait list and we don't have a really long wait list so more work to do obviously to expand access for students some of its budgetary some of its facilities and and again the board's doing a

[02:34:30] lot of great work looking at boundaries to try to figure out how to be as efficient as we can with our facilities so i think if we stay on that road we'll continue to see that number on the wait list continue to go down great yeah i would just say for the future it would be good to have not just the past four years but the past decade or so just to see that fluctuation um secondly you know you mentioned skipped uh in this presentation um i don't know who is currently our staff liaison to skip right now but i'd be curious to hear what the current charge is for that committee i think dr presidio is our representative on skipped i'm one we actually

[02:35:08] have several which is great dr ponce and dr king are also representatives on skipped and then we have other staff members that support the work there's a couple major initiatives that the skip group has but pre-k is still one of the major initiatives which is great but again I think one of the things that some of us on the school side have continued to advocate for is setting more measurable targets to increase access to pre-k and trying to figure out what internal accountability mechanisms we're going to use to hold ourselves as a community accountable for

[02:35:44] that and I think until we do that we're going to continue to to struggle probably to meet some of these targets, but I am optimistic that that work through SCIPP that we are looking at setting new goals for next year, and hopefully that will be something that we'll be able to do as a group.

[02:36:01] I would say that's a politically optimistic answer, and it does not necessarily coincide with what I have heard and observed, which is that SCIPP was founded for one specific purpose. for pre-K. And over the past decade, it has morphed into this monster that is trying to deal with every issue in our county when the top priority is pre-K. So I encourage my colleagues who are now our board liaisons to get that committee back on track. And then I think the

[02:36:36] last thing is I know there was talk in the last board about creating a center in South County and I'm not sure if that is what has become the Mount Vernon Center but Dr. Presidio can you talk a little bit more about that so we had in the presentation some opportunities in partnership with the county to expand some pre-k slots and dr. Reed mentioned one of those is at the original Mount Vernon high school with about 200 new slots opening up there so we're hopeful that we're going to be able to have FCPS students enrolled there as well so that

[02:37:12] that is one of those areas, but I'm not sure that you might be thinking about some others as well. Okay, that's fine. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. McElveen. Ms. Marin? Yes, Dr. Reed. Well, regarding early childhood, I think you and your team have made lemonade out of lemons. I think you've tried to maximize the funds that we have. I've seen you work through the math to create the spots and to put them in schools so that we can be inclusive. I mean, we are, it really is painful for me to think back on my own career having started an early childhood policy in 2002

[02:37:48] and really see nothing significant change. I think it's really just a blemish on this nation that it's not important to educate our young children the way they need to be educated. So thank you for doing what you can. I think we need to continue to advocate to the state.

[02:38:06] I think we can figure out also how to better have our partnerships with the county who Also does a lot of work to educate our young children, but we are only going to be able to get so far, but thank you. Yeah, thank you, Ms. Merritt. And I think the current data point that is most compelling nationally is it would cost 1% of our current military budget to fund universal pre-K nationally.

[02:38:34] Well, and I believe the same data point holds true that I heard 20 years ago, which is for every federal dollar invested, we recruit seven down the road. in not having to do you know rectifying activities and I remember hearing that that in 2002 and thinking in 20 years I don't want it to be that way and it's just it's it's data it's heartbreaking so thank you again for doing what you can and we're going to have to keep fighting and get the money. Yes ma'am. Thank you Miss Marin. Miss Dixit Dr. Reed you have answered a lot of questions

[02:39:09] I'll keep it brief. On page 27, the slide 27, I like the growth targets of the kindergartners who meet the grade level expectation of reading math and executive functioning. And it's ambitious goal, growth target, especially for the Hispanic students, which I felt like you were looking at almost 50% increase in that time so it's obviously needs a lot of coordinated efforts and you know with the school and what I felt the other students have some sort of I'm not saying

[02:39:48] all students but a lot of parents are involved and get this children early start at home like read books to them as a lot of time kindergarteners come to school and they are already reading at least take the picture books and things like that and that's why the pre-k is so important and get those students early because they don't get that support at home. So I wanted to just just emphasize that point that looks like a great goal and hopefully we can achieve that and I'm here to see that happening in some way as a community

[02:40:22] member. I did want to mention one more thing is kindergartner math. Is there a way we can challenge our kindergarteners a little bit more math in a fun way so they don't think it's math but they're doing math yes and then then you can do all students by algebra by eighth grade. I think that math is always fun mistakes it so we but I we are actually we have our math committee in place this year and we are looking at not we're looking at secondary math materials for next year and likely elementary math

[02:41:02] materials including kindergarten for two years out so we're very excited to support strong math skills both in preschool and in kindergarten yeah that's that's a great you know I my son I was to drive car and just ask him what is how do you add huge to our add in his fingers and just say that when he was four years old and I was like I'm not even a teacher I don't know how to teach like in a creative way but I think there's the younger ones there's like sponges anything and everything you tell them they just absorb it and they are

[02:41:36] prepared and I would love to see those more that happening in our schools and definitely it's a growth target for you I love to see executive functioning here because I it's it's been a disaster for one of my child who's did not have a good executive functioning and ADHD and over the period like it was okay in elementary school but then middle school it became worse and then by high school they even the IEP didn't help him so I think it's like executive functioning I think the early that they learned that's the better it is so

[02:42:13] it's like yes ma'am thank you thank you Ms. Dixit Mr. Moon Dr. Lee thank you thank you for presenting additional data and also answering additional questions from school board members tonight because on october 8th at the work session we already spent 20 hours for presentation and answering having a discussion answering a lot of questions so i'm not going to prolong this much more but i still gotta ask a couple of questions if you don't mind uh following i and mr dunn's

[02:42:46] question regarding a pre-k experience for a particular subgroup compared to uh overall percentage that that particular subgroup for pre-k experience was higher than overall, but I'm looking at the same group meeting grade level expectations for reading math and executive

[02:43:17] functioning in the far. That's a below, below the overall personage and I know that you will soon be presenting to us goal three report which is about overall academic success of our students and one of our metrics for success is going to be a reading by third grade.

[02:43:45] I would love to see, I want to see how subgroups do in their third grade for their reading level, whether the pre-K experience, how that is going to be translated to a third grade, when that comes up to the third grade, whether any subcruise is falling off from the expectations from the pre-k experience they may have had and if that's the case why that is the case

[02:44:20] what can we do better to make sure the students who come because we're trying to make sure that all of our students get strong pre-k experience but somehow if we do not maintain their pre-k experience good pre-k experience we do not translate into their academic success then that's on us to find the reasons and find the strategies to support them yes sir thank you mr moon mr mcdaniel just a quick question and this

[02:44:58] could be a i guess a budget question if needed but can we get cost on universal pre-k an updated estimate on that yes sir we can thank you pie in the sky wishes maybe but having the number would be beneficial thank you thank you mr mcdaniel i will take a turn um i'm going to talk about vpi for a second um so the last uh budget from the governor included um changes to the funding mechanisms for vpi that would have resulted in millions of dollars and lost funding for vpi in

[02:45:38] fairfax county alone um and you know i was at a meeting recently where i learned something that was pretty alarming to me so the good news was that for the last few years Fairfax County has filled every one of its VPI funded priest preschool slots which I think is fantastic work by staff but I had heard and maybe somebody can shed some light on this that we were approached by VDOE

[02:46:11] with a comment of okay great how many more slots would you like in VPI funded preschool and when we gave them a number what they came back with was cuts to the number of slots that we would be receiving for VPI here in Fairfax which seems not only misguided but cruel to dangle the possibility of additional student slots for preschool and then not only not give them but then also further cut what we're able to offer um is that an accurate recounting of

[02:46:48] what's gone on here dr presidio i know you work with miss pilsen who works directly with the county on this yeah so it i think that it's accurate um i don't know the precise uh number of slots that were in question but we were disappointed not to receive more slots um this past year and again to Mr. McElveen's point and other board members when we have students on the wait list and we have the ability to take more students we'd like to obviously be able to do that yeah I just it's incredibly disappointed to have the work undermined by people who are claiming to

[02:47:26] be on the same team especially as we go into these academic or these accreditation and accountability metric conversations where we know that the the single most important thing we can do to move those numbers is get as many of these kids who are not getting these services in as possible so to have the administration dangling opportunities for our students and then not only not giving them but taking more away from us is just highly disappointing hopefully we could partner more closely with our our state friends in Richmond going forward particularly as it relates

[02:48:01] to the accountability and accreditation standards I want to echo many of the comments that we've heard from colleagues about how impressive the numbers are for our multilingual learners and you know just terribly exciting to see that kind of progress echo Ms. Sizemore Heiser's concerns about inclusion you know one of the things that I've I visited a preschool in my district recently at one of our elementary schools and you know they talked about how they were struggling with

[02:48:36] inclusion and you know i just want to make sure that we are meeting those needs right if a school is struggling to get there that we are finding ways to help them get there because there's clearly a want to get there and many of uh at least in the ones that i've visited so um you know i look forward to having more conversations about this going forward and i will leave it there we have a couple go backs um we'll get started with mr dunn thank you um my colleague mr mckelveen asked about the Mount Vernon area and I believe there's a Pinewood Lakes Early Childhood Learning Center

[02:49:15] that's scheduled to be operationalized at some point do you know I'm sure that's part of the pre-k program do you have a sense of when that's going to be put into place Mr. Dunn I know there was a discussion on the last board about that the Pinewood Lakes but I don't have the timeline in in front of me this evening, but I'd be happy to provide that in the upcoming Friday letter.

[02:49:43] - Thank you, and if there are, if that is, I'd be interested, is that something that's still on the planning board? Is it something that's being reconsidered with school boundaries? I mean, that might change the analysis, just kind of how far we are into spending any dollars in that regard.

[02:50:02] And secondly, I wanted to ask about the inclusive pre-K, which sounds like a great move forward. I know that we have multiple pre-K programs. We have PAC, we have ECCB, we have EAC. Is the intent to move forward to essentially merge those programs together so that you have just one model for doing pre-K, or do you intend to maintain some programs as separate?

[02:50:33] - So this year in Fairfax County, we're piloting three different models for preschool inclusion and taking data on the effectiveness of each of those models. So that will inform strategies moving forward.

[02:50:49] I think as we look at inclusive preschool around the country, it's very important to think about how we bring our youngest learners together with students that may require IEPs, students that may qualify for federal economic economic supported programs typically developing peers that might be tuition paying and how do we bring together young children with really robust curriculum and resources for multilingual support at that age and then I think we'll

[02:51:27] be able to have a truly inclusive preschool program moving forward. it's really several answers to your question one the three models we're looking at will provide data for planning forward and we also know there are other models out there that we're still studying that I think we probably could benefit from looking at as well can you describe the three models that are currently being piloted Dr. Presidio the I named them but perhaps you could give a little more yeah color to them just real briefly and we're trying different models for a number of reasons one I don't think we're going to be able to have a one-size-fits-all model to begin with so the first model is our

[02:52:07] ESIP model which basically is you have one duly certified teacher in early childhood education and early childhood special education teaching students in an inclusive environment and getting teachers that are duly licensed like that is incredibly difficult and challenging so we're not going to be able to scale that up to meet the needs of all of our students and all of our schools the The second model is a paired classroom where we have students that are currently in a school building that has co-located programs with special ed, early childhood education, and income eligible preschool.

[02:52:44] Those two classrooms move students together across the day in a fluid manner so that they're always intermixed and intermingled, but they still, students with disabilities still have the ability to get specialized instruction whenever they may need it, but it's an inclusive model by pairing those two classrooms together and then the third model is an itinerant model where we blend students again from classrooms from a special ed program that's co-located in a school with an income eligible program and we push the specialized instruction services into those classrooms where students are co-located and learning together so it's three different models

[02:53:21] and we're trying to find the models that are going to lead to the best outcomes but also something that is really going to be scalable in our buildings because because one of our biggest challenges to inclusion right now is we have almost twice as many programs in classrooms for students with disabilities than we do for income eligible students, and we don't have a mix and a balance of those programs being co-located in the same building.

[02:53:45] So there's a lot of struggles just like structurally with how to scale inclusion up. - Thank you. - Thank you, Mr. Dunn. Ms. Sizemore-Heiser. - Thank you, and I really appreciate my colleagues' questions.

[02:54:00] I think one of the questions that perhaps Mr. Dunn asking maybe not and please correct me if i'm wrong is the models that we offer in preschool not the inclusive models right he mentioned eccb pack those are what we currently offer as program delivery and again please correct me if i misunderstand your question but i think that's the point that i was trying to make earlier so i really appreciate his line of questioning we have these models of preschool and i think one of the reasons we're struggling with inclusion is because our models of special ed preschool are outdated right and when you look at some best practices around the country some of the best practices are inclusion actually it's not just

[02:54:36] that i think people want to do it it feels right but there's a lot of data behind how it improves long-term outcomes so it's a data-driven model right but when you have outdated models it's going to be harder than create inclusive preschools when you're kind of putting round pegs and square holes i'm just going to leave that as it is um i wanted to ask kind of a separate question we have data on I think this page is like 35 to 40 maybe in the report around preschool readiness this is math reading executive functioning I really appreciate that data being there I'm wondering is there a way for maybe next year's report to disaggregate it so we can see math readiness versus reading resident versus

[02:55:15] executive functioning because I think it helped tease out to one of my colleagues point I really love the idea of expanding advanced math and math readiness and really getting our the youngest kids really ready and excited for math to be but it'd be helpful to know where they enter on each of those pieces because right now is one data point it's hard to tease out where maybe the deficits and strengths might be yes ma'am separate thing but you know the data behind inclusion shows long-term outcomes work our models don't fit

[02:55:52] inclusive models right now allowing one student to leave the classroom for a little bit of time is an inclusion just not thank you thank you miss Sizemore Heiser I call on mr. Moon for a motion. Thank you. Mr. Chairman. I was turning on the wrong button. Mr. Chairman I move that the school board approve the gold one strategic plan report for school year

[02:56:24] 2024 2025 is there a second a second miss Anderson mr. Moon would you like to speak to your motion? Just briefly Mr. Chairman Whenever we accept we are whenever we see a goals report what I'm looking for is the data progress data or what I'm looking for is data and also a from the superintendent the strategies to make

[02:56:59] continuous improvements from where we are to the ultimate goals obviously I'm making this motion I'll be supporting this motion my own motion but that does not mean that i am happy with our status where we are in every aspect no we not even with with celebration of how we have worked with multilingual learners are making huge progress 11 11 percent increase over base line data our ultimate goal is 100 but that the data is something that i needed

[02:57:37] and also how we were able to achieve that and how we are going to be doing going forward was what i was looking for from the report and i have those data and those strategies in the report you know report may not contain everything that every board member may be looking for but it does contain enough and reasonable amount for me to make this motion and support thank you document thank you mr moon miss anderson would you like to speak to your second just really fast we've had a great conversation about this report in a lot of different ways um i do want to say

[02:58:15] what i recognize that's going on here is effort not perfection we're not at perfect yet but we what everything that we have illustrated here shows the effort behind it and that's really important our house we have a sign over our front door that says just that because i want my kiddos to remember it when they leave the house so i love the fact that our staff is making progress i love the fact that we are leading this work the right way and it's showing the strategic plan is working we're not there yet it's not perfect and we're not done yet so i'm looking forward to seeing where this goes in the next iteration and i'm excited to see the progress thank you thank you

[02:58:50] miss anderson miss sizemore heiser i very much agree with my colleagues i really do and i don't expect anyone except for myself to vote no i'm just putting that out there i didn't make any phone calls i didn't try i'm not trying to have this fail but this is a line in the sand the change Change in multilingual students is phenomenal.

[02:59:15] Where is that one-year change for students with disabilities? Where is it? It's not there. Right. Progress is awesome. Effort is awesome. And those are heavily evident in this report.

[02:59:31] But what I see evident is unequal effort and unequal progress. And this is a 20-year battle that I am sitting here, and this is my line in the sand. Two years of talking about inclusive preschool, and I hear we're still just starting.

[02:59:51] So I very much respect my colleagues. It is killing me to vote no. The progress that you've made in most of these areas is phenomenal. I want you and your team to know that. But I cannot hear after two years we're just getting started. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Seismarheiser. Mr. Dunn?

[03:00:07] Thank you. Ms. Lady? Thank you. A couple thoughts about the report. It's fantastic work. I'm sitting here thinking about when I worked for this school system.

[03:00:25] And I'm going to be honest. There were times when I did watch a school board meeting. I thought, wow, they don't understand my world. We're underfunded. We need more people with our children. We need more teachers in front of our students. And I just want to be very careful, and I want to make sure that faculty out there who are working with our preschool students, working with our ESOL populations, understand that we see you, we do know how hard you're working, and we also know that you're understaffed and that you're educating students post-COVID is exponentially harder than it was pre-COVID.

[03:01:03] And I agree, we need to do a lot of the things that the members of this board have asked. But I just felt like I needed to turn my mic on and say thank you, because these are, we're moving the needle.

[03:01:20] And it doesn't happen by getting up and doing the same thing we've been doing. It happens because of your leadership, Dr. Reid, and other people and and and also providing the tools um but i just you know again back to the state not not you know possibly giving us the same number of you know seats and funding pre-k like it needs to be funded it's it's sick it's quite honestly it's just sick to think that that are that we all know the earlier that we can intervene and begin to teach young people things

[03:01:55] is the biggest predictor of their success in life and yet we can't figure out how to fund it. So again, I just want to if staff are listening, I just want to uplift you. I know my colleagues agree with me. I just felt like I needed to turn on the microphone and really make sure that they understand that we do see the progress and we're very grateful. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Lady.

[03:02:15] Miss St. John Cunning. So kind of along the same lines, I wanted to also say that this report is incredible um from being again down in the trenches and seeing how understaffed after covid we've been the remarkable progress that has been made in spite of being understaffed in spite of not having enough teachers in some areas and how everyone in that building has come together to make it happen and we're a huge system we have a lot of programs and the fact

[03:02:53] that we are reaching so many kids and being so successful is amazing. Yesterday morning when I was at the State of the Schools, I could not feel prouder. And the one thing that you did not end with that, that I wish you would have done, like the State of the Union, was to say the state of our schools are excellent. In terms of preschool, I sit on skip and I want to be a champion for preschool. I've signed up to be a champion for the preschool programs but I've worked in schools that

[03:03:29] have the different models that we have and I appreciate that you're doing three models to try to accommodate the limitations that we have. We don't have the ability to do some of the things we want to do just because physically it's impossible to do and so the fact that you have come up with three different models are we there yet no but are we making the strides absolutely and again as one of my colleagues had said we're striving to

[03:04:03] get better not for perfection and what I can say now is what this report shows me is we're not perfect we're moving forward but from where I sit and for where I've sat and when I've seen the work that's being done I think that our staff all of them from the teachers to the custodians to the cafeteria workers who touch the lives of our kids and lift them up you are doing perfectly wonderful work and thank you thank you Miss St. John Cunning seeing no others we will go to a vote the motion is on the screen all those in favor Miss Marin

[03:04:43] mystics at mr. McIlveen mr. McDaniel miss Anderson mr. Dunn mr. Moon miss lady missing John Cunning and myself posed besides more hyzer abstentions with dr. Anderson away from the table will the clerk read the vote 1010 with dr. Anderson away from the table thank you the motion carries moving right along agenda item 6.01 academic matters I call on dr. Reed thank you chairman

[03:05:22] Frisch it's my pleasure this evening to bring you academic matters if we can bring that up please on the screen so this evening we're gonna present just a few slides very high level about the Fairfax County youth survey this is if I know for those watching just a reminder that this is a comprehensive anonymous and voluntary survey that's given each year to Fairfax County students in grades

[03:06:00] 6 8 10 and 12 and the survey examines behaviors experiences and other factors that influence the health and well-being of our youth here in Fairfax County the youth survey asked questions about risky risky behavior mental health physical health and safety so Fairfax County Public Schools as well as county and community-based organizations rely on these results to assess youth needs and strengths develop programs monitor trends measure countywide outcomes and and guide countywide planning prevention efforts.

[03:06:39] So let's take a look. One of the things that I would say is that currently the-- I think we can probably move to the next slide, please.

[03:06:56] The current reported rates of alcohol and substance abuse among FCPS in this past or most recent youth survey show the lowest score since 2010 for all substances, including alcohol, marijuana, synthetic marijuana, smoking cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, vaping, non-medical use of painkillers, non-medical use of other prescription drugs, and so on and so forth, which is interesting, because I think that our work in the schools, again, and this is a tremendous amount of work by staff,

[03:07:33] and good decision-making or better decision-making by our students and family support. It's good to see these trends trending down, including vaping, because I know we've certainly had significant challenges in that topic over the last several years.

[03:07:52] And also, just a note that Fairfax County youth do report lower rates of use than those reported nationally for most substances. so we are feeling very good about that. When we take a look at mental health overall trends, it's important to note that all mental health indicators, including levels of stress, feelings of sadness or hopelessness for a prolonged period of time, and suicidal ideation and attempts, have improved from 2021.

[03:08:28] And this was the case across all grades, genders, and racial and ethnic groups so we're feeling much more positive I think about those declines and I'm going to sneeze so we do know that again we did see that nine percent of students in grades eight ten and twelve reported that they had considered attempting suicide in the past year and three percent reported attempting it in the past year three percent of students reported attempting it in the last year.

[03:09:06] So that must be sixth grade. Maybe it's a typo here. Yes, 3% attempted. Oh, 3% attempted reported attempting suicide versus the 9% considering it. These rates are not only lower than the high levels reported in 2022, but they're actually the lowest reported since 2015.

[03:09:28] So again, that data is trending in the correct location or the correct direction for Fairfax County. I would also note that female students, non-binary students, LGBTQ students, and students from food-insecure homes reported the higher rates of depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and attempts compared to their peers.

[03:09:51] And again, 52.1% of our LGBTQ students reported feeling sad or hopeless compared to 20% of our heterosexual and cisgender students. So that's definitely a mental health gap that we're going to be continuing to address as we want to make sure each and every one of our students' mental health concerns and trends become more positive.

[03:10:14] Also looking at mental health trends from 2016 to 23, this year's data does show continued improvement in students' mental health again since 2021 when mental health concerns really peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Physical health and nutrition, and looking at these overall trends, this survey again asked about the physical health and nutrition behaviors.

[03:10:43] In 2023, in particular among 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students, 38% reported being physically active for at least an hour for five or more days in the past week. 45% reported using their computer for non-academic purposes for three or more hours a day this is almost half of our students 32% said that they had eight or more hours of sleep so that's about a third of our students 13% ate fruits and vegetables five or more times a day that is a problem we need to get more than 13% of our students

[03:11:21] eating fruits and vegetables five or more times a day 29% had some sweetened beverage at least once a day again about a third of our students six percent reported having gone hungry in the past month due to lack of food in the home and nine percent without went without eating to lose weight so physical and health and nutrition in general are showing interesting trends again and a reminder the youth survey was not administered in 2020 due to the pandemic

[03:11:57] Looking at bullying and aggressive behaviors and overall trends just want to note that for grades 8, 10 and 12 the trend line in general is going down whereas in sixth grade the trend line is going up for cyber bullying and bullying in general.

[03:12:20] So I think we're definitely looking at the sixth grade students and bullying a situation as an opportunity and wanting to make sure we really address our sixth grade in this topic area.

[03:12:36] We do know that Three to Succeed is a program that Michael Axler and our counseling program, along with our mental health support staff, are definitely working toward. It's these protective factors are really important and children that have these six protective practice factors or at least some of them are more likely to be to have healthier outcomes both in the physical and mental health area.

[03:13:06] So as you think about looking at those one of the things we really think are important is that participation and extracurricular activities and if we continue to provide after school activities which our strategic plan talks about we think that those are some of the ways in which we can increase protective factors the three to succeed managing stress making better choices and developing healthy habits i think again will continue to increase the ability of our students to have healthier outcomes so that chairman frisch is academic matters for this evening

[03:13:44] Thank you, Dr. Reid. Mr. Dunn. Well, this is great data. What I think would be helpful just in the future would be, you know, comparison maybe to, you know, regional data trends, if that can be calculated or is readily available, or national trends, just to see where we are. I mean, and also within Virginia, if that data is available, because in so many presentations, we're comparing FCPS to the rest of Virginia, and then nationally, and then sometimes to, you know, WABY school

[03:14:19] districts. Do you have a sense of where we are compared to the rest of Virginia, compared to kind of DC metro area, and nationally? Like, is there a national downward trend in substance abuse across the board? Is there a national trend down in, you know, consumption of sweetened drinks, you know just these data points yes sir on slide three on the substance use overall trends we do know that we are lower than the national average I remember also that not this information comes

[03:14:55] from the Fairfax County healthy youth survey so these are questions that Fairfax County is asking And really, these are self-reported from students. So to the degree that other jurisdictions are asking those same questions or asking similar questions, I guess we could have that data.

[03:15:15] But Dr. Presidio, do you have a sense about how we might look regionally? And honestly, I don't know if other divisions ask these same questions or other counties. Yeah, I think, I mean, I can't add a whole lot to that. We can take a look and see where we might have some comparative data, but again, because this is a locally developed instrument, we've been giving it for decades, you know, our questions and the way we're phrasing the questions, even if another jurisdiction is asking a similar question, it might not be a direct comparator, but we'll take a look and see what we can find and see how we might be able to report that information in the future.

[03:15:52] It is remarkable, given the increasing ease of access of drugs in every form. where you can hide it in articles of clothing or something that looks like a small piece of computer equipment, like a USB drive, you know, it can be a vaping instrument or means of getting fentanyl or something else that you would have these just rapidly declining figures which is reassuring to parents, but we still have an unacceptable number of overdoses and such, so perhaps even though it's declining among the general population, the students

[03:16:31] WHO NEED HELP FROM ADDICTION, MAYBE WE CAN MAY THAT FREEZE UP SOME RESOURCES TO TARGET THEM FOR ADDITIONAL SUPPORT. I MEAN, DO YOU HAVE ANY -- YOU'VE BEEN SUPERINTENDENT IN OTHER SCHOOL DISTRICTS.

[03:16:47] IS THIS CONSISTENT WITH TRENDS YOU'VE SEEN IN PREVIOUS YEARS, PREVIOUS SCHOOL DIVISIONS? YES, SIR. I THINK SO. I THINK COMING OUT OF COVID, RIGHT IN THAT 2021, IMMEDIATELY COMING OUT, WE SAW SOME SERIOUS mental health concerns across the entire country.

[03:17:03] I think the access to substances, unless they were in the home, were very difficult coming out of COVID, right, because students weren't gathering and, you know, there just wasn't a lot of outside the home activity.

[03:17:20] But I do think in general, substance use seems to have gone down nationally. I think ours has just gotten lower than other data points but the mental health ideation I think the continued mental health concerns for LGBTQIA plus students is a national trend and I think that the importance of that safe and supportive learning space is critical for all of our students each and every one of them to feel like they can show up as their authentic selves and commit their full energy

[03:17:58] to learning and that's what will you know increase their achievement I I'm very happy to see the reduction especially in the number of students who attempted suicide 3.2% though if you calculate that number of students is still probably in the high hundreds or thousands of students across I guess eighth tenth and twelfth grade which is just you know from a parental perspective shocking and alarming and we need to do more to outreach to those

[03:18:30] students, I guess, identify, make sure that they have all the resources necessary to avoid those negative outcomes. Yes, sir. One student is one too many. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dunn.

[03:18:47] Mr. McDaniel. So drilling into this a little bit more, the point that was raised, the slide three data, the decrease in alcohol and marijuana, I mean, that's remarkable.

[03:19:03] It's almost too remarkable. Do we think that they're, I mean, that's a significant decrease with all the context that we've just discussed. So, you know, statistics and data and all of those instruments aside, I mean, does that pass the sniff test, in your opinion?

[03:19:25] Well, it's a great question. I think one of the things that I think is interesting, and we talked a little about this at State of Our Schools yesterday, are our young people are not driving as much they're not necessarily dating as much they're not working outside so I I almost wonder just the opportunity in

[03:19:56] some ways they're not gathering as much and so I I don't know dr. Presidio dr. Ponce does that pass the sniff test well as the father of two high school age boys I hope so but I'm also not naive I mean again this is self-reported data right so I mean we have to again always keep that in mind when we're looking at it I do think you know we're doing a lot to educate our students about the

[03:20:32] dangers of substance abuse and I do think that that is making a difference or substance abuse prevention specialists are very active in our schools our teachers our advisory teachers so we do a lot of preventative information to students and dr. Reid's point I do think students are less just less likely to to maybe engage in some of the behaviors as they become in some ways more socially isolated staying at home and on their cell phones and on computers and things and so I'm not sure how all those factors play in together

[03:21:05] but you know I think that these trends overall I think are reliable in terms of the percentages there's probably some margin of error in there for sure thank you for that and the other question or I guess observation and maybe a question on slide six the disturbing line for me the very disturbing line for me is the top right hand corner of the green trend line which hockey sticks up almost 30 percent from 35 to 45 percent and that's um sixth grade bully victims that have had race or culture

[03:21:46] insulted in the last year and that starts around 2021 um oh one and just an observation um so any any particular plans to address that we certainly are working very hard i know the team is um working with staff i'll let dr presidio share some of the strategies but it's definitely a data point that caught everyone's attention yeah and again and that's why the you know this annual survey is really important because not only does it inform what we do it informs our community

[03:22:25] partners so this is a big piece of work that you know the skip committee again looks at and um you know we try to activate as many community supports as we can but internally uh yes we're absolutely doing a lot more to educate our students, particularly at sixth grade, about our zero tolerance policy around bullying and harassment. Dr. King's team is working around the cultural responsiveness aspects of this with us as well, and so this is a big area of focus.

[03:22:58] Thank you, Mr. McDaniel. Ms. Dixit. Thank you, Dr. Reed, for this presentation. Actually, I am also concerned about that slide six what Mr. McDaniel brought up not just that trend everything is going upwards when it comes to sixth graders they also show more sadness as compared to the older population student population so I think there is like you know there's something going on with the sixth graders like it's a everything is

[03:23:32] going in a negative direction for them and this is the point I guess for us to and think as a board and as a school system is should we actually keep them in elementary school or there's a chance that they can be in middle school maybe have more resources less to less student body and pay more attention to those sixth graders because they are I think feeling either they're too old for the elementary they are they are the bullying is going up too like I

[03:24:06] I don't know what is going on with that data point is kind of disturbing to me personally. So I agree and I one of the scenarios we've asked our boundary consultant to craft or flesh out is would we have room to move our sixth graders into the middle school.

[03:24:28] So that's one of the scenarios we're certainly going to take a look at either way this behavior needs to be addressed. right and I think understanding what's happening since 2021 is critical in planning how to address it and I think Dr. Presidio shared some of those strategies and it's we have to turn that trend yes and also would that also help with our more classroom for pre-k when like we were talking earlier for pre-k so not this topic but then would that help I know not with the overload

[03:25:06] overall work you know teacher shortage is still going to be a problem but I guess we can make more space for the pre-k students and middle schoolers are I mean sixth graders are moved into middle school that would be correct thanks thank you miss Dixit miss Sizemore heiser thank you and I won't I echo many of my colleagues concerns about our sixth graders I won't repeat them I wonder I read somewhere that fentanyl usage for the first time has gone down in the last year

[03:25:42] amongst adults and I'm wondering if that trend and just the amount that it's more in lots of different places about the dangers of fentanyl and how it can be hidden in other drugs has impacted our students use of drugs you know to Mr. McDaniel's point it does seem a surprising data point then the level of it but the fact that it's gone down doesn't surprise me um I want to point out a couple other things that have concerns as well um when I look at the slide five you look at

[03:26:14] the this is 8th 10th and 12th graders 31 percent sleep eight or more hours so two-thirds are not getting enough sleep um only 38 percent are physically active one hour more a day so when we talk about expanding sports you know boys volleyball we've talked a lot about that i think girls wrestling i think also got expanded this last year we uh we know more more the little known secret about me or maybe not a secret is i used to teach physical life fitness classes for 15 years and there's such a link between physical health and movement and stress and anxiety and we see

[03:26:50] stress and anxiety has skyrocketed amongst our teens and the physical activity is 38 and so i'm wondering what we can do i think this goes to show the importance of middle school sports because eighth graders are part of this as well as well as expanding our sports but i'm wondering what we can do to look at more creative ways to make sure our students who can't stay after school can also be active like can we look at a tj kind of day where there's a day a period where there's more activity available more i don't know i just wanted to point those two data points out there um same with the fruit and vegetable trend but i think it's important to say that sleep physical

[03:27:29] activity mental health are all very related and these numbers don't look good right i um the sleep is a compelling data point and the physical activity 100 percent agree and we we might also look at some point to what can we do physical activity wise for our elementary students maybe fifth and sixth graders or that is something that occurs in many divisions across the country and may also be something that begins to come at some of the bullying and some of the relational issues from a different direction.

[03:28:08] So I think we're going to need many different strategies to impact that data point. I used to coach girls on the run when my daughter was in elementary school. And it was a really great way for kids from all different walks of life from the school to achieve a goal together. And there's lots of ways you can build into many of those physical programs of support for each other.

[03:28:27] I am concerned about the sixth grade bullying trend. And I'm wondering, are we looking potentially at re-looking at some of our lessons around inclusivity around proper behavior at a younger age to address that. I believe we are. Thank you. Thank you. Miss Sizemore Heiser. I will take a turn. Talk about this is something whenever I talk to families about fentanyl and drug use and when we were at the voice event earlier this school year I talked about there's like

[03:29:02] this cognitive dissonance between the two numbers right. We've been talking about fentanyl and the rising number of overdoses from fentanyl and at the same time we've been on a long-term trajectory downward slope for drug use hard drug use alcohol tobacco etc um and and not just recently either right it came down much more severely post-covid but it's continued the trajectory and the reason that they they don't make sense is because people assume well there There must be tons of drug use going on if we're having all these fentanyl overdoses,

[03:29:38] but I think the science bears out that using even once is just far more deadly than it was previously. And so that's why those two numbers match. And also, you know, this trend parallels all of the other studies that are done by this, by the National Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse and others with these decreasing numbers and it's interesting to think through what kind of isolation might be leading to this and whatnot and what the trade-off is there but

[03:30:13] you know to Ms. Sizemoreheiser's point about fentanyl also seeing that there are fewer youth overdoses as well so talking about it certainly matters I also think that the availability of Narcan is having a big impact as well I want to talk about our LGBTQIA students and the fact that year-over-year we keep showing that they experienced by more than 30 points more a 30% more incidents of depression and

[03:30:47] clearly they experienced bullying as well we talked a lot about you know in And goal two, safe, supported, included, et cetera, with the equity commitment that we will amplify student voice to inform our approaches, et cetera.

[03:31:09] This number is our students screaming that they need help. And we have the best policies and regulations for these students in the Commonwealth, in the region, in the entire southern United States. And many of them have no idea that they even exist.

[03:31:26] That is a moral failing of the school division. When we walk past inequity, we've lost the moral authority to lead. What good is having the best regulations and policies if students don't know they exist?

[03:31:42] A lot of it goes into why LGBTQ students are more likely to be depressed, experience bullying, et cetera. Part of it is home life, part of it is school life, part of it is whether they have friendships.

[03:31:57] We can only control what we can control, but we must do a better job, and I'd love to see you take the leadership you showed in washington on bullying initiatives and translate that here because we need something to change yes sir thank you miss sawant yeah first i just wanted to say i really appreciate presenting this information and the trends that we're seeing in terms of drug abuse and so earlier when we were talking about this sixth grade trend and talking about like the sniff test for these results i i think one thing that's important to think about one thing i'm I'm wondering about is these sixth graders were probably in like second third fourth grade during

[03:32:35] the pandemic and those are the times where you know in elementary school you're all online so I'm wondering if that has any impact in kind of the way they interacted with their peers afterwards in the coming years or their education and if that may be affecting the numbers and then for the sniff test I think you know as I've noticed people taking it from 6 to 8 to 10 to 12 I think when it comes to questions where they don't want to answer it sometimes they leave it blank because students are allowed to do that and choose not to answer so I also wonder how that may affect our results one thing that I just wanted to tag on to mr. Frisch's point is about the mental health gap in the

[03:33:13] LGBTQIA+ community I think you mentioned a stat that was like 50 something percent of students you know felt sad or depressed and that that worries me because when I champion mental health and you know distribute these mental health resources. It's like this community has the largest gap. So you know from my end too I'm wondering you know how do we how do we get these resources to the students that need it. But I just want to say I really appreciate this data and you know some of the gaps that we still need to address. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. McElveen. Thanks. I have just one question

[03:33:49] and it is how is it possible for us to disaggregate this data into smaller communities. So for example PYRAMID REGION I THINK I JUST I EXPECT THE ANSWER IS NO BUT I THINK THAT WOULD BE VERY HELPFUL SO WE COULD SEE WHERE WE'RE HAVING SPECIFIC ISSUES THANK YOU MR. McILEVEAN MS. NEAL I KNOW OR DR.

[03:34:13] PERSIDIO WE'VE ASKED THIS QUESTION AND I BELIEVE WE'VE MADE SOME PROGRESS ON THIS BUT YEAH LET ME LOOK INTO THAT A LITTLE BIT MORE WITH THE COUNTY BECAUSE THEY OWN THE INSTRUMENT AND THE DATA BUT LET ME SEE WHAT WE CAN DO ON THAT WE'LL GET BACK TO YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU MR. McILEVEAN AND THANK THANK YOU, DR. REED. I FEEL LIKE WE SHOULD HAVE LIKE SOME MUSIC THAT PLAYS YOU OFF FROM THE

[03:34:39] PODIUM. YEAH. ALL RIGHT. AGENDA ITEM 6.02, SUPERINTENDENT MATTERS. I CALL ON DR. REED FOR SUPERINTENDENT MATTERS. THANK YOU, MR. FRISH. AND WHAT AN EXCITING TIME TO BE IN FAIRFACTS COUNTY. LAST NIGHT, A NUMBER OF US HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO ATTEND THE CARTER G. WOODSON REDEDICATION CEREMONY. AND THAT WAS SOMETHING WE TALKED ABOUT AT ALL COUNTY PRINCIPALS MEETING

[03:35:18] this morning. Principal Greta was able to talk about how meaningful that was last night and I was honored to have an opportunity to participate and really moved by the enthusiasm and passion the Woodson Cavalier students demonstrated as they were ambassadors for the program. So a big shout out to the community for that work. We also had an opportunity to share our progress and accomplishments with the community yesterday at our inaugural State of Our Schools presentation and appreciate all the community members that took time to

[03:35:52] join us and all of our electeds as well. This month we've had our Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations and it was fabulous last Wednesday to join our FCPS Hispanic Educators group for their event celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month and it was exciting to gather with a number of staff and celebrate that. I've had the opportunity to attend several or visit several schools both Center Ridge and Sleepy Hollow elementary schools and both the Rams and Dolphins are doing fabulous job this year as well as drop in on elementary AVID training we had a

[03:36:32] record number of elementary schools choose to participate in AVID training and it was exciting to see that group want to mention that our very own Paul Andrade our executive director of transportation received a visionary award from the Greater Washington Region Clean Cities Coalition for spearheading our electric bus initiative so definitely want to congratulate Paul in our transportation department and then a big shout out to our Westfield Bulldog and Centerville Wildcat girls look field hockey team I had a chance to

[03:37:07] watch them in their playoff game as well as a fabulous Justice High School homecoming game versus Lewis High School and just a lot of spirit with the Wolves and Lancers that night and something was really that was really unique that evening the Justice High School marching band at halftime had several members of their football team that didn't go in the locker room but stayed and played in the marching band so I haven't seen that and I just want a A big shout out to our Justice High School marching band and all those participating.

[03:37:44] And that's it, Mr. Frisch, thank you. - Thank you, Dr. Reed. Agenda item seven, consent agenda. Our adopted rules of parliamentary procedure, Roberts rules, provide for a consent agenda listing several items for approval of the board by a single motion.

[03:38:01] Many items have listed have been gone through board review and documentation has been provided to all board members in the public in advance. ITEMS MAY BE REMOVED FROM A CONSENT AGENDA AT THE REQUEST OF A BOARD MEMBER PRIOR TO THE MEETING. THE CONSENT AGENDA IS ON THE SCREEN. IS THERE ANY OBJECTION TO APPROVING THE CONSENT AGENDA? SEEING NONE, HEARING NONE, THE CONSENT AGENDA IS APPROVED. AGENDA ITEM 9, NEW BUSINESS.

[03:38:26] THE FOLLOWING ARE NEW BUSINESS AGENDA ITEMS. THERE WILL NOT BE A VOTE ON THESE ITEMS THIS EVENING, BUT ACTION IS SCHEDULED FOR A FUTURE MEETING. AGENDA ITEM 9, BOARD COMMITTEE REPORTS. I CALL MISLADY FOR A REPORT FROM THE GOVERNANCE COMMITTEE. THANK YOU, CHAIRMAN FRISH. I'LL BE BRIEF.

[03:38:41] OUR NEXT GOVERNANCE MEETING IS TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29TH. AT PRESENT ON BOARD DOCKS SHOULD BE THE AGENDA AND THE CURRENT DRAFT THAT WE ARE WORKING THROUGH. AND AS A REMINDER TO THOSE WHO ARE MOST INTERESTED IN THIS WORK, WE WILL DO OUR WORK SESSION ON THE GRADING POLICY, WHICH IS WHAT I referenced earlier sorry if it wasn't clear um on November 12th thanks thank you Miss Lady Mr. Dunn do you have a report from CPDC I do um so we met uh this week and we discussed uh the

[03:39:19] ongoing uh effort to uh gather data to inform the development of a new uh renovation queue for our schools we talked through various projects the status of efforts to incorporate design build and construction management at risk into our procurement and the aligned effort to adapt our regulations which will be forthcoming in the coming months and also we discussed potential revisions to uh the uh fpac uh facilities planning advice and advisory council uh charter thank you

[03:39:59] thank you mr dunn agenda item 12 board matters the next item on the agenda is board matters i will call on each school board member to uh speak provide board matters mr mckelveen well thank you so um i know it's homecoming season for for many of our schools well all of our schools and some at some point. But this past weekend I was able to host my 20th reunion for Marshall High School, class of 2004. It was a wonderful weekend of events. I'm very grateful to Principal Litz,

[03:40:38] who was here earlier tonight, for leading us on a two and a half hour tour of the school, which was very impressive. It's changed a lot, and I didn't know that it has the most expensive ramp in the county so that was a very that was a highlight of the tour but I just advise all high school students never to become class president because you'll be an indentured servant for life planning your reunions but it's been a it's been a great two weeks and I agree with

[03:41:13] Superintendent Reed that last night at Carter G. Woodson High School it was a very special and respectful and really heartwarming experience. So thank you to everyone who made that possible.

[03:41:29] Thank you Mr. McElveen. Ms. Marin excuse me. Ms. Dixit she's not at the table. Ms. Marin sorry. Only if you're sure. OK. Well I wanted to thank our student performers this evening and wish our community a Happy Diwali with next week.

[03:41:45] Candy plus lights I think it's going to be a really great time all around the county with Halloween as well. and then right after Diaz del Muerto so lots of reasons to celebrate I I also the conversation tonight about early childhood and space it just keeps lighting the fire under the need for us to address how we fund our facilities here and look at the bonds and I'm really eager to see that we'll have on I think it's December 5th we're going to hear the presentation of our capital improvement

[03:42:21] program the CIP so I'm looking forward to that. I also want to wish all these sports teams there's just so many I keep trying to get to games and there's just too many but it's very exciting and Marshall had their homecoming so yeah I hope everyone has a great end of first quarter and yeah take care. Thank you Miss Marin. Miss Dixit. Thank you Mr. Fresh. I would like to thank our TJ High School Namaste Club for being so willing to perform today to celebrate Hindu American heritage month I'm very grateful that they took the time to do this especially since the end of

[03:42:58] the quarter and they have a lot of school work I'm also very grateful to our community members to making the time to attend today to support the proclamation thank you everyone it's a it's a busy but beautiful time of the year with musicals fall sports and concerts I hope everyone is able to make time to enjoy the season while supporting our favorite students in schools I recently attended a community event Centerville Day last weekend which was a lot of fun I was able to attend the superintendent's community conversation at Virginia Run Elementary School to listen the feedback from our Sully community. I'm looking forward to several take our legislator to school

[03:43:37] visits to visits to our school with our local Sully district legislator in early November. Finally I want to wish everyone a happy Diwali and which is on October 31st which is also Halloween day. May your ear be filled with light love and laughter.

[03:43:54] Thank you have a good night. Thank you miss Dixit. Miss St. John Cunning. Thank you. So I want to start by saying that I enjoyed the very end of Hispanic Heritage Month by joining the Lewis High School at their celebration featuring student performances by the band orchestra and student dancers which ended with a parade of flags representing Hispanic countries. I also visited the National Hispanic Heritage Museum where the powerful artwork titled I Am, created by our very own parents in our family literacy program, was featured.

[03:44:31] Finally, at the first Hispanic Educators Association Mixer of the Year, I learned that Principal Casablanca and Principal Paredes are participated in a friendly student attendance competition. The best thing about this competition is that no matter what, both the owls and the leprechauns will be winners because we will have better attendance.

[03:44:54] Last week, I spoke with students, parents, and staff at the post-secondary planning night for Region 3 and 6 en Español at the High Blow Valley Community Center. I was happy to attend the Hayfield Drama Hawks production of Hadestown this Saturday.

[03:45:11] On Tuesday, I was impressed by the water purification projects completed by the Edison High School 10th grade students as part of the Global STEM Challenge. Yesterday morning, I was inspired by the Fairfax County Public School's inaugural State of Our Schools program. It is an honor to sit on this board and to know that the state of our schools is excellent.

[03:45:32] I'd like to end by congratulating some of our students and schools. First, congratulations to Edison High School sophomore Owen Love on winning the Golf State Championship for the second time in a row. An incredible achievement that hasn't happened in the last 60 years. On October 1st, Edison Academy students showcase their exceptional skills at the 2024 Virginia State Fair Skills USA competition, where under the direction of Mr. Wolf, the electrical school U.S. winners were first place Landon Bradstreet from Hayfield Secondary,

[03:46:05] fourth place Ash Duggan from Edison High School, and eighth place Edwin Salis Victoriano from Justice High School. Under the direction of Mr. Stringham and his team, the HVAC Skill USA winners were 5th place Finn Brandt from West Springfield and 5th place Yacique Valdez from West Springfield.

[03:46:26] Finally, the college board announced that 17 FCPS high schools have been named to the Advanced Placement School Honor Rule. Schools can earn bronze, silver, gold, or platinum distinction. Congratulations to the school serving Franconia students.

[03:46:42] Silver Distinction School was West Potomac High School and Gold Distinction School was West Springfield High School. Finally, happy Diwali to everyone and happy Halloween to all our little scary friends that are gonna be out knocking on our doors on October 31st.

[03:47:00] - Thank you, Ms. St. John Cunning. Ms. Lady. - Thank you. As we head to the end of the first quarter, so many great things are happening at our schools. I've really enjoyed this beautiful fall weather and hope you all enjoy the fun fall school events like Coates and Great Falls Elementary Schools Fun Festivals and the upcoming November 9th Herndon High School Homecoming Parade.

[03:47:20] I too was very honored to attend the naming of Woodson after Carter Godwin Woodson, the father of African-American history. What an inspiring experience and what a joy it was to see those students, their planning come to fruition in such an amazing way.

[03:47:37] In the coming weeks, there are many band, chorus, and orchestra concerts in our middle schools and high schools. And next month, our high schools are doing their fall plays. join me in seeing as many as I can from Shakespeare at Herndon and Westfield, Sense and Sensibility at McLean, Marshall's Metamorphosis, and Langley's Beauty and the Beast, the musical.

[03:47:54] The fall sports seasons are wrapping up. I want to celebrate all the fall athletes and wish them luck as they compete in regionals, district, and state competitions, and offer congratulations to the Langley golf team for winning the VHSL Class 6 state championship. Also, McLean High School won the 2024 VHSL Multimedia Contest State Championship for all categories in broadcast.

[03:48:15] McLean High School students did extremely well in the categories of newspaper and literacy magazine. Langley High School and Marshall High School students won awards in these categories as well. I was able to visit Haycock, Spring Hill, Franklin Sherman and Clearview Elementary School since the last board meeting and continue to be re-energized after seeing the incredible work and dedication of our school staff and students.

[03:48:37] I held a thank you to our Drainsville principals and assistant principals this week. It was great to meet in person and have a chance to share my gratitude for the hard work it takes to start a school year. The school here has also come with many additional tasks for teachers and school staff at all grade levels.

[03:48:53] I'm aware of the heavy lift required, especially in the elementary schools, and I thank you. I'm bringing Delegate Shin, Senator Boisco, Supervisor Bierman to Adrainsville Elementary School to see many of these lifts in action while highlighting how they, as elected officials, can support our students, families, community, and school staff.

[03:49:11] I also want to offer additional congratulations again to Spring Hill Elementary School for being celebrated as a National Blue Ribbon Exemplary High-Performing School. This week is National School Bus Safety Week. I want to thank the 1,700-plus drivers, attendants, and transportation service staff who make sure our 130,000 bus-running students on 1,225 buses, including the 28 electric buses, get to and from school every day.

[03:49:38] Lastly, I encourage you to attend Dr. Reed's Community Conversation on October 30 at 6.30 p.m. at Herndon Middle School. can sign up for child care and translation if you pre-register on the fcps website and finally a happy diwali to all and a happy halloween thank you miss lady mr dunn excuse me mr moon thank you thank you mr chairman that is okay uh during the last two weeks uh you know in addition to joining my many of my colleagues at the woodson high school yesterday uh i enjoyed the football game

[03:50:11] at mclean high school volleyball game at thomas jefferson also a winter event hosted by hispanic educators association but one thing that i enjoyed the most was making a presentation and answering questions from a members of langley high school's world affairs club and i talked about a recent hostile threat from both korea against the south and the issues related to the unification of two countries. But tonight, Mr. Chairman, if you don't mind, I want to focus, spend a little bit of my time on part of Korean culture that is deeply personal,

[03:50:52] the rich tradition of the best-known Korean food, kimchi. Kimchi is a dish of fermented vegetables, primarily cabbage, seasoned with a mixture of red chili peppers, garlic, ginger, and other spices.

[03:51:09] But to Koreans, kimchi is more than just food. It symbolizes family, resilience, and tradition. Kimchi is a dish that is salty, sweet, spicy, and sour all at once that complements almost any meal. But it also carries the history of the Korean people, their connection to the land, perseverance through hardship, and the importance of family. It is a dish that has been passed down

[03:51:42] through generations and continues to unite Koreans everywhere. November is the traditional time, coming soon, when Korean families gather together to make a large batch of kimchi after the cabbage harvest. This communal event known as kimjang is a time for family and friends to come together, prepare the ingredients, and place the kimchi in jars to ferment, sometimes for months or even years.

[03:52:13] some of you probably already know that november 22nd is officially designated as kimchi day here in virginia thanks to delegate irene shin who brought the resolution to the house of delegates in 2022 subsequently the resolution passport chambers in the of the general assembly unanimously to celebrate this year's virginia kimchi day festival will be held at the fairfax county government center on november 8th november 8th from 11 a.m to 3 30 p.m attendees all attendees

[03:52:50] can learn how to make it enjoy lunch and take home their own batch so i want to invite all my colleagues to join me there so that we can all learn to make some kimchi and enjoy it what time is that on november 8th 11 a.m to 3 30 p.m anytime between those four and a half hours

[03:53:17] mr dunn send us an invite i'll send your invite so i i was excited to uh have a lot of meetings in the past few weeks and attend a lot of great events in the montferno district i have met with concerned parents who are advocating for a replacement for a teacher who was brought from overseas through Participate Learning but had a disappointing experience. I've been meeting with

[03:53:54] neighbors in the Washington Mill neighborhood who are seeking enhanced traffic safety measures to ensure the safety of their children as they walk and bike to school. I've also been meeting with Auditor General Esther Coe to look into potential waste that unfortunately occurred with a community fundraising for a garden facility at Holland Meadows Elementary, but unfortunately the wrong size was purchased and it sat there for years.

[03:54:34] I've also attended events like the STEMology STEM Fest, which was a fantastic event with students from TJ and other schools providing elementary and middle school students the opportunity to learn about everything from rockets to coding. I spoke before the West Potomac PTSA about school boundaries cell phones and other exciting topics. I also met with local FCPS teachers who wrote a fantastic book about technology in our schools and and and are looking at measures that could potentially be used to policy measures that could be used to inform our

[03:55:12] discussion of cell phone policies in our public schools. I also performed a site visit to Fort Hunt Elementary, which is a fantastic elementary school where my children attended and met with the principal. I also attended a military appreciation night at Mount Vernon High School. It's an exciting football game with with Hayfield. I participated in a West Potomac High School Student Services Advisory Council which was very informative and talked about how we can make sure all of our students are getting the support they need to be successful in our

[03:55:46] schools. I was fortunate to watch the county come out and help provide students the opportunity to established a stormwater garden at Gunston Elementary. I also attended my first Title I Parent Advisory Council meeting and it was exciting to meet with representatives of Title I schools across the county. I also had the opportunity to tour a Carpenter's Union Apprenticeship Training Center which was an amazing opportunity to learn all the great things that union is doing to provide career pathways for our local students. Very importantly I helped to make sure that Mount Vernon

[03:56:25] high school's graduation was situated at its stadium rather than far away at the Daughters of the American Revolution Society. That will make sure that all families are able to get unlimited tickets to attend a great ceremony with appropriate support from the school and FCPS. I'd like to thank the superintendent for making that possible to happen. I've also been making sure that I recognize the amazing opportunities that we have to support our local schools we have four local football teams hayfield mount vernon south county and lewis high school that will be celebrating

[03:57:05] homecoming tomorrow friday october 25th please check out my newsletter for time so that you can go there and help support your local football team why would you ever want to overpay for the nfl and its disappointing teams when you can support you can find exciting football at home and i also say "Why pay for Broadway in New York when you can watch the same productions locally?

[03:57:26] Our students at West Potomac, Edison and South County High School, Twain Middle School, Hayfield Middle School and South County Middle School are all producing theater productions that are great to watch: Puffs, Peter Pan and Wendy, The 39 Steps, Internet Does Distract, Oh Look a Kitten, Nine Reasons Not to Be in a Play, SpongeBob the Musical, which is my personal favorite, and Beauty and the Beast Junior."

[03:57:49] So please check out my October 23rd newsletter for links to the purchase tickets. So I wish all of you a wonderful weekend and look forward to speaking with you soon. Thank you, Mr. Dunn. Ms. Sizemore-Hyser. Thank you.

[03:58:09] And first, I just had to start by saying that my cup is really full by participating yesterday in the Carter G. Woodson High School renaming ceremony. Principal Grada, the staff, and especially the students. It was so professional and planned a flawless, flawless event that it was really amazing to see.

[03:58:31] The mural was phenomenal when you walk in. I have to thank my previous Bradford School member, Megan McLaughlin, who championed the name change resolution that the previous board passed. And I love the fact that it is now Carter G. Woodson with his example of inclusivity and education for all.

[03:58:49] Dr. Woodson among many other things we have to thank him for Black History Month the elevation of Black History and his values of valuing all people celebrating our diverse history and excellence and opportunity for all and learning as the cornerstone of life are emblematic of what Carter G. Woodson High School is so I'm just thrilled to be part of that a couple other things I'll be also be participating and take your legislator to school month we're actually going to go to Carter G. Woodson as well as Bonnie Bray. Great thank you to the T.J. Namaste Club for the amazing Bollywood dance. I had this bizarre dream that one night one day Ms. Dixit and I were doing

[03:59:27] a Bollywood dance on that stage so stay tuned. I also wanted to say you know I'm really honored Ms. Dixit to bring the Hindu American proclamation. It's really wonderful to celebrate the diversity in our community and the representation really matters. Lots of upcoming shows the next two weeks.

[03:59:43] I just saw Alice in Wonderland at Lake Braddock, which was quite the looking-glass experience and so much fun. I know, right? But Lewis High School Theatre is doing Puffs coming up soon, Woodson's doing King Lear, Annandale's doing Peter Pan and Wendy, Robinson's got Midsummer Night's Dream, TJ's got Antigone, and Fairfax has got Much Ado About Nothing. So lots of Shakespeare, which I know Dr. Reed loves.

[04:00:05] I'd like to commend Dr. Reed. I know Romeo and Juliet would have been a great start for that. I'd like to commend Dr. Reed on a really successful and her staff who worked so hard on a really successful State of Our Schools event earlier this week and I want to thank Educate Fairfax. It was a great way to let our community know about all the wonderful things that are happening here in Fairfax County and if I didn't say enough about Woodson, thank you to the students at Woodson for inviting me to participate in their homecoming parade. It was yet another thing that was flawlessly executed by the students and so much fun and I'll

[04:00:35] I'll end with saying congratulations to the five Braddock district schools who are among the 17 high schools on the Advanced Placement School Honor Roll, Fairfax, Lake Braddock, Woodson, West Springfield, and Thomas Jefferson, which I think we all kind of claim, even though it's not located in the Braddock district, these are schools that I have students at.

[04:00:51] So having said that, I love the fall weather. I love the changing leaves. Go out and see some of these great productions, orchestra, band, chorus concerts are coming up soon, and of course, Friday Night Lights and playoffs are coming up. So with that, have a great day. Thank you, Miss Esmerheiser. Mr. McDaniel. I have no board matters this evening. Thank you. Miss Anderson.

[04:01:15] Just really fast. I've done some really awesome things in the last two weeks, but nothing is going to be as important as what I'm going to do in 12 days where I get to go vote. So I have watched over over time that does not vote wins almost every election.

[04:01:32] And so I think this is one no matter what you're going to do, you need to get out there and do it. so please go vote on the on the fifth I'm looking forward to it thank you Miss Anderson I have had a busy couple weeks since our last meeting had the pleasure of attending the Hispanic educators gathering and spending some time and enjoying some good food and some good music thank you to Dr. Ponce for providing the the tunes it was a great gathering and it was nice to see Mr. Moon and Dr. Anderson there and Miss Lady and Miss St. John Cunning and others it was a great event

[04:02:12] and then Wednesday morning the superintendent found a way to get Miss Sizemore Heiser at a morning meeting by having a state of the schools event at 7:30 a.m. So if people were wondering how to crack that code it's been cracked and it was a great event and I echo my colleagues in saying the state of our schools is strong you know in no small part for our superintendent and the incredible team that we have that sits over there and is patiently waiting for me to finish but it was a great event it was great connecting with business and community

[04:02:47] leaders so that they could hear the story that we're actively putting together every single day here in Fairfax County Public Schools last night was incredibly powerful at Carter G Woodson High school not not only because we were surrounded by so many students who had it you know an important part in it the student ambassador I was paired with told me you know I was really worried that this was just going to gloss over and that we were just going to you know move right along and in being involved in the planning of the ceremony she said that she got to see that it was not

[04:03:23] going to just be a pro forma name change it was great to see Miss McLaughlin and all of our former school board colleagues with a little bit of a blended board between old and new present as well as our partners from the Board of Supervisors and others some delegates that came as well I also want to give a shout out to Marshall High School students and educators who were recognized at the recent Board of Supervisors meeting for the work they're doing around voter registration of high school students and congratulate my new FPAC representative Priya Swami who's just been approved to FPAC and my social studies

[04:04:01] instructional resource review committee representative Kelly McFarland who is a history professor at Georgetown and a parent of two FCPS kiddos and like everybody else please get out there and go see the amazing performances that our student actors are pulling off at Marshall High School Metamorphosis this next month Oakton you can still see 12 angry jurors and the crucible and the play that goes wrong later in November Falls Church High School the Phantom Tollbooth is in November and December Woodson you can see Lear in November McLean you

[04:04:40] can see Sense and Sensibility in November Madison High School you can see Puffs which is the young wizards edition if you were curious about which edition it was and at Fairfax you can see much ado about nothing in November as well lots of incredible opportunities to see great performances and great production from our students please visit your high school's website to find more about ticket information or sign up for my newsletter and with that at 11:04 p.m. we are adjourned.

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