Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Date: Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 5h 3m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzSGZuRvJ-Q
Official School Board page (FCPS): https://www.fcps.edu/about-fcps/leadership/school-board

Machine transcript (speech-to-text) produced by Coraggio Consulting. Not an official county record. Names and numbers may be misspelled; check the video at the timestamp before quoting.
Speech-to-text: whisper.cpp, model large-v3-turbo. Produced 2026-10-31. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:00] this work session into order we have our two very important topics this today we'll start with the middle school start times and that is slated to go until one o'clock that doesn't mean we have to use up all our 150 minutes that is the maximum amount allotted for today and in the afternoon after lunch break we are going to have a presentation and discussion of a strategic plan goer to report a for the first topic a middle school star times i'll be managing

[00:00:34] and rational heismar seismal hyzer is going to do the a timekeeping and in timekeeper over there all right if there's any violation you're gonna point out okay with that i'm gonna turn this over to mr muick super yeah okay dr dr reed thank you mr moon uh this morning uh i know that mr muick our chief operating officer is very excited to bring information around middle school start times this is a project that's been an ongoing project in the division for some time and began when high school start times were

[00:01:13] adjusted it's my understanding there was a commitment made to come back and revisit the middle school time at that point so here we are and so I'd like to turn it over to mr. muick and the team for our presentation so thank you mr. muick yes ma'am thanks dr. Reed good morning school board members let me start by introducing the team here with me to my left is Dr. Tasha Prieto the president and CEO of Prismatic Services and our lead consultant on this project to my right is Paul D'Andrade executive director of transportation and then sitting directly behind Mr. Moon is our two assistant directors Tracy Kubo

[00:01:52] Carrera and her nice Christmas turtleneck and Tracy Phillips sitting next to her. And they're here to assist in case some of the questions get too deep for Paul and I, we've got them as backup. Next slide, please. The meeting objective.

[00:02:08] We're here today to make sure that the school board fully understands the alternatives of middle school start times that Prismatic Services has developed. There's five in the presentation. And first goal is to make sure we discuss and understand those completely today.

[00:02:26] Second goal and objective of the meeting is to determine next steps. Next slide please. At this point, I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Prieto to go through the meat of the slides. So over to you, Dr. Prieto. - Good morning, thank you for having me today to discuss middle school start times.

[00:02:46] As Dr. Reed said, this has been a, on our side, at least a labor of love for over a year now. And I had the challenge and the honor of leading a team of 14 consultants and analysts and developing the work to date. So I'm excited to share it to you, with you. I've got a lot of slides to cover.

[00:03:02] I am gonna attempt to keep the presentation portion to 30 minutes so that we have plenty of time for questions and discussion afterwards. So just a quick reminder that this project, as Dr. Reed said, is really in many ways part two of the work that was completed in 2014-15, which resulted in moving the middle, the high school start times later, but did also adjust the middle school start times earlier.

[00:03:27] But that work in Fairfax really dates back to origins in 1998, when Fairfax was at the forefront in the nation of the later school start times conversations. In between 2014 and 2015, there was also a 2020 effort that also looked at school start times, and I'll mention some pieces from that as we go forward.

[00:03:48] So our goal in this project, as directed by the board, was to find options that got middle schools to eight o'clock or later school start times. There were several constraints outlined in the RFP. The first middle school start times at 8 o'clock or later, secondary schools and high schools needed to remain at 8 o'clock or later, and minimal fiscal impact as much as possible.

[00:04:12] Next slide, please. Since I last spoke before you, the Prismatic team has been busy. We reviewed a lot of data items supplied by staff in the division. We've heard from more than 700 constituents at in-person and online forums in the spring.

[00:04:31] We observed bus operations at most of your middle schools and your secondary schools. We interviewed many staffs and representatives of constituent groups, and we analyzed lots of survey input from constituents in the spring and the fall. Next slide, please.

[00:04:48] Here's a breakdown of the constituent bus drivers and attendants to get a feel for things, knowing that any changes that are approved by the board end up becoming incumbent upon the drivers and the attendants to make happen.

[00:05:04] We then did forums that included an online survey option for attendees. And then finally, in the fall, we had surveys of students, parents, and staff. On the fall surveys, we had sufficient student responses from 16 middle schools and one of the secondary schools.

[00:05:22] We had 100 or more parent responses from 21 middle schools and all three secondary schools, as well as sufficient responses from a number of elementary schools and high schools. And we had sufficient staff responses from all 23 middle schools.

[00:05:43] groups with whom we interviewed at least one representative we cast the net as wide as possible wanted to talk to everybody I think I've said it more than once we'll talk to anybody in the spring when we were gathering input and just wanted to hear what people had to say FCPS staff helped us develop the list and then in some cases those who we interviewed led to subsequent additional interviews all of the constituent input fed into the work that we did in the summer and the early fall developing options. And so things that came up as constraints, concerns, things that we felt just you know we're just not

[00:06:22] palatable to a strong section of the community guided us in choosing what we're where we would started looking at options. Also important in looking at this work is in where the division currently is in a number of different respects. And for that I'm going to turn it over to Mr. D'Andrade to talk about the current state of transportation. Good morning. Next slide. Good morning. Just talking to you guys and I explained this slide to go through a snapshot of our daily operations and just using it as a guideline to as the future options go

[00:07:01] forward. We have over 1,625 buses to support 45,000 bus stops. Out of those 1625 buses route buses are or 1100 we have 236 spares we have supervisors that have buses 173 buses for supervisors and our floater bus drivers 43 buses for training and activity buses and then we have 46 buses that are growth or extra buses to accommodate additional routes that are added currently we have 978

[00:07:39] drivers and 364 attendants so this is the bare bones of the drivers and the attendants that are going to be doing the work to operationalize any of the options that are to follow so I'll turn that back over to Dr. Prieto and could I just jump in I want to just add a elaborate on something Paul said that I that I questioned when I was going through this with Paul is if you look at the industry best practices and spares for a school system it's 10 to 20% spares. If you look at that spares line of 236, that's about 15. If you add those 46 from growth,

[00:08:15] that takes it up to 17 percent. So we're a little high on that, you know, 10 to 20 percent, but we're still within the industry standards because I know that's come up in my time here about, hey, why so many, the spares number jumps out and people think it's large, but I just wanted to give you that point of reference before we moved on. Next slide, please. So continuing our look at, you know, where the division is before we get to what it might be possible with school start times we recognize that your current school start time window sst is between 7:30 and 9:20 in the morning that's a hundred and ten minute window and so that

[00:08:54] guided us in looking at you know what might be possible both you know we actually looked at some scenarios that were a little larger than 110 as well as some that are a little smaller than 110 and entering please next slide there go so in looking at the possibilities looking at the range from 7:30 to 9:20 this left side of the slide shows where the school starts are so those are the schools that were included in the scenario that we looked at and you can see you've got the 23 middle schools right there at 7:30 and then another

[00:09:31] bunch most of your high schools at 8:10 you've got onesies and twosies with your elementary schools sort of all the way down from 8:10 a little bit of a peak in the 840 to 850 range for elementaries, and then a last peak in the 915 to 920 for your elementaries. We hit next slide, please. How does this translate into the bus work? And so bus runs that are required to accommodate those school start times are shown on the right. And so for your 23 middle schools, there are 498 regular education runs that are required to get the students to school.

[00:10:06] And so if you look at the totals on the right, the far right side, you can see we've got a big a big glob of work that has to get done between 7:30 and 8:10 in order to drop these kids at school in time for hopefully for for breakfast and then on to classes another small peak in the middle of that time period and then final bigger than the middle but smaller than the beginning peak from 9:15 to 9:20 the results in 2,127 regular education runs that are currently being done every day in the morning and then again in the afternoon an important point to note on

[00:10:41] this is that your current and school start times dictate the optimization of your bus runs another way to put it is that your bus runs are optimized for your current school start times and what do I mean by that being that middle schools are the first drop in the morning currently you can afford to do longer runs in the morning for middle school so you could you could do a 30 to 5 to 50 minute run or a longer run in the morning because that is the first drop and then in the afternoon because that would also be the first school that is picked up in the afternoon to be dropped off back at home you might split

[00:11:17] an hour run into two thirty minute runs and divide that work between the original bus and another bus and so what effective school transportation departments do and this one has done is that your current bus runs are optimized for your current school start times and that's an important piece to remember as we start going through the options. Next slide, please. So again, looking at the current situation, there are 783 general education buses in the data set provided to us that completed those 2,127 runs. 80% of your runs

[00:11:57] approximately are mirrored, meaning that in the morning they do a middle school, a high school, and an elementary school, for example, and in the afternoon they do the same middle school, high school, and elementary school. The word mirroring indicates the fact that in the mornings for that middle school run I pick up students along a route I drop them off at school in the afternoon I'm doing the exact mirror image of that I pick them up from the school and I take that same run back the opposite direction so we provide a little visual there to help with the terminology because the terminology has shifted between your 2014-15 or 2020 some of your 2006 studies so I want to be clear about the

[00:12:33] terminology we're using here runs make routes in the world that we're talking about and so an individual run is picking up students and dropping them out of school in the morning or picking them up from a school and taking them home in the afternoon and so what you see the visual on the left hand side we've got three runs making up a route for a bus next slide please what you want to see in an efficient transportation department is that you're making the best use of your buses that you can and this is exactly what we see with those 783 general education buses currently the number of runs that each bus completes in the morning is shown in that little table there and you see that a majority of

[00:13:12] your buses are doing three runs meaning they're doing exactly what the logo show on the left or they're even doing four schools so they're maybe doing a middle school high school sorry middle school elementary school high school elementary school or any combination we saw a variety of things you have a number of of buses, a small number, that are only doing one run in the morning. These are largely for some of your specialty programs, but then also some of that is the optimization because of the start times that you have. Next slide, please. So what did we do in 2014-15, or what did the

[00:13:50] division do? The division used a process called peak utilization modeling. Essentially, that involved taking the routes, as I described them, breaking them up into the individual Lego piece runs, and then putting them back together in new routes and counting up how many buses are needed at the peak in the morning or in the afternoon, and whichever number is the greatest ends up being the number of buses is estimated to be used.

[00:14:12] It's important to note that that work did not break runs apart. It looked at runs as individual, just like you can't split a Lego apart, individual, indivisible units. The 2014-15 work looked at four scenarios.

[00:14:28] Those scenarios were taken back out to the public and provided in forums and survey work to get input from the public on them, and then the board voted on a final recommendation. Two things to note on this slide. The cost estimates were fairly small at that point in the context of the overall annual transportation budget, and ultimately, the adopted school start times for middle school, secondary schools, and high schools did not exactly match any of the four scenarios.

[00:14:58] So there was some subsequent adjustment before the final adoption. Next slide, please. time around we've used a similar but not exactly the same methodology we also started with the existing runs and then recombine them into new routes based on various school start time options you can see a partial listing of what we began with in the database here color-coded by by Lego color so you can see there's some middle school some elementary and some high schools in there that listing also included distance and time and then when we put the runs back together into routes we included calculations for the the time

[00:15:35] in between the runs that's necessary, which would vary depending on which Lego pieces combined with which Lego piece. Then because our team included routers and FCPS now uses a much better routing system than you had in 2014-15 and even than you had in 2020, we were able to look at the routes individually and build the routing options within the division's own routing system.

[00:16:01] We also had the ability to assess places where some runs could be split up or otherwise edited in order to arrive at a solid initial estimate of how many buses be required for each option. This work helped to counterbalance the fact that your current runs are optimized for your current school start times.

[00:16:19] We know you wouldn't continue doing exactly the same runs if the school start times changed. Next slide, please. So while our route building work was done with the regular education data, we also took a look at the impact on special education busing. And so here's where the division currently sits in that regard. The division has 350 approximately AM and PM and 135 midday special education runs serving the schools that we modeled in the options. They use 320 buses.

[00:16:52] You can see pretty quickly right there comparing the 2,127 to the 783 regular education buses, of tiering going on 350 a.m. p.m. runs to 320 special education buses very little tiering possible within the constraints of what's required for special education then there are 90 approximately a.m. and p.m. six midday and eight late runs for schools serving exclusively specialty populations those use approximately 100 vehicles those are almost entirely in what you consider your own ecosystem and so they could shift start times as desired in any direction we did

[00:17:32] confirm that the division currently has very little overlap between the fleet serving the general education runs and the special education runs and and much less overlap than looks like was present in 2014-15 next slide please last slide before we dive into actual options the transportation office and the finance office provided cost details that we use once we determine how many additional buses would be needed for an option. Key to this work is that 47 figure Mr.

[00:18:05] D'Andrade mentioned earlier, the 46 additional extra buses that are available for assignment right now. This means that for anything up to and including 46 additional buses, the only additional cost to the division would be the incremental cost of the driver, the fuel, and the maintenance. After when we get to bus 47 and on, now you're talking about having to buy an additional bus and we We priced out options for diesel buses and electric buses, knowing the division's commitment to moving towards electric.

[00:18:37] We also, the cost methodology is slightly different from the 2014-15 in that the division pays for buses over five years. Life expectancy of a bus is 15 years, so we put the payment costs in the first five years and then included the next five years, a cost without the payment costs, took an average of that 10 years for what it would look like.

[00:19:00] Recognizing that once you get to 10 to 11 to 15 years of bus life Sometimes your maintenance costs shoot way up depending on the bus that you have So that that is our estimate for an additional bus on average for each of the first 10 years of its life Next slide, please So after a summer and early fall of grinding away at potential options These are the ones we would like to offer. I'm going to review each one separately. This is just an overview But each one meets the requirements of middle school being at or after 8:00 a.m The high schools and the secondary schools remaining at or after 8 a.m., minimizing fiscal impact as well.

[00:19:40] Note that the bus estimates shown here and in subsequent slides are where the scenarios sit now. They are not where they would be at final. And we have some good data from our work in Anne Arundel to know where we sit now and what we would end up with.

[00:19:56] Once the final solution is selected, once the transportation department takes those bell times back, puts them into the system, grinds away at all the other changes that routinely happen from year to year. Students go from middle school to high school.

[00:20:11] Students enroll. Students unenroll. All of those things. Next slide, please. Next slide. There was an extra in there. Okay. Option A. Option A pushes middle schools to 845.

[00:20:29] It also pushes secondary schools and high schools later. Almost all of the elementary schools shift earlier by an average of about an hour, but that is not distributed evenly. Some shift earlier by about 25 minutes, some shift earlier by 105 minutes.

[00:20:45] It does meet all of the criteria. It also moves all of your secondary students, so your middle, your secondary school, and your high school students to 8:30 or later, which is in keeping with the research, which recommends 8:30 or later school start time for those grade levels.

[00:21:02] The solution currently sits at an additional 13 buses, but we've estimated that at run rate it'll be a likely range of 0 to 25 additional buses. And so the data point we have from Anne Arundel, which applies to all five of these solutions, is that when we arrived at the initial solution with them, we were at a 10% additional bus cost.

[00:21:24] So for extrapolating to your numbers here, that would be an additional 78 buses. By the time we were done working with them and looking at what their options were, again, breaking runs apart, which is not work that was done in 2014-15, we were at a zero additional bus solution in Anne Arundel.

[00:21:42] And so we did take that into consideration and then also looked at some pieces of additional work that we could identify within each one of the options to figure out where the likely additional where the likely result will be and so the current additional 13 buses for this one we think is a likely range of zero to 25 additional buses and so we provided you with the estimated annual cost there next slide please option b pushes middle schools even further to a 9 a.m start time it also pushes secondary schools and high schools later your elementary schools go an

[00:22:20] average of 18 minutes earlier but there's a range some go 80 minutes earlier some go 50 minutes later that is entirely dependent upon geography where they are in relationship to other schools and buses that are available to complete work this one also moves all of your secondary students middle school secondary schools and high schools to 8 30 or later in keeping with the research it currently sits at 66 additional buses we think it's a likely range of 20 to 35 buses additional if it's selected for implementation next slide please option c pushes middle schools

[00:22:58] even further to a start time of 9:30. It keeps middle school secondary and high schools at 8:30, and it trims back that second elementary time to 9 o'clock, difference from the the option B which had a second elementary time of 9:20. And I should point out with options A, B, and C, we have eliminated the the the cascade of elementary schools with, you know, varying start times of five minutes here, ten minutes there. These are either or's, so in each one of them what we showed you was either that earlier start time or that later start time for your elementary schools. We feel this provides a lot of simplicity in terms of the

[00:23:34] planning for transportation and experience shows that it tends to provide simplicity for other elements of the organization as well because you're not constantly having to figure out which one starts when and ends when. Options B and C together are really the closest to what was implemented for Anne Arundel which was an elementary school all of their elementary schools at eight o'clock, all of their high schools at 8:30, and their middle schools at 9:15.

[00:24:02] The difference in these systems between the two is that percentage-wise, Fairfax has a higher ratio of elementary schools, and so we initially tried to cram all of them into one level to see what that would look like, and ultimately had to back it out and go with two levels for the elementary schools.

[00:24:23] Option C is also similar to what Fairfax had for Plan 4 in 2020, which was, but that included a 7:30 start time option for some of your elementary schools. And constituent input from the spring really led us away from looking at a 7:30 start time for elementary schools.

[00:24:40] You'll see that our options, the earliest possible to one is a 7:45. Next slide, please. Option D changes nothing except the middle school start time.

[00:24:56] We knew that that would be something that people would want to look at, if only to see what the cost might be. It does not get all of the older students to an 8:30 or later school start time. But it changes nothing except the middle schools and moves them to a 9 o'clock start time.

[00:25:12] With this one, we believe that the likely range of additional buses needed would be 75 to 150. If you push middle schools even later, that does come down probably closer to 75 to 100. But we don't quite get to a zero until we start talking about 10 o'clock.

[00:25:32] And so this is the first scenario that would involve the purchase of additional buses, as well as make use of all of your 46 buses. This one is similar to plan one that was provided in 2020, but we cut costs pretty substantially by pushing the middle schools to a nine o'clock plan one in 2020 headed at 8:20.

[00:25:54] Next slide, please. Option E is the last one I'd like to show you. It recognizes that we could achieve all of the RFP goals by simply moving all school start times by 30 minutes. This gets middle schools to an 8 o'clock start time.

[00:26:11] It pushes secondary and high schools to 8:30 and 8:40, and then all of your elementary schools would also shift by 30 minutes. It is likely with the number of schools that are in there at the 9:40 time, which would be not sorry at the 9:50 time which is currently 9:20 we could probably trim that down to 9:40 with minimal fiscal impact this one obviously has no additional cost benefits to this one is it's an easy change to communicate all the bells ship by the same amount your bell relationships the the current ones would remain intact so middle school would be going before high school and so

[00:26:50] on next slide please this slide provides a summary of all of the options that i've showed you with the current pieces in front there are a couple of footnotes in there there are a few specialty schools and a few regular schools that are not shown in the the current bell times this is the predominant bell times there's also a footnote for option c i did say that they all would start at one of those two times there are two elementary schools in option c that would shift to 9 30.

[00:27:20] so they're not all at eight o'clock or nine o'clock and then the cost of the buses and the cost shown below are not the buses that i showed you in originally which was where we were at current scenarios those are where we believe that they would be if the option is selected for implementation and the transportation department has time to work through the possibilities of where they can achieve further efficiencies and then the cost options are shown as well with the range for the buses next slide please some considerations we talked a fair amount in the

[00:27:56] last month or two about what considerations might need to be put on the table and things that we thought about as we were developing options the first you know the boundary adjustment process overlaps we recognize that we do think that if the boundary adjustment process results in the things that it's likely to result in the reduction of attendance islands for example that should reduce the transportation burden and the other piece to consider with that is that concerns about whether or not the transportation office could handle two changes in a row or

[00:28:31] whether it would be better to do one change all at once, I think the response to that is transportation departments respond to change all the time. Students move up grades every single year, students enroll, students unenroll, there's construction in certain sections of a school system, so the main result from a boundary adjustment process should reduce your transportation burden.

[00:28:56] Another thing to consider, as I said earlier, the transportation office has much better routing software that it had two years ago, that is going to reap them benefits in terms of being able to perhaps even do better than what we have estimated as final bus numbers.

[00:29:13] We did take a look at the AAP shuttle buses because they were a concern. And they are not what we expected to see in terms of students potentially taking a bus to a home high school, then immediately getting on a bus to go to an AAP program elsewhere.

[00:29:29] They actually occur throughout the school day. Students can go for one block, they can go for two blocks, they can go for three blocks. So that work is spread over, not evenly, but it's more spread over the actual school day for them. So that ended up being less of an impact on changing school start times than we thought it might be.

[00:29:47] We also think that changing school start times could be an opportunity to optimize in this area. We noticed a number of pieces where there are more students going to an AAP program than And there are students in the home school enrolled in that program.

[00:30:02] So maybe that's an opportunity to look at, instead of spending that money on busing students to it, if it's a program that could be replicated in another school, perhaps there's room to do something like that. We did recognize that for many students in AEP classes or programs, that they're losing instructional time on either end taking that bus.

[00:30:23] So that might be something to think about. Next slide, please. We took a look at the high school sports. That situation has changed since the 2014-15 work. Your high school sports start right after school. We would expect that to shift with whatever school start times are adjusted for high school.

[00:30:40] We also took a look at after school facilities usage by community groups, both sporting groups and others, and found that while on a positive note, your facilities are in great use by the community, which is a wonderful thing to see.

[00:30:56] Most of that usage begins at 5:00 PM or later. of those groups go as late as 11:00 p.m. We do think that with a shift, if you shifted some of your secondary schools, middle school, secondary, and high schools, to later, there might be opportunities for morning community usage. We did take a look at the middle school after-school programming, which currently runs 225 to 5:00 p.m. every day, or not every day, most days in most middle schools. The portion that is primarily sports and clubs is typically only about 55 minutes long, and so you see there a typical schedule for a middle school, and that That piece from 3:25 to 4:20 is the sports and club piece.

[00:31:34] What happens between 4:25 and 5, several websites, middle school websites, have it listed as I showed it here, intramurals, homework, socializing, dismissal. And the reason I think it's listed that way is because the buses come in a range of times, between 4:30 and 5:00.

[00:31:49] So they can't really do effective, you know, whole group programming in that time period. Next slide, please. At this time, I'd be happy to entertain questions or discussions. If you can go to the next slide, we can have the options summary up slide up there again, please.

[00:32:09] Okay. Wonderful. Thank you. I have three board members already on the list, starting with Dr. Anderson, to be followed by Chairman Frisch, and Ms. Marin. Firstly, thank you for all of this. I know I have a lot of parents in our middle school that are waiting with bated breath on this work.

[00:32:29] It's been quite the journey because we also have the three middle schools where we have three grade levels. we have a greater percentage of um parents and families that are impacted so the mason community is very invested in this and i know this board has been too and the last board rather because this has been a huge point of conversation in the last board um so thank you for this um really thorough work i i wanted to get back in a little bit in terms of what you talked about regarding the boundary work.

[00:33:01] I wanted to be sure that sequentially what is being proposed here can happen. Can you give me the arguments why we should not do this before the boundary is completed?

[00:33:18] The boundary work, whatever that ends up. The area means why we should not? Why should we wait until the boundary work is completed, or should we not? I'm just trying to get a sense of, are we overly duplicating the work? Are we being short-sighted if we deal with the start times before the boundary work is completed?

[00:33:38] I think that it's difficult to come up with reasons why we should wait for the boundary work to finish before this is implemented, for a couple of reasons. As I said, you know, you have a great transportation department and a routing team that can handle changes.

[00:34:01] change all the time already, and putting together the pieces for a school start time change and then an attendance boundary change is work on their part, but it is not overly burdensome to do them separately, and there's not a lot to be gained necessarily from doing that all at once.

[00:34:24] I do think that what we've tried to provide in these options gives you some simplicity to what you currently have. The range of your elementary schools across that 7:20 to 9:30 is difficult to manage.

[00:34:39] One of the things that one of our clients found that when they adopted more consistent school start times across their elementary schools was that there were other benefits outside of the transportation world. Now PD could be offered online at the same time because we knew what the schedules were for everyone.

[00:34:55] It was easier to communicate to families, those kinds of things. If you went with school start times earlier and you adopted the most expensive in terms of bus driver option that we have here, which would be option D, you would potentially be looking at purchasing some buses as well as bringing on additional drivers that are bigger than the other options.

[00:35:15] And so there might be a concern there is if we do that option and then later we change the attendance boundaries and now all of a sudden we need far less busing. I think the only risk there is that now you have some extra buses.

[00:35:30] Your natural turnover in bus drivers, I mean, you're currently short drivers now, and so I don't think that the Transportation Department would say that, you know, we'd end up having to let any drivers go. This would be, you know, this would probably fill gaps that are going to happen turnover-wise anyway and might present some other opportunities for how they organize their work.

[00:35:53] Reasons, one possible reason for why you might want to wait, and this is a stretch for me, but every change is disruptive, right? And so if we go and do a school start time change, you are moving, you're not changing necessarily where students go to school, you're just changing the time.

[00:36:14] And then if you do a boundary adjustment on top of that, now the following year, they might be at a different time and at a different school. impact might be felt more on staff with those subsequent changes there were some staff members in the survey who said that you know if you change middle school start times to earlier later any if you change it at all they're going to look at other school options and i think that that i don't know if that would be true with attendance boundaries or not but i do think that you know change is difficult I worry about the potential impact of trying to do two large things

[00:36:54] at once our work in Jefferson County and Kentucky one of the things that they attempted to do was make a large number of changes at once in terms of school start times and routing optimization and attendance boundaries our attendance assignment and they struggled I don't necessarily I don't there were a lot of reasons for that there and i don't see signs that you would have the same problem here um but it is you know recognize it is two big changes and making them at once might be more difficult than doing them in sequence um what would be a reasonable timeline in between these two activities

[00:37:33] since you don't recommend doing two big changes all at the same time um well so not knowing the the scope of what you're doing with the boundary piece and i think that one of the things that is important to differentiate with this is a school start time change anything other than option d here would impact every student there are almost no elementary schools that would have a zero start time change in option a b c and then d would impact all middle school students only

[00:38:09] i'm not aware of how much of an impact your attendance boundary process might be But I would have to think that since many of your students are already attending the school around which they live, it's gonna be a percentage of the student population as opposed to 100% of the students.

[00:38:30] And so that's a consideration. But if it is, if the attendance boundary process results, and I'm totally wrong, it results in 75% of the students going to a different school, then you'd be looking at two huge changes. So my answer to it would be, school start time changes work if they're communicated early and frequently, and you give everyone a chance to adjust.

[00:38:56] One of the things that was a strong lesson learned from the work in Jefferson County was they made the adjustment very late in the game, communicated it very late in the game, and a lot of systems didn't have a time to adjust. Anne Arundel, which was successful in making a huge start time change, communicated their new schedules months before.

[00:39:16] and everyone knew this is exactly what the change is going to be there was no last-minute adjustments to it Which was a lesson learned from Howard County's work and trying to change school start times They communicated early as well, but then they made some last-minute adjustments and that that that that hurt them So and then you you know, but once you've made the school start time change your own experience shows that With great preparation and then the 2015-16 school year there was there were no problems and and there was a great art newspaper article reporting on how there were no problems I think they expected to see a lot so there's that piece to consider

[00:39:53] but then so if you may if you voted to do a school start time change in January of 2025 effective in 25 26 I would venture to say that by the spring of 2026 your new school start times will be the norm and you'd be ready to do attendance boundary adjustments anytime sure for that and the last piece on that is I believe with the boundary work the superintendent is contemplating moving sixth grade into the middle schools for the other 23 22 high school middle schools in Fairfax County because where we have the three and Mason can you

[00:40:28] speak a little bit to that impact okay so that is going to likely make the remember the beginning slide where I showed you 23 middle schools 498 runs to accommodate that that in all likelihood would push that number up a little bit 23 middle schools 550 runs maybe depending on what we get to that if you want to keep all of your middle schools at the same start time you know that might impact the buses needed but we've tried to provide enough separation

[00:41:03] between all of the major packets of work 550 buses is still less than the 783 that you currently have so that should work out okay I would like to point out that one of the pieces that would be part of the work in getting from where we are in the current scenarios to the final bus numbers is looking at what your load factors look like one of the reasons that we were able to you know knock 10% off of our initial run at the Anne Arundel work was they had a fairly large number of very underutilized buses we did take a look at load factors here

[00:41:38] and your buses are not as underutilized but there is room to add students to some of these existing buses and we verified that both with the data that the transportation office provided to us and in doing the observations and so all of that plays into that which is why the I think 498 to 550 is a good place to start it might end up being much less than that by the time you get done so the worst case scenario in that instance is you have a student who's a fifth grader and would have this potential change in their elementary start time and then potentially the next year if they were moved to the middle

[00:42:15] school as a sixth grader will have another time to contend with because high school is going to be high school and right if you're already in middle school you don't have that impact right okay thank you one of the things that I don't think you talked about quite a bit and I don't know whether this is a you question or mr. Muir question is what are the potential savings that we can see here are there any and i know there's some zero options but are there any savings based on doing this work i mean if there isn't there isn't i can answer it if you want there there there is

[00:42:51] potential for savings and and but it doesn't it it piggybacks off the school start time work but it's not necessarily dependent solely upon it and the the savings comes from what i alluded to earlier the fact that you now have a very robust routing system that once your routing team um you know, has fully loaded everything, can start to see possibilities.

[00:43:14] It's really the difference, I'm going to date myself, it's really the difference going from like Lotus 1-2-3 to the current version of Excel. The power that is there is, you know, it is huge and it's a great thing and it happened completely independent of this.

[00:43:29] We already have that in place currently, right? You're currently running, it should be fully operationalized 25-26. They are currently running systems in tandem, and we're loading in special education routes over the late spring into the summer, and so that should be in place and provide you with a lot of possibilities for looking at things like, you know, maybe we can shift this work from a big bus to a smaller bus.

[00:44:00] Maybe we look at -- you know, they'll be able to provide you with analyses of things like let's change up how we do AAP if that's part of the attendance boundary discussion piece. That could have a huge impact. Thank you. And what's that system called? Traversa.

[00:44:16] Traversa. Thank you. Can you speak a little bit, this may be Mr. Muick, in terms of our acquisition of electric buses? I know that has primarily come to us through grants. What is the trajectory of that?

[00:44:32] I know initially we had 35. What do you see in the next five years in terms of the number that we can achieve through those grants yeah by the end of this school year we'll be at a little over 100 I think 102 with you know grants and a little bit of purchasing by us I think getting to that 2035 you know jet goal is probably a separate worthy of a separate discussion at some time I mean we're doing our best but the there's challenge too with not getting to try and not getting too far ahead of technology you know because we have a lot of routes that you can see in the system that we couldn't use an electric bus on because there's not enough

[00:45:08] time between the morning run and the afternoon run to recharge them and go so there's a lot of considerations in there but the one i'm pretty confident on is not meeting you know is not is the challenge in meeting the 2035 to have all 1600 buses be electric you know a typical diesel bus is 150 000 uh electric buses 450 so three times the amount and you know we're in some tough financial times right now so that that seems like a a tough one and what has been our grant amount each of the years that we've received it the grant amount you know it it just varies uh we are always

[00:45:46] looking for new grants so we've gotten one from um epa and so one was 16 million i may need some help from a friend here um paul or tracer michelle but they've been varying amounts so epa will come out and say hey we've got some grant money available for electric buses put your application in so we got a bunch from them we got another bunch from DEC if you can jump in and so currently we receive from the joint environmental task force 2.5 million dollars a year for electric conversion of those which

[00:46:24] we use that for our cost sharing for some of the grant opportunities by the EPA. In the past, we've had DEQ grants from the Volkswagen Settlement and currently we're looking on starting to do our own kind of purchasing where we break it out in five years.

[00:46:46] So we're in the process of making an order for there. So it's going to be a combination of both. We're not sure when it comes down to the grant work what grants are going to be available going forward. So I think the real path without getting too much in the weeds is looking at that budget that we have for buses every granted every year of course our buying power is going to go down just because of the prices of our buses but I didn't hear anything about the Dominion grant or the Dominion allocation that they provided in the past yeah so that's the initial eight buses and there's no more no but we work with Dominion and Dominion is providing a lot of our charging infrastructure so we're still having that

[00:47:24] relationship with Dominion but it's not a grant it's more partnership got it I I will definitely take a go back, but I do want to say I appreciate the fact that you talked about community use, but I'm struggling to understand how it would be feasible to have activities and sports in the morning, and I will expound upon that more during my next term.

[00:47:48] Any response to that? So a lot of it depends on what options are selected. You see that with some of these options, you've got a 9:30 start on some of the facilities, So you could potentially see your way to 7:30 to 8:30 or 7:30 to 9 for community use.

[00:48:09] One of the reasons we brought it up was because we didn't want to say that we were eliminating a potential block of time for community use, recognizing that facilities are pretty well used here, but there are some groups that are running until 11 o'clock playing sports at night, and so they might want to shift to an earlier piece.

[00:48:30] The other reason it came up is because students told us that they were engaging in athletic activities early in the morning already. Swimming was one of them that came up as being a big thing, where they're in the pool at 5:00 a.m., and so now I see potentially a trade-off, right? If that's where the high school athletes are swimming, then the community's not swimming at that time, and maybe there's a flip that happens there.

[00:48:52] It's difficult to say for sure. I will say that with the athletics piece, that was one of the things that was brought up as being a substantial concern in the 2014-15 and then switch but then in some subsequent research afterwards within the division staff or not staff students i'm sorry students indicated that it turned out not to be as big of a problem as they had feared it would be okay thank you it's a great conversation we're having this morning but uh not to be unfair to uh chairman fresh but uh when you provide the responses if you could make a little more succinct so that we don't use up almost 20

[00:49:31] minutes for each board member for the first round mr frisch i was being very unfair to you well hold my time because i demand as verbose as you can possibly be i'm my kid um i'll be interested to hear uh some comments from mr moon and mr mckelveen since they were on the board uh the last time we went through this and i really do appreciate the depth of work that went into uh the proposals and what not, I just want to clarify something that came up with Dr. Anderson's questions.

[00:50:03] I think you said that, like, let's say we move forward with like C or E or something like that, and then later down the road, we have the boundary work. We could realize additional efficiencies that would make those things more cost-effective in retrospect. Absolutely.

[00:50:19] So the data point that I can provide to you succinctly is in 2018-19, the division looked at runs serving attendance islands, which would be something I would presume you would address with the boundary work. At that point, they were 4.1% of the runs that were being done.

[00:50:35] So if attendance islands were eliminated, in theory, you're looking at those who go away immediately know whether there would be additional buses to accommodate additional students within the run. But potentially 4.1% would be on the table right away. - And then in addition to maybe needing more buses for middle school if we move sixth grade across the county, we'd need fewer for elementary as a result of moving them, correct?

[00:50:59] - Correct, unknowable until you get to the actual student database, what the actual impact is, yes. - Okay, one thing I wanted to talk about, the data from the surveys is certainly interesting, but like with most of our survey data, I have to really remember that it is informative, not scientific, right?

[00:51:20] And so I'm curious, have you ever produced this type of research and then weighted the results that you get as opposed to just using the raw numbers to make the point. I ask that because there's a ton of scientific research out there that people who are supportive of change are far more motivated to take part in voluntary surveys.

[00:51:42] So, and that's not to say that we wouldn't end up with very similar numbers in a weighted sample. Have you done weighted samples for school divisions before? - We have done it. What we got with the fall surveys was largely middle school results. And so what we provided in the appendices did provide you with some middle schools to secondary school comparisons to help with that piece.

[00:52:05] But I would point to a 2017 study done on your own school system that was published in Sleep Health that did do a pre and a post survey work of the caliber that you're talking about for research level. and found that before change to after change, your high school and your secondary students slept 30 minutes more and reported less daytime sleepiness.

[00:52:26] Your middle school, which remember in that time period went from 8:00 a.m. to 7:30 start times, your middle school students reported sleeping 15 minutes less and reported more daytime sleepiness. And that survey work was done at the level you're talking about. - I appreciate that. Speaking of the impact, you talked a little bit about the Anne Arundel example and the transition they did, which was a large transition.

[00:52:48] Is there any data coming out of that on the end about, you know, one of the things we talk about with the data around the sleep in addition to health is the impacts it can have in academics. Is there any research about the impact those changes may have had on academics in Arundel?

[00:53:04] - So the superintendent of that school system was new with the school start time change and has spoken on the topic a couple of times. He has pointed out a number of academic increases. Again, not a causal research-based study, but he has pointed out academic gains that he believes are a result of the school start time changes.

[00:53:25] He's also pointed out in a joking but also serious manner, he's never won more state championships than he has with the later school start times. And so I think that at least anecdotally, the data coming out of there are quite positive.

[00:53:41] - Okay. - One of the things I noticed in the survey data was the volume of staff who prefer the status quo. - Yes. - And so, you know, this is a question that I'll give to the superintendent to take back to staff is what kind of implications there may be with collective bargaining if such a changes move forward.

[00:54:05] So maybe we can have staff and our labor relations folks look at that question and bring that back to the board. that would be great. On the presentation, it indicates that maintenance is the same cost for electric and diesel buses.

[00:54:24] My understanding is that the maintenance is significantly less for electric buses. Is that the staffing element, or is that an error perhaps? You want to take that one, Paul?

[00:54:39] So we still have to do checks on the buses every 45 days. So you have the staff through our contract with the county through DVS. So the buses are still being checked. They're still being looked at. Of course, where you see the big difference is going to be fuel. And parts.

[00:54:54] And parts, right, fuel and parts. So there is a difference, but you still have to check the buses every 45 days. So it's more of a staff cost than it is a parts and labor, or parts and labor, right? And then finally, I guess I'll take a go back because I'm just about out of time.

[00:55:12] But I appreciate the work so far. Thank you. Ms. Marron. - Yes, thank you. I think this is really exciting and very cool. My first questions are about routes, and I'm wondering if during the analysis that was done, was there analysis of the current routes made, meaning that, like, is ridership efficient?

[00:55:34] Are the buses running at efficient or full capacity? Are students who can ride the bus actually riding the bus, or are they getting to school in some other way? And then relatedly, are stops that are receiving buses really in need of them, are they actually close enough to walk and I ask because I hear about different scenarios where technically a student could walk but they have to cross a highway or they'd have to go through you know a muddy wooded area to get to school and so I'm wondering if any of that kind of analysis was done or you just took all the routes we have in whatever state they are and did your

[00:56:07] analysis so we initially in developing the actual options took the route runs that you have as they are and then came up with an initial result for each one of the options a through D and then did look at where can we break apart runs based on what we know about the the process of optimization to current school start times and adjusting to additional school start times we don't we did also look at your load factors to see what might also be possible and so data

[00:56:42] provided by the transportation office average numbers of students on your regular education buses in the morning for elementary school to the end are worth 34 28 36 and 32 the only number that starts with the two there is your middle schools that's the 7:30 start time but what is a what's a good rate is it 30 is it 40 like and this might be a better question for our staff like how do you ensure that our stops are regularly evaluated or the routes are regularly evaluated for optimization of, you know, are our buses full? Are they

[00:57:18] running at capacity? Yeah, they're evaluating them every year. Starts usually in October where they'll do a capacity headcount for a week to make sure, you know, get the right count of number of kids at the stops that are getting on the buses and then they'll relook at it then to see if there's any ways to optimize those routes. But, you know, if you have three kids at a stop, two kids to stop you know you you've got to deal with that yeah and I guess my question is not so much about the stops it's that how full are the buses and again our kids walking that should be or that are given the bus or you know and then because there's a whole other kiss and ride scenario so that's like one

[00:57:56] aspect I just want to want to touch on and raise the other thing is can mr. Muick or mr. D'Andrea can you speak about the software used to manage the roots and that's in so far as do we purchase that by a contract are there contract renewals and what's the plan for keeping it current with extensions upgrades just thinking about recent experience and having software be quite defunct and we're still kind of patching it together I don't want to see that but how do we ensure that we have the best software we currently use a system called mapnet and we are in the process we awarded a contract around this time last year to transition to Tyler transversa which you may have heard

[00:58:35] mentioned earlier this morning that's the new software we're also going down the path of converting over to tyler mobile data tablets so that's the ipad that's on the bus so that we'll have the one suite of software and hardware on the bus which will give us more functionality like currently we don't have turn by turn on those mobile data tablets using both the tyler software and the Tyler MDT's will give us that it'll give us the options to upgrade to things such as badging kids on and off you know highlighting

[00:59:11] kindergartners that have to get transferred to you know to the assigned adult that's there to pick them up or drop them off great things like that so we are moving that direction okay great and so dr. Reed this is one of those things that when we speak of when we review your executive limitation like let's you know confirm this is when we did it so we know and we're not you know like 20, 30 years down the road, and we have this old system.

[00:59:33] My second group of questions are about program access. So this is definitely related to the boundary work. And if we wanna optimize program access, that could mean getting students into currently available programs or expanding the programs. So I feel like that's like a whole big thing that is so centrally tied to one of the big priorities of the boundary work that I see it inextricably linked.

[00:59:54] So I just wanna put that out there for my colleagues' consideration. regarding the impact on students, families, and staff. So I understand that transportation is nimble and can change, but asking families to change their bus time, change their school, is not something I'm interested in doing in two separate things in a short period of time.

[01:00:13] I think people will really not appreciate that. I do think that the market of afterschool, childcare, athletics, all those things will shift to the demand, but we have to be aware of how much we're asking our community to shift. I think we have to really make sure we're including in the decision-making how likely the same people are going to be changed. Is it like, you know, 30 minutes of a start time and their school boundary? So I will ask more questions next about impact on educators and

[01:00:45] other things. Thank you. Any comment? No, sir. I didn't have any comment on that. Okay. I'm going to Ms. Vaisal Anderson. Okay. So I have a bunch of questions. I'm probably going to need to go back, And I apologize in advance for the fact that they're all over my paper.

[01:01:05] So the first thing I want to ask is if we can go down to a 90-minute window, why would we have not done that already? Because if our window's at 110 minutes, I'm hearing from parents all the time that bus routes are having to change at the beginning of the year because we have aspirational goals and then it doesn't happen in real life because of traffic in the area.

[01:01:26] And so I just want to make sure that we actually recognize whether or not that 90 minutes is actually feasible. So we did run the scenarios by transportation staff to look at that possibility and got an initial, you know, thumbs up, yeah, looks like it could work kind of response from them to make sure that it was going to be there.

[01:01:46] The traffic concerns are prevalent in everything that we talked, heard about in the forums. the things that I think needs to be recognized with the traffic concerns is that the schools themselves with all of the kiss and ride work are their own traffic entity in terms of generating traffic around the school and that does impact the bus work but if you shift the school start time that that bubble of traffic is just going to go to whatever the new school start time is in looking at the options that were presented in 2020 that were all deemed to be feasible

[01:02:24] there was one with an 75-minute window as well as one with an 80-minute window. And how many buses did that require? Those were going to be large additional costs. The other two options that were there were 105 and 120 minutes. The windows in the 2014-15 work ranged all the way from 85 to 125 minutes, but it's not just the window that matters.

[01:02:51] so for example one of the 125 window options in 2014-15 had an additional annual cost of 22 million another one had an additional annual cost of 8 million same window what matters is which schools are at which times um miss Anderson if i could jump in real quick i would just want to point out you know in these options if we had that 120 vacancy you know driver vacancies filled yeah getting to the 90 definitely doable and getting to the 80 would be you know a little more challenging but we could get there but that 120 vac you know vacancies is the go back runs

[01:03:29] that are causing us trouble okay um okay so i do i will renew my concern that i've heard um significantly from my community members so far is that they are i have many people that are very worried about kids that parents are going to go to work and kiddos are still going to be at home for middle school with no feasibility of getting to school on their own we have a chronic absenteeism issue going on across the county that we're desperately trying to get under control and then we're going to create an opportunity where we have kids that physically can't get to school if they miss the bus because their parents are already gone I'm significantly concerned about us

[01:04:09] talking about community use before school starts because I think that's a safety issue that making sure that we get people out of the building that shouldn't be in the building with kids I think is a concern however if we did look at providing some of those after-school programs before school not calling it SAC for middle schoolers because that's not going to go well but if we do offer some before school activities that would allow parents to drop off their kids early and have some of those opportunities beforehand I think that that's feasible for some of those but a 9:30 start time for parents that have to be at work at 8 o'clock that's an hour and a half for your 12 and 13

[01:04:44] year old to be at home alone which is is a problem for many many parents the other concern that I have that we haven't discussed is that we have a lot of elementary schoolers that get off the bus to older siblings and that creates a problem in certain communities where you don't have someone that is going to be able to be to get off the bus with them so I'm concerned about those aspects when we talk about it and we're not really actually talking about which which schools we're going to pick at the earlier time and which schools we're going to pick at the later time and how those things are being decided. So I think that those things I would need to see fleshed out before I could make a particular decision. So I'll stop

[01:05:23] there and get myself reorganized in terms of the rest of the questions I have. But those are those are my initial concerns and to share some of the concerns that have been shared with me. Mr. Moon we don't have any comment. Those are good concerns. Stuff that we hadn't looked at yet in terms of before and after school support for the kids. If I could offer a little bit of survey data in response to it. We did ask on the fall survey of students, are you responsible for taking care of younger siblings after school at least once a week? 23% of the middle school respondents

[01:05:58] did say yes. We asked the same question of parents, do you currently count on your middle school student to take care of younger siblings after school at least once a week? Only 15% of the parents said yes so yes definitely a concern for a portion of the population yeah I would just say that sometimes its parents not wanting to fess up with the fact that they're middle schoolers watching their younger kiddos or maybe not recognizing the full impact of what happens when you have your have your older child get your kids off the bus so okay thank you I have a rational size more heiser thank you and it and my colleague actually asked a lot of my

[01:06:37] questions my first question was going to be that's a pretty big leap from a 110 minute to 80 or 90 minutes and while I appreciate if we have fully staffed buses we can make it happen we need to be in the reality we're living in now which I can't recall the last time we had fully staffed buses right and not a bus driver shortage so I do have concerns about that as a baseline to presume that we can do all of these things so is that being able to be done because of this new software or have you actually driven the routes to make sure they can actually work? It's largely looking at the software and understanding what might be possible

[01:07:13] and talking with transportation staff and observing operations. We did include one option that does maintain the 110-minute window, option E, which just shifts everything by 30 minutes. And that's a significant cost impact, which is what I kind of anticipated. Well, I guess, oh, just just by 30 minutes, but that also then gets some of the elementary school kids out very late in the evening, which I know is a concern from parents as well about getting kids out in twilight or late for what their body clocks are but having said that I think I have concerns about the feasibility of shifting taking that much time off bus runs I know you'd mentioned the 2015 2016 that there were no problems I will

[01:07:52] tell you as a parent who had kids in the school there was lots of times where the buses were in a route that they couldn't turn around in or kids were waiting on busy crowded streets and things had to be adjusted I remember the significant impact on the community not to say that that's not going to happen and it always will but I want to be really careful not to assume that as we actually implement this we're not going to find areas where buses are having difficulty turning around or we're having kids waiting and it still happens right on Braddock Road the stop got moved from in the neighborhood to right on Braddock which is easier for the bus but a lot more dangerous for the

[01:08:28] kids and I do think that we need to dig more into those pieces of this just my two cents I also I I really appreciate that in terms of the boundary work and saying transportation staff is is good at flexibility and I totally have a lot of faith mr. muick and your staff however I also think that that's missing a couple other folks who will need to be flexible and that's the students and the parents and especially around childcare it takes a long time to set chat as a person who used to be a single mother I can tell you it takes a long time to set up childcare and if we have a change in time now because we're

[01:09:05] adjusting these times and people set up childcare around that and then they get moved to another school with a different time and childcare has to be redone that is a significant burden on our families in the community and so I don't think we can kind of gloss over that right and in similar way with the students I do think students like structure they like routine so again I don't think we can gloss over two changes instead of one change is a significant impact on students so I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to do this separate from the boundary work but I just wanted to put that it's not just the transportation staff who I have full faith in being flexible it is also families and

[01:09:43] students that are impacted as well as our own staff who wanted to have structure so I will I know my time is almost up I've got I'll pause there and kind of recircle but I would like to hear more about the full impact not just on transportation but on everybody thank you yes ma'am I well I might not have a lot of experience in the education industry just managing projects and organizations over the past 30 years you know two big projects like this that can you know cause some disruption you know I I think they overlap enough that they can kind of inform each other so I think we have to be very precise and how we

[01:10:22] roll them out and and take that into consideration I agree I think we need to very thoughtful about how we do both of these thank you I could just add one point from the implementation from Anne Arundel one of the things that the board president in Anne Arundel noted in after action review of their process was she felt that one of the big shining stars that made them successful was the conversations that they fostered around child care options when the school's start time changes were known that the school system took the lead in bringing together providers and making sure they understood what the changes were making all these options known to parents I will say that you know one of the things

[01:11:00] that we heard again and again and again in the forums for you is that parents do seem to face a lack of child care options even with the current school start times so it's not necessarily that we create greater problems we have an existing challenge in their perception okay thank you I will mr. McAlevin as the last one on the list for the first round since he's not here they will go Thank you for all the work and presentation that you've done on this.

[01:11:33] My question in terms of the surveys, which we were talking about, and a concern that I have is to the child care, how many, first of all, were the surveys translated and how many did you receive that were translated surveys, if you could get me that data, and In terms of those that you did get back about children that take care or parents whose children, older siblings, take care of the younger siblings.

[01:12:04] The reason that I bring that up is that we need to look at the entirety of the demographics that we have and look at what areas there are children, older siblings, that take care of younger siblings. I particularly work in one area where I know that that happens a lot, which may be different than another part of the county.

[01:12:25] So when we look at everything that we do, we've gotta look at that lens of equity. And if this is gonna disproportionately impact certain schools in certain areas, that's a concern for me. When childcare, paid childcare is not an option for some people, you have to have family childcare.

[01:12:44] And I also have the concern about this shift, which was already mentioned about students and parents and that time, but also our staff. We have to look at how that impacts our staff and some of those later release times.

[01:13:01] They also have children that they have to pick up or they also have children that have to get to school that are not in this county. So those are things that I would like for you all to delve more into so that as we move forward we can have all that information.

[01:13:16] So I can answer the question about the survey. The Fall Parent Survey was made available in multiple languages. It was made available only online. FCPS staff took the lead in getting the word out about the survey. We did only receive 2% back in other languages than English.

[01:13:35] So we recognize that as an issue. I'm not sure what else could have been done to get the word out, but it was made available in multiple languages, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, several other ones beyond that. And so that was out there. At the forums, FCPS staff did provide interpreters in multiple languages, both for the in-person pieces and they were available if parents wanted to complete the survey, which that one was only available in English.

[01:14:02] Okay. With Mr. McAlvin just making a grand entry. To claim is 30 minutes. Thanks. I had to go find tissues because we don't have tissues, so -- and thanks to Christina for bringing them down.

[01:14:21] So first of all, thank you, Ms. Prieto, for all this work. For those of you who don't know, Ms. Prieto has done so much work for our system, transformative work over the years. She was the one who brought us the prismatic report back in 2013 that transformed our food and nutrition services system.

[01:14:41] So really appreciate you and all you've done for us. I think this discussion is probably the most transformative work for students that we've undertaken this entire calendar year, and I think, in my humble opinion, it takes priority over a boundary study.

[01:15:05] It's hard work, and we've seen an impressive outcome. You've presented us a number of scenarios. I think we can find something that works within this. You know, Carl asked for perspective, just based on past experience of going through this.

[01:15:27] And really, what just has to be done is the board has to set a marker in the ground that it's going to happen and move forward. We found a solution back in 2015 that, you know, had some cost to it. Nothing we do comes without cost.

[01:15:43] I think it was five to six million dollars, but that's probably one of the best investments we've ever made, in my opinion. So I'm looking at this, I'm seeing options with cost, and I'm happy to invest because this is, again, some of the most critical, important work we can do.

[01:16:01] So, Ms. Prieto, I do want to not let us lose sight of why we're here, and that is student health. So can you tell us a little bit about the cost-benefit analysis that's gone into this, thinking about things like teen car crashes or improved academic performance?

[01:16:26] - Certainly, I can speak to the research. There is a, we undertook a review of the literature from 2014 forward, recognizing that the previous work had already done an exhaustive look at the research base of 2014 and prior.

[01:16:43] So what's different from 2014 until now? And there's a couple of things. The need for sleep is better researched and known and that's at multiple levels. There's now some very good studies out there that speak to both the need for high schoolers and middle schoolers to have more sleep.

[01:17:00] There is more understood in the realm of neuroscience in terms of the fact that middle school and high school students are not just what parents have guessed but are factually known be fundamentally different in terms of circadian rhythms and their needs there, and that's been better documented.

[01:17:19] The American Academy Pediatrics statement expressing the need for middle school and high school to start at 8:30 or later came out in 2014, which was right in the middle of the previous large effort within the school system that resulted in the blueprint.

[01:17:35] And so there's also another 10 years of research on the need for sleep and some additional areas looking at things like mental health, as well as the tendency among teens who are sleep-deprived to make poor choices.

[01:17:53] There's been a couple of longitudinal studies that looked at sleep deprivation in the adolescent years and outcomes later on in terms of risky behaviors that are fairly well documented.

[01:18:09] So in response, we know more and we know better that later school start times are what's best physically and mentally for students. Great. Thank you for that. And then I think I'll just conclude my piece here with just saying that, as I previously stated, I have no desire to wait for a boundary study to embark on this work.

[01:18:34] There's nothing more important we can do than work to improve our student health at a time of mental health crises and just other things going on in society that that we can't control this is something we can control and I don't think we can wait any comment there no sir okay seems to be everybody has had a chance to ask some questions the first round I'm the last one before we do have to have a second round I have on the second round I have a talk to Anderson to be followed

[01:19:11] by Chairman Frisch and Vice Chair Anderson. I have a rationalize my manager. Anybody else? I have a Ms. Marin. Okay. - Mr. Moon, sorry to interrupt. Are we going two minutes for go backs?

[01:19:28] - I think we should still got time for three minutes. - Okay. With that said, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with my colleague and a former colleague as well, Ms. McAlvin, that it is an important work.

[01:19:46] I prefer not to wait. However, I still have some questions. So let me ask you those questions. Different options obviously may come down with how much the board may be willing to commit to financial resources.

[01:20:05] I mean, I'm looking at anywhere from zero solutions all the way up to $17.3 million, which could be considered a lot of money. Our transportation budget is about 200 million per year, and in terms of what the boundary study or boundary adjustments may potentially bring in as a transportation cost savings.

[01:20:41] We haven't done this yet, so it's all speculation. If it's a 5%, it's a 10 million. If 2%, that's 4 million, it could be anywhere, could it be anywhere, whether the amount of cost, potential cost savings could impact on board members in supporting one option over another.

[01:21:06] If a cost of saving is as large as 20 million, 10%, I have so much doubt about that, even from a lot of boundary adjustments. then D could be, we might go with D.

[01:21:23] Even though it may cost up to $17.3 million, board may do that. So that potential cost savings is a factor, could be a factor for board members in picking which options to go with. That's one question.

[01:21:40] In a second, the first one is actually my comment and showing my thoughts on that. Second is whether we have ever run different cost modeling keeping elementary and high school as is because survey data seem to show pretty reasonable satisfaction with current elementary and high school start times.

[01:22:07] but task is to change the middle school to later whether we have ever looked at ever looked at from current start times from middle school by 15 minutes increment to later how much that's going to cost us have you ever done that uh mr moon i don't think we have but i'm looking to paul who's been here a little longer i don't think we've run any modeling like that shifting by 15 minute increments keeping elementary high school staying same and moving the middle school

[01:22:40] to see if we could do it i can provide you with a couple of numbers we did look at how far out we would have to shift middle school in option d to get us to you know a number that might be considered minimal fiscal impact and somewhere around the 945 range begins to approach that but by not changing anything else, I don't think we get to that piece.

[01:23:12] In reference to your first part of your questions, earlier I alluded to some 2018-19 data that showed that you were looking at attendance island runs that were about 4.1% of the system at that time.

[01:23:28] If as part of the attendance boundaries, I think Ms. Marin alluded to it, looking at AAP assignments, same data set 2018-19, your AAP runs were 18% of the total number of runs in the system.

[01:23:43] And so those, to the extent that that ratio still holds, that might be savings that are realized as attendance boundaries are adjusted. And then those two together dwarf the cost of the options A through A, B, and C, and course E that we've proposed to you. Okay, thank you. I'm going to go back to the same question about running different financial modeling with a 15-minute increment for just the middle schools, keeping elementary and high school as is. Whether that's going to be a lot of work

[01:24:19] or that's just something that you can easily get back to us. Do you want to run it earlier than what we currently have in option d or you want to see 9 15 currently currently is a 7 30 whether we can do 7 45 8 8 15 8 45. um you start to run into that bubble at the beginning that i showed you on the slide where you have a huge number of runs in that half an hour time frame and so until you get beyond that dr pierre i just want to see i want to know whether you can get back to us with

[01:24:51] the numbers pretty quickly well that's going to be a lot of work we can make some estimates it won't be as clean I won't be as certain of the results as this estimate is better than nothing so thank you my time is up so I'm not gonna get to my third one so I'm gonna put myself and I'll go back with a doctor I have questions on mr.

[01:25:22] Mateo yes please turn and there are four I'll give you two and then hit the other two can you please explain whether the study included any consideration of of childcare arrangements for educators and parents caregivers.

[01:25:38] I am concerned that the proposed change in middle school start times does not align with childcare start or stop times in childcare availability throughout the county. Second question, the current boundary review includes consideration of moving sixth grade students from elementary school to middle school.

[01:25:58] If that proposal is adopted and implemented, can you please explain what changes be required to the analysis that you have presented today in answer to the first one child care definitely came up as a concern and was something that we looked at as possibilities and so right now you have a number of places where elementary students are either the last one to leave or the first one to leave in comparison to their older siblings so it becomes a very difficult task to figure out you know which parents are are doing which

[01:26:36] arrangements in terms of older siblings taking care of younger siblings but we did include a couple of options where some portion of the old potential older siblings are getting out earlier than some portion of the elementary school we tried to preserve some of those relationships in there and so for options a B and C we provided you with a list of what the school start times would be down at the individual school level because we knew everybody would want to see what the elementary school pieces are there but again it's a difficult piece to parse through with what you currently have it was a concern and as I said before I think that that that will be the first thing that parents will want

[01:27:15] to address with whatever school start times are adjusted or adopted their second question was related to I'm sorry it was the same question that I had asked earlier sixth grade students being moved Potentially an increase in the number of middle school runs that are required.

[01:27:33] And so I said 498 to maybe about 550 is probably where it would end up starting. But recognize that the load factors on the middle school buses with the best data that we have, have the buses at, where is it, somewhere in the neighborhood of half full on average.

[01:27:51] Now, that doesn't mean some buses aren't jam-packed. What it means is there are some buses that are definitely not jam-packed. And so it really depends on where those sixth graders live. It should also result in potentially at the system level, a lower need for buses for elementary schools because you're taking off a chunk of the student body.

[01:28:10] - Questions three and four. Can you please clarify the scope of the study? Did you approach the study from the perspective of determining the appropriate start times for elementary, middle and high school? Or were you just focused on middle school start times? And last one, did you determine whether the survey respondents representative of the FCPS student population. So the RFP requirements were middle school at 8 o'clock or later while preserving secondary and high schools at 8 o'clock or later. What we did add into that is the knowledge of the research body that recommends middle secondary and high school at 8:30 or

[01:28:48] later and tried to provide options that met the current research recognizing that the 8 o'clock or 8:10 start times for secondary and high schools was done at the time where we were just getting to the AAP statement of 8:30 or later the research based on elementary students actually says that earlier school start times are not a negative for them in terms of academics and then there is some research that points to our start times as early as 7:30 for elementary schools is not a negative in terms of academics however your your public at

[01:29:26] just like every constituency out there status quo becomes you know what they prefer and we saw that in the survey results and we certainly heard that in the forums which is why we did not even look at a solution that offered elementary schools at 7:30 the earliest we went with 7:45 and that was not all of your elementary schools and then as far as representative we did look at we did not ask a number of demographic questions that we would typically include in a more research-based study.

[01:29:56] We were concerned about length. There were a couple questions that were just not available to be asked, but we did look at number of responses from each one of the schools that were selected and able to draw generally representative.

[01:30:14] Again, I don't have the demographic data to be able to go in and splice out more so what I would like to do with it. Surveys were already getting pretty long. And so, you know, you run out, people don't respond the longer the surveys get, and it's getting worse and worse.

[01:30:29] Thank you. Okay, thank you. Dr. Anderson. Okay. Thank you. I think one of the things we didn't talk about is the safety factor, because I think the concern that I have had, you know, being in, being, driving around at 6:30 in the morning and seeing students there in the dark, particularly during these times.

[01:30:51] Can you speak a little bit about that, please? Sure. There's a couple of safety factors to consider, and they actually operate on both sides. So you have civil twilight concerns, which were a large topic of discussion in 2014-15 within FCPS as well.

[01:31:08] And civil twilight involves, obviously it varies throughout the year, depending on what time of year you're at. And so we did take a look at to what extent we have current civil twilight violations within the existing system, recognizing that we'd rather not have any.

[01:31:25] And when I say civil twilight violations, I mean we're picking up students before civil twilight occurs in the morning or dropping them off afterwards. And so there's not much of that currently going on in the system. There is some.

[01:31:40] And I think that what is a larger concern in terms of safety of stops is whether or not the walk to the stop is on a sidewalk and is lit as opposed to I'm walking on an actual street and there's no street lights so we did look at that and that's why we attempted to keep things within that magic zone and you know if we had unlimited buses we would all start at 8:30 all schools would start at 8:30 and all schools would get out at the same time and we wouldn't be having this conversation but we don't have that possibility and so we looked at that piece your second piece of the question was I'm sorry that was there was only

[01:32:18] one piece just a safety component yeah mr. Muir and your comments just a little while ago you talked about kind of your work in history of doing this work I want to make sure that I understood that you say it wouldn't be beyond capacity to do these separately or was your preference to do them together I don't know if I captured exactly what you were articulating just a little while ago yes ma'am I was just saying that when I've been implementing projects of this size in the past in previous positions two projects that

[01:32:51] have a decent amount of overlap like these do and implementing them you know very closely together separately just never made sense because they seem to inform each other they seem to help highlight things that maybe individually you wouldn't have noticed and it just made sense to see how they would impact each other and bring them both out at once okay it's an option okay thank you for that one of the things that i also noticed in the teacher surveys

[01:33:23] there were very low responses i think 38 was what was on one of the slides from the spring survey yes ma'am and so those are from so in accordance with fcps rules the only way that we could do a spring survey uh was to offer it as an activity at the forums and so we were not able to offer it out to the world it was just those who attended the forums and so we didn't have a lot of staff that attended the forums is that something that we can do

[01:33:57] differently can you speak about that a little bit dr. Reed yes dr. Anderson maybe mr. Mewick I don't know that I was involved in that conversation so perhaps yes ma'am you could help us with this thank you dr. Anderson it you know we we really try to manage the the survey fatigue of the community and at the time when we started doing the forums the survey queue of surveys going out academic after-school activities was filled so the only way we could do surveys was in association with the public forums that we were doing

[01:34:34] because there just wasn't a window to stick any more surveys into the pipeline to get out to the community but the community did get their surveys we have We have parents at 6,000, almost 6,200, but we just have the staff at 38.

[01:34:51] And the surveys that we did were just in September, October. So a second ago, I thought you mentioned in the spring, and I was referring to the spring. Well, it says spring '24. That was a timeframe that's right next to it on chart five. Back.

[01:35:09] Oh. Yeah. It's the difference between the spring and the fall, ma'am. I see. Thank you. So we only had 400-plus parents at the spring forums that chose to complete a survey, which was actually a substantial portion of those who attended.

[01:35:31] Thank you. One of the things that I do want to say is that I am in agreement with Mr. McElveen. I don't think this is a space for us to ignore, to do nothing. Doing nothing is really not an option. I certainly understand the cost. I certainly understand the shortage of drivers.

[01:35:49] How many bus drivers are we short currently? We're currently short 120 drivers. 120 drivers. And those things are important, but I also understand the safety and the health risks, which is why I'm really looking at option D as, I'm sorry, option E as a good option to review and to dig into a little bit further because the cost is minimal, it says zero.

[01:36:16] The impact to childcare would also be minimal because everyone is moving 30 minutes. So you will still have the availability of the middle schoolers to attend to the elementary school students. It's the same run times of 110 minutes.

[01:36:34] It does not require additional buses. But what it does raise for me is what conversations have we had with the county regarding SAC? As a former parent of SAC, it is really, really an important support to the community that would impact a lot of the child care discussions that we've had.

[01:36:58] Now that we, if option E were to be the option, moving it 30 minutes may be a hardship for some parents who don't have that 30 minutes. Have we had conversations with the county regarding SAC expansion? No, ma'am.

[01:37:14] Not in relation to shifting middle school start times. Now there's, I know there's other ongoing discussions with the county and SAC of expanding 'cause they got a big wait list, but nothing directly related to, hey, here's some options to alternatives to changing middle school start times.

[01:37:30] Could you support any of this? We haven't had any of those. 'Cause that, I think that, I felt like that would be getting ahead of you all. - But that's also a longstanding concern. Since I've been on the board way before these discussions, there's been a want from parents to have an expansion of SAC because when you're on that wait list you don't get it parents are scrambling so that's an ongoing discussion any comment no sir okay chairman Frisch thank you so I think looking forward you

[01:38:08] know what I would hope in terms of next steps and this is something I might put in the next steps document are a couple things one I'd love to have you know perhaps in a Friday letter the superintendent's assessment of what it would take to operationalize and, you know, the professional judgment of her and her team about the best approach that we might pursue and how that would work in conjunction with

[01:38:44] or apart from the boundary work and what the preference would be there. I think those are important elements of it, and I wouldn't be comfortable as a board member making those decisions without the professional guidance of the team that's responsible for implementing everything and having plenty of focused time to devote to what the impacts of those things are. I think the work that's been done to get us to this point is pretty good in terms of, is great in terms of the information being provided and the

[01:39:23] interesting insights we have from the survey data, but now I think the next step is not the board deciding what we're doing, it's the professional staff looking at these options and then reporting to the board on what the best path forward is. Then the board can decide whether they agree with that best best path forward, if they want to kick the tires a little bit more to see if there's, you know, some adjustments that can be made, et cetera, and then we can move forward as a team.

[01:39:53] So that would be my preference and my advocacy. I won't be taking another go back, but I do appreciate the presentation and the work that went into it and all the work the staff has done to help provide the data necessary for the report. So thank you.

[01:40:15] I want to start by saying that I think that everyone that does this work centers the importance of health, mental and otherwise, of all of our community members. So I don't think that us talking about whether or not this is feasible in relationship to our work with boundaries is related to whether or not we think this is good for kids.

[01:40:32] I do think that systems can only handle so many changes at one time, and I do want to make sure that we're making smart decisions as to how we're implementing those changes along the lines of what Mr. Mewick recommended as well. Can I ask how long is our current elementary school route?

[01:40:51] Like, what's our longest elementary school route? - It tends about 50. The longest would be about, at most, an hour. - Okay, so if we have a 7:45 start time, we're talking about 6:45 for a start time for elementary schools that are on that particular route, and that is a seven-year adventure.

[01:41:15] So, unfortunately, I understand that we do have some older kiddos that are outside in those twilight hours that are dangerous. I am far more concerned about the kindergartner that we would be sending out at that time to cross busy streets and things like that, rather than the seventh and eighth graders, and sixth graders in some circumstances.

[01:41:35] So I recognize the fact that we want, again, if we had infinite money, infinite time, we would make sure everybody's school started at exactly the perfect time. But I have heard from several community members that are like, yes, we understand that this is hard.

[01:41:50] It's two years of hard, potentially three, depending on where we go. But it's not seven years of hard. And when you have your youngest members that are in those twilight hours, that is what causes me concern. Something that we haven't talked about up to this point is special education.

[01:42:07] And I am particularly concerned about the length of the special education routes when we're talking about moving up the elementary start time because we have some of those kids that are on the bus for an hour and a half. And I understand that that's different than the general education, but we haven't talked about the impact of those students and what it does for their health to be able to sit on a bus for an hour and a half in order to receive the care.

[01:42:31] So one of the reasons that I want, that I personally would advocate for waiting for boundary work is because I'm hoping that we can alleviate some of those bus routes for kids that do need those special services to make sure that they're not sitting on a bus for an hour and a half and we can get services closer to where they live.

[01:42:48] And so that is one of the benefits that I think it would be of holding off on this to see if maybe we can alleviate some of the AAP stuff and we can look at special programming. So I don't think that this is an issue of whether or not we care about the mental health of our seventh and eighth graders or sixth graders.

[01:43:07] That is not the concern. As a parent of a ninth grader, I just dealt with this for two years, I got it. I do think that we need to make sure that we're looking at it holistically in terms of the mental health and welfare of all of our students and not just this population.

[01:43:24] - Any comment? - No, sir, we got all those notes. - Okay, rational science advisor. - I'd be happy to pick up what my colleague left off because I actually had a couple examples of the extensive and having had a special education kid who was shipped out of boundary, out of pyramid for lack of programming, it is significant impacts on the amount of bus time the students are at.

[01:43:46] And I know we had a study at some point that show that special education students spend the longest amount of time on buses. But for an example, Canterbury Woods Elementary School, that has the only deaf and hard of hearing program in the entire county, if we move it from 9:20 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., the kids commutes are about an hour and a half each way.

[01:44:04] That means we get on the bus at 6:30. We gotta think about three hour commute times for some of these students. Similar with Freedom Hill with an ID center and a PAC, which by the way are our youngest kiddos in preschool, two to five-year-olds, if we move it to 8 or 8.15, they're going to be picked up at 7 a.m. So what disturbed me, and I did bring this up, both my meeting manager and my two-by-two, is that there really isn't anything that talks about that impact. You have a special education methodology in here, but you don't actually talk about the reality. And that's a, if we're going to talk about equity and fairness and health of students, some of these students who have

[01:44:40] significant health needs as well, that's a huge gap, I think, in this. And it's another reason why I think we all care about our students' health, we all care about their mental health. My daughter was at a secondary school that started at 7:20 in the morning when she was in middle school all the way through two years of high school.

[01:44:57] I know it's hard, but we want to get it right because we don't want to disrupt their health by causing disruptions once and then disruptions again. And I also think some of these out-of-boundary, out-of-pyramid work can be addressed through the boundaries and then we can have the most optimal start times for everybody, not the majority because those are the ones we focus on because the outliers we've left out of this report and the special education students who are out of boundary and out of our outliers and they're left out and that's a problem so if we care about all students health i think we need to have a report

[01:45:37] that looks at all students needs and i think we need to have work done in a way that's strategic that's not going to cause disruption this year and disruption another year to schedules because that also impacts students health and well-being and i think the timeline we have PROPOSED FOR THE BOUNDARY WORK MAKES A LOT OF SENSE.

[01:45:56] I REALLY APPRECIATED WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT WHEN YOU ARE DOING THESE TWO PROJECTS THAT CAN BE THIS DISRUPTIVE CLOSE TOGETHER, IT'S BETTER TO DO THEM TOGETHER. IF I'M MISQUOTING YOU, PLEASE CORRECT ME, BUT THAT'S WHAT I HEARD. I THINK THAT MAKES THE MOST SENSE TO DO THIS IN THE BEST WAY POSSIBLE FOR OUR COMMUNITY TO MAXIMIZE ALL STUDENTS' HEALTH AND WELLNESS. SO I'LL LEAVE IT AT THAT.

[01:46:18] I THINK IT DOESN'T MAKE A LOT OF SENSE TO PICK THESE OPTIONS IN A VACUUM WITHOUT HAVING THE UNDERSTANDING OF WHERE being in school first so I appreciate all your hard work I appreciate that the presentation I think we need to do this in conjunction and hopefully that'll be just in a year so it's not going to be a lengthy amount of time any comment I would just say that we did take a close look at what would happen with the special education busing situation and I agree with you an hour and a half on a bus is too long for any kid you've heard special education or otherwise it is the

[01:46:53] reality with some of your students and in a large that is largely a function often of where a student lives and where programming is available and so those relationships haven't been altered in looking at these alternatives what this does likely change you're exactly right is that some students would be going earlier but other students would be going later and so it's a shift you know which students are going in which direction we did speak with various representatives that were associated with the the specialty schools and we were taking a look at initially at what might those be I mentioned earlier in

[01:47:31] the presentation with those hundred buses they're essentially their own ecosystem and they advocated very strongly for keeping the school start times that they have and some of those are actually quite early but they advocated for keeping them as they were so we said okay this is what they would like to do, and it doesn't necessarily impact the work that we were doing and looking at school start times for the larger number of schools. I'd like another go back. Okay, thank you. Ms. Marin?

[01:48:02] Yeah, regarding child care, so, I mean, as a parent, I went through the whole process of in-home child care with the county, waiting on the list for SAC, all the private stuff after school through PTA. I mean, this is not a new thing, and it will just shift either a half hour or not, and again, market will shift sac has been an unrealized program for decades and we have an mou memorandum of understanding that is from the 80s and so i think what this board can do is continue to advocate to county executive brian hill and the county board of supervisors to do more to realize the potential

[01:48:40] of that program i know dr reed you've been making some inroads but you know sac is what it is and we can hope that it'll change and we could try but it's under our purview neither is the lack of pre-k or child care we are doing what we can so i think we should apply that same lens here we don't have enough funding for early childhood pre-k but we're doing what we can we're putting in classrooms so i want to use that same approach here we are not going to impact the child care landscape of this this county alone and that really gets into what i am i urge my colleagues to consider about the length of time for change and how much this board directs not

[01:49:17] only the superintendent staff but actually will direct families of their daily schedule and you know just as my child went from elementary to middle what we got to change the daily schedule even if we kept the same times the same every family through every school transition is going to have to change their schedule and i you know there's a lot of speculation about well who's home to catch their kids and who's going to work in an office and who's working from home we just don't know we probably have every iteration possible in this county with 180 000 students but i think that as a board we can convey that we stay laser focused on what's best for kids which was the impetus for this it was how do we get the best health and i've been doing this you

[01:49:57] know in the town of vienna where i have a bunch of parents who have been trying to get the noise ordinance changed for years of the town and it's still not changed so it's like we know what's best but we can't always do it so but i'm certainly not interested in wreaking havoc on people even if you know they think that we're upending all these things and maybe it's not that much in our opinions i think it's a lot um i do think it needs to be simultaneous with the boundaries i'd love for it to happen all together but i recall being very planful in scheduling the work even earlier this year to review the boundary policy we had set the middle school tar time in motion we

[01:50:36] had done them to get them as close together as they could be and they are so i i just it's it seems to make sense although i would love to have middle school start earlier because i'm going to have a middle schooler next year again so total self-interest here i would love to do it but i'm not going to do it but that's how i feel um is i can't um and i would love to hear yes absolutely dr reed what do you think in your professional opinion is possible we heard a little bit from your director of operations what can be done about sac about after school programs and and what is your best you know opinion not the second but of how we proceed with this data thank you any comment

[01:51:14] i appreciate the question and that a little bit of time of thought before i would be responsive i know staff is working on the sac mou i think the current sac model is going to likely need to be expanded if we're going to be able to expand access and that's what mr smith and and the team have been working on.

[01:51:37] As with all things, models have to evolve with the changing new times, right? And I think it would be ideal if we could create a system where there wasn't a waiting list at every school. I think that would really create a very different level of stress for families, for staff.

[01:51:55] And I know staff's working hard on that model and the county's very invested as well. So I'm hopeful we'll reach some solution here this spring, skipped I know is talking about child care as well so we're hopeful around that with regard to these options you know I think the research on sleep is clear for adolescents I think as staff of or as other board members have mentioned some moves have been made and I think now it's incumbent on us to think about what are those next moves I think there is significant difference of

[01:52:30] perspective among staff and also community to be fair because of our traffic concerns and also child care availability because we have so many staff that work out of the county and so the SAC solution really is connected to this topic so I think more to come on the five options and really we can implement whichever of the five the board I think determines is the next step.

[01:53:01] Okay any other board member on second round before I go to myself? Just a quick comment I couldn't get you in my first round is something that was mentioned by a earlier by couple of board members is lack of a participation in the survey by language minority parents as a two percent I I'm sure that you did what the best you could do but I don't think two percent really reflects what we should

[01:53:39] be hearing from a language minority community and hope that we can find the miraculously better way it will get feedback from those the community which is a significant and their needs might be different from you know English speaking and our community members with that I am gonna go to Arash now for a third round thank you a couple things I wanted to mention I agree with my colleague Miss Marin I think we need to do them in conjunction I think we did actually plan the timing of this so we could be as close as possible because

[01:54:19] this was a conversation that started with the previous board so I agree I think it needs to be done in conjunction to do it thoughtfully well a couple things I did want to mention I think as we're doing that work we do need to talk about community use if we're shifting any of our use and times because we will will have high school sports who will need a certain amount of time after school.

[01:54:35] So I think that needs to be part of that conversation. I do think that we need to better engage a broader section of our community, and Dr. Reed, I'll leave that up to you, what my colleague Mr. Moon mentioned in terms of, and also, you know, I appreciate talking to the special education centers, separate schools, but they're on separate buses in different times.

[01:54:57] I'm referring to the students who are in programs our comprehensive schools and that is a very different reality when it comes to busing and and maybe you looked at those maybe you didn't but understand that if someone's going to a Burke school the whole school is a special education school if someone is is based at Kings Park Kings Glen but being shipped out of pyramid to Hunt Valley that is a very different reality and so and I'm happy to talk offline about that but that cannot be not embedded into the conversation so just as you move forward Dr. Reed I think it's important to look

[01:55:37] at that reality I agree with my other colleague about childcare maybe there's different parts of the community that has more reliant on older siblings for childcare I think but as we're looking at sixth grade potentially going into middle school as we're looking at hopefully in our goal to inclusive settings and keeping students in their communities and rejiggering how we're doing some of these programmatic access.

[01:55:59] I just think that makes sense to do that work in conjunction with also trying to look at the health and welfare of our students and the school start times to make sure school start times optimize the health and welfare. So Dr. Reed, I just look to you to say, do you feel like as we do this work, those are all pieces that can be subsumed into the boundary work, start times, community use, or is it separate?

[01:56:18] How do we see that? - I think it can be included. I think it's a parallel conversation though. I don't think it's an integrated conversation because we have a lot of data to go through for the boundaries that is very technical and I'm looking at Ms. Szymanski, it's really about geographic location per se, however, the reason this is such a complex task is if program availability existed differently and we weren't bussing across pyramids and

[01:56:53] regions I think very that also impacts any need to change boundaries if that makes sense so I think that the it's like a large math story problem not to bring the classroom to the board table but it's sort of like you know if the wind is blowing 20 miles went in so it's that type of question because yes program placement matters SAC sort of capacity absolutely matters I will also just insert a bit of feedback from high school students which they have some concern about going much later as a high school because of jobs that many of them

[01:57:32] have and other after-school either tutoring or you know programming that they have going on and also the limited light we have just between end of school and end of day during certain seasons of the year so it's just I think that it is a complex set of questions, but that's why we have a great team working on it. I do think the special ed busing programming is something we have to take a look at. And that can also be -- the length of transportation can be resolved also by program placement decisions.

[01:58:10] And I believe with the work we're doing around universal design for learning and more inclusive of programming at pre-K, for example, perhaps we'll be able to minimize some of those runs, both in time and length and destination.

[01:58:25] So to answer your question, they're all connected and we're gonna continue the process of study. I think some of these options, like the one that says just move everything 30 minutes, doesn't require that deep level per se. It's a decision that everything moves and that other work still goes on.

[01:58:46] So I think they do intersect, and they're not exclusive, I guess. - And dare I say, if you look at program delivery models that we haven't looked at in 30 years, we might change how we deliver programming, which might change where students access programming, which might change busing, not to mention something I've been throwing out a million times.

[01:59:07] - Yes, ma'am, I think it's duly noted that we're discussing goal two today, as well as middle school start times, because there is an intersectionality, And I know that's an important topic for sure. Thank you.

[01:59:25] I don't. Any other board member? Dr. Anderson. I think this is my third turn, too. So if you could speak to the neighboring counties, what their time is, because you didn't provide that information.

[01:59:42] Yes. So we did provide some information in the public forums, as well as some of the survey questions were set up with some of that. And so just to point out, you know, throughout history within this division, middle school start times have ranged from 7:20 all the way up to 8:45.

[02:00:04] But then looking at the national level, currently when you did the work in 2014-15, only about 20% of middle schools were starting at 8:30, 8:00 or later. We're now at an average middle school start time nationwide of 8:11.

[02:00:23] and 30% of the school system schools nationwide start at eight o'clock or later. Now, looking locally to your question, we do have a graphic that was provided in the forum packets that looked at what was going on with your next door neighbors.

[02:00:38] And so many of your geographic neighbors already start middle schools at eight o'clock or 8:30 and seem to be doing okay with it. In terms of specifics, Loudon starts middle school at 8:30 or at 8:50.

[02:00:58] They also start elementary schools at 7:30 or 8:00, since that seems to be part of the discussion. Arlington starts middle schools at 7:50 or 9:00. They also start elementary schools at 7:50 or 9:00. So there's some geographic transportation things being addressed there.

[02:01:16] An interesting one, Prince George's Maryland, another large division nearby, they have start times of 7:30, 8:30, or 9:30, and they've sort of gone a little rogue in terms of how they do that.

[02:01:31] The 7:30, 8:30, and 9:30 is assigned based on what the transportation system can accommodate. So you might have an elementary, middle school, or high school starting at any one of those times. Looking at Washington, D.C., Middle schools start at 8:30 to 9 o'clock, it's a range.

[02:01:48] Prince William, middle schools are 8:10 to 8:20. Montgomery, 8:15. Manassas Park, 7:25. Manassas, 7:40. I mentioned Loudon already. - Do you have the high school times for those schools? - Yes, I do. So looking at, let's see, Arlington, I said the elementary is 7:50 or 9 o'clock.

[02:02:11] Middle school is 7:50 or 9 o'clock. High school is 8, 8:20 or 9 o'clock. Charles County, elementary's are 8:55 to 9:45. Middle school's 8 o'clock, high school's 7:30. So you see the different approaches to it.

[02:02:28] Loudon, elementary or middle school, elementary's 7:30 or 8, middle school's 8:30 or 8:50. High school is 9:30 there. - Prince William? - Prince William, high school is at 7:25 or 7:30.

[02:02:45] - Okay, thank you so much for that information. will be the details and that'll be included in our report thank you I appreciate that because clearly other counties are making making it work they're making the sports work they're making the elementary work because they have the same issues that we're presented with much appreciated one of the other things that I wanted to share in this last turn is this is the second part to ongoing work that started when you were on the board and you were on the board so it's not a matter of just taking care of one small group they took care of one small group when they did the high school and with knowing that in the future which

[02:03:20] tended which ended up being a lot longer a lot further away than I think was anticipated and because of COVID when we got on the board this work had to be put to the side so it's just doing it in parts because that's what was decided at the board at that time and I do agree I do agree with a lot has been said regarding our students needing structure needing consistency which is again something that I raised during the boundary work if our students crave structure and consistency then we should be also phasing the boundary work for our students in high school and middle

[02:03:57] school and one of the things that I wanted to ask Dr. Reed when we talk about the boundary work one of the things you mentioned was potentially and I know we're far away from that but I know it's a potentiality of perhaps phasing it in rather than doing the entire county all at once I know that's been in the conversation can you confirm what I can say is that we have right now a timeline that has several cycles of review and cycles of community engagement as well as sort of an iterative process between the advisory

[02:04:32] committee to the superintendent and the school board so I think that at any point in time that could be raised as a strategy at this time I don't believe that a strategy has been set yet because we're still in the community engagement information gathering stage but to answer your question about could that be a possibility I think it certainly could but it hasn't been determined at this point that that's going to be a strategy and there's so many I think we talked about this at a prior work session there's so many phasing options right there could be this opportunity to potentially move sixth grade to middle

[02:05:09] school as a phase could be a phase by region it could be a phase by grade level it could I mean we might choose any manner of phasing or we may not so I just I think right now it's still very much so wide open right thank you and that's also another wondering if we end up landing on one of those strategies what does this mean if the conversation that I'm hearing here is to do it all together it's not all together if we're phasing it by region would we have a regional start time for middle schools for one section then another it just makes me wonder like are we then creating a situation that we cannot

[02:05:46] necessarily maintain if we land on the one of those strategies that is not yet known to us I'd love some feedback about that mr. muick well yeah I definitely would not want to try and phase in the transportation like that you know like you just described because that would be so then what would what would that mean if we happen to land and I'm asking you to look into the crystal ball here I do realize that if we do land on a strategy where we're phasing it through the different regions where does middle school start time end up I think it's kind of like Dr. Reed said these are like parallel efforts right so if

[02:06:23] we come to a decision and the board decides hey here's an alternative on the start times that we want to go with I just think you know no one what is happening with the boundary will just help us execute it better I don't think we would necessarily have to do it all at once and we could make that work while we're phasing in you know pieces of the boundary as we go well efforts they don't necessarily have to be done with the boundary they're parallel efforts so we can handle the middle school start time and the boundary work I guess I'm a little

[02:06:57] confused no you've got what I've said I just I I would want to see more you know if you're asking Andy I'd want to see more of what that boundary review is going to tell us before we start moving down this parallel path you don't have to wait and do it all at once but I think it could help inform us a little bit we've talked here today about impact on different programs accessibility how that'll reduce runs I think it it all helps sure and there's a lot out there I'm sure there was a lot out there when the conversation was being had to change the high school times but we also know we can only do so much at a time so we're

[02:07:34] still in that place where we're putting a lot in the bucket only to remove some of them out of the bucket to handle this middle school part which is secondary so my last piece of question is really for us I know there's been a lot of questions asked there's more information that is needed what are we intending to to do. What is our communication to the public? Because Dr. Reed says whatever the board tells her she'll make happen. What are we telling her and when is that going to be determined? I think Mr. Chairman wanted to address that. Mr. Chairman.

[02:08:04] All right so we have a next steps document just like we do at other work sessions so board members should complete that and register their views and suggestions on that front and the vice chair and I will work with the superintendent to ensure that appropriate answers are provided in the Friday letter and then we can communicate that out appropriately through newsletters at meetings and we will obviously schedule anything that needs to be scheduled in conjunction with what the the council and boards prerogative is if you can in your deliberations kind of think a little bit of a timeline

[02:08:42] because one of the things I would not want to see happen is this conversation ends up being in suspense and before you know it we're six months nine months down the road and we haven't had a conversation or had the opportunity to give any directives to the superintendent. - Well, we have an opportunity to bring clarity to what the board wants in the next steps, so we'll be keeping an eye on that.

[02:09:02] And please, please, please register your next steps and register your opinion on those next steps so that we have as clear guidance as we can get. - Okay, with that, unless Dr. Priya, if you wanna say anything more, before i go to oh we got two more board members okay i'm gonna give each board member a minute if that's okay miss marron yeah thank you yeah i do want especially for the public to understand

[02:09:37] where the board is on this today where we stand and so if i'm understanding we are not making a decision on any option right now and we are not scheduled to make a decision on any option right now the next step seems to be for Dr. Reed to come back at some point we haven't determined when about what her professional opinion is for implementing this so I don't know if we can give the public any more specificity on are we talking months you know we don't know is it fair to say this would not be implemented this fall like what because we got people you know coming from all directions wondering is it happening or not so any clarity I think the public

[02:10:15] appreciate. So a question I would have and I'm happy to work with staff to construct this we could perhaps construct several scenarios doing boundary work and start time shift together doing them parallel doing them serial right like doing one ahead of the other we could create some scenarios for the board and I don't know if that's something mr. first that you'd want to have in the next steps or if there are just several scenarios we could agree on today that we would like to have the numbers run on but that way that would give the board something to study because I think that the different

[02:10:55] scenarios have very different bodies of work and very different potential impacts in terms of timing. Well I can't speak to what the board will decide in the next steps document but as I said during my share my intention is to add a a next step that would require something like that from the superintendent and you know in addition to professional judgment on what the best approach would be not just providing all the options that are available so if the board wants to go in that direction i think having um clarity on

[02:11:32] what all of the different things are and what the implementation plan would be would be great As the meeting manager, I was actually going to say that, so I appreciate, but yeah, I think that's what the next step is for.

[02:11:48] I don't think we're making a decision today, and I appreciate the question. We need to go now under the next step documents and ask what we want from staff based on this report, based on the conversation on boundaries. I also would support the idea of having different options, right, in parallel, in conjunction, also staffs recommendations as to what they'd recommend for the best potential outcome that would serve our students staff and families the best so if that's the next step you can put in i'll take a look at it but i think that's the next steps document to figure out how we're going to move forward with this work um i did want to just point out to you all as you're looking at these

[02:12:25] busing one of the inefficiencies in busing is because of these out-of-boundary buses right so you have a neighborhood that school starts at eight and these kids are getting bussed out of of boundary to a school that starts at 9:00 or 9:30, Sue, sometimes you have neighborhoods with two, three, five, six buses picking up one student each, and that creates a lot of inefficiencies in busing, so as you're looking at that, it's important to recognize the impact that has significantly.

[02:12:50] Yes, ma'am. Okay. With that, I was about to say something, but I'm going to -- I -- oh, okay, Mr. McElroy.

[02:13:06] I think it's just important to clarify that when districts are successful in doing this, They start out by doing what we did in 2015, which is setting out the priority of making this happen and committing to that, right?

[02:13:22] I don't think this board has stated that we want to do this, and I think it's important that we do, and then subsequently we figure out how. But anyway, successful districts handle it that way. Since Mr. Maccabin gave me an opportunity to say something, I'm going to say it.

[02:13:42] may sound very provocative i think we need to make a commitment to do this timeline wise realistically speaking uh you know doing it next year is probably we're not going to be ready for ourselves also i believe in giving community enough time if they need to make some uh child care arrangements or some other arrangements so i'm a you know for me if i need to vote today i'm not going to be able to support doing it next year but doing your following i'll be supportive

[02:14:17] okay with that this work session yeah unless you want to say something okay yeah this work session is over we'll take a little early lunch break mr moon just to clarify you don't mean the work sessions over we're just in which is part of the work is yes ma'am yes ma'am thank you i stand

[02:14:47] correct it we'll take a lunch break and then come back at 1:30 afternoon session at do we have quorum yep we have quorum so we can go ahead and get begin thank you for joining us for afternoon session for a goal to report before I turn to

[02:15:26] dr. reeve for an introduction just I think we're gonna do this like we did last time where there's three segments of the report so we'll have a presentation on each segment open for one round of board questions that go to the next segment one round of board questions next them at one round of board questions and then we'll finish with go backs and people can do go backs on any section that they want to do. So if that works for you all, we'll go ahead and do that. We'll just do one round of board questions in between each section. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you, Dr. Reed.

[02:15:53] Thank you, Ms. Sizemoreheiser. And this afternoon, it's our opportunity to share our goal two report. And this is a really important goal for a variety of reasons. And we've got quite a large goal team here because the segments are integrated, but they're also really critically important. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Marcy Neal, who's going to introduce the team presenting. And we have Dr. Presidio and Dr. King in their departments as well. So Ms. Neal, why don't you start the presentation, please? Thank you, Dr. Reed. Well, good afternoon to members of the board. We're looking forward to continuing our second in the series of five goal reports this

[02:16:32] year. I'm joined by staff from multiple departments who all contributed to the work of this report and are here to support the board's discussion. Before we get started, I do want to introduce Candace Hunstead, who is our new Executive Director for Strategy and Planning, and just welcome her on to the team.

[02:16:47] We told her she did not have to do the full report today. So our objectives for today are to provide the board with an update on our progress towards meeting the 2030 Goal 2 measures, to discuss the work at the division as it relates to Goal 2, and to discuss the policy, budget, and strategic considerations for the board moving forward to achieve these goals by 2030.

[02:17:14] Today's presentation is on Goal 2, which is our safe, supported, included, and empowered goal.

[02:17:42] There are six measures in Goal 2 that you can see on the screen, and our presentation will be focused on measures A, D, and F.

[02:17:57] The majority of the data for the remaining goal two measures is going to come as a part of our student experience survey that's currently being piloted in 70 of our schools in order to capture student voice related to these measures. A full administration of the student experience survey will take place in the spring and the results will be shared with the board at that time.

[02:18:17] In the process of operationalizing the strategic plan, these initial priorities were identified by the division leadership to focus the efforts of both school and departments with the understanding that these are key drivers for success across multiple measures within the strategic plan.

[02:18:33] All of our strategic plan measures are focused on student outcomes, and improving these directly impacts the work of our schools and teachers. We're continuing our focus on these priorities, which provides schools with continuity of their efforts, allowing our teachers and staff to become more proficient in the work around these topics, which we anticipate will drive improvements across multiple measures in the plan.

[02:18:54] Today's presentation will be looking at chronic absenteeism, discipline disproportionality, and student academic inclusion. And as a reminder, we looked at Pre-K inclusion as a part of this year's Goal 1 report, which is available on BoardDocs and linked to this presentation.

[02:19:09] Our annual goal reports include outcome data from 23-24 school year compared to our baseline and annual targets that we've set in order to meet our 2030 goals. All the data in these reports were aligned to a consistent student data source and matched VDOE reporting methodology when applicable. For both chronic absenteeism and discipline disproportionality, the baselines were updated to reflect a two-year average, removing the 2020-21 school year where most of our students were learning virtually because of COVID. Last year, the board asked staff to consider this, and we did conclude that this was most accurate to use

[02:19:45] the two-year baseline and have updated the approach accordingly this year. For full transparency, table 54 and table 55 and the full report provide the data for the 2021 school year alongside the two years of data that were used in the updated baseline. And the chronic absenteeism data also now matches VDOE calculations, which allow for external comparisons and greater clarity of our data. Finally, each report will provide contextual data to support interpretation and an update on the strategic efforts the division is making towards our targets. So first, we're going to take a look at our efforts towards addressing chronic absenteeism. There's

[02:20:22] been a nationwide focus on the topic of chronic absenteeism and students who are chronically absent are those who missed 10% or more of the school year which includes excused and unexcused absences as well as out of school suspensions. Attendance is an important focus in our strategic plan and it's linked to success on many goal 3 and goal 5 measures. The research indicates that when absences become chronic students are more likely to have lower test scores, higher rates of dropping out, lower rates of on-time graduation, and a decrease in college enrollment. As we continue to focus on chronic absenteeism, we expect to see improvements across multiple measures within our plan. Research has also

[02:21:00] identified several factors that contribute to chronic absenteeism, including barriers to school attendance, aversion to school attendance, disengagement from school, and misconceptions about attendance such as when to keep a child home due to illness. This slide shows how FCPS compared to Virginia in the last three years with regard to chronic absenteeism. FCPS has consistently outperformed the state overall on this measure. Last year both FCPS and the state did see a notable decline in chronic absenteeism and it's important to note that for FCPS this decline is not due to the recent statewide implementation of flexible instruction which allows students to recover missed days through

[02:21:39] additional instruction. The inclusion of recovery hours had a minimal impact on on our overall rate of chronic absenteeism, which means we can largely attribute our success on this metric to students attending school more consistently. And there's some additional information in the full report in tables six and figure two.

[02:21:58] We also saw a significant increase in the percent of schools meeting the VDOE level one accreditation status for chronic absenteeism. The rate increased from 67% at the baseline to 96% last school year. This slide shows the tremendous efforts that are happening at our schools improve attendance for students. This slide looks at the percent of students who are chronically absent by student group. The change from the baseline can be seen in the bottom row. Four groups saw improvements of five or more percentage points from the baseline. Student groups with the highest rates of chronic absenteeism last year were students who were economically disadvantaged, multilingual learners, students with

[02:22:36] disabilities, and Hispanic students. And it's important to note that of all the students who were chronically absent last year, 59% of those students were economically disadvantaged. This slide shows the annual growth targets that FCPS has set related to chronic absenteeism from the baseline. For this metric, growth is shown as a decline in the rates.

[02:22:57] The yellow line charts the actuals for students for each year, while the dark blue line represents the growth targets for all students. The remaining lines signify the growth needed for student groups who were closest to and furthest from the target given their starting point in the baseline years.

[02:23:13] For 23-24, FCPS exceeded the annual targets and is on track for our 2030 goals on this measure. This slide breaks down chronic absenteeism by grade level, where we see higher rates of chronic absenteeism in the younger and older grades.

[02:23:29] Last year, we saw improvements across all grade levels, with a 5 percentage point improvement for students in grade 1 and 12, and an 8 percentage point improvement in kindergarten. On our next slide we can see the data by English language proficiency level where we saw substantial progress for all multilingual learners and for students with ELP levels of 1, 2, and 9.

[02:23:52] And as a reminder, that ELP level 9 is used for our kindergarten multilingual learners, and this mirrors the data we saw in the previous slide where we saw significant gains in the kindergarten year. This slide synthesizes intersectionality data and data for additional student groups that are found on pages 23 through 28 of the full report.

[02:24:12] We've combined this data onto one slide for you to be able to see the trends. There are data charts for each of these student groups in the full report. The slide shows the improvement from the baseline to 23-24. The groups shown in green improved by at least five percentage points in the rates of chronic absenteeism from the baseline, which includes all student groups who are also economically disadvantaged, Hispanic multilingual learners, and Hispanic students with disabilities.

[02:24:38] The remaining student groups that are depicted in gray as their rates of chronic absenteeism were within five percentage points of the baseline. However, all but one of those groups made between two to four percentage points of improvement from the baseline. In the previous slide, we looked at improvement from the baseline, and in this slide, we see the rates of chronic absenteeism for these student groups.

[02:25:00] So while we made significant progress, 12 of the student groups that we examined had rates of chronic absenteeism that were five or more percentage points higher than division average, which are seen in yellow. The three groups with the highest rates of chronic absenteeism last year were Hispanic students with disabilities, students with disabilities categorized as level 2, and economically disadvantaged students with disabilities. Next slide shows the percent of days missed last school year by student group. The majority of FCPS students were absent less than 5% of the school year which is shown in green. Across all student groups we saw a

[02:25:37] similar percentage of students that were absent between 5 to 9.9% of the school year which is shown in yellow and this is an area for us to continue to monitor to support consistent attendance for all of our students. While FCPS does not collect data on student sexual orientation and we only have gender data that's based on official government documentation such as passports or birth certificates, the Fairfax County Youth Survey provides some insights into factors that may contribute for a portion of our LGBTQIA+ student group it's absenteeism, in particular our LGBTQ+ students. LGBTQ+ students self-reported

[02:26:14] substantially higher rates of persistent sadness on the youth survey, which may contribute to absenteeism. Students also self-reported elevated rates of being bullied, which can contribute to missing school. And finally, we did not see differences by gender or sexual orientation in patterns of skipping school, which suggests truancy is not a contributing factor to chronic absenteeism for our LGBTQ+ students.

[02:26:39] Now we're gonna talk about the work the divisionists and schools are doing to improve chronic absenteeism rates. We saw gains in improving chronic absenteeism that can be attributed to three big ideas. First, a division-wide focus on systems that support good attendance for all students.

[02:26:56] Second, providing targeted supports for schools with higher rates of chronic absenteeism. And finally, providing personalized supports for students and families to remove or reduce individual barriers inhibiting their attendance. Schools continue to proactively communicate with families to ensure they're clear about when to keep their children home from school, the impacts of excessive absences, and how to monitor and report their children's attendance.

[02:27:22] Positive relationships and school environments support attendance for all students, and there's a great deal of overlap between this strategy and our work around discipline, including a focus on bullying, prevention, and intervention. Some examples of actions within this strategy include our SEL work, including morning meetings and responsive advisory lessons, the Purple Star School Student Ambassador Program that supports the transition of new students into the school community by connecting them to peers and extracurriculars, and the student-led Our Minds Matter Club that promotes a safe and caring school climate by reducing the stigma associated with mental health, which can be a barrier to school attendance.

[02:28:00] We continue to provide more targeted resources and supports for schools with higher rates of chronic absenteeism, including required SIP goals and support and monitoring from Project Momentum, partnering with EduFurturo in schools with higher rates of chronic absenteeism to support student and family outreach, and we've expanded the Belonging Project as a part of MentorWorks to connect students with higher rates of chronic absenteeism to mentors.

[02:28:26] At the school level, our educators continue to focus on individual school student attendance and intervene when needed. An attendance dashboard was launched last year to allow for the early identification of students who may need attendance conferences or plans developed. Return to learn plans are created for any student who's returning to school following an extended absence to support their successful transition back.

[02:28:48] And finally, we continue to provide impersonal flexible instruction time to allow students to recover missed learning. Students may have specific barriers impeding their attendance, including challenges with accessing health or mental health supports. FCPS works with community partners such as the Community Services Board to connect students and families to behavioral health services.

[02:29:08] Our public health nurses connect families and students who may have unmet health needs with resources. And our homeless education program also supports families with connecting to a variety of services that can reduce barriers to attendance. Telemental health services are provided free of charge to our high school students through the Hazel Health Program.

[02:29:26] And last year, over 800 students were referred for these services. Finally, our chronic absenteeism goal innovation team will continue to identify innovative ways to improve chronic absenteeism in particular for areas of concern identified in this report.

[02:29:43] As we close out our chronic absenteeism section, these are our key takeaways from last school year. We had rates of chronic absenteeism that are lower than the state overall and saw rates of chronic absenteeism that declined from the baseline. Almost all schools reached the VDOE level one accreditation status for chronic absenteeism, which was a significant improvement from the baseline.

[02:30:04] All student groups achieved or exceeded the annual growth targets we set for the 23-24 school year, meaning we're on track to achieve our 2030 goals. And this progress is tied to efforts that support consistent attendance for all students and targeted school, student, and family supports.

[02:30:21] So at this point, I will turn this back over to our meeting manager for questions. - Thank you, and I see one placard up, so we'll say with one round, first round for these, then we'll go to the next session, so Dr. Anderson.

[02:30:36] - Thank you for this information. One of the pieces that I particularly have appreciated what you outlined on table one on page 15 of the full report it's very helpful to see those categories of challenges in terms of what is impeding our students from getting into our schools so given that I would love to hear your thoughts on what are the barriers that our schools particularly the 4% that are not making the accreditation what are their primary excuse me what are their primary

[02:31:11] barriers. Good afternoon. I can speak a little bit to I think the what we have experienced historically with those schools who have not met accreditation is that these tend to build our alternative learning sites so Mountain View Bryant that have higher rates of chronic absenteeism in large part I think due to the nature of the student body I can't speak and will rely on our strategy planning and learning team for some more detail with respect to our non-alternative sites but we've historically seen the highest rates by

[02:31:47] far in alternative programs and I think due to the nature of the student body of those programs that's likely been and the unique characteristics of the students the needs of those students that's generally been one of the reasons that we've seen higher rates of chronic absenteeism among that population thank you I'm mostly interested in terms of how are we translating having that information into strategies that can be helpful to students in those schools and if you could speak more to also the schools that are not at not more but as well to the schools that are not those special centers that you just discussed no I know miss lemons here with us and as a part of our project momentum work

[02:32:26] they're working with schools that have those higher rates of chronic absenteeism I don't know miss lemon if you want to add anything to that I think one of the reasons that we were able to get to 96% was because of support with for schools specifically overall just messaging with families and then again working on that welcoming environment but then also putting specific strategies in place such as the IP fit the after-school sessions with students where

[02:33:01] they can learn after school and then gain some hours back that that support the video we accreditation I think that is a number one strategy that we use last year. We also collaborated with transportation to look at bus routes and to do some go-back routes for specific communities that needed that, working directly with schools. So those I think were our two main strategies for really supporting some of our neediest populations that got us to 96 percent. I could just add a couple things to that. I think, you know, looking at the data you

[02:33:38] can see some groups are experiencing, you know, more difficulty with regular attendance than others. I think our general approach is to work with every single student and family to figure out what the root cause of their issues and challenges are. It might be transportation, it might be illness, it might be school anxiety. There's a whole host of different factors. However, there are also some targeted things that we're doing in some of those communities where our data is telling us we need a different strategy and approach. So one thing that Marie didn't mention that her team has been really helpful with and Ms. Hall's team has been helpful with is partnering with EduFuturo to really work with our multilingual

[02:34:14] families in 15 different schools where we had some of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism. That's been really helpful because those folks are able, obviously, to bring, you know, a bilingual skill set into that conversation working with the family, but they're also case managing those students and families, serving as mentors and coaches to make sure that they've got what they need to be able to get to school as Mike mentioned we're doing some of those same things in all of our schools but that's more reliant on the school-based staff being able to do that but we have identified again based on our data about 15 schools where we knew that we needed a different approach thank you and just

[02:34:51] my last point on this measure where can I find the list of the 4% schools that are represented on this slide that did not meet accreditation is that in here no we can provide that as a follow-up to the board thank you so much one of the things that I wanted to talk about getting into some of the data that are identified on page 17 can you speak a little bit in terms of as to why it's represented differently than last year's report and I don't know if I went through this too quickly sort of in the intro but last year when we presented the

[02:35:27] data to the board we presented a three-year average looking at the inverse essentially of this data so we align this data with video which is data that's reporting on chronic absenteeism so we have the opportunity to provide comparison data at the state level and then we pulled out that COVID year in particular based on some board feedback and when you look at the charts that are in here tables I think 54 and 55 you can see it was an outlier year so it was most appropriate to make those adjustments in the data and we're no longer doing the inverse because correct because we wanted to align with how VDOE does this reporting, which is what our schools are held accountable for and what the reporting is at the state level.

[02:36:06] Okay. Thank you. Just wanted to speak a little bit regarding some of the goals. This is page 19, the chart that is there. Help me to understand a little bit, given the change, just using one as an example.

[02:36:21] We have all students was at 14%. The actual was 13%. The goal for this year is 11%. for economically disadvantaged students and went from 22 to 19 and is remaining as 19 as the goal so speak to that please you know it's a great question dr anderson so we set the annual growth targets to show the path essentially that we need to stay on in order to meet our targets by 2030 what we've done with our economically disadvantaged students in this case is made so much more significant growth that we're outpacing where we need to be so this is this target is basically

[02:36:58] showing the minimum threshold to be able to get to our 2030 targets okay i don't know if i agree with that i'd like to think that if we've met it then we set the other goal we might get there a little bit sooner keeping it the same to me just doesn't seem to be it wouldn't be what i would prefer that happened um but it also speak to how you're setting the targets this year i know we had a long conversation about this last time regarding or see um record recommending that five percentage points would be what we use as targets at least that initial year and then maybe the second year and then maybe getting a little bit more aggressive but

[02:37:35] these are two to three percentage points so on each one of our measures what we did is we looked at the length of the strategic plan and understood where the starting point was for all students and for each student group and then measured out the progress that each of those groups would need to make to hit our 2030 goals in some cases that's less than 5% in some cases that's significantly more than five percent and showing what that annual growth is helps us understand the types of resource and focus that we need to have on each of our different strategic measures again that's

[02:38:10] another point where i am not sure that i agree with this because it just seems as if in the later years where it gets a little bit more challenging you're going to have bigger jumps this is the low-hanging fruit now potentially i mean i think that the point of setting these targets is to make sure that we're staying on course and the understanding that some of these measures are going to be harder for us to move if they've been perpetually stuck at certain data points for year over year and we're not seeing that growth.

[02:38:40] But if we're not seeing the move at 2 and 3 percent, why would we see the move at 10 or 15 percent when we get into the out years? I will have to think about your question, Dr. Anderson. Okay.

[02:38:55] This -- was that -- just one last thing before my time goes. On page 16 where you have the comparison between Virginia and FCPS, can you provide those raw numbers, please? - I don't know if BDOE publishes their numerators and denominators, but we'll add that to our list of things that we can provide to the board if that's available.

[02:39:18] - Thank you, Dr. Anderson. Would you like to go, well, we'll do just one round. Mr. Frisch, followed by Ms. Marin. - Thank you. If we could go to, and I brought this up in a board meeting recently, if we could go to slide 19.

[02:39:35] All right, so I'm heartened to see that some attention being paid to these issues impacting LGBTQ students. In looking at the way that the report indicates an approach to solving this issue, it includes mentioning of clubs and such.

[02:40:01] I think the academic research and the medical research would point in this direction. If the disproportionality of mental health issues for LGBTQ youth are driven by the accepting culture in which they reside or lack thereof, how does that club or those efforts impact that reality?

[02:40:26] And if they don't specifically impact that reality, could they not be doing more harm than good? What I worry about is a club where we talk about mental health without talking about THE ACTUAL REASON THESE STUDENTS ARE EXPERIENING THE DISPROPORTIONALITY.

[02:40:43] MR. FISH, I CAN ADDRESS SOME PART OF THE QUESTION. I THINK THAT YOUR HYPOTHESIS IS RIGHT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE ROOT CAUSES OF SOME OF THE DISPROPORTIONALITIES IN MENTAL HEALTH OUTCOMES WITH RESPECT TO OUR LGBTQIA+ YOUTH HAVING TO DO WITH AN ACCEPTING AND AFFIRMING CULTURE OR LACK THERE OF.

[02:41:01] AND I THINK THAT SOME OF THE EFFORTS THAT ARE BEING PUT IN PLACE ARE TRYING TO ADDRESS climate and culture on a broader scale and so I'll go back to what Ms. Neal referenced in terms of some of our SEL efforts such as all elementary schools having morning meeting and closing circles and all secondary schools having responsive advisory meetings and while some of these are intended specifically for skill building of social and emotional skills the predominant purpose is for connection fostering a sense of connection with one another connections with safe and supportive adults which we know to be some of the most important protective factors for our youth and fostering safe and supportive relationships with one another and so some of those efforts are intended to ensure that we're bolstering the sense of affirmation and belonging and

[02:41:41] protection against some of these adverse outcomes those are not unique to LGBTQIA plus youth however they might disproportionately benefit from the impact of having a more safe and supportive environment and the youth survey does speak to the protective power of having some of these protective factors or assets in helping to forestall some of these negative mental health outcomes?

[02:42:07] - I'm not sure we can adequately address the issue unless we're willing to adequately mention the issue in the work that we're doing to address it. So that will continue to be my advocacy. We have the best policies and regulations for LGBTQ students, among the best in the country, and they don't know about them.

[02:42:25] So the more we can do to make sure that they know what culture and climate we're trying to have in our schools, the more they can avail themselves of the protections we have in our school system. and maybe we can see some change in this. I think that it's kind of like bullying in general.

[02:42:45] If somebody's bullying because of a characteristic they have no control over, and the response to that is they should be nice, that does not solve the problem. Not with the bullying, certainly not in the eyes of the person who's being bullied, right? If a student was a victim of a racist attack, we wouldn't not mention the racist element of the attack, right?

[02:43:07] And so I think we need to be specifically, if it is important enough for us to highlight it in a slide, it is important enough for us to highlight it in the examples we give for the solution. Got 30 seconds, I'm gonna try and get one more question.

[02:43:25] And if we can go to slide 29, please. And I'm gonna use up all my time getting to it myself. No, here we go. So I believe this indicates a 2% increase in uh discipline referrals for students with disabilities mr frisch we're going to get to that in the next section okay oh that's right we're doing it in sections you have 10 seconds back that would explain why i didn't hear anything about it thank you you can have 10 seconds back if you want uh no that's all right i'll wait until the next section thank you mr frisch

[02:44:00] i'm sorry miss marron yes thank you um thank you for all of this information my comments are mostly going to be for the superintendent but for my colleagues and those of us who were here during covid i'm reminded of the question the board asked during the influx of esser funds which is what should we fund like tell us the things that are working so we can fund them and i'm not so clear about some of these things in terms of the return on investment and i recognize that we can't ever you know know to the penny but like so here are some of my questions like sprouts so there's a description and we know that all these you know hundreds of hours thousands of hours were recovered but do we know like for a student who participated in sprouts how did that

[02:44:39] helped that student like how did that investment end up you know really working and i don't just want to know like generally we had all these hours okay well we know research says more in school will boost but did it actually work for our kiddos and for what kiddos um same with edu futuro we i was really excited about that program but you know there's one thing in there that talks about well we worked with these hundred schools the next time we're going to work with these students and next time we're going to work with these students are those the same students are the same things happening like tell us what to fund or what you think we should fund and how much that costs generally but what i will say is what i've said many times about this work is that it from my

[02:45:18] observations and from input from staff it's incredibly labor-intensive it just requires a lot of personalized work and so i'm wondering okay did we fund the monitors who could cover class so teachers could go and spend that time calling families or did we hire more attendance staff who could do those calls and be that trusted person like I don't know from reading this and then just in general this is one big communications practice to me I mean it's all about communicating the importance of being in school you know did the materials go home are we putting it in different languages did the talking points app work like I don't know if it's unrealistic

[02:45:56] to get a sense of how all of these investments are funding this but when it comes time and we have to pick and choose things like it would be good to know I'd love to know what what gives us the best bang for the buck thank you miss Marin and I I know that dr. Presidio could comment on several of those tools and miss lemon I know you've put together the sprouts program and we have some initial data on that but to your point it's hard to isolate variables and a lot of the work we do but I think we can have some at least

[02:46:32] anecdotal data and as we're expanding that program this year really being thoughtful about what that impact is so perhaps Dr. Presidio briefly in the Muslim and briefly yeah I think that's right I mean we could we could try to do a better job of measuring return on investment that's hard work in and of itself for all the different things we just discussed right here in this one topic we do have some anecdotal information though so for example out of the ESSER funding the funds that we invested to support chronic absenteeism was about $3 million. Most of that money went to late buses. And we've had a really good return on investment because all of those are students that are actually getting to school. And transportation

[02:47:09] could tell us how many students they've been able to bring back to school through the late bus runs. We also use that money to fund the edufuturo work. And we've had, we have collected data on that in terms of the number of students that they were able to get reconnected back to school, as well as the number of students now attending on a regular basis. So those are two of the bigger points and then I think the third biggest one probably is the one Marie could talk a little bit about with the impact of the spring sprouts.

[02:47:35] Thank you so much. I think you bring up a really great question because really when we were looking at spring sprouts we were looking at getting kids back into school and helping them recover some time, recover some of that learning and so many of the kids because we targeted k1 and 2 I don't know that we have specific academic data to see if you know four extra days in school would really be a boost for them I would say at the school level we did see those schools then do much better in terms of level one accreditation with their

[02:48:10] chronic absenteeism which also supported you know the federal identification with TSI or not being TSI so that was I think one achievement but student by student like you're you're pulling up we could definitely go back and kind of look at were they chronically absent last year and then where are they this year are they chronically absent we could definitely do that for students because I think a big piece of that spring sprouts that I think anecdotally would be most successful is the field trip that we had we had so many parents come on that field trip and the communication about why it was important to be in school that school leaders and school staff could have with

[02:48:49] parents on that trip, I think really help parents understand why a kindergartner must come, even if maybe they have a little sniffle or something like that. So we can definitely look at did that impact chronic absenteeism this year from that parent relationship that happened at Spring Sprouts.

[02:49:08] And because it was only four days, I think it was more the family engagement piece that will have most of the impact, and it will be much more difficult to decipher out the academic success. Okay. Thanks, Ms. Lemon. And I'm not seeking to get data to answer this question.

[02:49:25] You know, I'm seeking to have it be useful for funding decisions, and, you know, also if we know that the parent engagement piece is the important thing, then, you know, let's do that. I also do think, though, even though the state is changing the prevalence of chronic absenteeism when they look at accountability I hope we continue to do this work just because they are changing their measure doesn't mean it's not as important to us so thank you thank you Ms. Marin Mr. Moon thank you thank you for the presentation and just a couple of questions for the first round my first

[02:50:03] question has probably a related to next part of the discussion as well but what part of our chronic absenteeism is it related to student discipline we're going to share some data in the next segment but what we were able to see is for our out of school students who are suspended out of school 40 percent of those students were chronically absent okay thank you i'll wait for the next section then the next one is on page 21 you talked about a as a part of strategies that's been working

[02:50:42] we've been we've been using it's personalized approach for students and families i think you cited some examples of how to do it uh what are the rules in addition to as futuro what are the rules uh parent liaisons play in providing those personalized support if any well i i mean i would say they're one important staff member but not the only important staff member i mean counselors social workers, even classroom teachers, are all part of the solution of, you know, supporting

[02:51:21] students and providing case management services to students. But definitely the family liaisons play a really important role and are very involved in that work as well. Would you be able to provide a written response as to what role, if any, those parent liaisons play in providing this personal support?

[02:51:40] I'm asking this question, potentially related to upcoming budget discussion. Understood. - Thank you, Ms. St. John-Cunning. - Thank you for this information. I appreciate it.

[02:51:55] You mentioned that where there was greater numbers of absenteeism were in schools like Bryant and Mountain View. Do you have the data in terms of the students that were missing, if they were missing because they were working?

[02:52:10] I know some of those parents might be teen moms that might have a sick child. I don't know if your data, is that granular? - So unfortunately it's not. And that is a problem that we have with respect to our attendance coding, is that really we know whether an absence is excused or unexcused, and then there is an optional fill-in where people can fill in the reason for that, but that doesn't allow us to really analyze based on root cause, so it leads us to hypothesize.

[02:52:38] So I would imagine that all of those are reasons, but we don't have hard quantifiable data that we can reference to say this proportion of those absences were likely due to these causes. Thank you. I wish we could get that data. I don't know if we could. It's self-reported.

[02:52:55] My other question, for the 800 students that did access the Hazel services, do we have that broken down into terms of what grade levels we're accessing? We do, and I can get that specifically to you, but what I can tell you is that it's It's roughly equal numbers of 10th and 11th and 12th grade students, a smaller proportion of 9th grade students.

[02:53:20] I think the hypothesis is that students being new to high school may not be as aware of the resources that are available to them earlier in the year, but then as the year picks up are likely to use more. We've seen that last year, that in the first few months of the last school year, not as many 9th grade students utilized Hazel Health, but then as we kind of hit the second, third, quarters we saw an increase in utilization and are those services just offered in high school those are available just to students in high school at this time and are those services offered in varying languages yes hazel health therapists speak over 15 languages and that was one of the primary reasons that we selected the vendor was the available of multi-lingual

[02:54:00] services and what is the cost so the cost for the current school year for 24 25 for access to just high school students is roughly 1.2 million. The reason that I ask is I worked at elementary school and some of our fifth and sixth graders were talking about pretty serious mental health issues and including suicide. So I would love to see this program expanded but again we'd have to look at what the cost is. And one thing I would add is that Hazel is not

[02:54:40] the only mental health program available to our youth. We do utilize our community partners for mental health services and one of the most effective services that we found is our short-term behavioral health program which is available to all high school students middle school students and every title one elementary school where students have free access to eight roughly eight short-term sessions with community providers that partner with Healthy Minds Fairfax and if they require more intensive services than they are given a warm handoff to the community services board or other community providers there so I do just to highlight that we have other opportunities that are available to these youths thank you

[02:55:19] i'm going to pivot a little bit and just do we know the numbers in terms of how many students edu futudo brought back and kept in school i'll have to i'll have to work with you offline to get that we did have that data point earlier so i'm assuming we can update it if we need to thank you thank you miss st john cunning and seeing no other placards up then i will take a turn thank you for this information and i first just want to congratulate the team on the incredible

[02:55:55] efforts on reducing that chronic absenteeism it is really incredible and i know it's a lot of hard work by your team by our principals our teachers our building staff families on social workers all you know psychologists counselors i just wanted to say this is there's a lot of work to be done we all recognize that and a lot of good questions but i just want to first thank you for that data point um and for the hard work that goes behind that so thank you um i wanted to mention a couple things as i'm looking at some of the reasons for chronic absenteeism i noticed one of the lists was aversion you know anxiety aversion to school and i have sent to you all maybe not everybody but a

[02:56:31] few of you sort of information about pervasive or prevalent demand avoidance and i think that's something really important to look at because that goes directly to aversion to school and aversion to demands and and it's as it's the research is really out of england right now which is what the research of neurodiversity was before it came to the united states i really encourage you all to look at that as you're looking at this work it's it relates um i also like i love the hard work and i'm so grateful the hard work of our staff but i love to talk a little more about long-term solutions to chronic absenteeism because i don't think we can expect our staff to do the level of

[02:57:07] phone calls and outreach and i love that they're doing and i know their heart is but it's a lot and you know i'd love to look so one thing i was thinking about is i kept hearing connection and belonging right and i look at the students who have the highest levels of chronic absenteeism or hispanic students or students with disabilities are um economically disadvantaged students and especially as you get further down the graph our students with disabilities who are minorities have the highest level and tying to our end we have failed indicator five and six for at least 15 or 20 years which is inclusion and that's how you get that sense of connection and belonging so

[02:57:44] like it's not isolated work um and our goal is actually inclusion in extracurriculars and for some of our students who can't stay after school i am wondering what can we do to look into miss marron's point about funding about looking at either using advisory or creating a tj like eighth period to give students a space within the school day to have access to those extracurriculars those clubs you know for the students with disabilities as we saw the data points are much more segregated coming into high school when right right when the absenteeism rates are going up what can we do long term to look at creative solutions to how we deliver

[02:58:21] programs to increase that space for connection and belonging so I'll pause there to see if anyone has some thoughts on that I feel like everybody's looking at me I don't know why I was looking at Dr. Reed but I'm happy no I mean I would say I think he raised an excellent point and we're just still at the beginning stages in a lot of ways on the work that we're doing with inclusion we're to talk about some of that work in this report in the third section. You know, we're just starting our work with our inclusion consultants. But as you said, I mean, our goal and our vision for our inclusion work is not just for academics, it's for extracurriculars and, you know, things that

[02:58:59] students are going to even do in the community outside of school to be included as much as possible. So I do think he raised some really good questions for us to consider more in terms of what we can do during the school day with some of these highly impacted student groups that if they were connected to school in more positive and productive ways probably their attendance rates would continue to grow so I mean I think that's an area we just need to get more focus to and I appreciate that night and while I think inclusion is an important component I want to emphasize what I'm really trying to get at is how do we create systematic ways for connection and belonging for all students but in particular those groups that have the higher chronic absenteeism rates because reaching out to families and say come to school come

[02:59:38] to school is labor-intensive making them want to be at school is the long-term solution so that's what I'd love to see more of what are we doing to make our students want to be there right what and hopefully that takes from the burden of our parent of our staff reaching out to parents and same with our families making them feel connected so they I think that's what I would love to see more of in terms of solutions for moving forward I think I see no the placards up for this section of it so we're going to go on to the next section for the presentation we'll do one more round of board questions last section one

[03:00:15] and then we'll just open it up to go backs for any of the sections. So having said that, Dr. Reed, I'll turn to you. All right. Thank you, Ms. Sizemore-Heiser. And I'm still thinking about your last question, and I don't want you to feel like we're not being thoughtful about systemic resolution, and I think I'm going to ask the team to consider also what we're doing with our advisory time, and I know it's not called that, but there are a variety of ways.

[03:00:42] It is correct? Okay. know i mean that's another block of time we have that's already in our system and in our schedule and maybe there's a conversation to be had in terms of blending the topic we're talking about now and maybe that time which is already in our our system so i think that's something i would ask the team maybe to take back and give some thought to i know there are a lot of topics we're trying to address in that time and this is an important topic too right so just trying to be thoughtful about that and I think there's also this continuum right I think when children

[03:01:19] are little young we have to get the family to understand why it's important to get the child to school because we don't have second graders generally driving themselves to school or you know getting themselves to school if they're a distance but but once kids move into that secondary school then it's more so we need to make sure that the child for sure really wants to be there of course we want children at every age to be to want to be in school but it's sort of that gradual release of responsibility and I think if we think about it in those terms there's work that we can do because it education is a relationship

[03:01:55] work right that relationship between a child and their teacher their content the school culture so I know the team's taking good notes and we'll come back with some ideas. Let's move to the second part which of the presentation which really is around discipline disproportionality. So I think Dr. King is gonna head this up. Alright I'm gonna go through the presentation and then we'll turn it back over for questions. So we're gonna go to the next slide. Discipline disproportionality occurs when students who belong to one group are disciplined

[03:02:34] at higher rates than students who are not a member of that group. And nationally we see that boys, Hispanic, and black students, and students with disabilities are more likely to receive disciplinary actions. The research on LGBTQIA+ students is limited, however, a recent study estimates they are twice as likely to be suspended, and transgender students in particular are three times as likely.

[03:02:59] Discipline can have a negative impact on student outcomes, including measures that we have in our Goal 3 and 5 of our strategic plan, and the research indicates that students who are suspended or more likely to have lower test scores, less engagement, higher dropout rates and increased involvement in the justice system.

[03:03:17] As I shared prior, one of the links that we saw within our own data was approximately 40% of the students who received an out of school suspension were also chronically absent last year. Disproportionate discipline can deepen inequities and outcomes and our sustained focus on this topic is expected to improve other strategic plan measures.

[03:03:36] The research indicates there are several factors that can contribute to discipline disproportionality, including school climate, capacity to respond to trauma, bias, and vague policies, amongst others. And Figure 5 of the full report does provide some additional details of these root causes.

[03:03:54] This table shows the range and the number of discipline referrals entered last year by school level. And you'll see on a subsequent slide that being late to class or cutting class were significant contributors to student discipline referrals. This range shows how the application of the SR&R may differ from school to school, which means FCPS needs to continue to focus on consistency of reporting and responding to discipline to understand trends across the division.

[03:04:20] The majority of our students had no discipline referrals last year. 9% of all students had one or more discipline incident that was referred to the school administration. No student groups made substantial improvements compared to the adjusted baseline, and there slight upticks observed in discipline that may be driven by increases in discipline incidents changes in how our teachers and schools are responding to discipline behavior and or increases in the recording of incidents as the division seeks greater consistency in that area five student groups saw rates of referrals increased by two percentage points and the highest rates of one or more discipline referral were for black students economically disadvantaged students

[03:05:00] multilingual learners, Hispanic students, and students with disabilities. This slide shows the annual growth targets FCPS has set for discipline referrals as we work towards our 2030 goals. The targets are expressed as a change in the overall rate of discipline, which will also equate to a change in the risk ratios that we'll explore on the next slide.

[03:05:20] These targets were set on percentages in order to provide greater clarity. We have some groups that are already within our success target and are working to have all groups reduce their discipline to this level which will allow us to achieve reductions in discipline disproportionality. While we did not meet our annual target for the 23-24 school year which means growth will need to be accelerated in subsequent years in order to meet the 2030 target. This slide looks at the risk ratios for discipline by comparing the rates for one student group to the rates of students not in that group and as a reminder a risk ratio of two means that a student from that group was twice as likely to receive a

[03:05:59] discipline referral as a student not in that group. When examining risk ratios we're looking at risk ratios that are above two and trends over time to show that show a pattern of disproportionality. So on this slide you can see that two groups had three consecutive years of risk ratios over 2.0 and two groups had risk ratios above a 2.0 in the 21-22 school year however those ratios have now fallen below the 2.0 threshold. This chart looks at discipline referrals by grade level and we see a steady increase in students receiving referrals through eighth grade where it peaks and then

[03:06:33] declines again through grade 12. When looking at the drivers of discipline and FCPS, the top five reasons for discipline referrals last year included cutting class, minor physical altercations, unexcused tardies to class, behaviors impacting classroom learning, and engaging in reckless or negligent behavior with a risk to self or others. The Fairfax County Youth Survey also provides us with additional insights on school climate particular into bullying where we saw 15% of students self-reporting being bullied with especially high rates in grade six and for our

[03:07:06] lgbtq plus students and students who self-reported disability now we're going to take a look at data for additional student groups starting with our multilingual learners this chart shows discipline referrals by elp level students who are classified as elps level two and three have the highest rates of having one or more discipline referral, with ELP level nine students or kindergartners having substantially lower rates. Similar to our look at attendance data, the next two slides synthesize our intersectionality data and data for additional student groups that are found on pages 45 to 51

[03:07:42] of the full report. This slide is looking at the rate of change in discipline referrals compared to the baseline. None of the intersected groups examined saw substantial improvement in their in their discipline referral rates, and five groups improved slightly or stayed the same.

[03:07:57] 15 groups saw their rates increased by two percentage points or more, and the largest increases were for black multilingual learners, black students with disabilities, and multilingual learners with disabilities. On the previous slide, we looked at change from the baseline, and on this slide, we see the percentage of students who had one or more discipline referral during the 23-24 school year.

[03:08:19] The student groups with discipline referrals that were five percentage points above the division average are pictured in yellow. And the highest rates were for black students with disabilities, multilingual learners with a 504 plan, which is a smaller student group, and students with disabilities who are also economically disadvantaged.

[03:08:35] And all of those students groups had a rate that was in excess of 20%. This slide looks at the number of discipline referrals during the 23-24 school year by student group. And as we noted earlier, the vast majority of students, 91%, had no discipline referrals last year.

[03:08:52] That's pictured in the dark blue. 5% received only one referral, and the numbers hovering over the top are for those who received two or more referrals. So we had 4% of all students received two or more referrals. We do see differences in this chart, in particular for our students with disabilities and our black students who have elevated rates of having two or more discipline referrals.

[03:09:13] Now we're gonna shift gears and look at out-of-school suspensions. As you know, the SRNR governs the application of discipline sanctions, including out-of-school suspensions, with some level of discretion provided for administrators. Overall, just under 2% of all students received an out-of-school suspension last year.

[03:09:31] And because this rate is very low, we're looking at change and differences by group out by two decimal points. So we saw very small changes from the baseline and the highest rates of students with one or more out-of-school suspension were for students with disabilities and black students, which were both above 4%.

[03:09:50] This slide shows the growth targets we've set out for out of school suspensions as we work towards our 2030 goals. The targets again are expressed as a change in the overall rate, which will also equate to a change in risk ratios that we'll look at on the next slide. Our target for 2023-24 was for all students to be at or below 2%, and we met this target.

[03:10:12] However, we did not meet the targets for multiple student groups, which impacts their risk ratios. And we have a need to accelerate their growth to be on track for our 2030 goals. And we've got full details on the targets in the report. This slide shows the risk ratios for students with one or more out of school suspension.

[03:10:30] Again, we're looking at risk ratios above that 2.0 threshold and trends over time. Six groups had risk ratios that were higher than 2.0 across all three years, and economically disadvantaged and students with disabilities had risk ratios above 3.0 last year.

[03:10:46] Boys have seen a decline in their risk ratio over the last three years, but remain above the 2.0 level. When we look at grade-level trends, we see similar trends for out-of-school suspensions as we did for discipline referrals, meaning that they are lower than the earlier grades, increase in peak in grade eight, and decline again by grade 12.

[03:11:07] Last year, approximately 9% of the out-of-school suspensions were mandatory based on the SRNR, and the most serious violation associated with those out-of-school suspensions were those that created unsafe conditions in the school, followed by those that endangered the health, safety, and welfare of students or others in the school, and then those that interfered with school operations.

[03:11:28] Next, we're gonna start to break down the data by additional student groups, starting with our ELP level. Our multilingual learners who were categorized as ELP level two or three had the highest rates of out-of-school suspensions, while students categorized as ELP level nine, again, those kindergarten students had the lowest rates.

[03:11:46] The next two slides, again, synthesize the data for additional student groups that are found on pages 58 through 62 and on page 65 of the full report. This slide is looking at the rate of change out-of-school suspensions compared to the baseline. Two intersected student groups improved suspension rates by one or more percentage point and three student groups saw rates that increased by over one percentage point. It is important to keep in mind that because these numbers are very small in some cases we're talking about a difference of two to ten students depending on the group. On the previous slide we looked at change in the rate of out-of-school suspension and this is visualizing the percent of out-of-school suspensions for

[03:12:25] 23-24. In yellow you can see the 12 student groups that had a suspension rate that was two percentage points or more above the division average and black students with disabilities had the highest rate of out-of-school suspensions at over 10 percent. Last year we targeted identified schools to reduce discipline disproportionality using a model referred to as RDD and this strategy did not yield the desired results at the division level and FCPS is currently focused now on universal work across all schools with the intention of initiating more targeted work at the school and classroom level following these more global efforts. To improve discipline disproportionality,

[03:13:04] we're currently focused on strategies that minimize discipline incidents from occurring in the first place, increasing consistency of responses to discipline behavior incidents, to behavior incidents, excuse me, strengthening data collection and monitoring of discipline incidents across the division, providing targeted supports, and reducing the risk of future discipline occurrences. Similar to our efforts on positive school and classroom environments for attendance. These efforts are also intended to reduce incidents of negative behavior from occurring in the first place by fostering positive relationships and providing routines and clear and consistent expectations for student behavior. Some

[03:13:42] examples of this include resources and learning opportunities to help teachers establish clear routines and expectations while fostering a positive classroom environment with targeted supports being provided to our new teachers required health curriculum with lessons on bullying and harassment equity leads that facilitate required learning and focus on building equity capacity across the division and improving the diversity of the teacher workforce which is a research-based strategy for reducing discipline disproportionality to increase consistency we've trained school administrators in the SR&R hearings office procedures and title nine regulation updates with sessions that were grounded in equity cultural

[03:14:21] responsiveness and neurodiversity. We work with principal associations to develop a tool to support greater consistency in the application of the SRNR discipline matrix and we'll be conducting audits on discipline incidents this year to identify inconsistencies in the use of discipline codes and we've strengthened our process for withdrawing student disciplinary cases where misconduct is determined to be a manifestation of a student's disability resulting in substantial reduction in hearing office referrals for students with disabilities.

[03:14:50] both last year and this year schools identified as having discipline disproportionality were required to develop a goal an associated action plan as a part of their sip we provide students with support to minimize the risk of future discipline involvement for example small group counseling student behavior intervention supports and behavior intervention plans are available to help students who need additional support restorative justice is used to help students who have been involved in conflict to repair relationships and understand the impact of the behavior so future incidents don't occur.

[03:15:22] And further, we connect students and families to resources including substance prevention and intervention supports and other supports through the hearings office social worker as needed. We're currently focusing on strengthening the timely and accurate reporting of incidents given the variants we see across the division, which is not a challenge that is unique to FCPS.

[03:15:42] As a part of our ongoing data work, we're also reviewing current data methodology to better support identification of disciplinary data and trends. And finally, a discipline dashboard is being expanded for administrators to better monitor ongoing data and provide appropriate responses as needed.

[03:15:58] This dashboard will also allow our region offices to monitor and support schools more effectively with these efforts. And then finally, our goal innovation team focused on discipline disproportionality is identifying additional targeted strategies as a part of our multi-year plan.

[03:16:13] So as we close out this section, these are our key takeaways from the 23-24 school year. 9% of our students received a discipline referral last year and just under 2% had an out-of-school suspension. These data points remain largely unchanged from the baseline. We see patterns in discipline disproportionality across multiple school years, with students who are economically disadvantaged and boys having higher referral and suspension rates, and multilingual learners, students with disabilities, black students and Hispanic students also having elevated rates of suspension compared to their peers.

[03:16:44] We're currently focusing on global strategies to minimize discipline from occurring to ensure consistent monitoring in response to behavior and discipline, and to provide more targeted supports to impacted students and families. And at this time, I'll turn the meeting back over to the meeting managers.

[03:16:59] - Thank you very much. We'll start with Mr. Frisch, followed by Dr. Anderson and then Ms. Anderson. - Thank you very much for this. I imagine people at home and maybe even a few of us are confused by risk ratios.

[03:17:17] So perhaps you could break it down a little bit. I get that two is twice as likely. Does that mean that a 1.8 is 80% more likely? - So one, it's essentially a student in one group has the same risk of being disciplined as a student who's not a part of that group.

[03:17:39] Two is twice as likely, and anything in between would be 1.8 times as likely. I don't know if Mr. Frisch, if that helps to-- - Yes, it does. - Okay. - To that end, along the lines of what Ms. Seismar Heiser was asking on the chronic absenteeism front, looking at the slide 29, and I did cross-reference it in the report, it shows a 2% increase in referrals for students with disabilities, which in numbers is 650 kids.

[03:18:11] More, now it may be a smaller percentage of the overall population, which is why we're seeing a slight reduction in the risk ratio but it you know I think one of the questions I'm going to start having going forward is you know if we're looking at one of the primary ways of addressing chronic absenteeism and discipline issues is in the inclusive environment that we're putting students in you know broadly speaking then how is the inclusive classroom and experience for these students or lack

[03:18:48] thereof contributing to that equation so is it goal for that we previously addressed the subject of inclusion this goal over here it's too yeah so I'll be interested in knowing perhaps going forward how that data might bring this information to life here and elsewhere where we're seeing disparities especially any comments on that or things you might already have an inkling about? Well, I think we were both going to add in. I don't really have too many comments right now

[03:19:27] other than to say I do think our hypothesis is that as we get students in more inclusive environments where they're more, have a greater sense of belonging, right, have a greater sense of self-efficacy, are more engaged academically and intellectually, that we're going to see some of these types of behavior incidents that are leading to referrals reduce, right? But again, we don't WE'RE NOT AT THE POINT WHERE WE CAN REALLY START TO TRACK AND MEASURE THAT.

[03:19:57] SO THAT IS THAT INTERSECTION OF THOSE DATA POINTS IS GOING TO BE REALLY IMPORTANT MOVING FORWARD. AND THEN THE THIRD SECTION OF THIS REPORT, WE'LL TALK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT OUR TIMELINE FOR THE INCLUSION WORK WE'RE DOING, BUT IT'S REALLY LIKE WITHIN THE NEXT THREE TO FIVE YEARS TO TRY TO GET TO A FULLY INCLUSIVE CONTINUUM OF SERVICES IN FCPS.

[03:20:15] SO IT'S GOING TO BE A LITTLE WHILE, I THINK, BEFORE WE HAVE ENOUGH DATA, BEFORE WE CAN DRAW REAL VALID CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THAT. But our hypothesis would be that those incidents would go down in terms of behavior incidents. Well, I think it speaks volumes to the amount of granularity that's in this is bringing these questions to the surface.

[03:20:32] This is exactly the type of stuff that we've been asking for, and so it's very much appreciated. I don't want to get lost on the fact that the state may say that a 2 is the threshold. It's certainly not anything below that is certainly not acceptable, right?

[03:20:51] And so it's a goal that we're shooting for. but we should be shooting for even more improvement. So I think we should probably keep that in mind as well. I had one more question.

[03:21:06] Oh, as it pertains to the out-of-school suspensions, I can't remember what slide that was on. All right, it's on slide 38.

[03:21:25] And so this could account for one of the reasons that the board might be seeing fewer referrals coming to us that we're seeing fewer out of school suspensions across the board, it looks like, are just about.

[03:21:43] That seems interesting given the other categories that are increasing. Is it that we're not doling out the punishment as frequently for the behavior, or is it truly practices leading to change behavior?

[03:21:58] - Are we sharing our chart of, I guess I'm talking about it now, aren't I? the gap in reporting? - So in the full report is the CEIS data.

[03:22:15] I think, Dr. Reed, that's what you're referring to. - Well, the elementary, middle, and high. - Oh, no, we did, yes. - Would you go back to that slide, please? Slide 28. So I think this slide, probably more so than any slide, we sort of walk through this, but I wanna be really thoughtful about this slide because as I've said on several occasions, when we think about being a school system a system of schools what this refers to is all 141 of our elementary schools the range in reported

[03:22:49] discipline incidents we have a school that's reported one for the entire school year and what was that no we the what was the incident i was trying to recall was a bus incident it was a bus incident didn't happen at school so one of our 141 schools had essentially zero school-based discipline referrals up to one of our 141 had 831 and when you look at our middle school of our 24 middle schools we go from anywhere between 92 to 60 so when you look at that I think that what we need to also have a conversation

[03:23:27] about is the collective expectation for what we should be reporting because I think for many years there's been a move to not report and there's been I since I've been here I've been asked you know is there a disincentive or are we suppressing discipline reporting and we're not and there's also I think a lot of pride in the fact that we're using a lot of opportunities to redirect and engage with our students so that we don't have a lot of discipline and frankly for a school division the size we have very little discipline and I

[03:24:03] think that I also want to share that discipline isn't a bad thing I think that we learn a lot through discipline experiences it's how we manage those experiences so keeping students in school right and learning from mistakes we would best want our children to make mistakes young where we can learn where the consequences aren't so significant so I do think there's something within this slide that is a strategy that I've asked the staff to be thinking about along with our regional assistant superintendent team and our executive principals as we work with schools I think this consistency is very important

[03:24:41] and it is connected to our data so I think that's part of the answer to the question you're raising Dr. Reed if I may thank you we noticed more than anything in our training this summer when we trained our school-based administrators around SR&R when we did our scenario training there was a lot of conflict at the elementary level about something that's reported or something that's handled by the teacher and the expectation of the leader in the school right and and we saw that rise in just going around and listening to the table talk so we recognize and on our team as we continue to provide training for our

[03:25:21] staff what is the standard in our system that we can all agree to and that's part of the shall and maze that we talked about in the follow-on motion and what our team is looking forward to sharing with you at Future 2x2 to discuss for future SR&R.

[03:25:37] Thanks. Thank you. Dr. Anderson? Thank you. I'm actually glad you stopped at this slide because it was one of my initial questions because there's definitely a story to be told here. I would love for what's on the left-hand side to be the reality, but the fact that we have these two superimposed next to each other, it's an issue.

[03:26:02] And I definitely understand, and I realize what you said, discipline is not a bad thing. It is an opportunity to learn. But given the disproportionality that we have, how come it's only certain kids that are learning this? If we're looking at the data, it's the black kids who are learning this.

[03:26:17] It's the Hispanic kids who are learning this. Please help me understand that. So I would have to go back to the team that's working on this. We have a division-wide team whose charge right now is working on discipline disproportionality and a grant, our CEIS grant that's working on special education identification disproportionality as well as discipline disproportionality, so I'm going to turn to staff for thoughts on what we've discovered and our plans to address that.

[03:26:48] So yes, thank you for that, Dr. Reed. My name is Deanna Shin, and I am the new senior manager for the Office of Equity and Student Conduct, so thank you for being here with you all today. address some of the the questions around enforcement and kind of like consistency of policies and practices that we see across the division one of the things that we have instituted this year to support our schools is an effective implementation and data entry into our student information system also known as cysts one of the things that we found in our collaboration and partnership with

[03:27:24] the chief info tech office is that we were seeing a lot of audit errors in the reporting of discipline and as such we combined forces to be able to provide training to administrators and how to be able to enter discipline effectively and some of the things that are coming out of that training we posted eight of them so far but some of the things coming out of that training especially from our elementary schools is that they are feeling ill-equipped to answer questions for parents around discipline on how discipline is entered on why it needs to be entered and so as part of learning that information from these trainings we

[03:28:00] are in the process of developing some resources to give to administer to give to elementary school administrators to be able to have these conversations on the importance of entering discipline and assists why and how it's helpful and how we're able to be able to support our parents and our families and students better around discipline at that level it's very similar to the work and the resources that we developed around restorative justice when we heard from administrators that they were wanting to offer restorative justice but feeling ill-equipped about how to answer questions about RJ to parents in order to be able to offer it to them. And one of the resources we developed from there was a line-by-line script that

[03:28:38] administrators are able to use and frequently ask questions that families have around RJ. So we are in the process of developing something similar for our elementary school administrators as they talk to families about effective discipline data entry. I appreciate that, but I don't know if that was necessarily my question, so I'd like to be a little bit clearer.

[03:28:59] Page 29, if we could put that slide up, please. I think what was mentioned by Ms. Heismolheiser, Mr. Frisch, and Dr. Reed certainly makes sense when we're talking about students with disabilities, where the inclusion creates the connections which will impact behavior.

[03:29:17] How are we going to create a different scenario for our Black and Hispanic students as identified in these areas? Because when we're looking at numbers, 18,718 black kids, yet 16, I'm sorry, which group?

[03:29:34] 16 or 14, however you look at it, whether it be adjusted or the regular, it's a whole lot of kids. What are the strategies? Is it going to be more of what we've already done? Are we just going to say it slower and louder? Or are we going to do something that's going to move this needle?

[03:29:52] Because if I'm looking at what is identified in even the targets, you have not met them in this area at all. And actually, for those categories, it's growing exponentially. Yes. So, again, thank you for that question. So, one of the root causes of discipline is proportionality.

[03:30:10] It's certainly a multifaceted and stubborn concern. But one of the leading causes of disproportionality is ensuring that we have consistency of enforcement of practices and policies that are equitable. And so one of the things that we are focusing on this year is ensuring that we have consistent enforcement of our student discipline code.

[03:30:33] And we have engaged quite a few strategies to help support that. So initially, what has been developed right now, then I can also walk you through some of the things that will be rolling out in the winter, and then also things that we'll be looking at into next year. But currently, we have implemented our equitable discipline training sessions.

[03:30:51] There are four of those sessions currently. Two are for administrators, two are for teachers. They provide strategies to those particular groups in order to provide resources and supports on how to be able to equitably implement discipline in the classroom.

[03:31:06] Also, how do we equitably implement discipline at the level once we get to a referral being accepted by an administrator, and therefore reaching this level of potentially receiving a sanction of out-of-school suspension or in-school suspension. and the training feedback that we are receiving from that has been overwhelmingly positive.

[03:31:23] Those trainings launched in October 2024, and we of course will have data by the end of the year to be able to show the progress of that. One of the data metrics that we'll be looking at for those equitable discipline trainings, very specifically, is looking at participants who attended the training, looking at their referrals prior to the training, and then also looking at the referrals after the training in some of the subgroups that we've clearly identified here are in need of targeted support and intervention.

[03:31:51] And then, of course, providing that targeted support and intervention to those staff members ongoing as they continue to implement this work. Additionally, some of our other strategies include the development of our how to use the discipline matrix tool. One of the things that we're finding in our conversations with administrators is that there is some confusion around what the discipline matrix is, how you find it, and how you actually use it.

[03:32:16] And so one of the things that we've done is, again, create a resource which we have introduced in our SRNR trainings, which 99% of our administrators have attended during our SRNR office hours, during the CIS trainings, and also through a lot of the resources that we're also developing division-wide to be able to provide that how to use the discipline matrix tool for administrators to help guide not only them but their administrative teams in making these equitable decisions.

[03:32:43] One of the things that we find in discipline is proportionality is something called VDPs or Vulnerable Points of Decision Making, meaning where we have opportunities for subjectivity to enter into the discipline process and so as much as possible we want to try to remove those opportunities for subjectivity and one of those things that can help us do that is to providing a bit more clarity and guidance around how to utilize the discipline matrix tool.

[03:33:09] Additionally, we have our SRNR office hour sessions that we're hosting where, again, we implement this information and introduce it, our Let's Talk feature on the FCPS.edu website, and then, of course, our CIS trainings for administrators.

[03:33:24] And those are just the things that we are currently doing. And we also have things that we are looking into, of course, for spring, which are already in motion and will launch when we return back from the holiday break. Thank you for that. Can you speak a little bit as to who writes the discipline referrals?

[03:33:41] So, there are two groups who write discipline referrals. So, well, correction, there's one. So, teachers write discipline referrals. So, a teacher is managing a behavior. They have attempted to try to use classroom management strategies and techniques.

[03:33:59] Perhaps it's been a progressive disciplinary issue. And then at that point, they then write a discipline referral which goes to an administrator. the administrator then either accepts it or denies that referral and if they accept the referral then the srnr process now begins where we begin looking at what interventions and sanctions are possible for that particular disciplinary issue so if the administrator accepts the referral it gets coded that is correct but the writer of the discipline referrals are the teachers that is correct so can you speak a little bit to the work that is happening at that level what is their

[03:34:35] version of the discipline matrix what if they're their version of the VDP's because that seems to be the place where we need to have the greatest level of intervention yes so that your question actually goes to the heart of why we implemented our equitable discipline trainings this year and why we have those trainings very specifically for teachers and why we have them also for administrators so those trainings are to be able to provide teachers with an understanding around what does equitable classroom management look like what are the strategies that we're incorporating and we are doing those train those

[03:35:13] trainings in partnership with members of the MTSS team and and the SEL team as well so that's kind of the targeted work that we're trying to do at that classroom level in addition to be able to do some of the data progress monitoring and enforcement around some of the data trends that we're seeing so all of our teachers are being trained in this way is it an optional training that would be ideal certainly for all of our teachers to be doing that right now it is an optional training but it is information sorry it is trainings that we are promoting amongst our schools pretty consistently and in a very targeted way

[03:35:51] to to ensure that our teachers at that level are participating in these trainings yes so dr. Reed I think that's a place why I have an issue because if we're trying to impact and influence at the decision-making level those kinds of training shouldn't be optional because how are we going to be able to impact this chart if people can select whether or not they participate yes ma'am I think that's that's a fair statement I do know that we've had some required trainings for assistant principals this fall and last summer we had required training for principals and assistant principals on this topic I think what

[03:36:27] staff are describing is this training continues to evolve but the expectation is clear and I think we also have to be responsible honestly from my office all the way through the system that says that it's important to share data that we need shared so we can allocate resources to support our students and staff in places where they're needed that it's not a negative issue when there are discipline issues that arise we have to be able to honestly talk to each other about that if we're going to resolve the situations that we need to

[03:37:03] work to resolve. Thank you. I will get back to that and might go back, but I wanted to ask this. Marcy, you talked about a little bit in terms of one of the strategies being the diversity of the teacher workforce. Can you say a little bit more here, please? And this is coming in the next EL the board is gonna talk about on Thursday, but one of, when you look in the body of research, one of the evidence-based strategies for reducing discipline disproportionality is increasing the diversity of the teacher workforce, and that has been something that our HR team is working on and we'll have some additional data that we can share it is in the full report if I can find it real quick I'll share it but

[03:37:42] ensuring that we have a workforce that is diverse and equipped to meet the needs of a diverse student and by teacher workforce are you meaning the classroom teacher or you're meaning the administrative staff counselors I believe this research particularly speaks to the importance of teachers okay thank you I would love to yes I'm confirming with my team yes it's teachers Okay, thank you. One of the other things that I heard in your statements is that there is universal work that will be taking place across all schools. I beg to differ that some schools require a little bit more intentionality than

[03:38:19] others. How have we broken down this data by school? We have not provided that data in this report, but certainly if that's something the board is interested in, we can share. I am very interested. Thank you, Dr. Anderson. Ms. Anderson? So So I am going to throw a wrench in this that I actually think that this is actually a good news story.

[03:38:43] And the reason that is is because I see that disproportionality. What I'm hoping that this is showing is that we had almost 3,000 more instances of discipline in the last year. I actually see the positive, like the plus one in that category as a positive because it means that we potentially don't have kids that are acting out more.

[03:39:02] just are reporting the kids that are acting out in the way that is just the type of discipline that you were discussing. So I don't necessarily see that as a problem in the same way. I went back to the baseline report on this because I wanted to make sure that I was actually looking at it correctly.

[03:39:20] This is a completely different chart than we used in the baseline data, because if we were looking at this chart in the same format that we looked at it before, I'm not as concerned as the plus one with all students. What I'm trying to figure out is how we're doing on whether or not the 5 percent is less than the 9 percent.

[03:39:40] And that's the way we looked at it last year. So it would be helpful to have this actually echo the way we started the conversation because this shows a disproportionality that may be different than what we're actually discussing. And so I want to make sure that it's an apples-to-apples comparison as we move through all of this.

[03:39:58] And I think that's a particularly important aspect of this. But I don't necessarily see this as bad news as long as we can fix the other slide that we were looking at that shows that we've got some kids, some elementary schools that are reporting nothing and some that are reporting either everything or what's actually occurring or whatever variety of that that is.

[03:40:22] So I do want to make sure that we continue to kind of compare those two in the same way just to make sure that we're looking at things appropriately. Dr. Reed? Yeah. To Mrs. Anderson's point, I also wanted to ask staff, because one of the things I asked is what are these discipline referrals primarily the result of?

[03:40:42] What is the behavior we're discussing here? Because one of the things I feel like we are making progress on is the types of issues that we're dealing with today rather than prior issues. I feel like we've taken -- if you have a Maslow's -- Michael, I think there's a Maslow's hierarchy for naughty behavior, but it feels like our behavior is less naughty this year than it has been, or this past year.

[03:41:12] So staff, if you would share perhaps the issues perhaps that are being reflected in this data. These were the top five reasons that we're driving referrals last year, so you can see Two out of the three of those are about students being, cutting class or being late to their assigned class.

[03:41:30] That's a significant portion of what these referrals represent. - Which one could argue goes back to attendance. And there's, we had a bit of a discussion because we label it as discipline, we did have a discussion about if we took the tardies, the cutting class out of this data set because they're connected to attendance, then what would it look like, right?

[03:41:50] So I do wanna just reframe a little bit that the naughtiness for one or more discipline referral is, this is what we're talking about, so thank you. - It would also be very helpful to see if this is a comparison between elementary and secondary, just because I think that we have different reasons that we have discipline going on.

[03:42:11] The other thing that I want us to do is actually spend the time to realign expectations of our parents, because I believe that a large part of the reason that some schools are reporting things and some schools aren't is expectation of the parents involved. And so talking about when you're gonna see discipline reported in CIS because we all have access to be able to see what's happening with our kids.

[03:42:34] I think that it's important that some schools, parents aren't, they may be getting calls but they're not seeing it actually recorded. I think that that's the type of thing that we should make sure that parents understand that as we move towards a system that is creating accountability for students, then it's important that they understand that's happening thank you miss Anderson miss Marin hi I I guess I'm gonna take this a little more macro level than I intended because I hear a lot of again

[03:43:11] similar to the earlier piece about chronic absenteeism and also really this goes back to the executive limitations that some of us have talked about and I've talked with the superintendent about like well how do we categorize the things in the places that they are so like what's a what I don't hear now is a a measurable way of like how effective the offerings are I hear a lot of what's offered we're doing all these things that seem good in their research based but I I don't know how effective they are I mean I guess in the totality of data I could figure it out but you know what mr. Frisch said about you know so

[03:43:48] there may be fewer out-of-school suspensions but why like that's good but but why are our strategies working and sure it could be that people are not diagnosing and recording the discipline issues the same and thank you for the you know the detailed explanation but like the whole idea is how do we get to the consistency of things that subjective humans are constantly evaluating and recording on right like what is the sort of statistical you know limits that we're okay with knowing that people are gonna you know we move grading we talk about they're hard grader they're a soft grader right but

[03:44:24] just even more bigger picture like we don't talk about class size like anymore or at all like that used to be something that I was always like if I could do one thing it would be class size and this strategy is foster positive trusting and supportive school and classroom activities so while I totally value that we're looking at discipline in the strategies like just like we talk about boundaries being something that could help you know resolve a lot of issues well so could smaller classes I don't hear us talking about that at all like that was the big thing when I first started advocating in 2015. My kids, both my kids,

[03:44:59] 20 to 29 kids in elementary school every single year in a class, and they weren't in a high-needs school. So, you know, I just wonder, and I don't know if this is true, but I wonder, like, with advisory in middle school, like, is it, okay, this is time to do advisory, and this is when we're going to deliver the social-emotional learning, and then we're going to do math, and then we're going to do civics. Like, but I certainly wouldn't fault teachers because they're doing everything, And I'm just wondering, what's the big lens of ensuring that what's on teachers' plates is able to be achieved?

[03:45:31] So that is the thoughtfulness about discipline, knowing your kids enough to know if it's maybe they just didn't get enough sleep or if they really have a discipline issue. Instructing using the science of literacy, right? That's a whole big thing for elementary school. Universal design for learning. And then the required trainings.

[03:45:47] I really dislike these optional trainings. i just either it's required or not optional whether it's instructing about the holocaust or learning how to identify discipline needs like i just you know it's good to get into this nitty gritty but at the same time like how are we just kind of taking care of like the people aspect of this so yeah i'll just put out my ideological wondering and class sizes any comments before we

[03:46:15] move on? Thank you. Mr. Moon? Since my colleague, Ms. Mera, mentioned about ideological wondering, I am in that ideological wondering myself. With this question especially, you know, we routinely, we regularly get the data, discipline data, based upon students' background. Do we ever collect the

[03:46:54] data based upon administrators who are teachers background with whether there's is consistency discrepancy um mr moon to my awareness we do not collect that data is that is that is that permissible is that illegal if you can get the data based upon students demographic information why can't you get the reverse and see well there's something that we could work on especially when we talk

[03:47:28] about training being optional whether that has an effect that's a factor into this i think i would say and i'll ask dr king to weigh in as well at the school level school administrative teams are certainly looking at where they are seeing patterns of discipline coming out of a classroom level and then working with those individual teachers to identify what may be going on in that classroom where additional support may be needed so i think at an individual school level that's very much looked at in terms of a more you know division-wide level and dr. King I don't know if you have anything to add we don't collect the information at the

[03:48:07] division-wide but like Marcy said school-based administrators know where their pockets of challenges are in their schools when it comes to discipline and the expectation working with their school principals via the RAS is to ensure that they're providing support to those teachers around classroom management strategies or if there are other things that are popping up I say this you know over the last three decades by and large this proportionality student discipline has not changed that much and we have never gotten a

[03:48:45] presentation on the other demographic whether that makes a difference I think I I urge superintendents and superintendents they have to give some thought see whether we can have that data and present it to us noted thank you thank you mr john cunning so so that just prompted me to have my own wondering about when you do the trainings are you explaining to administrators and teachers the difference between

[03:49:23] an incident that should be managed in the classroom versus being taken to the administrator because working in schools and speaking sometimes with teachers and sometimes with administrators i've heard teachers say well they just want me to manage this in the classroom and this is not something i can manage or i've heard the opposite where administrators are like well that should be something they manage in the classroom they should be bringing it to me my extreme apologies i'm so sorry can you repeat the question so in the trainings that you're giving to staff are you

[03:50:02] identifying what is something that has to be managed within the classroom versus something that goes to an administrator. - Yes, we're absolutely doing that. So in our SRNR trainings that happened across the division, we did cover classroom-managed behaviors versus office-managed behaviors.

[03:50:20] In our equitable discipline trainings, we included there as well. And there's also some guidance around that in the SRNR as well, around classroom-managed versus office-managed. And then during our SRNR office hours, we provide that targeted one-on-one support to administrators who are having questions around how to guide their teachers on classroom-managed behaviors.

[03:50:47] - So for our benefit and maybe the benefit of the public, I know we discuss about these things theoretically, but can you give us an example of what would be a classroom-based behavior versus something that goes to the administrator? - A student is excessively talking during class, right?

[03:51:08] It is a disruption to the class for sure, but it's something that that teacher certainly could manage in the classroom with perhaps like a seat change, right? Or just a conversation with the student, or perhaps a call to the parent in partnership around, you know, just being on task and making sure to respect the learning environment.

[03:51:28] Versus if that behavior, for example, is continuing, is progressing in nature, and has now at some point substantially or like materially begun to impact classroom environment, at that point, then that's something that you probably would want to send a discipline referral to.

[03:51:46] It's almost a continuum of behavior that if it is considered progressive, then that is something that we certainly want to incorporate an administrator in for a discipline referral. Or even if it is a one-time incident, if it's something that is significant enough to have substantially impacted the learning environment, then again, that's something you would want to partner with your administrator on in terms of a discipline referral.

[03:52:12] from being in the classroom, I can see where that can be very subjective. I can see where some teachers have a higher tolerance for students speaking, you know, and whereas those that don't, you know, and so I think that that's where the difficulty lies in the situation, because depending not only on the classroom teacher, but also on the activity, which may account for some of this discrepancy. And one of, and you're absolutely right, and thank you for lifting that up and one of the things that we will be of course proposing in a later

[03:52:51] work session related to the SRNR is trying to enhance clarity in the SRNR to provide teachers and administrative staff on guidance on how to of course implement that code and what is classroom managed and what is office managed so certainly clarity is one of our key concerns around the SRNR thank you seeing no the placards up I will take my turn I appreciate the information and I do think I agree with some of my

[03:53:30] colleagues in terms of I think it's difficult to know fully the picture of what's going on when we don't have a full picture of we don't have consistency reporting right and so I'm concerned about some of the numbers of disproportionality having not changed or gotten worse especially with students disabilities i will say i'm heartened is not the right word but i remember when i started on this board my first work session around discipline i mentioned that there's a disproportionality of disabilities and everybody looked at me very surprised and so i'm glad to see that we're acknowledging it more now and recognizing it i think my first question would be what are the

[03:54:09] specific strategies that we are deploying aimed at the disproportionality for some of these groups So again, I will circle us back to our key strategy right now is to attack one of those root causes of disproportionality, which is a lack of consistency in discipline coding.

[03:54:37] And so to support that, one of the things that we have, of course, implemented is our CIS trainings for administrators on how to effectively implement that discipline code into SIS and some of the changes that do happen from year to year that occur through the VDOE and how they implement -- I'm sorry, and how we as a division are recording our discipline in SIS.

[03:55:04] Additionally, starting in winter 2025 when we return back from the holiday break, we will be expanding the use of Guardian for administrators to be able to submit questions about the SRNR, to also request ongoing one-on-one consultation and support for either themselves or their administrative teams, and also to request school-wide training as well.

[03:55:30] From that Guardian platform, our intention is to be able to collect data based upon the questions and the requests that are provided, to be able to identify trends and deploy resources based upon the information that we're seeing there. In addition, we are expanding our discipline dashboard currently and providing a lot more data metrics for administrators to be able to make decisions in their schools relevant to many of the subgroups that perhaps they're seeing are experiencing disproportionality.

[03:56:02] Some of the expanded metrics include metrics around in-school suspensions and also metrics around interventions versus sanctions. This is some information that is kind of coming up out of our CIS trainings, which is that administrators needing to really understand that distinction between having to provide the intervention and then of course also providing the sanction and then seeing where they are using that.

[03:56:26] Are they overusing sanctions but not providing interventions or even vice versa? So really some of the, again, our target strategy is to provide consistency of enforcement and then through the data that we collect in that consistency of enforcement to be able to deploy targeted resources to schools teachers and administrators can I also add I'm sorry I just want to also add that we have 23 schools that have been identified as RDD schools that we are providing additional support and each of those schools are required to have a goal in their sit plan to address this specifically so I'd like to invite our

[03:57:04] colleagues who's here to speak upon that maybe Ray can you share with what schools are doing that are already I'm not sure if any of your schools are Just briefly because I want to make sure we get to the next section. Okay.

[03:57:21] Can you come to the mic? Here, can you use this mic? Thank you. I think Dr. Anderson's point made earlier about who's entering the data that goes in around the discipline infraction is something we really have to work at because this is close to the work. And if we want to really look at what's happening Tier 1 and within the classrooms, that's where we're going to see the most change.

[03:57:41] And Mrs. Shin mentioned some work happening with our MTSS resources and some of the support that we have across the division in that regard and they're poised to be able to help our teachers to be able to make those tier one shifts in behavior and practices in the classroom but we've got to collect the data to do that and as you saw in some of the data that we had we have a great opportunity for you know you start in kindergarten with redirecting and reminding but when do you start putting that those things into indices and what's the purpose of that and how do you partner with parents because that informs them right away about what's happening in the classroom as well so I think that by focusing there it's here one and we'll see the greatest difference thank you thank you

[03:58:18] so much and I look I wanted to get to that because I feel like over the years when you've had this conversation there seems to be perhaps a misunderstanding or confusion that the goal of reducing disproportionality is necessary the goal of reducing discipline right and of course we want to help all of our kiddos behave properly we don't want discipline incidents in our schools but the solution to reducing disproportionality isn't to not report right and the solution to reducing disproportionality isn't to not have consequences if needed to teach or we need to teach our students it's to have that I appreciate which of the consistency of enforcement and the consistency of consequences so

[03:58:53] I'd be interesting to know also whether the types of discipline or or types of behavior issues have changed because I remember a couple years ago being some of this being surprised that are the few number of discipline referrals that we had and one of the statements that I remember hearing was well we have fewer discipline but but the situations that are happening are much worse like the behavior is much worse than it used to be so it's feeling like it's more out of control even though the data didn't show it so I'm be curious if that's still what we're seeing I didn't see a lot of data in here on the types of discipline changes if any I'll pause there so I think when the staff came to talk about

[03:59:33] this report we've obviously addressed this several times in senior leadership your point miss Sizemore heiser one if you lower the overall discipline percentage you actually increase the likelihood of disproportionality because your end sizes become smaller.

[03:59:48] So we are actually, as we lower, does that make sense? So it's a counterintuitive discussion, and so that's where we were back to where you started, Mr. Frisch. The risk ratio is something that's difficult to explain because you can make a lot of progress in overall discipline, but because the end size then gets smaller and smaller, the disproportionality, you could have one student act, get a discipline referral, and that makes that student twice is likely to get a discipline referral if no one else had one, if that makes sense.

[04:00:21] So I think we have to also think about what we're talking about statistically as well. Dr. King, you're kind of -- you're thinking. I know. Well, it's complex because we just -- we think we've, you know, established a strategy and then we've made progress, but then we've exacerbated a different data point.

[04:00:39] So -- and we have to remember these data points for our children. And I guess that's where I'm struggling with this, because we want to address the disproportion However, we also, the overarching goal, right, is to make sure our school environments are safe, right, for students, and students are learning how to adapt, you know, their students, their kids, they're learning how to behave properly, so we have all the strategies in place to teach them how to behave properly, while ensuring that we have, you know, the consequences that they need as well.

[04:01:07] And we want to do that on a fair and consistent basis, right, so you don't have the disproportionality. I mean, I would say, and you've heard me say it a million times, for students with disabilities, There's a level of understanding neurodiversity and understanding the norms and lots of things around those that I won't repeat, but I think I'd like to get in some ways a bigger picture of what's happening with our discipline, right, which includes disproportionality and what's happening with behavior, right.

[04:01:34] Are the more significant behaviors getting worse? Are we seeing -- and so I think I'm struggling to fully comprehend this without having that data as well. And to your point, I don't know if we really know what the disproportionality is until we have consistent referrals.

[04:01:52] So I look forward to trying to building through those points, but I'd love to hear Dr. Reeds or what your plans are, maybe not right now, but for kind of those bigger pieces that inform this information. Well, as soon as Ms. Neal can comment, and then I'll share a summative comment on that.

[04:02:09] I think as we've dug into this data, what we realized, it's a bit of an onion, right? You pull some layers back, you realize you need to pull more layers back. And so we are in the process of doing some additional analysis work as a part of working on this topic, and certainly we'll share the information we find through this.

[04:02:25] But I think that's what I would say, is we recognize in some cases the data actually lends itself to more questions that need to be explored. So things like you're asking for Ms. Sizemore-Heismar, like what's the trend of the changes in discipline year-over-year is something that we'll be taking a look at. I just wonder if that's part of the safe schools, right?

[04:02:42] All of those go into that. I think that's a topic obviously that's going to take on even more importance in our spring term, right, making sure our schools are safe places for all of our children and our families and our staff.

[04:02:59] And so I think that as we think about data collection and working more closely with our chief of schools as well and our regional teams, one of the things we've really expanded is the membership in our goal teams and it's critically important that our schools teams are working very directly with our counseling and our intervention and student conduct and equity teams because this is work that encompasses all of us.

[04:03:31] And so I think one of the keys you're gonna see is that this work cuts across all departments and schools and with better data collection, I think we can better allocate resources and move the needle on this.

[04:03:48] - Thank you. I see no other placards up for a first round on this. We'll go on to the last section. Dr. Reed. - Thank you, Ms. Sizemore-Heiser. This is the third and final section of our goal two report this afternoon.

[04:04:03] And this is student academic inclusion. So Ms. Neal. - All right, well, as a reminder, in our last goal report for goal one, we did focus on pre-K inclusion. And just so the public is aware, that report is available publicly on BoardDocs.

[04:04:20] The FCPS vision for inclusion is to ensure students with disabilities have the same full access to academic, non-academic, extracurricular and educational settings as their non-disabled peers, as appropriate and in the most inclusive environment to meet their needs and goals of each individual student.

[04:04:37] We continue to focus in on academic inclusion with benefits for both students with and without disabilities. For our students with disabilities, the research indicates that inclusion is associated with higher math and reading test scores, the increased likelihood of graduation, and stronger belonging and peer ties.

[04:04:55] So the impacts of inclusion not only support our Goal 2 efforts, but also Goals 3 and 5. The research has also identified a number of barriers to inclusion, including, for example, perceptions of students with disabilities, teacher preparation and experience in instructing students with disabilities, and lack of capacity at a classroom, school, or division level.

[04:05:15] We are using the VDOE indicators, five and six as a starting point for monitoring our inclusion rates and these are indicators that the state reports on annually as a part of meeting the requirements for idea indicators 5a through c focus on inclusion for students in grades k through age 21 and indicators 6a through c focus on inclusion in preschool the data on this slide shows both the overall state and fcps performance for 2022-23 in comparison to the state targets for that year. The cells in green mean that the

[04:05:50] target was met and this is the most recently reported data by VDOE. It's important to note that VDOE indicators do not report on the entire range that a student could be included in a general education setting during the school day and this pie chart represents students in grades K through age 21 for the last school year and the extent to which they were included and these are estimates that were created using VDOE business rules as the official data has not yet been released.

[04:06:19] In the dark blue portion of the circle you see the percent of students included in the general education setting 80 percent or more of the day which matches indicator 5A. Yellow is the percent of students who spend between 40 and 79 percent of the day in inclusive settings and this is data that is not reported as a part of the VDOE indicators. The light blue represents students who spend less than 40 percent of the day in an inclusive setting so matching indicator 5b and then that last segment the light green represents those students who spend who are in a separate public private school or residential or hospital setting which matches with indicator 5c and

[04:06:58] because the yellow portion of the data isn't reported as a part of these indicators students who are transitioning from less inclusive settings to more inclusive environment may not automatically show up in the indicator data. And just as a reminder, we're trying to grow the dark blue portion of this pie while shrinking the other portions of the pie. This slide presents the FCPS performance on indicator 5A compared to the VDOE targets that are shown in blue.

[04:07:25] The state targets increase each year, and the last published state target is for 2025-26. Using that VDOE data methodology, we estimate that 58.91% of students met the criteria for Indicator 6A last year, and this represents continued growth towards the state target.

[04:07:45] The next slide shows the data for Indicator 5B, and in this case we want our yellow, our actual data, to go below the blue line, meaning fewer students are included less than 40% of the day. The estimate for the 23-24 school year is that just over 12% of students met the criteria for Indicator 5B, which means we remained relatively flat on this metric.

[04:08:08] FCPS has met the state target for indicator 5C and we anticipate we will continue to meet this target on the indicator for the 23-24 school year. Similar to the pie chart that was shown on the prior slide, this slide shows the breakdown of inclusion by grade level.

[04:08:28] So we see higher rates of students being included 80% or more of the day, so again in that dark blue bar, in the younger grades, which decline in middle school and then again in high school. The data in yellow represents where there may be opportunities to increase the percentage of students, meaning indicator 5A, as these students are already included between 40 to 79% of the day.

[04:08:50] This slide provides the same look at the data by student group, and the full report does have charts for each of these indicators. Our white, multiracial, and Asian students had the highest rates of being included, 80% or more of the school day, while multilingual learners had the lowest rates of being included.

[04:09:05] It's also important to note that our multilingual learner student group had the highest percentage of students included 40 to 79 percent of the instructional day. Again that's shown in yellow. This slide shows the breakdown of inclusion for preschool age students which includes the indicator 6a through c data. A small percentage of preschool age students with disabilities are not represented within indicator data which is in the yellow portion of the chart and these are students who were evaluated and found eligible for special education services in preschool but are not accessing those services and as preschools not compulsory families may make that choice to not

[04:09:42] enroll in preschool and access those services we did share the preschool inclusion data as a part of the goal one report however this slide does also include the estimates for the 23-24 school year for indicator 6a and we do estimate that just under 24 of students will meet the criteria for indicator 6a which is just below the state target and shows significant progress towards the target. We are estimating slight improvements on indicator 6B, which is the percent of preschool students in a separate special education class, school, or residential facility. And again,

[04:10:16] we are looking to have our data move below the blue line on this slide. And then finally, we continue to see improvements in indicator 6C, which is for students receiving special education services in the home. And we're making progress towards this target. And like the previous slide, we want our data to move below the blue line. Now we're going to talk a little bit about the strategies towards inclusion. Our strategies for inclusion focus on better meeting the needs of students with disabilities in the general education setting, strengthening IEP processes for considering placement in more inclusive settings, providing additional supports to

[04:10:55] schools and regions with lower levels of inclusion, leveraging external expertise on best practices on current research to inform planning, and increasing inclusion for preschool-aged children, as was outlined in the Goal 1 report. We are focused on building the capacity of teachers to meet the diverse learning needs of all students. PD began on Universal Design for Learning, or UDL, during the 23-24 school year and continues this year. FCPS is also embedding information regarding specific high-leverage practices for teaching students with disabilities into existing training

[04:11:30] and resources. These changes, along with updates to the existing instructional framework, will provide staff with concrete resources to support the design and facilitation of inclusive practices within instruction. In addition to increasing staff capacity, we're also adopting instructional resources and practices to support general education teachers in differentiating instruction for all students. For example, the newly adopted K-6 language arts resource includes embedded scaffolds and resources for planning instruction for all students including accommodations to

[04:12:05] provide the appropriate support for each learner. Screeners are used to identify student strengths and instructional next steps and PD is provided to staff to support implementation of new instructional materials. Last school year we initiated the use of the least restrictive environment or LRE tool to support IEP discussions when a student is being considered for instruction outside of the general ed setting and required training for staff involved in IEP team meetings was also conducted last year, and again this fall.

[04:12:35] We're currently engaging with external consultants that are experts in working with school divisions in the area of inclusion. The work with the consultants will focus on a three-year roadmap to exceed state targets, a long-term comprehensive PD plan to support all schools in implementing UDL, and guidance on revisions to our instructional framework and teacher-facing resources to support these practices.

[04:12:59] And further, FCPS is planning to engage with an expert on instructional program delivery to inform models for students with autism. An LRE data dashboard is currently being developed to support the monitoring of data as it relates to indicators 5A and B and 6A and B.

[04:13:14] And this dashboard is expected to go live in the second quarter of the school year and will allow for ongoing monitoring across schools and the division to refine decision-making as it relates to our inclusion goals. And then finally, a project team is developing a multi-year plan which aims to enhance support for students identified as twice exceptional.

[04:13:31] And the key drivers of this work include designing and deploying accountability tools, building staff capacity, engaging families and students as partners, and developing enhancements to the IEP process that include considerations around advanced learner needs and access to advanced coursework.

[04:13:48] As we close out the report, these are our key takeaways on student academic inclusion for last school year. We have made progress towards inclusion, but have not yet met the majority of state targets. Certain student groups saw a substantial increase in inclusion while we also continued to see lower levels of inclusion for other student groups.

[04:14:05] And we'll need to continue a multi-year focus on inclusion, including those strategies specific to preschool that were previously presented. I'll turn this back over to the meeting managers. - Thank you. And I will start with Ms. Mara and then Dr. Anderson.

[04:14:22] - Great. I was just wondering about ORSI, the Office for Strategic Research Initiatives. How is, are they involved in this? Like what's, there's just a lot of data collection going on. And again, just like thoughts I haven't had in a while that I guess are coming to mind.

[04:14:37] But what's the process there? Because I'm just wondering about all these research methods. Not questioning, wondering about them, yeah. So they are currently in the process of deploying our student experience survey, which is where a lot of their focus has been in developing that survey and delivering the survey and also conducting program evaluation related to some of our strategic objectives.

[04:14:59] Okay. So because this team is focused on the very high level strategic plan work, but it sounds like there's data gathering that's happening that's not happening at ORSI is that right like some of the data you're using is not from okay I just wonder about that and how that could be better connected as like the research that happens in the division one thing I just want to underscore is the two oh do you want to yeah I just want to make one comment on that I think there are many comments probably but one comment is one of the reasons we have not been as nimble I think in our ability to turn data around into

[04:15:35] actionable practice is because we have this pinch point if everything has to go through a single stop we could wait months to get data and we don't have months right now we have to and that's that was the inception of the data dashboards where we brought our IT teams in Dr. Presidio has a data team that came in so we've had to really create nimble data teams our regions need data in real time. So ORSI does a lot of research with the data so they're able to more so I don't want to use the word autopsy but more so look at what has happened but what we're really talking about

[04:16:15] in some of these reports are how do we collect data today and have that dashboard that we look at every week and then make decisions which is what we did with attendance last year. We realized we had issues so we were able to immediately say we've got to start double back buses we have to start our sprouts we have to we can't wait till the end of the year and study it because well our students will have lost that year of experience so or see has an important role in the division it's just not been able to that one group has not been able I think to keep up with the data demand right now that our schools regions and departments need to allocate resources but there's still

[04:16:52] a significant part of the research work in the division so I don't know if that's helpful. It is helpful. I mean, I was just remembering years past where ORSI would be at the table. So, and again, you've been at this table before, but I was just, I think maybe I'm just kind of seeing, I don't know if it's the end of the year, you know, you take stock, but like just trying to see there's a lot going on, and I'm just trying to understand how it's all connected together. But I just wanted to underscore the importance of looking at that 2E, the twice exceptional, especially when we saw the data, the lower numbers for our older students in middle and high and we know that they struggle to access the instructional and

[04:17:29] extracurricular opportunities because there are a lot more limitations so I hear it a lot for my community they want more for their students who are twice exceptional so I really hope that we can do more on that and hear more on that thank you thank you miss Marin dr. Anderson yes I feel like this is gonna be the hodgepodge section for me for things left over because there's gonna be no more time here I just kind of want to share a couple of very logistical things it's really a challenge to kind of track the data or rather the progress or the change when the formatting is so different last year's baseline is very

[04:18:07] different from this year I'm really seeking some consistency here just to make it for just a little bit easier easier to digest as I asked last year and I'm gonna continue to ask this year how can we get some of these data in by school so I want to make sure that I share this with you I would love for to hear the articulation and I'm going back to the discipline discipline data the articulation of the roles of the chief of staff chief of schools which I think you began to speak about the RAS is and the principles when it comes to

[04:18:41] impacting the data that we have so I'll pause here just to hear that so I think that the data is a team effort and I guess I'll our chief of schools is involved in an interview panel today for our TJ principal so that's been an all-day process and that's where dr. Ponce is today I will ask miss Neal to elaborate on how that collaboration has gone is that the question around the collaboration with our chief of schools office how each of these levels are

[04:19:20] are supposed to impact what happens in the classroom because we know that the principals you've shared very clearly that they have the matrix what are they supposed to do with that is it just for themselves are they training others how will our RAS is holding the principals responsible what's the chief of schools role in this effort well I think clearly the chief of schools oversees the six regions so the chief of schools meets regularly with our six regional assistant superintendents who then work with our executive principals and the whether it's a curriculum issue with our new for example literacy curriculum the

[04:19:58] region offices work directly with schools to make sure that that curriculums being implemented in a way that we know is best practice the work that dr. King is leading in working with dr. Ponce we want to make sure that the same level of impact as occurring with our region offices supporting our our work in our discipline disproportionality data and I I kind of hate to put her on the spot but not really and the sense that is here our most recent principal and perhaps you can share a minute Candace how the division initiatives

[04:20:35] trickle to a principal because I think that's really the question right now and And how, as a principal, you know, you understand the calibration needs, et cetera. Absolutely. So when I would attend either district-wide professional development, let's say on the behavior matrices, I would then turn it around to my staff.

[04:20:59] So we'd go back and as an admin team, myself and the assistant principals, we'd talk about what our turnaround training looks like. And then how we make those resources available for teachers and how we also support them in their learning and hold them accountable for that learning as well.

[04:21:15] So not only this is the training that you got, you received, but also how can I support you in the learning and how are we talking about it and making it authentic every day when I'm in your classrooms and I'm doing classroom observations or when I'm supporting you with student behavior?

[04:21:31] How are we referring back to that discipline nature, matrices, or how are we looking at SRNR and looking at that together. Thank you and also was mentioned that some of the schools have discipline uh disproportionality as part of their SIP. How was that decided? What was the threshold?

[04:21:48] So that was some of the work that initially started in in 2021 where we would calculate risk ratios by school in i believe four or more subgroups and our risk um our threshold was was 3.0 or higher um and then subsequent from there following the ddoe standards in terms of risk ratios so the schools that were identified for receiving some of those targeted supports were identified by risk

[04:22:22] ratios which were calculated at the time um twice a year and now they're not calculated for this current year so currently we are reviewing the as miss neil said earlier today we are currently reviewing some of the practices that occurred initially around the rdd meaning the reducing discipline is a portionality initiative um to enhance some of those strategies and we have at the same time we are continuing to run our primary strategy which is that consistency of enforcement and so we will be be able to be provided with the list of schools that would have to have this in their SIP, so I will request that. The other piece of data that I think

[04:23:01] is really important, particularly when it comes around to the discipline, is the transiency data. How do we see this being impactful to what we're seeing in the schools, and how can this become part of this report? Dr. Anderson, are you thinking about students who just move from one school to another school within the division, or students who are moving into FCPS? Can you say a little more?

[04:23:24] Maybe both, because I know with many of my schools, the 600 that they start with in August is not the 600 that they have in January or in June. And I know that impacts the continuing work, particularly if we're talking about using advisory and using other resources to educate students and their families.

[04:23:42] If they're different kids, how do we address it? Yeah, I certainly think that's something that we could take a look at, like the entry dates of students, because we know our teachers spend a lot of time at the beginning of the year setting routines establishing routines building those relationships with kids and certainly that's something they do is they return from extended breaks as well but I think what you're getting at is if kids are cycling in at different points of the year how is that impacting and that's certainly something we can try to see if we can pull out of the data thank you and I do want to kind of give some feedback on the advisory I think before last year I had very high hopes in terms of what we can do

[04:24:18] in those sessions and I'm not finding that to be the reality of somebody who's had now four years of middle school experience and what happens in advisory it's a hit or miss and so it's hard to put a lot of marbles into that basket lastly I wanted to talk about hazel health it's $1,500 per student being that we have 800 students that participate that you mentioned 10 11 and 12 and a few ninth graders how do we wrap that up because if the contract is 1.2 I don't

[04:24:51] think that was our intention to spend $1,500 per student access I think yes the intention was certainly to open it up to our 63,000 high school students I think that what we've been doing to try and increase utilization and what's worked this school year what we've seen has been removing the opt-in process This was an IT process that had been put in place which was an additional hurdle for families that they had to opt in to having data shared and then had to consent to services being provided that had been removed in conjunction with our chief IT officer and their team.

[04:25:31] And since then we've seen an uptick and that was only removed late summer. And so I'd like to see how the data pan out for the remainder of this school year to see if we see an increase in that. though I think your feedback overall is duly noted that only a small subset of our whole high school population are utilizing this we are advertising it through every communication channel that we have regularly to try and promote the awareness of this we also have school staff who are designated referrers so anytime a student sees a psychologist counselor social worker who thinks they might benefit from their service they can directly refer the student and the parent just has to provide consent to that service or the parent doesn't even have to submit that referral so we're doing our best to try and increase uptick

[04:26:11] Thank you. Thank you. Ms. St. John Cunning, followed by Mr. McElveen. So I have a question about inclusion for preschool. I want to ask, number one, do we have the space and do we have a co-location of programs to make that happen? Well, we don't have the space that we would like to have and we definitely do not have the co-location of programs in an optimal fashion to to really allow us to accelerate as quickly as we would like to our inclusion efforts.

[04:26:50] So I won't go too far on this topic today because we did talk about it a little bit in goal one, but we've got three different inclusion models we're using at the preschool level because of the fact that we don't have co-location and programs in the way that we would like. We actually have three times as many classrooms for early childhood special education than we do for general education early childhood.

[04:27:12] So that makes it even more difficult. There's a bigger challenge there. That challenge would be great to overcome if we could just add more general education preschool classes and combine all the classes into inclusion classes, but obviously there's facilities and other budgetary factors that are going to challenge us, our ability to do that as quickly as we would like.

[04:27:32] But we are working with facilities to look at every single one of our campuses and Janice Szymanski, our chief facilities officer, is working with us on that to figure out where we do have opportunities to open new programs that would be more inclusive than what we have right now in one of the three inclusion models that we have.

[04:27:51] We also have some opportunities. The county is actually talking about a potential investment in early childhood education possibly within the next few years, so that would be great. And, again, we're partnering with the county to look at other county buildings, community-use buildings, any place that we can really think about to expand because we've got to have the co-location of programs, as you point out, to be able to really facilitate the inclusion model that we would like to have.

[04:28:15] - I was asking that 'cause I kind of feel that that's why that population maybe has a higher rate of not having inclusion. - I think there's a lot of reasons, but those operational ones are the ones that we've gotta partner together to solve, right? I mean, so.

[04:28:31] - Thank you. - Yeah, thank you. - Thank you. Mr. McIlvine. - Thank you. I have a question for Dr. Reed on twice exceptional. So I know there's been talk about a stand-alone learning environment for that group of students.

[04:28:47] Can you share any updates? - Yes, Mr. McElveen, we actually, I'm really excited about the work we're doing with our twice exceptional students. I know that there's a team, Dr. Edmunds Hurd, Noni, and Christa Maloney, there's a huge team that's been working on a continuum that's much more transparent for our community in terms of services for twice exceptional students.

[04:29:13] I'm also convening a twice exceptional advisory committee that will begin in the first two weeks of January, and we just met with SEPTA yesterday actually to discuss that and the membership of that group to look for and to craft a model for really a smaller learning community for secondary school twice exceptional students.

[04:29:33] So that work is going to be launched in January, and we really hope to create an instructional model because many of our twice exceptional students find attending really large secondary schools to be problematic from a sensory standpoint and for a variety of reasons.

[04:29:51] So that work will be launched in January and I'll make sure we have updates for the board and the community on that. - That's great, congratulations to you and the team for moving that forward. One other point I'll make just for consideration and it builds off of Dr. Anderson's question on Hazel Health.

[04:30:10] I think Hazel Health very well could be a successor to tutor.com just in terms of student participation. As we know, tutor.com, we were paying upwards of, you know, $1,000 per student who was using it. And I think we do need to give some thought and rethink the idea of pushing kids into these online resources, which, you know, could be very, very good and positive for those that use it.

[04:30:37] but in terms of resource use, it may just make more sense to do things in person. Thank you. - Thank you, Ms. Anderson. - Okay, so I'm gonna talk fast and I'm gonna ask our clerks to be fast on the timer 'cause I have a couple of things and I'm gonna try not to have a go back.

[04:30:56] Okay, first thing I wanted to say, Dr. Presidio, you said something earlier that I feel the need to say something about. I just wanna say that I do not believe inclusion is the solution for discipline problems. I want to make sure that successful inclusion will lead to belonging, which may reduce discipline problems, but successful inclusion is related to making sure that our staff understand how to foster those inclusive environments.

[04:31:23] So I don't want to just say that just because the number of included kiddos increases that we're automatically supposed to see a reduction in discipline. So I see there's a connection there that I just wanted to make sure that we discuss. I'm going to go back for just a second to talk about chronic absenteeism related to our alternative schools.

[04:31:45] And I'm wondering how many of those chronic absentee schools are actually impacted by discipline referrals that are actually related to suspensions, because I've heard from many principals that a lot of those kids walk in with their 10, and so they're already chronically absent and so then we have even so I guess my question isn't something that I've been talking to dr. Reed about is how do we are those schools particularly when we're talking about some of our schools that are supporting medically fragile students how are we making sure that our schools are not that that we're supporting our students in a way that we're not worried about accreditation

[04:32:23] we're actually focused on the needs of the students and so that is one aspect that I am going to continue to kind of hallmark if I can I want to I want to speak up about what I said previously because I want to make sure that I wasn't misunderstood. I have a significant problem with disproportionality within discipline. I don't have a problem with our discipline record going up right now. So I actually would prefer if we don't indicate at all that our goal is zero because it's not. And so having an adjustment the way that we have it on this particular chart is not helpful because of the fact that what we're actually measuring is on the baseline

[04:33:02] of what is there, so it's the percentage of discipline for this year is what we should be measuring on, so Ms. Neal, I will get with you about how I think we could rework this chart just a little bit to help with Dr. Anderson's point about a continuity of data across.

[04:33:19] The other thing that I would argue for is that on slide 30, it makes it look like we are going for zero, and what we're going for is zero in the disproportionality, so we need We need to change the title of that slide to make sure that that's put in there. So I think that that all is going on there.

[04:33:39] And I would love to see a chart that actually showed the new adjusted compared, because am I correct that the discipline is also only two years? Is that correct? Okay. So we need a new chart that is similar to the one that we did last year that shows that it's just two years and what's the adjusted compared to the ratio the same way we did it last year.

[04:34:00] we only have that for the baseline that we were previously using and it's not the two-year data. So it would be very helpful as moving forward to make sure that we're including that. I know. If we can include that moving forward in the next reports about how that has changed. So we did that on the first one. Would you like to go back? Seeing no other new placards that are up, I will take my turn. I spoke pretty lengthy to this Dr. Reed at the regular meeting when this presented so I will just repeat a few things and and mention a couple of the things that I see here

[04:34:36] um I really appreciate I'll start with a positive I appreciate this vision of inclusion that I don't know if I've seen before but was stated in here but the data points don't meet the vision and the data points don't meet the goal in the strategic plan the data points are a base state compliance data point and the data points were important when we amended this goal report to show the the extent of the problem, but there's not a lot of other places in FCPS where we say what the state expects, SOQs, for example, are going to be just dandy with us.

[04:35:15] And that's what we're doing by the majority of this report being focused on state compliance. Same with the LRE dashboard. The LRE dashboard is a compliance. It's basically saying your IEP meetings are supposed to be talking about least-restricted environment. Well, we've got to put in a whole dashboard to make sure you're doing it.

[04:35:33] That's not a goal. That's just getting to compliance. And it bothers me because as I said to you, this is something I started saying when my son was five and he's now 23. At what point do we get beyond basic compliance for our -- the goal is a great goal, the vision here, right?

[04:35:55] Inclusion and extracurriculars, but the data points on indicator five and six are not anything to do with extracurriculars or community belonging or sense of connection or any of those things. It is butts in seats. It's not even about meaningful inclusion, which really is what we really want. not breathing the same air as somebody else it's meaningful inclusion but those data points don't get to that I understand it might be a good place to start but I think we need to be really realistic of what those data points are and what they're not the other thing that's the state indicated data points misses the middle kids it talks about those included 80% or more or those included 40% or less but it really doesn't talk about the rest of them and

[04:36:31] by doing that and I most of the conversation I've heard when it does actually talk about disability has been on 2e we're missing the bulk of the kids and so I appreciate your chart very much miss Neal that has that shaded in in between I just don't think we talk about it as much in sort of what we're going to do here so that's the first thing we also really I appreciate that there's a summary in here about program delivery for students with autism and I know I understand that's probably an addition because I've been hammering at it so I really appreciate that but understand that when I mentioned program delivery it is for all students with disabilities because we have 27,000 of them and we haven't looked at program delivery holistically for 30 to 40 to

[04:37:09] 50 years. So it's a great start I appreciate the start but it's we've got to do more because all of these things fall apart without that we can't we can have the LRE conversation IEP meeting but if there isn't a good place to provide LRE it doesn't matter if your choices you can be in a segregated environment or you can go into gen ed with zero support that's not gonna foster inclusion right so we have to start with program delivery we can't start with these compliance tools.

[04:37:42] I will go back, so I'll put myself on the list. Mr. Moon, first, since he hasn't had a first turn, then we'll go back. - If I could just say one or two things, just real briefly. Yeah, I mean, I think you raise excellent points as always, and we appreciate your advocacy on these important issues and want to continue to partner with you and all of our board members.

[04:37:59] I would say, I think you're right about the data indicators that we've chosen, and it doesn't mean that we can't add others in the future, right? I mean, we have like 100 data indicators in the strategic plan. You know, we could add a couple more, right? So we started probably with a low level of compliance and we can now I think start to get to something that's more aspirational as we craft this vision that really measures the true experience of students with disabilities better.

[04:38:23] I would say I think the work that we're doing with the consultants right now is very much taking a complete look at everything that we do with our service delivery model. But we do want to bring in somebody who has some additional expertise in autism, particularly at the early childhood level because we know we've got a lot of heavy lifting to do there.

[04:38:41] So I think working with the consultants that we've already identified, we're going to be able to do some really good work here. And I think a relatively short period of time. And we are going to arrange opportunities for the consultants to connect with our board members.

[04:38:57] They're going to be on site. We're trying to get them scheduled to be on site in January. And I'm going to work with them to provide a little bit more information about the work that we're planning to do with them prior to January and then create some opportunities for board members to meet and connect with those folks in January so that we can make sure that we're really incorporating everybody's feedback in the work that we're doing with them.

[04:39:16] So more to come, but I appreciate the points that you raised. Thank you, Mr. Moon. OK, this is something that I forgot to ask. I think I raised this this question when I'm a size but I and I were preparing for this work session as a meeting managers that I make a distinction between amongst disciplinary offenses.

[04:39:40] I make a distinction between my own terminology, soft offenses from hard offenses, drug, weapons-related, serious altercation, physical altercations. I consider them to be hard offenses, and our teachers and administrators may not have much choice.

[04:40:01] Other things, especially those I saw, those five offenses that I saw, including coming up late, coming too late, or some maybe a disrupting instructional atmosphere. Is there a lot of those, to me, somewhat soft offenses?

[04:40:19] Maybe they are pretty closely related to a classroom management issues as well. If he, is there a way for you to provide us with a separate data set showing hard offenses, disproportionality, whether there is versus soft offenses?

[04:40:43] Because soft offenses, to me, I think training probably will help us to see whether we can perhaps be able to achieve a different result. Mr. Moon, I think that we're conferring over here.

[04:41:00] We believe that we should be able to pull that out by classification so you can see sort of the severity of the discipline referrals. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Dr. Anderson and then Mr. McLevine. Yes, I'll be fairly fast.

[04:41:17] And one of the things that I was looking at, based on what Mr. Moon has just said, were the suspension data. Because when you're suspended, that's when it's a severe situation. A referral may not be as severe, but a suspension means it's something that is either pretty egregious or pretty chronic.

[04:41:33] So that might be a helpful data point to review. But what I also wanted to talk about is when we were talking about chronic absenteeism and the impact of school-imposed discipline, can you tease that out? I know you mentioned that 40% of the students who were chronically absent were engaged in an out-of-school suspension, but where were they on that continuum?

[04:41:57] Were the suspensions the reason that put them over, or were they already over? If you could tease that out a little bit, I'd appreciate it. I don't know. So I'm sure that we can. I don't know that we will be able to turn around that type of analysis in advance of the board voting on this, but we're certainly happy to take that back to try and go ahead.

[04:42:16] curious nevertheless so whenever you're able to provide it I would appreciate it and again on page 41 I do want to highlight what was shared earlier I had it in my notes didn't have a chance to I don't think this is a reasonable chart on page 41 where we're talking about going down to zero not the disproportionality one but the discipline referral I don't think our goal is by 2030 that we will have zero discipline referrals that it's not even reasonable am i misreading this chart yeah so the targets we have set are not at zero but i recognize that that has definitely created a question in this conversation for multiple board members so

[04:42:54] we will take a look at how we can make that more clear that that is not the target okay because kids will do the things that they do um my last question i think it's probably for mr dr axler the youth survey data can't seem to pull it because i know we had this discussion i sat next to you and skipped but can you refresh my memory in terms of how many of our students actually completed the youth survey we had about 40,000 students in grades 6 8 10 and 12 who completed the youth survey which is roughly 71% of those who are in those grade levels and can you speak to I'd like to think there

[04:43:32] was a data point that spoke to how many students identified as LGBTQ we had 12 12% of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders, which was 28,500 students, who identified as LGBTQ.

[04:43:48] 28,000. So that's a pretty significant amount. So that does give us a little bit of reliability on the data set, because I always worry about the sample size being so small for students who are self-reporting. Thank you for that. I think that is all that I have.

[04:44:08] Thank you. Mr. Frischling, you haven't entered your first turn yet, so. I don't think I need the whole time. I do have one kind of macro question about the efforts around inclusion for our students with disabilities. In previous settings, we've looked at the data from other school divisions and seen that maybe this one is doing better in these indicators, and this one is doing better in these indicators, often markedly, right?

[04:44:34] And so my question is, I don't think it can just be the volume of students that the divisions are addressing the needs of but are we doing anything to learn from other school divisions is that where these practices that we're we're hearing about are coming from is school divisions where it's been shown to work yeah thank you thank you for that that's an excellent question um we are outreaching to other school divisions to see what their practices look like when we when we see those outliers and we're doing that in a couple different ways our staff is doing some of that with school

[04:45:10] divisions in the state. We're also working with our consultants to be partnered with other school divisions that they recommend on kind of a national basis that are doing some things differently. You know, I'd say probably one of the biggest things, and Ms. Sizemore-Hyzer kind of pointed this out, is that we've had a model that we've employed here for decades where other school divisions have made systematic changes to their service delivery much earlier than we've made them.

[04:45:35] So I think, like, when we talk to these districts, the things that we're planning to do are the types of things that they've already done, they're just farther down the road than we are. So our plan is to really start working with a group of schools in FCPS this school year to implement some of those practices next school year with other schools following in the second year and in the third year to really be able to scale that up before the end of the strategic plan so that we can implement new practices, a completely re-overhauled service delivery model in FCPS within our strategic plan timeline.

[04:46:09] It's an excellent question and we're continuing to learn as much as we can from other divisions. I'll add to that that Dr. Presidio has brought me now a revised second plan of creating model school sites, model classrooms for preschool and model school sites around inclusion at elementary, middle, and high that are strategically identified and then modeling those moving forward.

[04:46:32] So we believe we'll have 100% of the schools in play by 28, 29 if we stick with the plan. So it's very, very intentional at this time. Yeah. Thank you. And I think one would think looking at this report and this goal report in particular where some of the work has been ongoing for so long and not specifically on inclusion in the classroom or education settings, but we're seeing like, you know, 0.28% change here and a 0.3% change here that on something like this where we are talking about a transformational change, we should be able to at least, how it typically goes, right, if the big change

[04:47:11] is going to be impactful, the big impact is when you immediately do it and then it gets harder as you kind of continue doing the work and have to find new strategies to reach. So that should be a big incentive for moving this along as quickly as possible.

[04:47:26] Yes, sir. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Frisch. I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate hearing about the models and I know you and I have talked a lot offline about none of this will work without really modeling how we do the work and I think I want to make sure that staffing models and staffing ratios are gonna be included as part of that program delivery review because it isn't just you know the program but it's also how we staff and how we support the staff for doing the work so I want to make sure that's included I saw somewhere in here that we talked about continuing strategies and high lever high leverage practices so I want to ask what high leverage practices accommodations and

[04:48:05] supports are we putting in place for neurotypical peers and non-disabled peers to support inclusion? So I don't know how much time we want to devote to this I'll give you a very high level and then if you want to dig deeper I'll invite some colleagues to come up to the table that are leading that work but we've had an instructional model in FCPS for a number of years that is our tier one model that we expect all classrooms to employ and then we've as you know obviously had many students in a more self-contained learning environment operating on kind of a different instructional model if you will so what we're trying to do right now with our consultants is identify the

[04:48:42] research base the evidence-based best practices that educating students with disabilities need to have in a general education inclusive setting and reframing our entire instructional model so that we have one model for all students at FCPS we're also looking at those best practices for multilingual learners for example to be part of that instructional model so that model has has kind of four domains, making sure that we've got a learner-centered environment so you can think there about building the relationships, the belonging, understanding students, building students' voice in the classroom, strengthening relationships.

[04:49:14] Then we talk about the types of instructional practices that we want to deliver, so that's going to range the gamut from everything from like really explicit instruction and things that we want to be really concrete about with evidence-based literacy, instructional strategies to things that are more like project-based learning strategies and when to use those things and how to use those things together.

[04:49:32] The third component of that model is the type of curriculum that we use. So again, we want to make sure that we've got a curriculum that's going to work for all students that can be differentiated and something that teachers are going to be able to implement without having to do, you know, we want to minimize the planning as much as we can.

[04:49:48] And then the fourth domain of that model is really around assessment and purposeful assessment in the types of ways, the types of assessments that we're using and the types of information that we're collecting from them. So sometimes, again, it's like a progress monitoring or a diagnostic assessment. Other times, it's student self-reflection, student presentations of their own learning, and a lot of different ways that they can demonstrate their learning.

[04:50:09] And all of those things together make up the FCPS instructional model, and we're trying to revise that to make sure that we're really clear and explicit about the types of practices that we want to see in each of those four domains that are going to support all of our student groups in being successful in a gen ed tier one setting.

[04:50:26] I appreciate that. I appreciate walking through the models. Those models include explicit strategies for non-disabled and neurotypical peers because when you have been segregated away from a population for a long time, there is a mindset shift that you have to go through to include a new population.

[04:50:48] We have segregated this population. What high leverage practices are we putting in place for non-disabled and neurotypical peers to make inclusion successful? - And again, this is in development right now. So we're drafting this out with our consultants and we're pulling research from a lot of different places.

[04:51:04] So we don't have all of that documented so far. We'll be happy to share iterations of that work with you. And again, when the consultants are here, they can talk to you more about that. But yeah, absolutely. - I just wanna make sure that's included. - And a big piece of what we're doing before we even do that change in terms of practice is the mindset work with all of our school-based staff, right?

[04:51:23] So we know that we've gotta go through a process of making sure that everybody in one of these early adopter schools are going to start this work in the winter, right, one of the first things that we're going to do is have them working through some professional development and training with our consultants about why this work is important, right, what it looks like, how it's going to make a difference in the learning environment for students.

[04:51:41] So that mindset shift is kind of one of the first things that we're going to lean into. I bring that up because one of the -- students with disabilities are subject to bullying three to five -- four times more than students without disabilities, and one One of the things I hear a lot from parents about the fear of inclusion is the fear of their kids being bullied.

[04:52:00] So if we don't address that from creating a welcoming environment, not just putting the burden on the student with a disability to adapt, but the environment to adapt and the people who have already kind of owned that environment to adapt, right, then if we don't address the bullying, it leads to chronic absenteeism, right, it leads to a fear of inclusion, all of those.

[04:52:20] So we have to address all of those pieces. That's why I bring that piece up. AND THAT'S THAT FIRST DOMAIN OF THE MODEL I WAS TALKING ABOUT, LEARNING-CENTERED ENVIRONMENT. PLEASE STOP MY TIME. A BIG PIECE OF THAT IS THE RELATIONSHIPS WITH STUDENTS THEMSELVES, RIGHT? IT'S NOT JUST TEACHER AND STUDENT, IT'S STUDENTS WITH STUDENTS IN THAT ENVIRONMENT. SO THERE IS A BIG PIECE OF WORK THAT WE HAVE TO DO WITH ALL OF OUR STUDENTS IN THAT REGARD, TOO.

[04:52:38] AND I THINK THERE'S A PIECE WE HAVE TO DO WITH OUR FAMILIES, TOO, BECAUSE I THINK THERE'S SOME FEAR OF INCLUSION, BECAUSE TO BE PERFECTLY HONEST, WE HAVEN'T SET THE ENVIRONMENT up well to be successful and so therefore kids have not been successful in that model or it's there's created bullying and other issues and so it's created a fear of that as well and i do appreciate that for our students we're still providing a continuum of services like we talked about the 2e academy i think it's important to recognize that for some students we need a continuum of services but the default that has been segregated settings should not be the default and so i appreciate hearing that um i would i love i really appreciate hearing you say we can have other data points I guess the reason I really have

[04:53:17] a concern is this is the second year of a report so I guess I'll ask at what point can I expect different data points well I think one of the things that we'll be seeing is additional data that will come back as a part of that student experience survey so I think when you've talked about what does inclusion look like for students in extracurriculars or other types of activities as we think about our different students experiences that's some of the information that will come back and that student experience survey I was just going to say, I realized before I said that I should have checked with the data boss and this Neil here.

[04:53:52] But I mean, we've done different things over the years that I've worked here, right? So I mean, I think part of it is what Marcy just said and looking at other data points that the board might need to round out the reports that we're doing. So there might be some additional things that we could do and, you know, we could work with the superintendent and the board chairs to think about how to do that.

[04:54:09] Yeah. I just mentioned, I think it's important to be really thoughtful about this because this is not something we've done in Fairfax County as the indicators show and so students may not even know what to answer on these surveys because when you've been segregated and that's the experience of both the people who have been segregated those who haven't that's all they know it's hard to rely on a student survey right so I think just be really thoughtful about it and as far as preschool we did used to have a different model of inclusion which was a community peers model which ended during COVID I wasn't great and it wasn't everywhere, and it wasn't in PAC, but we did have a different model that didn't rely on

[04:54:48] the co-location, and so I do think there's other ways we can look at inclusion that doesn't rely on co-location. Again, you're right, but I will say we still are doing community peers. It's just, that's really difficult, right, like to scale that up because it's reliant on a family wanting to bring their student in, and there's a lot of recruitment that goes into that, so we are still doing it, but you're right, we're not at the same level that we were pre-pandemic, so.

[04:55:12] I think with the cost of childcare and preschool, I think you could get a lot of families interested if we did the work to recruit them. Ms. St. John Cunning, I see your placard went up. - So before I say what I wanted to say, I do want to say that I do spend a lot of time in schools and I have seen some schools doing this work.

[04:55:33] I know some of our elementary schools have great buddy programs and the kids are dying to be a buddy with some of their special education preschool kids and they help them. And I know that's just a baby step. It's not where it's supposed to be, but it's a start in terms of starting to change the mindset with the younger ones, at least.

[04:55:53] But I don't want this session to end without recognizing the work that is currently happening. We talked about absenteeism and discipline issues, and we talked about inclusion. And I just really think that it's important that we recognize the work that is already happening in our schools, in our classrooms with teachers, administrators, staff, and even out of our classrooms, the people that come in and support people in our classrooms.

[04:56:22] And I always think that sometimes when we talk about all of these issues at this table, we forget the people that are doing the work every day and touching our students' lives every day and really making a difference. So I just wanted to thank them for what they're doing and to know that we're here to support them and that everything that we're discussing is to make sure that our students have the best experience and that we want to help support the adults in the building for that to happen.

[04:56:52] - Thank you, Dr. Anderson. - Sorry, I forgot one more thing. Dr. Reed, you had mentioned a little while ago regarding CEI grants and how that will, how is this going to be supporting this work? Can you give a little bit more detail there, please? - Certainly, it's a specialized grant which involves a set-aside actually from IDEA for, I think it's IDEA, Dr. Edmunds Heard.

[04:57:16] It's a set-aside to reduce disproportionality in special education identification as well as discipline disproportionality. And I believe Dr. Presidio, you currently administer the grant, so perhaps you could share, I know we have a number of staff positions in the grant and the impact of those positions on this work.

[04:57:37] - Yeah, I don't personally administer it, but I supervise the teams that do. So this is an annual process where we look at issues of disproportionality in identification for students with special education. So that's one of the areas that we also have disproportionality issues.

[04:57:54] We've been talking about discipline. That's another one of those grant funded areas. So those are two of the major areas that we look at. And we look to try to, on an annual basis, be responsive to the data that we have in terms of the additional resources that we can bring into the division to support those areas of disproportionality.

[04:58:11] So we're working with Dr. King right now figure out if there's a way to amend the grant for next fiscal year to add some additional support positions to reduce discipline disproportionality work. And how much is the grant? I think we have about six million dollars in staffing in that grant total. And it's all for staff purposes?

[04:58:32] Largely, yeah. Okay, so it can't be infrastructure. Can you talk a little bit, this is not our first year receiving this grant? No, this grant's been around for decades. Okay, so how have we utilized it in the past we're utilizing it right now we're staffing a number of positions already related to disproportionality in those two big buckets i talked about so for example there's a number of positions on mike's team supporting restorative practices positive behavior support counseling positions social work positions things like that and is it also staffing folks in the equity office staffing two positions there but that's very minimal in terms of the need

[04:59:12] that they've just laid out as we've gone through this report today you can see that the need is pretty great is that going to be one of the amendments so the way that we do the process is we have a team-based process that goes through looks at the data and makes recommendations that will come to me and come to dr king we can share those obviously with dr reed she's going to have to approve the grant before it's submitted but yeah we intend to try to add additional positions for the discipline disproportionality work into that grant i mean given what we saw today and how we're not really making the moves that we would like to make and all of the areas I would definitely would like to have some more resources to the

[04:59:49] discipline discipline disproportionality I've said it like 800 times today particularly regarding around the areas that I've talked about I appreciate the RJ services but what new and innovative things that we can do because I think as a board to speak to miss Marin's point you know we have the policies. It's how do we put those into practices that are actually going to be impactful. So I'd love to have a little bit more of a rundown at some other time in terms of how do you anticipate adding to maybe the equity office or to some of the other offices. I mean we can obviously give you a copy of the previous year's grant if you want to see that and we can keep you informed

[05:00:29] about the development of this year's grant. The team is going to convene in January and we'll get that completed in the winter and then submitted in the spring thank you I would love a copy so I'm gonna make the request now okay thank you seeing no other placards up I will just make one last statement I think I know I push you all really hard on special ed and and I need to because someone needs to to be perfectly honest but I will I want to just call out positively some of the work that Woodson is doing around their executive functioning pilot and being

[05:01:06] very thoughtful about not having a kind of a -- having a very equality-based model where students are working together for a common project as opposed to one person helping another. And I really think that mindset is a great way to go.

[05:01:22] So I didn't want to end without saying something positive. I appreciate that we're doing this work. It's, for me, a 17-year-in-the-process journey to get to this point, and we have a long way to go and i appreciate the honesty dr presidio that many other school systems have made systemic changes while we haven't and that is what i have seen and said for a long time and and i think and we can't fix things if we don't recognize that and so i appreciate that recognition and i please

[05:01:56] one thing i want to lift up is we cannot necessarily expect our families and students to lead this work either because they have not been raised or in or brought into that atmosphere either. This is a systemic and transformational shift in thinking about a set of people who have not been thought about this way. We have to lead that work. We can't have others lead it for us.

[05:02:29] We need to bring people along in that work, but we have to lead it. And if we can lead it, we're Fairfax. It can be transformational for the country. But we have to lead it. And we have to recognize that 30, 40 years of a lack of systemic change has impacted the mindset of students and teachers and staff and families and we can lead that change but we have to lead it so thank you yes well I think with that would look at you guys nine minutes of your life back this meeting this work session is adjourned

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