Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Date: Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 3h 56m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Osbw021YF94
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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[00:00:12] - Okay, we're gonna go ahead and get started for this afternoon. Morning, thank you. Welcome to everybody. We're gonna go ahead and start off with the School and Traffics Pedestrian Safety Assessment Project.

[00:00:30] To start, Ms. Heismore-Heiser has submitted a written request to attend this morning's meeting virtually due to a medical conflict and is attending this morning's meeting from Burke, Virginia. All those in favor of approving Ms. Heismore-Heismore's request, Mr. Moon, Mr. McLevine, Ms. Marin, And Ms. St. John Cunning, Mr. McDaniel, Dr. Anderson, and myself.

[00:00:58] So that is unanimous for everyone here. Ms. Sizemore-Hyser, can you please go ahead and check your microphone and camera? We'll check in with her when she comes back online.

[00:01:25] Okay, so to kick off this morning, we have Mr. Muick, our Chief Operating Officer, Ms. Szymanski, our Chief of Facilities, Services, and Capital Programs, and Mr. Lambert, Chief Safety and Security Officer. so you guys can go ahead and take it away.

[00:01:41] - Thank you, Ms. Anderson. Good morning, school board. We're here to talk about the school traffic and pedestrian safety assessment plan, as Ms. Anderson mentioned. Again, Andy Muick, COO. We've got Janice Szymanski, Chief of Facilities and Capital Programs. Brian Lambert, Chief of Safety and Security.

[00:01:58] And then for the working group, when I call your name in the back, if you could just stand up real quick, I'll run through the group back there. Transportation, Paul D'Andrade, Executive Director. Tracy Kubo-Carrera, Assistant Director, John McCracken, Senior Manager, Marari Zamani, Senior Manager, Derek Gwynn, Safety Specialist, Isaac Robertson, Senior Manager, and then all the way in the back, our previous chief, Tom Vaccarello, who helped get us kicking this off.

[00:02:32] Next slide, please. The agenda, we'll briefly talk about the CIP motion and then more importantly, go into what the working group has developed and where we plan on going from here. Next slide, please.

[00:02:47] So here's the motion, everybody can read it. I just wanna cover a quick summary highlight. The motion was to develop an annual school traffic and pedestrian safety assessment program that models the capital improvement program in approach mitigation strategies and reporting in a structured response to ongoing concerns across the division.

[00:03:09] So again, just modeling the CIP, hitting on a proper approach, mitigation, and reporting. Next slide, please. And here's the timeline to date.

[00:03:25] We got started working on this in earnest in January of this past year. At the time, the group was focused on how central office personnel could conduct the assessment across all the schools and develop guidance and approach to do it.

[00:03:42] From February through June, that's what we worked on. The outcome was lessons learned from conducting a joint working group assessment, kind of a pilot of the document we put together in February and early March at Fairfax High School to see if it was gonna, that standard operating procedure was gonna get the desired effect that we wanted.

[00:04:02] It helped us gain some lessons learned, which caused us to reevaluate our approach. And in August through December, we spent our efforts working on a revised approach to accomplish the annual assessment via a school-based initial self-assessment process.

[00:04:18] And here we are today talking to you about it. Next slide, please. This is just a list for inventory of the people on the working group for your reference later. It's all the people I just introduced. Next slide, please.

[00:04:33] So this is a list of the documents or artifacts that the team has developed over the last 11 months when we first started off looking at doing it as a central office-based approach and then shifting to a school-based self-assessment process.

[00:04:48] We have a slide talking about each one of those in a little bit more depth, so I won't waste a lot of time talking about it here. Next slide, please. So the first one, school traffic and pedestrian safety assessment guidelines. This is the document the team put together, kind of a standard, an SOP, that they were gonna use going forward when it was central office-based staff doing it.

[00:05:11] About a five or six page document so that we would do the assessment the same way every time in a nice, consistent, repeatable process. Next slide, please. That led us to doing the joint working group assessment of Fairfax High School.

[00:05:27] The working group decided to conduct that to better inform their approach on this project, and it served its purpose. We went out there in March, the week prior to spring break, and it took several weeks after that and a couple more visits out at Fairfax to fully develop the assessment.

[00:05:44] And what it really did was it highlighted some lessons learned from us, just as we hoped. It informed us on how we want to approach this process going forward. And we'll discuss that on the next slide. Next slide, please. So the lessons learned. What we learned from this was the time to conduct a single school assessment clearly indicated that a small team that's sitting behind you back there would not be able to get to all 200 schools in a year.

[00:06:08] The formal assessment write-up that they put together was very detailed, but it took several weeks and a couple visits to the school to pull it together. data collection and tough to consolidate from these kind of narratives they had some but just realized that it was you know it wasn't going to be impossible what it wasn't the most smooth and efficient way to gain data and start to see trends limiting resources obviously the personnel and the time to get this done and then the local nuances it's hard to capture those when you're unfamiliar with the surroundings and you're coming into a school and I know

[00:06:45] that we're all familiar with our 200 schools but there's something about the people that are there working and operating out of that school every day that know little nuances that this team wouldn't necessarily pick up on in one or two or three visits and then lastly the lesson learned on figuring out how to get better community and stakeholder input into this process as well next slide please so as I said what we learned from that was that approach wasn't necessarily going to be achievable so we had to develop a new iteration of it and that was a school-based self-assessment process. The

[00:07:22] team created a questionnaire to help guide the school team through an assessment of their school. They developed an accompanying electronic submission form to provide an efficient method to consolidate input from all the assessments to enable us in central office to start seeing trends either at a school you know across several years or across all schools common issues that we're seeing across the division and it to enable us to have a little bit more comprehensive perspective on the situation and the third thing they developed was a mitigation toolkit it's a living document to help schools you know address some of their concerns you know it's the old concept of you know

[00:08:00] give a man a fish feed him for a day teach him how to fish feed him for life so that mitigation toolkit was along those lines next slide please the school based self-assessment approach or questionnaire if you look the slide behind me has the headings for the sections in that school based assessment underneath each one of those set quite those headings is a several more additional questions to get into more detail and to help help highlight some issues or concerns that may be at those schools this is going to help us it'll provide us more standardized data about the pedestrian traffic concerns along

[00:08:40] with an opportunity for central office personnel now to better see what's going on at all 200 schools next slide please so this is the school-based self assessment electronic submission form and just a quick shout out to Marari behind you all she took the it was her initiative to kind of pull this thing together and create this document so I just wanted to highlight there everybody back in that row has done a great job but I just wanted to call her out for getting that in here this electronic submission form a company accompanies the school-based self-assessment process and I'll kind of after the next slide

[00:09:19] double back to the slide before this number 11 and could just kind of walk you through how we envision this process working next slide please the mitigation toolkit many schools are willing and able to attempt to solve some of their own problems and that's the purpose of this living document the the team already has a bunch of different links tools examples of setting up kiss and ride how flow patterns in school should go better without buses and kiss and ride crossing each other or interfering with each other at exits and use of cones and signs so this mitigation toolkit as I mentioned a

[00:09:58] couple times very living document help those people that have the time and the initiative to be able to address some of their simpler problems at the school without having to tie pull in central office so Janet if you go back to slide 11 the way we kind of envision this going is if you know whenever we decide that there's going to be let's say the month that the schools do their assessment you have a leadership or admin person who has the questionnaire you know kind of on a clipboard walking around you know for a day or two or three answering the questions that are on there taking the counts the timing that we've listed when they're done they come back to their office they sit down

[00:10:36] they go into this electronic submission form they upload all those answers to those questions because the two match and they also scan in the actual hard copy that they used because we'd want to see that too right that's important the notes they took what they did when they were walking around and now when they hit submit we start to build and have you know some kind of repository of information so that we have the beginnings of being able to see some trends and highlight common issues understand what's going on at each school and then back to the mitigation toolkit slide number 13 that is intended to give them some ways to help themselves right we the whole division is

[00:11:15] a small team and the more people that throw their hands into the mix of the solutions the better we'll be next slide slide 14 Janet thanks so where do we go from here path forward our proposal is in the spring that we would conduct a pilot of six schools one from each region just to make sure that what we just told you our vision was actually works out the way we think it will obviously there'll be some things that help us shape this even more from that pilot but if everything going the way we think it should and will post pilot decision would be yes let's roll this out and move forward

[00:11:51] in school year 25 26 and then in a year the way we envision it going is you know let's say october seems like a good month schools have settled out in their routine we give schools that 30 days to do this school-based self-assessment and upload their electronic submission and scan their document in in November they can immediately start looking at that mitigation toolkit and they can look at it all year long and figure out hey what are some things we could do on our own to solve some of our problems during that same November early December we at central office are looking at it to start figuring out okay which of those

[00:12:27] schools are in most need of our assistance because we can't get to all of you know if there was 30 high priorities we will do our best to start knocking them out one by one but we'll do our best to prioritize and start attacking those most in need and develop plans to mitigate those biggest concerns and then January through May we would be working with those schools helping to solve some of those concerns and issues and then in June and there was a typo in here that that I did not catch before that should have say June of 26 instead of January because we want to have those five months of work and mitigation to be

[00:13:04] able to come back to you all and say hey here's the results of this first year here's what we got from the school-based self-assessments here's the mitigations we did here's some of the things that we were able to solve and we're now ready to go into year two next and last line Janet next steps this just a little bit less a little simpler summary of what we just said so spring conduct the pilots finish these the guides continue to work on the toolkit for mitigation strategies in May confirm that we think the pilot proved that this

[00:13:40] is a good way to go and then in May as well once we have that decision we start working on the internal external communication strategies right because there's a lot of communication that goes along with this to to tell internal stakeholders external stakeholders what we're doing there'll be questions on how they can play how they can help how they can assist and then school year 25 26 implement it and see the first report June of 2026 I know that was a pretty fast through those 15 slides everyone here has had them in advance and I figured it was probably more important for the discussion and questions that

[00:14:19] that you may have and you also have a big day ahead of you with the the SIP as well so I figured time was of the essence so with that miss Anderson I think we're open for questions comments okay I'm gonna go ahead and jump in with the placards I see already doctor did you want to say anything and realize that you weren't here when we first got kicked off no other than I think this is really important safety work when we think about especially our carbon goals as well having the number of students able to walk or bike to school or have

[00:14:54] safer routes to school I think is healthier for our students and also for our carbon footprint so I think this is important work and I appreciate the board's attention to it this morning okay dr. Anderson go ahead and kick off and then mr. moon thank you I also think this is important work because when we worked on this back in 23 it was because we had so many schools having so many issues with having a safe way to get in and out of the buildings I appreciate the approach that's going to be consistent and uniform throughout the division and

[00:15:30] I'm particularly mindful and grateful that you are cognizant of the nuances that live in each school because it's I was a school principal the things that I see are not the things you would see as somebody who is in the central office and the mitigation measures that I see here are also very helpful but what I wonder here a little bit is the schools do the self-assessment then they go through the mitigation list to determine what they can utilize I see this as kind of another layer for the schools to complete I'm wondering what are we

[00:16:07] taking off of the plate because we're adding one more thing well first of all dr. Anderson a good question but not but there are several schools already that are taking their own initiative to do mitigation strategies so what I think we're suggesting isn't something that's going to be foreign to a lot of them if you could go out to I think a bunch of us were at TJ when they were figuring out how to solve their own kiss and ride traffic fiasco and they were able to fix it on their own I think can you give me the rest of the question because I

[00:16:45] kind of lost my thought there um it's okay we'll come back to it because I you kind of headed to where I was going a lot of these again speaking from being a former school administrator a lot of these mitigation measures if you're having an issue at your school you're kind of trying everything you're doing everything I'm not necessarily seeing the newness of it I'll give you the example that you just talked about TJ they've been working on it for years they got me involved got you involved when it had more conversations and did things that are not having the impact that we're hoping for so I just feel like what's the next step because that impact is not being felt I mean the community

[00:17:22] now they're like we did what we could with the school but I don't know what else to do here I think what it takes off there and thank you that reminded me of the other part of the question I think what that takes off their plate is like right now today they just have hundreds of different people coming in and maybe complaining about different things this doesn't work that doesn't work what about this concern now we put a plan in place and that's part of the communication that says hey we heard you we're putting in a process to address these give your concerns beginning of the year whenever we say to the principal to the team we'll incorporate it into this process and I think we kind of see that that will take some of that burden off of the schools because right now

[00:18:02] community is like if I'm not in your face telling you that there's a you know a problem and beating you up all the time it's not necessarily going to get done and I think this is a good step towards us you know kind of getting our effort you know more focused getting everybody to the table and after a you know it's not going to be immediate but I would say after a certain amount of time whatever that is maybe a year you start to see those improvements across the board and people realize hey I have a method I have an opportunity to give my concerns to the school and it's going to get addressed well it's definitely going to organize it oh yeah and that and that toolkit is there so now they're

[00:18:41] not trying to think of stuff on their own they have this toolkit of resources where they if they have a problem that should save them time as well in terms of having to go look for something or create it they can look and see a school that had a similar issue how they fix it and maybe that speeds it up for them okay thank you very much appreciate the toolkit because it may provide some ideas that were not yet there and some of these are how to reduce car traffic vehicle traffic which I think is important but I'd be remiss if I didn't raise the fact that I know particularly at our middle schools where the kids are

[00:19:17] starting as early as they are that increases the traffic because parents are not comfortable having their 10 year old who's a sixth grader be at a bus stop at 6:20 in the morning and I could speak about that firsthand because I do that as a parent I'm one of those drivers in that kiss and ride and it's a long kiss and ride when you have a school that starts that early so I also think we have to kind of walk hand in hand with what we expect with the infrastructure yes ma'am can you speak a little bit as to how was it decided that

[00:19:52] Fairfax High School would be the pilot boy I'm looking at the back room to phone a friend you know I anybody back there remember why we picked Fairfax and you have to if you holler I'll repeat it in the microphone you can walk to a microphone there's there's a mic right here come on sorry we need you add a microphone please sorry Tracy there's a mic here there's us good morning Fairfax

[00:20:31] High School has a notorious traffic problem that we've been dealing with for years and years and years the buses and the cars are commingled coming into and exiting the school it creates significant delays for buses trying to drop off students and then once they drop them off they can't get out of the schools the school to get to their next run which makes that next run late it's predominantly a bus school there's very few walkers there's very few bike riders so that's why we selected Fairfax because it's very it's the way it's set

[00:21:06] up it really needs to be redone with a separate bus entrance exit but that's beyond our control absolutely because they have a different facilities work thank you so much the six schools that you're going to use for the second I guess you had this pilot and now you're going to have a test run how are those schools going to be decided have they been selected they have not been selected we were gonna pick one from each of the six regions but we hadn't gotten that far down the path yet I would love to hear some of the criteria because I think this was important because I if it's having one mode of egress and ingress

[00:21:44] for the buses and vehicles I think that says something having schools that are right on main roads also has a different impact I'll go back please mr. moon and then miss Marin thank you madam vice chair just a couple of preliminary questions since many of us were not on the board back in February 2023 I think just a folk you were there that wasn't it a particular impetus behind this

[00:22:19] motion whether or accidents or just could somebody explain. Ms. Sanders if that's okay I can because this was born out of two separate motions that end up being merged because there are some issues that Mr. Frisch was experiencing in his area where there were some accidents and I was having a similar issue in the Mason district if you remember the accident with the young girl who was killed off of Columbia Pike getting her sister on the bus and then

[00:22:57] something's similar at Belvedere where the the speed at which cars were traveling caused accidents at a fairly blind road so it was really out of pedestrian safety that came from two different areas of the division and we ended up merging it into a big motion to just evaluate all of the schools because we knew this problem was probably a little bit more widespread okay with that in mind uh you know looking at the timeline well you know motion started from february 2023 and full report to the

[00:23:32] board is not expected until june of 26 that's a three and a half years is that to deal with something as grave as what you described i guess this question goes to mr mill well the the original motion was in February of 23, and I know that we were reminded of it in, I think it was, was it December 23 or January of 24, and as soon as, as soon as it came back up, Janice, myself, and Tom

[00:24:08] Vaccarello got the working group together right away. The only thing I could say for that interim period was just there was a lot of churn going on. You had an interim COO. You did not have three individual chiefs yet. They were in the process of doing that restructure. Janice got here in July.

[00:24:24] I got here in October. Tom became a chief in December. I think there was just a lot of chaos around it. But I'm speaking to a time when I wasn't here either, so one of my bosses may have an opinion on that. Certainly we've lost about a year's worth of time. I'm not sure that you want characterize that as a chaos but because I don't want to see any chaos in this course system but thank you sir miss Marin and then mr. McDaniel thank you again so much for this work and I'm not sure if you mentioned this but you did

[00:25:01] dr. Reed did share an update of this to the school board in a Friday letter I'm in August of 24 so that was the first time we saw the initial plans I know I submitted a lot of comments and now we're seeing the report to the full board at this time so this is obviously a great amount of work and it makes sense but FCPS and our individual schools cannot bear the full responsibility of all matters related to pedestrian and vehicular safety regarding our schools this is just another example of how we are being saddled with so much more than just instruction now because we're FCPS we're trying to solve this problem we know that our kiddos and our adults I've got adults that have been hitting

[00:25:41] crosswalks I've got seven years creating a road diet and crosswalk I mean the list goes on and on we always say that student safety is a top priority and it's true but I will continue to push on the boundaries and as the superintendent to walk a very fine line of what our school staff and our central office staff are going to do and what we need other partners to do I think it's reasonable to talk about to be effective and thoughtful about how our students and adults are engaging on school grounds especially when it comes to buses that's that's our world right how we get in our buses in and out effectively but um you know this underscores that it's not only government

[00:26:20] agencies but students families and our local residents who really need to play their role even just thinking about snow days you know FCPS did its its due diligence to remove the snow but those public roadways those residential sidewalks were not cleared so I am not comfortable with our schools and our staff bearing the amount of work that is proposed in this tool so here are my questions um what is the workload for this effort when it comes to how much staff time and resources this occupies you know in the context of the portfolio of work that each of your offices are

[00:26:55] bringing because you all each have huge portfolios and i also would like to hear you know notably there is zero inclusion in this in this work about our fairfax county police department who are responsible for law enforcement or the county and state departments of transportation what was their role if any in developing this work i don't see from the scope on slide seven the list of public spaces those are those are public managed spaces they're not our spaces i'd like to hear about crossing guards and i'd like to hear about the experiences that you've had when you do get and our schools do get the call hey we got to change the speed limit we got

[00:27:35] to get a crosswalk we need a speed bump we need wincomatics because that's really for me where my advocacy was born out of. I've got residents asking me and I'm asking facilities, I'm asking safety. So ultimately what I'd like to know is this: what is the role of the county in helping us with this and how do we dial back this approach? How do we use students even to create the assessments for them to safely go out and do we have wincomatics? What's the speed bone? I am hard-pressed to have instructors and building leaders out logging what the speed limit is in front of their schools I'll kind of start a response on this I

[00:28:13] think that what we want to get out of is the cycle of responding to the urgent so that we can address the important and right now almost exclusively I would say that it's the complaints and the loudest voices and complaints that get our energy and resources but there's not been what I would characterize as a comprehensive look at all sites and an objective queue built around what needs to happen first and so I think when we talk about staff and staff time it's often responding responding responding and what we want to do is get out ahead

[00:28:52] of responding responding responding so that we can get as I mentioned also be able to use our finances more efficiently in terms of at scale providing adjustments where there need to be made I think mr. Lambert can talk little about our collaboration with law enforcement that Mr. Vaccarello began and many others and he can continue that I think we have many parts of the county where the school division the county maybe even a city and then VDOT are all stakeholders in an intersection or in a part of

[00:29:29] real estate for whatever reason I know the accident Dr. Anderson referred to earlier Mr. Vaccarello and I went out to the scene that morning and it wasn't really necessarily adjacent or proximal at all to a school it was a one of those separated four-lane highways with a turn lane unfortunately on a horrific sorrowful morning for sure and it's not something the school division necessarily like we couldn't have put a stoplight up there or put the lights but those are the types of places where you look at you think this doesn't look

[00:30:04] safe and clearly wasn't safe that morning and so I really applaud the effort that the board had the vision to think about how can we get ahead of the constant reacting but then I think it's a great segue to our SIP conversation this afternoon the level of resource allocation required to get ahead of it is a commitment that's going to need to be a collaborative commitment because we continue to fall behind in our just keeping up with work orders to our backup projects and you could substitute safe walks safe routes and pedestrian

[00:30:42] areas for the SIP backlogs right like we continue to try to address backlogs so we're not really having a lot of success getting out ahead of things so that's just a general statement and mr. Lambert you want to talk about specifically our collaboration with law enforcement please thank you dr. Reed thank you miss Marin I think we are very fortunate with our relationship with the Fairfax County Police Department I know dr. Reed and chief of police collaborate and speak often that said there are parts of this plan where I am most comfortable that it will move quickly and to dr. Anderson's

[00:31:17] point one of the areas where I want to make sure we include in this pilot our elementary schools and the reason being is we know we have great coverage with school resource officers at our high and middle schools which taps into a lot of resources that are at the administration's fingertips so I want to personally be very sensitive to the elementary schools who may not as easily or readily be able to pull information like accident reports or speed violations or whatnot so that is a factor that we'll consider in the pilot and seek to find a way where those school resource officers are really helping because each of those school resource

[00:31:54] officers even though I'm blessed to have an outstanding captain who sits here and he's the collective glue they do all report to the stations that are in their community so they're they're connected to their community as well ma'am you mentioned the crossing guards that is a collaboration between us and the police department the police departments the the only folks who have the authority to to stop traffic or their designee through a crossing guard so there there are a variety of ways that we hear about the need to change those sometimes it could be a community member you know school staff what we do is we send out a

[00:32:32] person from our staff to see first and foremost do we agree with that if we do agree that hey we should look at this again we work with the Department of Motor Vehicle Enforcement from the Fairfax County Police Department they also come out and sit down and look at different factors like speeds number of crossers is there an alternative that's minimally invasive and as long as we have concurrence then the police department will look to place a crossing guard there are occasions where demographics may change and they may have assessed this in 22 23 school year but now there were a lot of elementary students who are now

[00:33:09] middle school or whatnot so they'll sometimes come back to it but we do have a good back-and-forth relationship on that on that topic as well and then just getting down at the very micro level and shame on me that I don't share it more but Derek and his team that work for for Isaac they are constantly in communication with VDOT so that when we have something and I know wink-o-matics has been you know an issue that we've we've talked about lately it is it is complex within the school system it requires us to assess it Janice's team because you're involving placing electronics and cooking up to perhaps

[00:33:48] people's easements or property talking to VDOT seeing how they're doing with installation but I do want to point out something that's not well known is VDOT does also reach out to us unsolicited team shared with me an example of they were placing a crosswalk that has nothing to do with schools but they reached out to Derek and said hey this isn't proximal to a school but do we need to put the right sign that has students crossing and so I do want to provide encouragement that there is a lot of back and forth. It's not often raised up to the top levels, but it is happening. And I would also add, and good morning everyone, I would also add that

[00:34:28] if I were to put my former elementary principal hat on, these are activities that I would do with my staff at the beginning of each year before students arrived. I didn't have a full spate of assistant principals. I had one assistant principal and then I had one individual who was responsible for buses, but we would annually do a walk around the properties, look to see where there were issues, work very closely with safety and security at the time if there were issues.

[00:34:57] And today, if I were a principal to have these resources, it would actually help ease the load of the work that we were doing. And it also creates some consistency so that I could have conversations with colleagues who are having some of the same issues. We could work from the same sheet, we would have the same set of resources.

[00:35:17] So I do see this as a support for principals. And I do know that the team has worked very closely with our RAS and EPs to have these conversations to ensure that principals would be comfortable taking on some of this work. And again, I don't see it as additional work because all of our schools are actively engaged in ensuring that our students are getting to and from school safely.

[00:35:41] Okay, so we have about 20 minutes left, and we have five people that still want the first initial time. So I'm going to ask everybody to keep your comments as quick as possible in order to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to speak. So Kyle, or Mr. McDaniel, and then Ms. Lady.

[00:35:58] Thank you. And if we continue the conversation, I think we'll probably set a world record for the number of times Wink-O-Matic is mentioned in a single setting. But I can buy into the concept of this. I think it's a good idea. do have some questions on the details of implementation so if each if each of our 198 schools are being asked to kind of compile this list it's safe to say that this is all self-reporting is that accurate right have we ever had how confident are we in the consistency of the self-reporting that's a big concern that I have and and that's going to be heavily driven by the data collection

[00:36:35] tool are we asking qualitative questions are we asking more quantitative questions kind of walk me through that actual assessment process questions are a mix of both qualitative and quantitative so you know there's some things that are more focused on yes no numbers and then others that hey what concerns do you have what does what have you heard from the community so it's a mix of both and I think that's partly why we want to do that pilot with six before we roll it out to kind of ferret out some of that okay and then in terms of expectation setting once we have this list across all of our schools is

[00:37:13] someone going to sit down and go through this list and say okay here's what we can do here's what we can't touch because this is inevitably going to involve as Miss Mirren brought up in particular V dot police outside agencies that we have no control over yes sir I think there's going to be a portion of the data that comes back and in an ideal world we were talking October would be an administration November would be an analysis and sitting down I'm actually curious to know what we don't know because just like the pilot told us stuff that we don't know I'm also selfishly a little bit excited because it's going to grab some information to help our safer house to school program which rests with

[00:37:52] us some of the questions that are asked is how many are walkers how many are bikers that will tell us where we want to put some of that training bicycle training where people aren't doing it so where we can focus different resources because the program has some different parts to it but I think there's a piece of we don't know what we don't know until we hit that first survey.

[00:38:13] And at what point, again, kind of what Ms. Mearn's bringing up, once we have this list and we know that, you know, here's our items that we can't touch because it's DOT or police or whatever it may be, when does that get sent off to those agencies and kind of what is that relationship? Because I can understand why we would want to take off chunks at a time, you know, top 10, top 20, top 30, but everything that VDOT has to fix should go in lump sum over to VDOT.

[00:38:38] everything that the police have to do should go and lump some over there. So I just want to make sure that that would occur. Yes, sir. I think that's absolutely valid. And this is where I believe we transition from the schools playing a role to the central office playing a role because the relationships with VDOT, for example, are our relationships.

[00:38:55] And that's best served when we go over writ large. And I think an example of where that worked best is recently during this snowstorm. We didn't bombard VDOT with 10 different emails. Janice and Andy were compiling. Hey, these are the hot spots that are coming in so that we're giving them as well a product That's simple not confusing and we're talking in tandem. Okay. That was all I had. Thank you Miss lady and then miss st. John Cunning So first question is as anyone run this by the principles at all or any principles to see what their initial feelings are

[00:39:31] We yeah, we did run it by the chief of schools and the Razzes and a couple EPS and they were all positive but not directly to principals okay um because I I do agree with this plan of action I do think that schools know better what's actually going on because they're there on a daily basis and they understand other iterations of an accident at this main intersection how does that further congest I also want to share that we were just tackling something similar at Chesterbrook in terms of that main road and working with Department of Transportation working VDOT working with Fairfax County and I mean the resolution is not what the

[00:40:11] residents want but what they are gonna do is eliminate a lane because they had like a turn lane that people were flying up and not slowing and it was on the side of the school because it that turn lane did go into a retirement home but you have to merge back but people were doing the fly up and cut over so while there while there is some resolution to what's gonna happen they're gonna put some different sidewalks they didn't get the blinking lights right they didn't get some of the things they wanted. But I will say that was a pretty productive meeting. As I attended the first one and, you know, residents were there, school was there. It was good dialogue

[00:40:45] to stand outside and sort of during what was happening with the start of school. The other thing I want to say is please make sure schools are fully aware of the timeline because it really pains me how often, you know, and I lived it. School-based people feel like, what are they doing up there? They asked us for this like a year ago. Okay. Nothing's being done. So please make sure that people understand timelines. And so there's not an unfair expectation of turnaround.

[00:41:15] And then the other question, and I'm going to, it's rhetorical, but I'm going to throw it out there. The work order problem that was presented to us in last, last spring, I believe, with technology that was grossly broken. Someone, I believe it was Ms. Dixit made the suggestion that we tackle, we tap our TJ students or either anyone in our system who is willing it when it comes to technology to write a program for Fairfax.

[00:41:41] Has anyone followed up on that? I will check in on whether anyone has followed up on that. I'm guessing not. So I will follow up on that. My apologies.

[00:41:56] Thank you. I just think it's a brilliant idea. I mean, we need, if we tap our own kids and it's a great portfolio for them for whatever, whether it's workforce they're going directly into or whether looking to apply to colleges, it's a great portfolio. believe we have the kids capable of doing it because they certainly can break into our technology thank you and miss lady just a quick comment you know when we will definitely make sure that they know the timeline and that was why we went to the chief of schools and the razzes and eps to make sure we hit up our you know central office main point of contact first and the three of us are very reluctant to ever put workload back on schools you know we we talk about all the time

[00:42:33] about hey how do we take stuff away from it's only an extreme situation like this safety focus first that we would even consider it so and I hope in that communication you'll copy principals I'd like to believe that the turnaround conversation happens consistently but everyone's volume is lies high and so just if something would directly go to principals and there's in their staffs about the timeline I think be great thanks yes ma'am

[00:42:59] Miss St. John Cunning and then Miss Dixit. So my question, and again, concurring with my colleagues here, the people that are there at the school really know what's going on. And thank you for the work. Providing the toolkit is going to be very helpful. But I'm looking at the self-assessment form and where you get feedback from students and from the community. You're asking, you know, what are the primary safety concerns raised by the community or the school staff versus asking them directly and I know that I've been working on several issues in my in my

[00:43:37] district with several schools where the issues have been brought up by community members and sometimes we have extremely vigilant community members that know a lot more I don't want to say they know a lot more but they're on top of it they're out there they're watching I have a constituent that will send me pictures they're parking here they're parking there and so when we're asking the staff members to say what are the concerns that the community has brought you versus going directly to the community I don't know what that would look like so I'm just putting that out there as something that we hear directly

[00:44:12] from them versus it coming through that's my one I guess suggestion question something for you guys to look at and then just the other thing for general knowledge for the public as another colleague has mentioned all of our partnerships and working on a specific other issue about what community members want. And again, Wink-O-Matics and working with our partners at a meeting last week, you know, when it comes down to it, it's like, how much is this going to cost? And that's an issue. Can we do this? And our

[00:44:51] partners that help fund us are like, that's prohibitive. You know, the community wants it, But are we going to invest that money on, you know, $40,000 for a Wink-O-Matic on a road that's not a major road? So I think it's incumbent for our community to recognize that there are some things that are outside of our budget that it's difficult to do as much as we want to do it.

[00:45:20] And that's where working with our partners is important. And that's where having our partners understand the needs and prioritize what we can and can't do is important. Ms. Dixit. Thank you for the presentation.

[00:45:37] I wanted to ask you that-- and I know that you are part of the joint working group and leading this, but do you have experience in this kind of work before, like questionnaires, assessment, any of this listed work here?

[00:45:56] Have you had done it before? No, ma'am. It's the first time for me. So I just wanted to understand, like, while we do all these comprehensive studies and we are hiring consultants to do the middle school start time and, you know, a cop boundary and everything like that.

[00:46:16] This looks like a, you know, really important undertaking as well. And I think it's gonna take a lot of time away from our staff. So I just kind of wondered the decision, did the board decide to, not our board, previous board decide to go with the staff to do this or it was decision made?

[00:46:39] - That was the motion as you see it. - But it doesn't say who's gonna actually do the work. Okay, so Dr. Reed, I just, maybe just ask you this. Did you decide this based on the, there was no budget for it, or you didn't think that was the right approach to just go with another external consultant?

[00:47:03] - I think that what we really wanted to try to do, there had been previously members of a department tasked for this work. So, and there were staff whose role had this work assigned to them. So I think what we wanted to try to do first is see if we could do this in-house rather than go outside again.

[00:47:21] I think it's really important in these tight budget times as we're talking about budget. It's my priority to be as efficient as we possibly can and not to begin new consultant contracts where it's not absolutely necessary. So we do want to try to use staff to, many hands, make light work.

[00:47:40] So I think that's part of the idea here is partnering with our county and VDOT colleagues as well as all of our school principals and school communities to make better choices rather than going with another consultant. However, I think we certainly can look at that.

[00:47:58] If, you know, I think we, as things are, they evolve. But at this time, we really felt like we could create this plan in-house. - No, I agree. For the work already has been done, It's kind of the path to go forward, but I feel like if there is a task where, you know, somebody is expert in that debt, it would be done more efficiently and in a timely manner than we creating a task force with our team, which is already busy and have their full-time job, day-to-day work, and they probably have to now take this project on its own and lead that.

[00:48:37] So I guess the timeline and everything looks good because we are internally working on this. But I guess if we had hired somebody to do it, we could have probably hit the timeline a bit earlier. So just for the future, I would just say that we're taking such initiatives.

[00:48:56] I would like to discuss as a board whether we would like to hire somebody or we'd like our staff to do all this additional work. Thank you. Ma'am. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and take an opportunity to speak, and then we'll go back to a few go-backs that we had.

[00:49:16] I appreciate what you guys have done here because I think that what you've done is create a model for initiatives that are around the division where we can empower schools to make decisions for themselves where they're not necessarily just waiting for direction from higher-ups. So I do think that that is a model that we can use for lots of other things around the division, so I am extremely happy to see things like the mitigation toolkit.

[00:49:37] I do want us to go and seek out those things that are unique that are being done, not just the norms. But sometimes when you get a new principal, they don't know where to buy the traffic cones, and just having that cheat sheet of a place to go to is really important. So I'm happy to see all of those things.

[00:49:54] I also think that this is an important moment of alignment. So asking the question both of the community members and the principals I think is extremely important because then you can figure out whether or not both things are rising to the top or whether or not you just have one squeaky wheel, because that does sometimes happen.

[00:50:11] The community doesn't always know what's possible. Lots of times we're advocating for things that -- we've had projects in my community that were funded by FDOT and they were -- or FCDOT, and then they were overruled by VDOT. And so we have lots of times that we have overarching state authority that comes in.

[00:50:30] What I love about the idea of collecting information in one location is that when we pass things forward to VDOT, we can also make sure that the things that we know are possible and that are functional problems that they need to address are able to rise to the top and maybe we can get some traction on that and everybody's not dealing with just the squeaky wheel over and over again.

[00:50:51] Not to say that the squeaky wheel doesn't have very important things to say, but it's just sometimes it's not always, as Dr. Reed said, it's not always the important, it's the urgent. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that the communication strategies to engage with the public is essential here.

[00:51:06] So making sure that the public understands how to share problems, I think that's going to make it easier for all of us to also know what's going on, but also have the opportunity for community members to feel empowered with what they need to do as well.

[00:51:25] Because there are aspects of this, like shoveling sidewalks and things like that, that are important, that it's all a partnership that needs to work together. So I am excited about the fact that we may be able to use this information to make our interaction with state partners and local partners more effective.

[00:51:42] And the last thing I'll say is regardless of what avenue we take, we are going to need input from the principals because somebody has to feed the assessment and they are the people that have the information. So I am hopeful that what we can do is do that as efficiently as possible. So I am strongly in favor of having a tool that they have a certain window to collect information and and then they have a place to to pass information for the rest of the year so I think that that not to say that we'll diminish the importance of those other projects but I think that it's important to kind of

[00:52:14] target that in and I think it will ease time in the long run Dr. Anderson for a go back thank you you mentioned a little bit ago about the time it took to take the assessment to complete a report can you say a little bit more there yes ma'am it was about I'm looking back there was probably about three weeks start to finish took at least if I remember correctly two visits to Fairfax high school and it was just kind of what we've discussed here earlier it's just this was you know along with their other daily jobs so finding that time to get

[00:52:54] out there and get into the details at Fairfax carving that out for us to go as a team just it was a little cumbersome the three weeks included the assessment yes ma'am what writing okay and again I do want to raise my concern regarding the additional workload to principals I know their input is key but I'm also concerned that they were not part of this conversation and we always talk about not doing things on to people without them being part of the conversation this was a missed opportunity it's much easier for us to sit in central office and shift things around but I think we have to really engage with the practitioners hopefully you could have a group of principals

[00:53:29] review this really quickly before the next update I was just you know just to give a little insight we we started the conversation with chief of schools and razzes and EPS because that's you know who all the principals kind of get their guidance from and we started there we weren't by any means done today that's where we wanted to see where this went before we start rolling it out more and that was kind of part of the internal external communication plan we referred to which is pulling all them in and like Janice had mentioned you know all the principal association meetings that we go to once a month there's a lot of opportunities for us to roll this out and and make sure that they're we're not

[00:54:07] just piling stuff on them and doctors and you brought up a point that I wrote down that I want to reflect in the pilot you see often how long did it take to complete this form I'm very curious in gathering that data as well because I think that's important for us before we roll out countywide thank you also information about vehicular traffic I know that the move is to have more kids on the bus because we can control it and it just decreases traffic do we know at the high schools or do we have a means of collecting how many of our students actually drive to school or how many parking spots are sold at the schools

[00:54:46] maybe that's more reasonable I was looking at mr. and D'Andrade back there to see but go ahead dr. Reed sorry well we have actually provided the number of parking slots I believe or we're in the middle of putting that together I think we had it prior to construction projects and then construction projects have adjusted some of the school parking lot footprints but that would be for those who park on the school grounds there are a lot of schools like many schools across the country right that don't have sufficient student

[00:55:22] parking and in some cases staff parking and so we have folks parking on side streets and local roads So we can certainly get that information more definitively for you. We know 130,000 roughly of our -- roughly 183,000 students are on the bus.

[00:55:40] So that roughly leaves 50,000 that are either walking, biking, flying, or driving in some way. Well, we're going to have flying cars, I think, very shortly. But, you know, skipping, hopping, however they get there. but that's about 50,000 left that are either driving or going other than, you know, motorized transportation. I think reviewing that data will be a good next step as well, because it informs what are our goals here, because we can't just work in darkness around this. We kind of have to have a measure for success. The last thing, the next to last thing I want to share is it's really difficult at the school site, and you talked, you heard about it at TJ, when you have parents that

[00:56:19] are speeding when you have folks making illegal u-turns school staff cannot enforce that and that's the frustration I think you hear from Miss Marin because we we can't be at this alone but yet we know that's the issue that is contributing to the safety issues around those schools so it's just making sure we have someone who could be supportive of this and also just for the rest of the conversation one of the things that we wanted to get out of this when this was brought forward as a follow-on motion a couple of years ago is that we have a regular look at this information rather than just being responsive or

[00:56:54] reactive to urgent and catastrophic situations I see this being embedded in EL11 as a regular review I see this being part of the regular CIP cycle and it was just to allow us to be really consistent this is Anderson one of the things and dr. Anderson in prior work that I've done we actually had an annual meeting with stakeholders I know we have a skip committee here that's a cooperative committee between the county and the school division I think having a similar arrangement that would focus on this topic might allow us to have

[00:57:32] actually if you will and itemized like we could bring our list of hot areas in the county and other stakeholders and if we brought that to the table and all agreed that these are the 20% that we could address this year I think we could make steady progress. Mr. McElveen for his original like for he gets the full three minutes. That's okay I will be terse if possible so I appreciate this this approach but and it's you've done what you were tasked with so I appreciate

[00:58:09] that but it is very much an inward looking approach and I think what we need is to accompany this an outward looking approach and frankly we need a countywide public awareness campaign you know in my in my role as a PTA leader for two years I had worked with my elementary school to do things like add a wink-o-matic add speed bumps add crossing guards at the school and after two years of advocacy work all VDOT did for us was repaint a crosswalk it's

[00:58:44] really appalling and to be very honest the supervisors were not very helpful they they have all this additional transportation funding and the excuse they use is that well every school has the same issue so we can't do it for every school so I think the the bottom line is that schools are bringing forward concerns already and there are more concerns will come from this but the folks outside of FCPS just aren't listening so I think that goes to what Dr. Reed just said is that we do need a countywide focus on this whether it's a

[00:59:19] committee or something else and I think we need to do everything we can once we get the results of this to compile all our needs present them to the Board of Supervisors and begin holding VDOT to account. Thanks. Okay, Ms. Marin we have time for one last go back yeah I continue to say we cannot normalize that schools that education professionals and operational staff are responsible for the assessment management and resolution for safe routes to schools I see value in having base level data about status and needs but we need to

[00:59:56] have the avenue of raising immediate needs in a thoughtful way and that's a cue and I know you all love your cues but I just like to give you a smattering of the issues I've been dealing with for the last five years. Flint Hill Elementary, first had an issue in 2012 with a crossing guard being hit in the crosswalk.

[01:00:14] Still to this date, nothing of significance has been done. There's been some movement most recently because the delegates stepped in. Flores Elementary, speeding. The county now has the authority to change the speed zone. I have asked for it to be changed, nothing has happened. Sunrise Valley Elementary, the county has rights over the roadways, the sidewalks are not ADA compliant.

[01:00:35] It's a dangerous curve. raised it to the county to the rest of the association nothing forest edge elementary have asked for a crosswalk to be painted totally the county's jurisdiction hasn't happened wolf trap elementary took seven years to make beulah roll be safe and that effort was largely driven by myself and my neighbors as residents getting grants and seeking accountability so this is the kind of stuff that residents are asking us about um the police you said um mr limit the police are the only ones with the responsibility the authority to stop traffic and yet the county proposed in january 2024 to cut all the crossing guards in the town of vienna which i represent and

[01:01:11] as recently as august 2024 proposed to have scps be responsible for managing the crossing guard program across the entire county now i don't know the status of that i believe that's changed but i am concerned that i see efforts by the county to push their responsibility for road and pedestrian safety onto fairfax county public schools in my view the strategies presented here today are an effort to fill a void left vacant for too long by the county in the state ultimately though i want to know what is the flow of information from fcps to the county and state for them to get things

[01:01:44] fixed when we raise them and have accountability for it to be done ms mayor you bring up a good point and in my brief time here i have my own frustrations often with where we are with a project i think we can do better on that from our end so that we can report out better and i heard some ideas. I think Ms. Lady, I was keying in to an idea that she had to provide me with a better tracking mechanism because email is not a sufficient way to follow up on whether you are asking for something or a community member. So I take that as a point of action for me. And I think

[01:02:22] like Dr. Reed said, I think a real pathway forward is to do more routine and regular sit-downs with the main stakeholders in this. I take that for action myself. And last but not least, Ms. Seismar-Hyser for her initial. Thank you. And I'll be quick. I've been listening to the conversation and I agree with many of the things my colleagues have said. And I'm wondering, Dr. Reed, you touched on this, but I'm wondering after we do our assessment, we've had short-term joint committees with the Board of Supervisors on specific topics.

[01:03:01] specifically the last one was around funding for facilities. So I'm really wondering if there's a way that we could, after we do our assessment, once we have the data, we have something to kind of go to the Board of Supervisors with regarding data around specific issues and needs, whether it's possible at that point to propose doing some sort of joint committee.

[01:03:21] I mean, we're starting those conversations now about a joint task force, perhaps, to look at this. Because I appreciate what we're doing. I think we can do what we can. But we are not able to mitigate all the traffic and safety concerns on our own. And I know our county partners want to work with us on getting this done.

[01:03:40] So just a thought, maybe those conversations can get started, maybe from chair to chair. Just some things I wanted to talk about. And also, you know, I'm hearing from a lot of concerns from different residents in the Braddock District about safety and walking routes. I think, Mr. Lightfoot, you and I worked together on assessing some walking routes, some sidewalks towards Oakview and some of the other schools.

[01:04:02] But I'm wondering how we can sort of practically communicate to our community. Here's kind of what's under our preview. Here's what we can do. You know, here's sort of a process for lifting up concerns. I know many people were surprised during this recent snowstorm, right, that the sidewalks don't get shoveled.

[01:04:18] you know it's responsibility the homeowner if there isn't a homeowner or a renter against certain sidewalks it's you know it's kind of up to the community to do it so i'm just wondering if there's two pieces one conversation about some sort of joint task force with the board of supervisors um and two whether there's some sort of proactive communications plan to help better you know inform our community what we do and what we can do yes ma'am i i think that um both are critical I think we have to have a joint task force joint committee I would hope it's a committee that has the authority to act because I think that this

[01:04:58] reviewing these hazardous locations and identifying high priority locations and moving on them is critical honestly that's what we were doing all last week with VDOT is we were providing lists of parts of the county that we were receiving updates on about the most concerning roads we were providing it and we were working through that list.

[01:05:22] The team was together with VDOT and our staff and I think when we're more strategic we can get things moving more quickly. I think the communication around who has what part would also be a great outcome of such a task force because I think there's not a shared understanding in some cases of whose responsibility certain locations are.

[01:05:46] And then thirdly, I think the ability to share information across departments and across entities is very important. I know the team, when we talked with VDOT Sunday afternoon actually, talked about how important it would be even for them to have our bus routes.

[01:06:04] So that way they would know which roads specifically bus routing was critical for, notwithstanding other routing that community members need. They already have hospitals and so forth but I just think that the more information we share, the common purpose, we're all using the same resources and the more efficient we can be with those resources and clearly we communicate them, I think it minimizes a lot of consternation which leads to conflict.

[01:06:29] Well, maybe it's a joint task force with VDOT, you know, the county and us. I don't know but it feels like there's, you know, a room to have better processes for information sharing better you know better communication to our community and um you know room to sort of have more collaboration because i think we all are sharing right we all have the same goal we want our kids to be able to get to school safe we want our community and roads to be safe but how do we better work together on the different pieces and understand kind of where our lanes are and other people's lanes are and you know work together to have the best outcome if it would be

[01:07:05] helpful I will ask the team to draft a plan for how we might envision that better working relationship and we can provide that in a Friday letter to the board and have a follow-up conversation about who initiates that with who I think from the work work side department side we want to we have a high interest in doing that I think your point around the chair to chair contact or however we go down that road I think we can come back with a plan for consideration that would be great thank you okay so we are about 10 minutes behind schedule at this point but that's okay um we're going to take a quick five minute recess but really five minutes

[01:07:44] so we'll be back here at 11 45 to start the cip conversation okay welcome back we are in our next portion of the work session and let's just check our time here we are due to have this discussion until 1 p.m when we will break for a short recess for lunch until 1 30 and then reconvene so we uh let me just okay so today we are focusing on the 8.5 billion dollars in public

[01:08:19] infrastructure assets in fairfax county for which this board is responsible these of course are the facilities and spaces managed by fairfax county public schools for pre-k-12 and adult instruction and the public's use of these spaces for a range of events which last year alone in 2024 totaled 500 000 public events our facilities are used seven days a week from morning until night for essential community services that include public education athletics performing arts academic competitions distribution of medical care food and public services private athletic leagues and

[01:08:54] events religious services and more it's critical to recall that it is the voter approved public bonds on the annual November general election ballot that pay for the majority of facilities in FCPS, not the annual real estate taxes which provide the annual operating budget of over $4 billion. This Capital Improvement Program, or CIP, covers the array of critical topics regarding our facilities, including building maintenance and renovation, which includes safety upgrades, and new construction, school capacity, programming and boundaries, and environmental sustainability,

[01:09:28] to name a few the board previously during the review of the cip in 2024 publicly directed the superintendent through two follow-on motions to provide the board information about future strategies that could further economize the public funds used for fcps facilities this includes exploring new ways to generate revenue using swing spaces to decrease construction time and alternative delivering methods for projects such as public-private partnerships power purchase agreements construction management at risk and design build and reducing leasing expenses while

[01:10:04] we do have copious information in response to these follow-on motions the scope of today's work session will be on reviewing and improving the cip document approving the cip is critical because this sets in motion the bond work that the board of supervisors must do on a timeline that runs through spring for completion to place it onto the november general election ballot additional work sessions will be scheduled for us to more meaningfully review the details and possibilities of those follow-on motions as this is ongoing work so with that i will turn it over to our chief of facilities miss janice samansky over to our superintendent dr michelle reed

[01:10:41] thank you miss marin and this is uh really an epic meeting um it's our annual look at our future five-year plan and our facilities as you mentioned miss marin are actually a significant uh part of what we're stewards for the amount of square footage is incredible and the projects needs renovations are significant outlays both of staff time and resources the schools are the center of our communities so it's my pleasure to turn it over to miss Szymanski I think that one of the things we really

[01:11:18] want to stress is that this is about the approval for this five-year plan there There are many other topics that are connected and we hope to have other conversations and work sessions perhaps scheduled to address some of the other nuanced topics that traditionally have not been a part of our annual CIP process.

[01:11:40] But anyhow, I would like to turn it over to Ms. Szymanski to share the presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Reed, and good morning. Today we are going to cover a summary presentation on the proposed capital improvement program for fiscal year 2026 through 2030.

[01:11:58] Next slide. I'd like to provide an introduction and overview of my department's offices and responsibilities. The Department of Capital Improvements and Planning is responsible for facility planning services, design and construction, and property management.

[01:12:15] The work includes the production of the CIP, school enrollment projections by grade level, and attendance area adjustment recommendations, and proposes in conjunction with other offices in the department, bond referenda to fund required capital improvements. Design and construction services is responsible for the design and construction services for new school facilities, addition to existing schools, renewals or renovations, capital improvement work orders, and the purchase, installation, and relocation of temporary classroom facilities.

[01:12:45] The Office of Facility Management is responsible for the building and grounds maintenance services, facility infrastructure repair, replacement, and sustainability. Next slide. Facilities has responsibility for the planning in design and construction and maintenance of 8.7 billion in public infrastructure assets in Fairfax County.

[01:13:07] I wanna emphasize that that is a billion with a B. These public assets consist of over 28 million square feet across over 200 buildings in the county. For perspective, FCPS has more than the equivalent of four pentagons of space, and if you didn't know, the Pentagon is the world's second largest office building at about 6.5 million square feet.

[01:13:30] Next slide. Facilities goes just beyond education. our facilities are also community assets that serve as most the public meeting spaces in the county in many cases spaces in our facilities provided are provided free of charge to organizations such as homeowner associations 4-h clubs scouting groups employee organizations and cultural and civic groups in addition 500 000 events occurred in school facilities beyond the school day instruction annually for some perspective if every facility held the same number of events that's

[01:14:02] over 2500 events per facility that would be 48 events per week at each school 169 of our schools and centers are also used as polling places for elections 142 schools serve as sites for fairfax sac program and 91 religious and cultural organizations use our facilities for regularly scheduled events next slide we want to highlight the policies and regulations that govern facilities work and the formation of the CIP. This full list is included in the regulation section of the CIP

[01:14:36] on pages 15 through 17. We do want to make special note of policy and regulation 8110 that establishes procedures for the five-year capital improvement program planning. Also important to highlight is policy 8258. This policy dictates a 20 to 25-year renovation cycle. And lastly, I would like to highlight policy 8542, which is our policy on environmental stewardship and initiatives.

[01:15:00] These policies all govern and guide our work. Next slide. All right, so now that we have covered some background on facilities as a whole, I'd like to talk about this year's proposed CIP. Next slide, please. Capital Improvement Program, or CIP, is a planning and fiscal management tool used to coordinate the location, timing, and funding of projects over the five years.

[01:15:23] The cash flow is submitted to the county for incorporation into the larger Fairfax County CIP. Our CIP includes an annual review of student membership and facilities data to identify capital projects. Newly identified needs are included in the estimated schedule of capital projects for the next five years, and the capital cash flow tracks the funding allocation for these projects.

[01:15:45] Please note, facilities work reaches beyond just the five-year cash flow of major capital projects. While that is what the CIP covers, facilities also performs projects ranging from reactive and preventative maintenance, major maintenance projects such as painting classrooms replacing flooring and larger infrastructure projects examples of that might be an hvac equipment replacement or replacing a roof next slide please the cip is a zero to five year look ahead but it's informed by longer range planning this graphic shows how fcps collaborates with fairfax county government on the review of county-wide residential development and growth

[01:16:24] within and beyond the five years to identify the impacts on school facilities fcps monitors new residential developments during the plan amendment review process for the Fairfax County comprehensive plan and the zoning review process for zoning applications and considers new residential development that is actively under construction in the five-year student membership projections in the FCPSCIP as they may potentially contribute to student membership growth within the next five years. An example of this long-range planning initiative with the Fairfax County government is the acquisition of the Silver Line Elementary school site. The need for a school site was identified by FCPS as part of the

[01:17:04] comprehensive plan review of Land Unit A within the Dulles Suburban Center. A school site was recommended by FCPS and was recently dedicated as part of a zoning application. Next slide please. The CIP includes September certified student membership division-wide and by individual schools. The total certified student membership decreased by 422 students from 180,806 students in in school year 23-24 to 180,384 students in school year 24-25.

[01:17:39] The primary factors that contribute to changes in student membership include the birth to kindergarten ratio, the migration of students in and out of FCPS, and the transfer of students from their base school to their attending schools. This data is included at the end of this presentation as reference, on pages 27 through 32 in the CIP, and on the facility membership dashboards online.

[01:18:03] The CIP includes five-year student membership projections which show a decrease in student membership for the five-year period on page 36. The student membership is projected to decrease by 2,606 students, so that's going from 180,384 students in school year 24-25 to 177,778 students in school year 29-30.

[01:18:28] As best practice, FCPS uses the cohort survival ratio methodology as the basis for the student membership projections. The cohort survival ratio methodology compares the proportion of students in one grade that progresses to the next grade. Then historical cohort survival ratios are considered and applied to those ratios to project for students in the next school years. As a reminder, for the student membership projections, only new residential development that is actively under construction are considered as they may potentially contribute to membership growth within the next five years and as i shared we do work with fairfax county government and review planning amendments

[01:19:05] and zoning applications for potential new developments in the pipeline and we update the student member projections every year to capture any new residential developments that may have become then active can you stay on the past side please so some of the factors that relate to this projected decline are we are seeing bursts continuing to decrease the 23 fairfax county demographic report projects a decrease in the school age populations that's ages 5 through 19 in fairfax county the same report also projects that housing growth will primarily be multi-family

[01:19:41] housing units which generally yields fewer students compared to single family and townhomes and overall we're seeing elementary and middle school student cohorts decreasing every year currently the largest student cohorts in school year 24 25 are in 11th and 12th grade and again i just would like to stress that with the recent decline and ongoing changes in student membership it is very important to highlight the projections are updated every year in the FCPS CIP to reflect the changing conditions continuously. Next slide, please. Thank you. This table shows the accuracy

[01:20:20] of the five-year student membership projections from previous CIPs, which includes the CIP 2017 through 21 to CIP fiscal year 25 through 29, compared to the actual student membership for school year 2021 to this school year division-wide. The columns represent which CIP the student membership's projections are from whereas the rows represent which school year the student's membership is coming from. Each CIP includes five-year projected years which is why you will see one to five projection accuracy percentages in each column. The projection accuracy is calculated by dividing the projected student membership by the actual student membership for each school year.

[01:21:00] a projection accuracy of greater than 100 means the projected student membership was greater than the actual student membership for that school year and a projection accuracy less than 100 means the projected student membership was less than the actual student membership for that school year the one-year projection accuracy for cip fiscal year 25 through 29 which was last year's cip the student membership projection for school year 24 25 was 101 so that's off by one percent Thank you. Types of capital projects in the CIP include new school construction,

[01:21:38] repurposing projects, capacity enhancements, facility renovations, and potential sites, and which are defined here on this slide. Next slide please. So next I would like to provide a brief overview of current and completed projects in the CIP. Next slide. This includes but is not limited to the renovations of Louise Archer Elementary, Wakefield Forest Elementary, Oak Hill Elementary and the capacity enhancement at Justice High School. FCPS also has many projects in the CIP

[01:22:15] that are actively under construction. This includes, but is not limited to, the renovations of Falls Church High School, Mosaic Elementary, Bonnie Bray Elementary, and Dranesville Elementary. Next. All the projects we just saw under construction each have their own project page on our website. FCPS is implementing a standard engagement and communication plan for large capital projects. Lastly, I'd like to provide a brief update on one of the unique projects that was improved in a previous CIP a division-wide effort to install security vestibules at schools the project is organized into five rounds totaling 93 locations at a

[01:22:53] projected cost of over 22 million dollars this has not been fully funded round one for 19 schools is in construction only and will be substantially complete by the end of January round two which is 20 schools and that's in permitting these are anticipated to go out to bid in the spring with the majority of construction commencing over in the summer months round three is in design and rounds four and five are to be determined dependent on funding next i'd like to move on to environmental sustainability environmental sustainability highlights of fcps facilities

[01:23:30] are shown on this slide and include get to green energy conservation and solar energy projects we have 149 schools registered with the national wildlife federation eco schools usa program we are planting over 800 trees between 2024 and 2025 to increase our tree canopies and reduce heat island effect. Since 2013, we have reduced energy expenditures by approximately 97 million and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 46 percent. And we now have nine solar power purchase agreements underway on elementary school roofs. Going on to net zero energy, active design and construction

[01:24:07] projects maximize net zero energy ready where possible to prepare for future renewable energy installations. This might include structural loading on a roof to allow for future solar to be installed. And future projects starting in FY26 and beyond include CIP funding for major energy reduction measures to gain possible on-site net zero ready, such as photovoltaics, arrays and ground source heat pumps for our mechanical system, such as geothermal. Thank you. Now next I'd like to review capital project funding. So this slide shows an overview of facilities funding and their

[01:24:46] sources. Funding sources for the capital projects is shown at the very top of the chart, and they're the general obligation bond, as voted on by residents in the biannual school bond referendum. The annual limit for general obligation bond funding has increased over time. The most recent increase is the result of a joint CIP committee back in 2021. This increased the annual amount allocated to $230 million per year in FY25 and beyond. It should be noted that the referendum for schools is biannual and we're in the odd years so 23 25 27 etc as a result of escalation in the

[01:25:23] construction industry fcps continues to monitor these costs as they relate to the fcps capital projects and pipeline additional funds that impact the fcps facilities team are also here on the slide and so that includes our operating funds funds from the fairfax county board of supervisors for infrastructure management, the capital sinking fund, and proffers. But again, just to stress, the majority of it is represented in that capital bond project row. So this slide summarizes the capital projects identified in the capital construction cash flow. Within the next five

[01:26:00] years, these include new construction of Dunloring Elementary and Silverline Elementary schools, with Silverline being identified for planning design to begin in the very last year, in 2030, capacity enhancement and relocation of three existing modular buildings, and the majority of the CIP cashflow includes the renovation of 22 schools, including 18 elementary, two middle, and two high schools.

[01:26:23] Looking within the next 10 years, the capital projects included are new construction and/or repurposing of Western High School, Route 1, which is also known as Pinewood Lakes Early Childhood Center, Tyson's Elementary, Pimmitt Hills, and Virginia Hills. Renovations include two elementary schools from the existing renovation queue.

[01:26:42] I would also like to note with the countywide boundary review underway and work on going towards a new renovation queue, we will want to understand the full effects of those efforts and the relationship to any out-year work and we will continue to monitor.

[01:26:59] So this slide is a summary of funding for the current identified projects we just saw on the previous slide. The total five-year funding requirement is approximately $1.4 billion and projects have been scheduled based on the bond funding limit. So the total is the anticipated bond sales coming to FCPS for the next 5 and 10 years as it currently stands.

[01:27:21] Approximately $384 million is currently funded by bonds and approximately $1 billion is unfunded and would be included on future bond referenda. The total 10-year requirement is approximately $2.6 billion, approximately $429 million is funded by bonds, and approximately $2.1 billion is unfunded and would be included on future bond referenda.

[01:27:42] All right. So to this point, I have reviewed the proposed CIP. And as you can see, we are prioritizing based on available resources. And we feel like we are doing the best we can with the resources that we have. So at this point, we would like to change gears a little bit. And I would like to share some analysis we have completed related to future funding needs.

[01:28:07] So the previous circles shared a total of funding anticipated over the next 10 years scheduled based on current bond funding limitations this slide however shows the total amount broken down by funded and unfunded over the next 10 years if fcps were to catch up on renovating facilities older than 25 years and having all future work on a 20-year 25-year renovation cycle per school board policy 8258 the total amount required would be 14.4 billion dollars of which

[01:28:42] 428 million is currently funded from bond referendum already approved and that means 13.9 billion is unfunded that is an additional 1.4 billion dollars needed per year for the next 10 years so ms manski i just want to pause we looked at this slide together and debated whether to put this in the presentation or not and i just i feel like the board in our community really need to to understand this is what it would take to actually, because of cost escalation and deferring

[01:29:17] and deferring, to actually get back on simply a 25-year cycle. So I just appreciate the time it took to create this slide, and it's a significant slide for many purposes. I know we're going through this. I just want to make sure we both talk about where we are and then what would it actually take to get where we want to be responsibly, not even, like, this isn't particularly aspirational.

[01:29:45] This would simply get us back to where we've traditionally been as a county and school division. Is that correct? Absolutely, that's correct. This is intended to give you a sense of scale, because please note, we use CIP estimates in today's dollars, which is not even adjusted for inflation. So this number could even change, depending on the timing of funding, future construction costs, and the commencement of actual work.

[01:30:06] So again, the intent is just to demonstrate the investment required to renovate aging schools and bring the current queue down to 25 years in today's dollars. Next slide please. So staying on this topic of funding, the data on this chart compares capital construction funding per existing square footage compared to other divisions limited to the DMV where the cost of regional of construction is most comparable to FCPS market conditions.

[01:30:36] funding per square foot helps understand the size of facility portfolio at a minimum obligated for renovations against available funding. We included divisions approximately one-third the size of FCPS or greater as most comparable to FCPS's design and construction program. Of the eight public schools listed above, FCPS ranks last with a funding per square foot of $8.54. The average funding per square foot of school division shown here is $21.80. Because FCPS is such a large school

[01:31:09] system, even increasing funding per square foot by an additional $3.58 to bring FCPS up to the second lowest ranked school system on this chart, that would mean an annual bond amount or alternative funding would be needed to be increased by $97.5 million annually. That's an additional $195 million per two-year referendum cycle. Next slide. So to provide a little bit of an update on the marketplace, last year we did see a large increase in projected costs for capital construction

[01:31:45] projects to accommodate for rising inflation, Fairfax's prevailing wage requirements, and supply chain challenges. In response, active design and construction projects were budgeted in the CIP using a very design-specific cost estimate. And so with that, we are happy to report that all CIP projects that have bid since the last CIP have had good market competition and have come in on or under budget, with the last three bids averaging 12% below estimates. So we've been able to build up our construction reserve and value engineering or reducing scope has not been

[01:32:19] required on projects at the time of bid. We are updating our construction assumptions annually to keep on top of market trends and they are reflected in our budgets. So like other market sectors though projects do still remain more costly than in years past however the updated estimates and practices have allowed for more realistic planning of the capital pipeline while the bond increased to 230 million dollars annually in 2025 though i think it's fair to surmise that it's not sufficient enough to cover the cost increases and so not only is the renovation

[01:32:55] renovation cycle impacted but there are other impacts to the facilities program as well and so And so that segues to this slide. This slide provides a breakdown of the cost of major maintenance and infrastructure replacement requirements, and this is done by type of replacement for the next five years.

[01:33:14] Of the assets currently tracked, the backlog stands at $244.6 million, emphasizing the pressing need for resource allocation to address deferred maintenance and upgrades. If the funding is not increased, the backlog will continue to outpace the replacement.

[01:33:33] And so to demonstrate the backlog impacts, FCPS, we reviewed historic trends over the last 10 years to determine an estimated average rate of 8.4% growth of backlog annually. And so we use this historic data on the previous slide to project over the next 10 years, looking to the future, the estimated backlog should current resources and funding remain constant.

[01:33:57] FCPS projects the rate of growth increasing from 8.4% to 10% with the longer renovation cycle and the cost of construction continuing to rise. The result is a projected backlog of over 635 million in the next 10 years and this is for current tracked assets. Next, the Joint Environmental Task Force or JET's mission was to join the political and administrative capabilities of the county and school system to proactively address climate change and environmental sustainability. To meet the JET's 50% reduction by the 2040 milestone, we're

[01:34:35] estimating 1.8 billion worth of facilities projects that improve energy reduction are needed to meet that 2040 date and this is I have to caveat is a low-end estimate because it assumes work not covered by renovations and current projects shown in blue they would be done via an energy savings performance contract these contracts typically have a shorter upfront cost and the remainder is funded by financing anticipated energy savings so examples of that might be HVAC projects LED lighting installations building envelope improvements and commissioning our HVAC systems and building automation and

[01:35:11] system controls so without the additional funding we believe this 2040 milestone will not be met all right so with that all being said we now like to review the next steps for the CIP so this slide shows the timeline of the proposed CIP today is the work school board work session and public hearing the The school board is scheduled to take up action on the proposed CIP on February 6, 2025.

[01:35:42] And once adopted, FCPS staff will work with the county government staff to incorporate into their CIP for release on February 18th. Okay, and then lastly, and we want to close on this, we want to acknowledge that in addition to the CIP, Facilities has many initiatives to present to the school board for discussion in the future.

[01:36:03] And so that's including but not limited to our facility condition assessment, the new renovation queue we're building, work on public-private partnerships, reduction of leasing expenses, potential new swing space opportunities, policy revisions and new procurement options, athletic capital replacement queue, student membership projections, development and review of proffers and student yield formulas, new environmental and sustainability initiatives, and even elevators. And so moving forward, I'd suggest that we work strategically in partnership to continue the discussion.

[01:36:39] We look forward to working with the school board on the best path forward for these important topics. And so with that, today, we appreciate the board's support and advocacy for our work. Thank you for your time and attention, and I'm available for any questions. Thank you, Ms. Szymanski.

[01:36:55] So we are going to begin round one. May the fighting begin. So we have three minutes per initial intervention. So I see Dr. Anderson followed by Mr. Dunn.

[01:37:17] That was a lot. First of all, thank you. This is always a huge component. And I appreciate the level setting that both you and Ms. Marin did at the beginning of this session, which is to talk about how important this work is.

[01:37:34] These are buildings that are used by our entire community pretty much 24 hours a day. And so there's a lot of stake here for not just students, which we know that's the reason why we're here, but we've expanded beyond that, which is also what causes me a little bit of a worry.

[01:37:51] We've spent quite a bit of time talking about how important this is, and on the day that we are offering the CIP to the public, we're also having the public hearing. That makes it a little bit tight for people to get themselves together to come and speak with us. And then we are voting on this at the very next meeting.

[01:38:09] So the timetable causes me some concern, but I do want to spend a little, my first round just talking about funding. If you could just talk a little bit, because I miss what you said in terms of how many more dollars would we need in the bond in order to get the extra $3 per square foot.

[01:38:33] Did you say 97? That is correct. To add an additional $3.58 per square foot, and again, we're 28 million square feet. So when you add all that up, that's another $97.5 million annually.

[01:38:49] Because we go for the bond referendum every two years, you double that, right? And it's $195 million per two year referendum. And again, just to clarify, that's to bring us up to the second lowest ranked school when we were comparing against other DMV funding. I also want to point out another number, the current unfunded is $13.9 billion to get us back up to that 25-year renovation cycle, bringing up every school to 25 years or younger and then projecting out a 25-year cycle moving forward.

[01:39:19] Sure. Thank you. Clearly, I mean, I've said this ad nauseum in a lot of ways, our needs have greatly outpaced our resources. And I don't see a universe where we just look to the Board of Supervisors to help close that gap can we bring that circle back up please that seems almost unrealistic Lee it's daunting in order to address so I want to start talking about what are the baby steps we can take into chipping away at this so the first piece is increasing the bond ask can you walk us through the process where we can engage

[01:39:56] with our funders in in order to get to the 425 that you've recommended and in lieu of the 230 million that we have currently? - So I believe the last time the bond limit increased was the result of a joint CIP discussion between the Fairfax County School Board and the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.

[01:40:22] This was last done in 2021, and the changes we're just now feeling, it was for an implementation of an increase to 230 for fiscal year 25 and out year moving forward. And so I see some space for maybe for us to revitalize that committee so we can engage in this discussion.

[01:40:43] I'm going to skip over the P3 conversation for right now even though this is part of this. We have to look at many different ways in order to close this gap because we're not getting a check for $14.4 billion from any entity. What I'd like to talk about is when you discussed the Backlog I forget what chart this was and the Exponential impact of having the deferred maintenance on to the system. This is slide 30. Thank you Could should we be considering?

[01:41:22] Using a year's bond just to handle the 44 million so that we prevent from further expenses further losses yeah this question has come up a lot internally amongst staff in fact when we were developing the CIP proposed cash flow we ran a scenario that said what if we only had 80% of the funding and we dedicated another 20 of it to doing things like this like infrastructure replacements the result was just very very very dramatic for that renovation cycle we're already over almost doubled

[01:42:01] where we should be per school board policy so while that is an option we just have to remember there's very big and unintended consequences to doing that I'll take a go back that was my time okay thank you on to mr. Dunn thank you how does our asset portfolio of 200 buildings with value of 8.7 billion compared to our peer school divisions in the DMV region and nationally yeah I

[01:42:35] would probably direct ourselves back up to slide 27 please so we did look at the funding other school divisions and the DMV got and we compared it to how big their school sizes were so then you could really see how much money they were receiving compared to how big they were in terms of how much stewardship of square footage they had right so we are definitely by far and large the biggest school system in terms of square footage so you can't really actually see the total sizes here it's more about that ratio I think the next comparable is

[01:43:12] probably Montgomery County Public Schools they're in the 20 plus million square footage range DC Prince William and Loudon they're all more in that third to half range so I can definitely provide more but we are by far and large the largest around here okay what i was trying to understand is we have 200 school buildings right and is that the right number is that more than our peers or is that on target and it seems from the very small font total schools at the bottom of each of those columns it looks like we're about

[01:43:45] where we should be in your opinion should we be looking to consolidate or reduce the number of assets you know merge schools together so we have a smaller number of buildings that we have to manage well again I think that's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison we are geographically spread out we have the highest enrollment of all of these divisions as well so I think we would need to do further analysis to understand if that's the case again for example District of

[01:44:19] Columbia Public Schools, their schools are much more closely compacted, so if you were to consolidate a school, it wouldn't be that much of a geographic impact. So, again, just a point to say, I think that would need further exploration before you just stack up these school divisions side by side.

[01:44:36] Should FCPS be looking to negotiate with developers, asset swaps, trading existing school sites for perhaps new schools that developers could build at different sites? know so they might we might have schools in attractive locations for new housing or new condo buildings to be built right so is that something that you see in other school divisions and something that we should consider not something I've seen personally except for maybe one instance in DC where part of a parcel was split off for workforce housing so I do know there is some instances out

[01:45:14] there personally haven't experienced that but definitely something I think we would need to come back with more information before being able to talk about how that would work at FCPS so there's lots of priorities right and if nothing's a priority then then you don't accomplish anything at the end of the day between maintenance backlog infrastructure backlog and school renovation construction those are three different buckets what from you know architect facilities perspective what should be our highest priority i think the biggest gap

[01:45:54] is the construction right i mean one it costs the most so it's got the highest barrier to entry and i think when that is also not um properly funded that's where you get the trickle down effect of the maintenance backlog if buildings are being more holistically looked at and renovated and modernized the backlog the energy reduction some of the other things where we shared that funding gap will start to close up because when you take the time to modernize a full facility you're bringing all that thing back up to a certain bar and so when we close that really big daunting red circle the good

[01:46:31] news is is the other circles and those other charts you close those gaps as well those school renovations should take priority over maintenance and infrastructure is that right again if I were to tackle one of those if I could fix one of those things that is what I would fix it's the most costly thing to fix but it will have again positive impacts on other areas so yes slide 26 the circle of 14 billion I don't understand this slide can you can you explain how you calculated this and how does it compare to slide 27 because you

[01:47:10] mentioned $97.5 million to get to you said the second lowest school system which is Loudon on this chart. So if you get $97 million per year on slide 27 does that get us to 25 years? No it does not. So this slide here shows us to get back to school board policy for a 25 year renovation cycle and this is the cost it would take. And then we said hey that's a lot of money let's go see what other schools in the DMV are doing so the next slide if you don't mind flipping over the next

[01:47:48] slide just does a comparison saying hey are these other school systems around experiencing the same thing are they receiving the same proportion of funding and we can say the answer is no they are receiving more comparative to how much they have to maintain and take care of so we were just sort of playing out some scenarios to give you a sense of scale to say hey even if we were to meet ourselves up to Howard County or Loudoun County, you know, and get us up to where their proportion of funding is compared to their size, that is still another $195 million per bond referendum.

[01:48:24] So again, the whole point is just to demonstrate a sense of scale and a sense of resource needs and not from our, compared to our own school board policy and compared to what other school divisions are doing. So just to clarify, $97 million gets us to $12.63 three cents not all the way to fifty two dollars and seventy five cents no it only gets us to the second lowest chart on here which is twelve dollars and twelve cents okay well that that's the lowest and the second you keep saying second lowest but that's loud in that twelve sixty three oh I believe Howard County

[01:49:02] is twelve dollars and twelve cents but so you mean the lowest not the second lowest well we're the lowest okay fair point okay so have you done a comparison of funding sources between these different school divisions and nationally because Maryland it's state centrally funded as opposed to we get funded through bonds yeah and so we tried our very very best to do an apples to apples comparison for the Virginia schools we use the wavy numbers and that was looking at purely bond Geo bond and Pago bond money not operating and then

[01:49:40] for the Maryland and DC schools we tried again just to look at their capital funding so we tried to extract out all the operating funds what is unique about Maryland is their capital funding it's a lot more of it's coming from the state level and a much smaller percentage is funded by the county level but again to be more fair in that comparison we weren't just gonna purely look at their county capital funding we did a combination of capital funding for state and local for the Maryland schools but for at least our Virginia peers there could be a comparison looking at are they issuing some type of bond in Loudon and Prince William that

[01:50:18] we aren't issuing? I mean, that's my question. Are they making use of some fiscal instruments that we're not making use of or not making use of enough? I would need to get back to you and do some of that. We'd started some of that research to talk about each school division and what their primary funding sources was, be it either bonds or taxes or a bigger proportion of operating funds.

[01:50:44] And so let me follow up with you because I think we have some of that preliminary information. And for slide 32, you said that only reflected tracked assets. What would it look like for untracked assets being included? Well, it's a really good question.

[01:51:00] We don't know what we don't know, right? And so I did want to caveat in this presentation. It's for current tracked assets because that's what we know is outdated or outaged. As we embark on the facility condition assessment, we are going to learn a lot more about our facilities and will now know having a whole nother list of inventory of assets combined with what we currently know and so I would project that this number will increase after we've done that exercise okay thank you mr. Dunn we're gonna push Rachna before mr. moon and then mr. moon because Russian has to

[01:51:37] leave Rachna thank you I really appreciate that and thank you for being flexible with my schedule I wanted to go back to some of the same slides that mr. was just speaking to so if we can go back to slide 27 that would be great so to kind of pick up on some of the points here obviously the current bond funding or the best comparison you can get when I look at Montgomery County schools I think that's a good comparison because there's number of schools were slightly higher and their enrollments slightly lower but one of the things I think this really shows is in some ways why we have to do the boundary work we're

[01:52:16] doing right because we don't have the funds to build our way out of some of capacity issues. And I think that's, you know, this is a real data-driven indicator of some of that work. But even with that, I think I heard someone say to me, well, if the enrollment's going down, why do we need funding for renovations? And part of that is because, you know, it's not a one-to-one for students in schools, right? There's a lot of common school spaces that need to be renovated regardless of whether the school's at 100% capacity or 90% or 110%. And there's also the impact of the community use. So, Ms. Szymanski, can you talk a little bit about, I don't know if been able to kind of quantify the impact of community use versus student use in the building

[01:52:53] in terms of wear and tear on the building and i think it's great that our schools are community resources and i want them to be those who are community centers and hubs but i think it's important to sort of quantify the impact that has on our buildings sure and i think you're right on and that's that was actually one of the reasons we wanted to compare ourselves to other school divisions because schools as you know have just thousands and thousands of occupants of all ages and and uses throughout the day so the wear and tear on those facilities might be greater than that of a different typology so again that's why we found it very important to compare ourselves to

[01:53:31] other school divisions because they're dealing with the same maintenance needs the same use and abuse and the same use around the clock of their facilities and so i do think that definitely needs to be considered when we think about the importance of making sure that these renovations are done at a timely clip and that's why the majority of the cip that we're seeing proposed focuses on those renovations as that key component how much do you think you know i think we've been looking this last year and had some great conversations about unique funding sources or looking at being more creative around our renovations do we look at partial renovations instead of whole renovations

[01:54:10] how much of those different things do you think can really impact when i look at these numbers Right. I look, you know, we're a little less than half. Montgomery County is per square footage, you know, and two thirds of Loudoun and significantly less than Prince William. Do you think there's a lot of space in looking at some of these things to get us from 42 to 25?

[01:54:32] Like, is that going to get from 42 to 35? Right. Like, how much can that really get to us? And you may not have the answer, but I'm trying to figure out how do we compensate for the difference in funding here? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I definitely subscribe to leave no stone unturned. So that's why we are continuously, you know, looking at ways to maximize our funding. I think first, it's important to do the best you can with the funding you have. And we hope that we've demonstrated that. I don't think there's an easy button where we're going to get a windfall and that red circle turns blue tomorrow. So we do need to continue working together on addressing it.

[01:55:10] For me, the first step is sharing this presentation with you guys to hope that you and the public can understand just a sense of scale that, you know, you're right. If we do something small to make a tweak and we get a little bit, we don't expect overnight all the problems to go away.

[01:55:28] This is going to be a long collaborative effort. But I think the first step is understanding what we have and what we need for the future to move forward. Yeah, and I think on that note, I wanted to sort of also talk about slide 30 and 31 when we talk about sort of the infrastructure replacement, right? So not entire renovations, but major maintenance, you know, athletics. We've heard a lot about athletic fields replacements. I know it took you out to Woodson to look at some of their athletic fields, and I really appreciate your team's hard work in addressing the situations.

[01:55:57] But, you know, I think we need to point out that the backlog of maintenance is just going to grow coming out of either the, I mean, my question for you, I guess I should ask is, when you look at current backlog, is this funding from bond funding, operation funds, both?

[01:56:13] Like, where are these numbers coming from? Or this is just the total need? Like, how much of this, I guess, are we paying for out of bond versus operation funds right now? Currently, none. So we had to make the tough decision to say we only have the $230 million annually coming in. we need to divert as much of that as possible into our renovations to keep that cycle down as low as we possibly can or the rate at growth of backlog is going to go way up so right now we are diverting most of that bond money towards renovations and all the major capital projects in the CIP I mean in order to renovate you do need good amount of capital up front so that's a

[01:56:51] barrier to entry so that's why we need to divert and maintain those funds for those renovations. And then that does leave us in a challenging position where that $244 million has to come from somewhere else. So a lot of that's funded from our operating funds and the year end and year end from the county. And I just bring that up because some of these numbers are very concerning, right? HVAC, like we have to have functioning HVAC systems to have a comfortable learning environment. And if you're saying our current backlog is $139 million, And in fiscal year 27, we only have almost $20 million, right, if I'm rounding up a little bit.

[01:57:32] That concerns me. And with athletic capital, asphalt, major maintenance, I know I hear a lot from the community about different maintenance issues at schools. There's one around cafeteria tables and sort of the sharp edges. And how are we able to find some creative solutions to these?

[01:57:47] And how, I think the bigger question, how are we communicating this? I really appreciate this slide, right? But it's a lot of numbers. Like, how are we telling the story of where we're at and where our funding is in comparison to surrounding jurisdictions and what creative things we are doing to address it and the impact on lower enrollment vis-a-vis what we really still need to do for our buildings?

[01:58:09] And I think that may be my time. I can't hear. So if my time is up, please tell me. That is your time. Thanks, Roshna. Thank you. Would you mind if Janice has answered that question about the story behind it? And then I'll be silent and thank you for letting me go early. And just to make sure I answer you correct, can you repeat the question?

[01:58:27] I just think we need to, and this may be Dr. Reed, put together all of these pieces to kind of answer the community's concerns. Because I don't think there's a real good understanding. And numbers are great, but we need a story behind all of this. Makes sense. I think that's something we'll have to continue to look.

[01:58:49] again we just wanted to come and share the data that when we come saying hey sorry these elevators are broken or hey you're frustrated our community is rightfully frustrated that we're not able to get something done we just want to show the true data and what would what we need and what's required to get there so i agree this side to me is like a good starting point and then being able to really articulate that in a meaningful story so people really understand what's going on and what's going to continue to go on if something doesn't change.

[01:59:24] Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Szymanski and Ms. Seismore-Heiser. I think we're also looking at -- Ms. Marin requested some very sort of clear slides for our presentation at the board meeting when we do the CIP presentation, which will look a little different than this in-depth presentation at a work session.

[01:59:47] So we are planning, I think, on those, if you will, storyboard ideas. Because I think the more people understand, we all have a shared interest in making progress on this particular area. So thank you for that reminder. Thanks, Dr. E. We'll try to get through two more folks. So we have Mr. Moon followed by Ms. Lady.

[02:00:05] Thank you, Ms. McEwen. I have a lot of questions, but I am limited by my first three minutes. So I'm going to start with slide number 24, where we see about a billion dollars of unfunded need for the first five years.

[02:00:24] Does that mean that within the first five years, based upon our proposed CIP, we will only need $200 million per year? That's correct.

[02:00:41] So, this slide shows what we currently have funded from previous referendum and loaded into our projects. And the red is what is currently unfunded, but we anticipate getting in those future $230 million annual bond sales.

[02:00:58] So, again, because we're going to be making presentation to the county board of supervisors, what if they look at this and say that, oh, we are giving you $230 million per year, And five times five is obviously going to exceed $1 billion of that one funding need for the first five years.

[02:01:24] So you don't need any more money unless you are asking to be able to do a 25-year cycle. Correct. Where we will need another $1.4 billion per year to get to that point. Is that fair?

[02:01:41] Yep, you're exactly right. So this doesn't show the need, right? It shows what we anticipate getting, and we built out a CIP from what is currently approved and what we anticipate receiving. I think, to your point, that does not include a 25-year renovation cycle.

[02:01:58] The circle looks a lot bigger when you include what we actually need per our school board policy. So let's talk about the 20-year cycle. I don't recall when that was adopted, that 25-year cycle as a school board policy. I did take a quick look at a policy 8258.

[02:02:18] It seems to be, it says, notation at the bottom, it says it was initially adopted back in 1989, and the last revision was 2014. Do you think that 25-year cycle is still a good industry standard cycle?

[02:02:36] Let me say this, because when I first got my first car, the new car it wasn't a brand new car at that time that was long ago it was long ago uh you know being able to you know drive a car a more than hundred thousand miles was unthinkable because there was considered to be a a lot of miles on a car you know back then now hey driving for two hundred thousand dollars is nothing unusual uh so it's a 25-year cycle if there was adopted long

[02:03:16] ago, 1980s, is that a still good number? I am trying to anticipate the questions that may come from supervisors and members and community who may be concerned about such a huge funding gap we are saying that we need. Yeah, it's a great question. And we go into a little bit more detail into the CIP. And basically, I would say I still agree with a generally a 25-year renovation cycle because many of the major building components when you look at a typical hvac equipment or a typical

[02:03:52] major electrical equipment those manufacturer recommendations are still less than 25 years even the year average lifespan on a roof on windows they're all 25 years or under so i do still feel like the 25 year is appropriate and that's a great time to go in and take apart those older big pieces of equipment that's that's the whole point of renovating it's not just you know painting here and there it's it's doing a big overhaul on your building systems and and those currently to date are not exceeding 25 years that's fair uh since i will have 11 seconds left

[02:04:29] let me make a request whether you can do this because again anticipating potential questions Do you have data showing what renovation cycles other school districts around us are using?

[02:04:47] I don't have that data, and it is difficult. We would really have to try to get it as apples as possible. When I look at other programs, such as our neighbors over at Loudoun, the majority of their school capital projects are like 100% brand new buildings. So that might have a different life cycle that we would need to consider when comparing to our standard ed spec renovations i know i'm out of time so could you put me on go back okay added to go back uh gentle lady thank you um and thank you for this um i really appreciate

[02:05:24] the slides in the red i think it's very telling right so you know it is our hope that we can get this story out uh to our communities and uh and taxpayers and folks who just don't seem to fully understand how limited we are in resources, because we often have community members coming and talking at board meetings around things that need to be done in certain facilities, and so a deeper understanding is great.

[02:05:51] I have a couple questions that I think are going to be tough. One is, I know we've never considered multifamily units as producing a lot of children. Obviously, I'm Drainsville, where Coates is situated, and we missed the mark.

[02:06:08] So I just, I understand it predates you. I just, I'm just asking, is that methodology going to be revisited? Are there lessons learned? Because as I, as a Herndon resident and also in Drainsville, not just in Herndon, other places, the cost of living here is insane.

[02:06:26] And so we're seeing a lot more families with children in apartments, in condos, in tiny townhouses or multifamilies than we used to. So is that methodology going to be revisited? Yeah, and I think it's important just to keep on top of that student yield formula when we think about future developments, because you're right, maybe 30 years ago, the super luxury condo is now quite aged.

[02:06:49] And so there's different families moving into those same units, right? So I definitely think that's something I'd like to keep working again in those kind of next steps in partnership with the board to make sure that, one, we're educating appropriately and that we're able to demonstrate the things that we're doing to keep on top of that okay thank you the other one is and this is slide 23 it's the five-year plan versus the 10-year plan again as a drains for resident i'm getting lots of questions about the urgency for a dunloring versus the urgency for a tyson's

[02:07:22] elementary school i don't believe we have the property for a tyson's correct what we have in the cip and i think i want to make sure i'm articulating correct is a silver line elementary school and that's out in the coats boundary right i'm going towards tyson's now oh okay i've moved and i'm looking at dunloring which is in the five year and tyson's elementary school which is in the 10-year and what i'm understanding and what i'm observing it demographically and in terms of construction is perhaps a higher need for tyson's over dunloring in terms of timing so do we have

[02:07:59] the property for tyson's have we have we purchased do we know where that's going to go i'm going to ask staff to chime in on that one because i don't believe we do the site has been identified and is owned by the board of supervisors it's uh off of i think jones branch drive it's currently where there's soccer fields yeah but it's not in possession of the school board so it's identified but not possessed by the school board correct okay so i guess that's one of my questions because i'm hearing that a lot and we're adopting a five-year and maybe this is something for me for next steps you know and again i wasn't here um you know i'm coming into my second year but it seems to me that

[02:08:38] that needs to be looked at i also would like a lot more transparency about western high school i can remember when i worked at chantilly i thought that was eminent i thought was and i i've been gone from that place now i'm in my 18th year gone and early in my tenure there they were talking about it so we don't have property for that our public needs to understand there is no property nor do we think we have the money to purchase a site is that correct that's correct we do not have a site identified at this time we have pushed that project out it's in the 10-year but it's not slated to start any planning until fiscal year 2032 and how

[02:09:16] many years has it been in the 10-year cycle I can't say for certain but I do believe it's it's been in there for quite some time but always in that more five to ten year range and never into the zero to five range with the actual cash flow thank you I just want to be transparent to our public to make sure they understand the end you know again just to highlight what my colleagues have already highlighted and and you know hopefully we'll get maybe some some press around this story because when you look at slide 27 which compares us to other districts and how much we're spending per square foot it's

[02:09:53] embarrassing it's embarrassing and we've got to do something about it thank you perfectly timed it is 1 o'clock so we will reconvene again in 30 minutes at 1:30. Thank you all. Minutes. So we will continue our discussion of the proposed CIP for fiscal year

[02:10:33] 2630. We'll continue with our list of speakers. We have Ms. Dixit followed by Ms. St. John Cunning. Thank you so much for this presentation.

[02:10:49] My question is about the community use and I know this topic has come several times before are we getting is it like giving us any kind of profit and I believe it is a small profit but how can we capitalize on that if you could give me some you know maybe some ideas and we can discuss that as a board are you talking about the current community use fees paid by are coming into NCS with the county yes

[02:11:27] So overall, the revenue, I think we had shared in the past that we do have some small amount coming in from that as a profit. That's correct. We do get a portion of the fees collected by Fairfax County. I would recommend as a next step, I'd like to connect with our chief operating officer, whoever sees all the community use of facilities.

[02:11:48] And really, I think the first step would be understanding what are the total amount of fees brought in, comparative to what fees FCPS specifically is receiving. And then that is something that I've been working with him in the background to really understand, yes, we are receiving fees to pay custodial overtime.

[02:12:06] But as we mentioned, there is a big maintenance and long-term impact to this that I don't think previously has been quantified. And I think that is something I would also recommend we do next when we try to understand the true cost of operating these great services to our community.

[02:12:24] And I think as far as I know, there is an insurance requirement from the community or the organization. And that kind of hinders a lot of organization nonprofits to utilize FCPS facilities. And we like to address that as a board.

[02:12:42] I think a few of us are interested to look into that. It will open up, obviously, more doors to getting additional revenue. Because I know a lot of organizations can pay a small fee to just do a meeting at the school facilities.

[02:12:59] And sometimes they need a larger facility like cafeteria. And right now, they need a million dollar insurance to avail that. So that's one of the things we want to look at. The other thing I wanted to ask about the facility maintenance piece of it, we all talked about the large cycle and the backlog, but have you ever done any sort of outsourcing, contracting to contractors for building maintenance?

[02:13:29] Do we do that at FCPS and what's the percentage? I would say the percentage is primarily full-time employees at FCPS. Right now we do contract out the more specialty services. A great example of that is the snow because it's so unpredictable from year to year and we don't have that level of equipment and all the additional like specialty equipment needed that is something we contract out we contract out other services such as elevators again it's such a specific technical trade that we really need to rely on skilled vendors to assist us in that but the primary HVAC

[02:14:03] electric plumbing structural that is primarily done in-house we do have contracts on call when that maybe repair what what not becomes beyond our means and measures of being able to handle it we might bring it we do have some on-call contracts to assist us as well so that's one thing i want to address is that in federal government most of the ground maintenance is outsourced and and there is a huge like basically people do the hvac and plumbing electrical work ground maintenance so that's all included in that contract given to a

[02:14:42] certain contractor and it's and then they perform the work and I don't know the cost savings which comes to to with that that's something I would like to look at it as and and reason one of the things I've heard in the last year we were I was an audit committee was that there was a lot of short like the turnover or there was open vacant positions also at the some level and when we saw talk about reactive fixing of things it's the any shortage of manpower can add to the work for flow because now you have less employees to

[02:15:17] take care of that part so I'm I'm personally interested in looking into how we can see contracting methods can be used to procure some of those services and if this was offset any cost thank you great thanks Seema next we We have Marcia followed by Kyle.

[02:15:40] So just to follow up on what my colleague just asked in terms of community use in the million-dollar insurance policy, is there a differentiation in terms of when an HOA is using, say, the library or the cafeteria for a meeting versus when there's a big event where there might be, you know, more risk in terms of what the insurance policy requirement would be because that has been brought up several times by community members and how that is creating barriers for smaller nonprofits just to see if there is a differentiation in terms of why that insurance policy next I'm going to move

[02:16:20] to when we're talking about population projections and student projections when you're looking at that are you also looking at specific areas of growth like geographic areas where there might be declines in one area and increases in another because when we're talking capacity and boundaries yes we do we do it by geographic area we do look at that again starting with that cohort progression but then we look at a variety of other factors as well so one of them does include things like housing sales census data etc etc and we work closely with the county and that is done by geographic area because we do one

[02:17:00] year and five year projections per school and we're looking at it down to the level of every school every grade level okay so then my next question that that I want to ask in terms of square footage and the amount of space per student for square footage when we're looking into that do we also consider the needs of programming in a school for example the amount of students that are receiving IEP services or multilingual services in terms of meeting you might

[02:17:37] What I'm getting at is you may have a lower student population, but a higher need population. So you're going to need space, square footage for pullouts. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And I think that then goes kind of to that question of overall capacity and utilization of a building.

[02:17:54] And there's the pure design capacity, how maybe an architect intended it 50 years ago. But we all know schools have evolved and changed, and we need to be reflective of the program. So if a school has a particular program that might require more classrooms with smaller class sizes, that is going to affect the overall available capacity in that school.

[02:18:15] And that's something we look at very closely. Can you guys stop my time while it's being answered? I'm sorry. No, you're fine. And so looking at that true program capacity is something we do annually so we understand the true availability of the school every year, given the programs and the needs of that school community.

[02:18:37] And are you also looking into projections in terms of capacity for academy space? I do think that does-- that would influence the overall student projections. It might influence schools in certain geographic areas.

[02:18:53] So yes, we do consider programs and program changes. And I would extend that to academies as well. And I know that we all desire-- and there is potentially a push for having universal pre-K.

[02:19:09] - If we were to say we're gonna have universal pre-K, what would the capacity be in our schools to handle that? - I think I would probably need to get more information to give you a sense of that. And I also think that there's other initiatives happening right now in the county too with the county wide boundary.

[02:19:29] So it will be good to know what is a potential from going through that exercise as we think about ways to expand pre-K opportunities. Okay, and my last question is, because this has been raised in some of my schools where they are older schools and they've had a small addition, but the entire school hasn't been renovated.

[02:19:52] And they have articulated to me that because of that, they have been dropped down in the queue. Could you explain that process? - Sure, that's a great question. It's good to clarify because currently, we're at the very tail end of our current renovation queue.

[02:20:07] And that's what is in the CIP that you see today. Right now we have going on, we're developing a procurement for a facility condition assessment. And part of that will also be as an outcome, developing a new renovation queue. And so as part of that scope, we are looking at all schools.

[02:20:23] It doesn't matter if it had only a capacity enhancement and not a renovation or a renovation done 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Doing an overview of that facility condition assessment level sets our facilities. So when we come with that new queue, that first batch of schools, we feel like we have all the right data across the board, irregardless of what's happened in the past.

[02:20:46] - Okay, and just for, and this has been brought up, but just for the sake of the listening public, our renovation queue has, the time has increased and increased. Can you explain the reason for that? - Sure, I mean, that is largely in part due to the overall rise of cost of construction.

[02:21:02] And there's been a variety of factors for that. We came out of a global pandemic And we saw a sharp increase in supply chain and subsequent challenges. And some of that has never gone back down to pre-pandemic prices.

[02:21:18] Furthermore, prevailing wage requirements were brought on by the county and FCPS a couple years ago. And so there's a big cost implication to that. We're still seeing inflation go up, so on and so forth. So with that being said, I don't feel like anytime soon going to be going down to those lower prices and it's just something that we need to address okay great thanks marcia next kyle i want to go back to a point that miss lady brought up prior to us

[02:21:55] breaking for lunch um the dunloring project i want to clarify something we do have a school site in tyson's i know that our name is not on the deed but that site is proffered and i'm old enough to remember the tyson's comp plan discussions and when this was done it was very clear at the time and the board of supervisors expectation at the time was a school site in tyson's a walkable school site in tyson's and in our own document we show it in our inventory list and it's a seven acre site so i want to put that out there for the public we do have a proffered land in tyson's for

[02:22:30] an elementary school that was the expectation when this comp plan was done um that being said dovetailing into dunloring if correct me if i'm wrong the point of the dunloring project was to absorb capacity as a result of growth in the tyson's area correct correct so if you look at the four schools that around dunloring right now based on our numbers they're showing a 1027 seat deficit in the 29 30 school year excess yeah excess uh yeah excess not deficit surplus there

[02:23:06] you go a 1027 seat surplus based on our projections in this document and that will be around the same time that this new school opens which is dumping another 950 seats so simple math shows nearly 2,000 seat surplus I'm kind of struggling with this guys I'll be honest because when I look at that but I look at these maps in this document showing capacity issues across the county I'm having a hard time with eighty six million dollars I really am and if the point is to absorb Tyson's

[02:23:43] capacity why aren't we putting the school in Tyson's why are we putting it three miles south. And I've driven that road long enough to know three miles on that road is a long time. So I'm really struggling with the Dunloring project. I'm looking forward to some more information, hopefully coming back to the board. We just got a letter today from the History Commission asking it to be deferred or outright denied because of some of the planning struggles that we've had. So, you know, we need to do some more homework on this before we put our taxpayers

[02:24:15] on the hook for nearly 90 for 86 million dollars assuming no cost overruns thank you okay next uh melanie yes thank you um mr manski thank you for reminding us that it was in 2021 that the two boards the board of supervisors and the school board uh together the as a result the bond would increase to 230. do you happen to know what it was prior i don't think that was a huge jump i

[02:24:51] want to say it was like around 200 or 210 if i remember i might call staff to uh confirm but i I believe the recent increase is at one point it was 180 and then went to 200 and is now at 230. So they've been roughly around that 20 to 30 million dollar jump each time they've increased it.

[02:25:11] Okay, and I would love to know more of that perhaps in the future of what's been the history of the bond funding. And I'll just put a side note is, you know, we have no dedicated funding for security upgrades. Everything that we're doing comes from either capital operation. So we have scrounged together grants, mostly federal.

[02:25:28] So I want to say to my colleagues that we as a board have to do something differently. We must do the policy review. When the chief of facilities put up that all of this product, this whole CIP, is based on a 25-year funding cycle, that is because a board determines that in 2014.

[02:25:48] And no board since has really looked at that. Thank goodness that policy is still on target. But we cannot make decisions about $8.5 billion in assets based on policies that haven't been reviewed, sometimes in over a decade.

[02:26:04] So as part of the CIP approval last year, Ms. Seismarheiser and I put forth a motion, which the board approved. It's in the follow-on motion response that we received in April, but it's still pretty light in response. But it has the 27 policies-- so this was the public motion-- that some of them are redundant, some of them are outdated some of them need to go away we must do this work because if we don't we will be right here again in one year having the same conversation because this staff is using this as their roadmap so we have governance in a week one week from today and i'm really eager to see the agenda

[02:26:42] posted i know we just did a huge lift doing the grading policy and the boundary policy but also those two policies were out of date we're supposed to be reviewing having completed a review every five years okay not like starting it in five years but like a new policy updated and if there's no change there's no change to me this is the most important thing because if we don't do this everything else is it's not going to happen so um i think it's just the prime example of what happened when a board ignores and abandons its duty to do policy work so um you know just backtracking knowing what it takes to produce the cip i believe you know you in the late fall

[02:27:22] the team the facilities team is really trying to wrap this thing up so that means we've got to get them policies way more in advance so the work starts right now so i hope that um our governance meeting in a week we can discuss with the superintendent what that timeline looks like just like we've done with the grading policy and the boundary policy to back map that and analyze these policies into something better um and we must have discussions together about what we requested from the follow-ons that we all did last year we've gotten volumes from the staff i'm aware that the chair vice chair and superintendent have discussed scheduling additional work sessions we need multiple work sessions to talk about these huge topics this will

[02:28:00] be a legacy and our entire community is counting on us so let's do it great so we're going to move to second round so we'll be doing two minutes each so off uh to the races uh dr anderson thank you may i ask that we continue with three minutes because we still have two and a half hours on the schedule okay after conferring and hearing her telling me this we will continue with three minutes for this thank you um one of the things that i wanted to ask which i spoke with you right

[02:28:36] before the break is how nimble can we be once decisions are made because i certainly understand that we can only make the decision with the information in front of us but i think mr um mcdaniel really underscored what we were talking about which is there are future concerns that are surrounding the dunloring project that it's set up to address future concerns but we also have current concerns that are not being addressed what is that cut off where we review the data

[02:29:11] and maybe pivot to put our resources however limited they are to the places where they're most needed yeah so i guess taking denlorian aside and just thinking more generally about your question i will say it probably depends right depends on the situation i do think the benefit of our work current work plan is that we are updating and adopting a new cip every year and we are being very good at being proactive of looking and taking in new information from our projections right we do our projections every year so as something that we've kept our

[02:29:48] finger on the pulse on on a development becomes active then we have the time and the ability to put it in that new updated projection set and the new projection set continuously is updated and taking in new data so then from there it's actually put into the cip and we're making decisions based on all that data that we're collecting and updating it annually so i think moving forward it might just make sense to talk about things that have changed again we kind of spoke briefly about trends and projections and whatnot but if there's a way we could talk more holistically about things that might be changing any sort of update in the cip i think that's

[02:30:27] probably worth exploring further i'm definitely encouraged and i want to have that conversation but similarly to what was shared i find it difficult to explain to the public that we are going to add as was described 900 seats in an area where there's already a surplus i can't explain that to anybody in the mason district because we're bursting at the seams getting a little bit more specific into the student enrollment part of the cip on table five which i guess begins uh page 53 somewhere there i'm sorry page 51 actually table one

[02:31:05] that shows coats elementary's numbers um for this year and in the out years Coates does not have modulars or temporary classrooms? Coates does have multiple temporary trailers out on their site right now.

[02:31:21] It's not here without it. Can you just kind of help me understand table one? That's on page 51 of the full document. Sure. So right now, the first set, that capacity utilization, we're currently sitting at a 137% deficit.

[02:31:43] now that i believe does include modulars but does not include trailers and i'm asking make sure i'm not missing that okay that's correct and with the projected growth in this specific area we are seeing by 2029-2030 school year that over utilization to be at 163 and again just a caveat that does consider modulars we consider them a more permanent type structure with a foundation et cetera it does not consider temporary capacity trailers are we missing data in the last two which

[02:32:17] is without modulars i don't think it's applicable in the case of coats because coats does currently not have any modulars if it did we would show it an even higher over utilization so it does not have modular correct it does have trailers it has many trailers it does not have modulars so how does a school qualified to receive a modular? I think that's something that my team works closely with at the beginning of the year we look at the projections that come through we work closely with ISD and DSS on identifying program needs and

[02:32:54] then honestly we look to see what kind of resources we have available with the current modular systems that we have to deploy those to the areas of greatest need. Because when I take a look at the schools that I rep the schools that I represent which is park lawn without the modulars they're similar situated as coats so if we were to add modulars at coats and i'm just using this as an example because i'm trying to understand right why park lawn is not also on table one again we were trying to be very flexible and show the data in multiple ways like if you do consider modulars which again we consider modulars a more permanent

[02:33:34] structure that was the basis of our you know putting it on table one right now that would be coats only because they don't have any and so we can see that we're at 137 percent right I see it but I guess I'm disagreeing the premise of this and I'd like a review of particularly the schools where those people are looking to me to get the sea of modulars out from where they are great if you could speak to renovations you talked about how renovations have the biggest bang for our buck and I appreciate that all renovations do they

[02:34:12] automatically include an expansion and square footage that's a good question it depends depends on the size of the existing building we do try to again be very cost-efficient with our building so when you are renovating it does make sense if you're going to expand, do it at the time of renovation. Additionally, a lot of times you rely on the expansions because it's a phased occupied renovation. So sometimes you would build some of that additional expansion and then the kids would go there as you renovate, back renovate the area. So typically we do try to accommodate for that long-term growth when we are renovating.

[02:34:51] And I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you use it in conjunction with boundary to best align where your capacity is and yeah is that it that doesn't sound my quite it does answer my question but it raises this question for me when I look at the future projects that are going to be renovated and potentially expanded one two four of them I believe already are in the surplus category so I wonder is that the best and the most strategic use of our limited resources to expand schools that in the out years already show that they're in the surplus right I

[02:35:28] would agree with you and maybe when we say expansion it doesn't mean maxing out to that policy of a thousand plus kids right it might be just putting in a little bit of growth and that's something we do look at when we develop the space and program for every renovation school so they're not always the same built out to the same amount I'll take go back please okay thank you - Thank you, Mr. Moon, followed by Mr. Dunn.

[02:35:58] - Thank you, Mr. McAlvin. Probably this question goes along with questions related to downloading, constructing, I guess changing the building to a school building at the downloading site.

[02:36:17] If we are projecting overall enrollment decline, and at the same time we are presenting to the public that we will be building two schools, to elementary schools, how do we explain that?

[02:36:36] Because there is just overall a capacity deficit, whether it's just a pure capacity or program capacity, we still need two more school buildings?

[02:36:52] - Correct, I think right now you'll see that when you look at our maps across the board, there's areas that are underutilized and overutilized. And while there's an overall short decline, that's across the county, right? So there's other pockets where we still are experiencing growth in specific geographic locations.

[02:37:13] So I would argue that. I would also argue there's other factors that relate to utilization of a building and it being overutilized. And some of that might be programming. If we're adding additional programming, we're going to need more space. I think pre-K was brought up in the conversation.

[02:37:30] You need space if you wanted to expand pre-K options, so there's still a building need, even if there is an overall decline in the county, when you look more specifically in the geographic areas and when you consider other factors, such as programmings, geographic location, et cetera.

[02:37:46] - So going back to the downloading elementary school site, that even though there is a capacity surplus currently existing in the area, are we then expecting additional programs to be placed to use that excess capacity?

[02:38:11] - Potentially, and I think you need to keep it in the context of county-wide, right? Maybe it's not there, but it might be somewhere else. So we need to consider that. - So I second, you know, basically what Mr. McDaniel suggested earlier that we really look at.

[02:38:31] At least we need to find the real good justification be presented to a county taxpayers in the governing body asking for more funding when you constantly ask for more funding because we are there is a funding deficit that we need to be able to really explain where how we are most efficiently using our resources they are giving us so with that said i have some minor questions i'm gonna go to a page number

[02:39:10] This is a report, CIP. It's not part of any presentation, it wasn't. Page number 38. What caught my attention was, I was trying to see the trend in enrollment projection.

[02:39:29] Then I saw, please correct me if I am interpreting this wrong, in three sets of bar graphs on the page number 38 of CIP. at the very bottom in in green color is a special education and it's broken into high school middle school and elementary and all seem to be either you know below 10 or hovering around 10 for the special education which is quite different from my understanding of percentage of students our

[02:40:04] students in special education which is somewhat like a 16 so what am i what am i missing here i'm actually going to have some staff provide a little bit of context to that because the numbers displayed are correct they're ranging anywhere from that 7 to 11 percent but i'd like them to be able to provide a little bit more clarity of course um the those graphs look at the self-contained special ed populations um the ones that would be level one maybe in the general ed classroom um so we're looking at self-contained they are the ones that are in a dedicated like

[02:40:41] enhanced autism classroom or an ID classroom okay since my top time is up probably I need to do at least one more go back later thank you mr. moon for that self-reflection next we'll have mr. Dunn I'd like to thank mr. McDaniel for bringing up the issue about Dunloring and the data he shared what I'll share is in my district Bucknell elementary school in around 2017 or so had 300 seats added on to its capacity its capacity was 600 but that school had had

[02:41:18] only 250 students for decades so why were 300 seats added back then at significant cost to taxpayers I've asked a question to dozens of people and no one's been ever able to explain to me why and adding to this and there's another project in my area pre-k Center that I don't think is necessary or could be repurposed for another thing, I think it would behoove this school board to not assume that everything that's currently in the queue should remain in the queue.

[02:41:50] And I think we should start with the superintendent, Dr. Reed, taking a thorough scrub of what's in the queue right now, where we have not bid out anything, or even if we've bid out only design, should we actually go forward with that? Do the same analysis that Mr. McDaniel did, and he's a school board member, doesn't have the whole facility staff, and look at the surrounding schools and say, is there capacity at those surrounding schools?

[02:42:13] And should this project go forward? And do it in a fairly ruthless way, because we just, we don't have the dollars to, you know, we have to make hard choices as it is, we should conserve every dollar and spend it in the most efficient way that actually meets the demands of the system.

[02:42:30] So we're not, as you say, we're governing as a school system, not a system of schools. I want to ask what expectation you would have that right now we're in the midst of a school boundary review that will involve a lot of changes, right? What effect do you think it will have so that we are having perhaps a completely different conversation next year?

[02:42:50] Yeah, like I said, we do this process every year. So this time next year, we potentially could have more data, right? So my guidance would be is we use the current data that we have to date to make the decisions are best suited with the resources we have in this cip and then again i agree we would continue the conversation see what has changed i think the boundaries will have some sort of impact to this work and then we're going to make some recommendations on what should change as a result of that and given scarce dollars we have facilities condition assessment which

[02:43:26] really should be the the foundation of determining which schools get renovated and in what order and and perhaps at what scale, partial, full, et cetera. When do you expect that work to be done? - Yes, and I had a background slide, if someone could bring that up with a timeline.

[02:43:50] If you can go to slide. - Oh.

[02:44:11] - No, it's the facility condition assessment in the back, 42. Thank you. Because we have so many initiatives, we didn't wanna build out a full slide for the sake of this presentation, but we did include a brief slide in the background information because the facility condition assessment, to your point, is very, very tied to the CIP work.

[02:44:34] So currently we're in phase one right now. This is the proposal and procurement. Facilities team has been drafting and completing that scope of work built out to the budget that we have for this endeavor. It's now with procurement services, and then we'll move on to phase two, which is bringing a vendor on board.

[02:44:51] And just as a reminder, this is going to be to do the facility condition assessment and have that same vendor, to your point, develop that framework for creating the queue and then as an outcome, create the queue itself. So it will really depend on when we can bring the vendor on board, but our anticipation is that at that nine month period after we bring them on, that we'll have a lot of the data collected and then we can then take another month or two to about that one year point to actually create that new renovation queue.

[02:45:24] we'll be you know again spending kind of in parallel path assessing the facilities thinking about the ways the weight that factors and other things to consider and then generate it my goal is for that to then time up with enough heads up that it could influence not next year's cip well not next year's cip but potentially the following and can you talk a little bit about the the benefits financially in terms of construction time frames that could be achieved by implementing construction management at risk and design build which

[02:46:01] fpac and cpdc have been looking at and discussing with you over the past year yeah it's a great topic to bring up and it's something that we have taken the first steps as staff to allow ourselves to use this methodology current school board policy 8240 only limits ourselves to low bid construction methods so the one thing that we've been working on since the last cip presentation is working with our partners at legal counsel and procurement teams and our facilities groups and we've redlined 8240 to allow for these two methodologies i will say construction manager

[02:46:40] at risk and design build while they are a little bit different they do follow more of that best value model versus just going in under a blind concealed bid one of the benefits of that is you get your builder up front earlier on in the construction progress process and while you I can't always come up with like a dollar saved.

[02:46:58] Just having someone on board earlier in the process with that perspective is very beneficial to school construction work. School construction work is on an aggressive timeline. It's complicated. We have to deal with a lot of logistics. So just really having that builder to help with the constructability reviews, to make sure that the designs are meeting current budgets.

[02:47:20] It's really invaluable information. When done right, sometimes those builders can even bring on, as a design assist, some of the vendors and installers of the equipment and more specialty items. So just having the guy that installs the HVAC system be a part of that HVAC design process is great.

[02:47:39] And so while I don't think it's gonna make that big red circle blue, I do think it's gonna help with the overall product here at FCPS, especially given the challenging and constraints of school construction. And I do think it might offer some predictability to the budgets too, because you're building to a guaranteed maximum price and you're catching all those, hey, I caught this, I caught that of making the price go up upfront.

[02:48:06] And so the cost of the construction is still gonna be roughly the cost, but I think it might be better for that planning of the budget. - So bottom line, if the school board adopts the red line to 8240, we could adopt these new construction methodologies, construction management methodologies, which could speed construction and perhaps reduce costs?

[02:48:26] - Potentially, yes. We had a lot of conversations with vendors in the DMV. When you have a project that's already very far down design, you don't get that benefit of having them upfront. So we wanna pick the right projects more in that moving forward versus the projects you might see go out to bid as early as next month for some renovation projects we have.

[02:48:51] Right now, we are slated to have design start per the current proposed CIP for two renovation schools in FY25, so we're actually writing those RFPs and writing the scopes of work now. And we're writing in the scope of work, it's anticipated that this could be a construction manager at risk, so the architect, when they're brought on board, know that that's a potential procurement method.

[02:49:14] So we are trying to future-proof all the schools moving forward to allow for this. - In terms of the, um modulars trailers in our county we have 900 classrooms and modulars and trailers when can we expect to reduce that significantly and get it down to zero that's a it's another it depends kind of answer i one i think there's a lot of initiatives going on to address capacity like the county-wide boundary work so i will be very interested to see what that does for the ability

[02:49:49] to remove trailers i also think trailers if we're being quite frank offer something and so it's a trade-off right you know we have as we mentioned the desire to expand programs and offer more to our students so they need to have some sort of space and so i think moving forward i would like to work with everyone on ways to reduce that but we got to understand what the trade-offs are can you talk about the p3 guidelines that you developed with office of division council sure for the legal guidelines correct so again i'll just remind everyone policy 8240 only allows for

[02:50:28] low bid construction so in addition to redlining 8240 to allow for construction manager at risk and design build we also wanted to get ahead of things again just letting it be an option to develop legal and procurement guidelines for a potential public-private partnership should we ever choose to enact one.

[02:50:49] This could be as a rider to that policy to allow for it to take place. So we developed a draft, and I believe that was part of the follow-on motions, and it really just kind of walks through how we would envision this process going. We talked about the different ways we could solicit for a P3 vendor or unsolicited vendors could bring forth ideas to us and how we would engage the board, how we would engage the public, how we could um set up the criteria for moving that forward uh has uh fcps looked at innovative

[02:51:24] construction technologies such as 3d printing or modular construction not modulars in terms of trailers but modular in terms of assembling buildings like legos where the legos are built in a factory yeah it's a good question i think everyone's favorite projects the stadium restrooms is a good example that's actually a prefabricated unit and while it was a it was good in that we learned a lot in working with the county i think there was some frustration on the time it took to get to the point where we could get underway with construction and a lot of that was because of the prefabricated nature and so that's been good for us on that smaller scale to understand

[02:52:03] how we would permit it how we would get an architect to sign off on it and what we're we're seeing now is they're in fabrication and we're going to be able to build them at a fairly rapid pace. The only other example I can think of and share it's a project not really discussed much it's not on the CIP is we had our grounds and operations center burnt partially burned down in a fire so we had the insurance money to rebuild part of the facility that's the Woodson complex and so we're actually doing a prefabricated model there as well so So it's under construction right now.

[02:52:37] It's slated to open this summer, and it's been really amazing. We built the foundations and did that last summer and over the fall, and you just saw the building kind of pop up overnight. So once that building's open, I think we're going to do kind of a debrief on that one as well just to understand, because that's a little bit larger of a scale than just the restroom.

[02:52:56] Not a full school, but on a much bigger building type. Great. Thank you, Mr. Dunn. Next, we have Ms. Dixit.

[02:53:14] So I'm going to ask a question about one of the, I guess, one of the topics we keep discussing about Western High School. Are we looking at any ways of acquisition of the land?

[02:53:31] We have talked about it. If you could address that a second, and I have some follow-up questions on that, too. Sure. We've engaged a real estate broker, JLL, to help us identify potential fits for a Western High School. again without knowing the exact criteria and need and size it's a little bit kind of like shots in the dark but we are continuously meeting with them to say hey what are potentials it's you know it's very difficult to find that many acres of open land to build upon so we've also asked them to

[02:54:04] still to consider office space facilities as well I think we mentioned that in last week's EL there's a lot more of a trend towards retrofitting office buildings we actually went toward one at alexandria city public schools where they took an office building and turned it into an elementary school and with great success and now they're building another one across the street so we are having them explore that again i do think the biggest barrier to entry is financial we have some money approved in the previous bond for some site acquisition but just given that dollar per

[02:54:39] square foot and dollar per acre we don't have the funding so currently it's sitting in an out year and so as we get more information about the boundaries and other initiatives and other programs going on in the division i do think that could offer some clarity on the program requirements and then as we get closer to implementing and until us we're in that cip it should fall too so one of the things uh why you know there is a request for a western high school obviously it's it's a geographical need because there's a lot of population growth in the western side of

[02:55:16] fairfax but also there's a whole question about having a another science of technology school which is focusing more on you know again these things and i feel like we shantley being one of the schools which has the academy but it's like overcrowded already and centerville high school has his own challenges and going through the permitting right now it's going to take them a long time so we really don't see any anything until 2030 or 2035 to even get to a

[02:55:51] new high school so in the interim um i wanted to just see if we could be a little bit more creative and we have that some funding there and we use some of that funding to uh maybe potentially look at other school under the high school in Western side and make that as a science and technology center or center just adding more programming and maybe adding more space so obviously you you know you can do that analysis which has a capacity or the acreage but I was looking at the Senderville high school

[02:56:29] has 35 acres center centerville high school 36 sorry center shantley's 35 acre space westfield high school is sitting on 76 acres westfield is not on the renovation queue I wanted to know ask why it's not being added ever I can't speak to the history of where Westfield fell I knew I know the current queue were on was developed in 2008-2009 and it looked at specific school criteria I

[02:57:03] believe it schools built older than 91 92 so again without really knowing the specifics that was the nexus of the current QUC today that Westfield West fields on and then again just to reiterate we're nearing the end of it and I think at this point the direction and the previous approved CIPs was honoring the current renovation projects and then we're going to as this slide shows do the facility condition assessment so we can get a new queue and I just want to remind everyone we're gonna be looking at all the schools so everything is on the table to really understand the condition of their

[02:57:42] facilities when considering the next pipeline of schools thank you for that answer but I think with the boundary review and also the discussion we just had that we need to look at even the current pipe queue a bit more I think any school which is not currently in construction should be looked at again which is not currently having active construction still in permitting and designing and things like that because this question has come up that the one school did not need to be constructed or may not be needed there and possible

[02:58:19] location so we are doing this 40 year boundary review after and taking so much of time effort to do it it should be used for CIP that's like and I think also this facility condition assessment would really help to come up with a better queue so having a queue from 2008 may be redundant after we review all of that so and also I would like to look at adding some funding for science and technology school at one of the existing high school points duly noted and

[02:58:54] agreed on the boundary and whatnot great next miss lady thank you and I appreciate the continued conversations around capacity for Dunloring versus what's happening with expansion and Tysons because I too remain concerned about spending taxpayer money at that level also I'm a little perplexed too I'm gonna I don't want to derail this conversation I'm gonna go back to slide 38 why is it that we only are counting self-contained when we indicate a sped

[02:59:27] number in here I find that not to be transparent to our public page 38 page 38 of the CIP and we can follow up with more of the rationale but I believe that's because it's directly tied to space that it's a dedicated physical space that has an impact on the program capacity and utilization for schools which makes sense to me so can we just add special education self-contained sure because we can make a clarification to somebody who's understanding that

[03:00:04] we're quoting a different statistic of our special ed population and then this is absolutely absolutely so my other question is I know that part of the boundary view or at least I've heard perhaps there might be some conversations later around wanting to have our elementary schools be K through five in our middle schools to be six through eight which might in turn requires to convert some elementary schools to middle schools just hypothetical is that is there is there something that we projectively know about what cost it would take to do that conversion we do not and that's one of the big things we're going to be working through in the development of the

[03:00:41] scenarios and the countywide boundary work and again I just want to reiterate since we are in that phase one we're engaging with the community right now we have not begun to start on any kind of development and building out what that could look like so you know again in later conversations we might have more to share but we just don't right now okay I appreciate that and perhaps that was some at one of the events I went to maybe that was somebody's on somebody's sheet it was shared so I just thought I'd ask the question thanks Marcia so

[03:01:17] just to follow up again from being in elementary schools and when we're talking about self-contained that is dedicated space but we have to consider if a student has a requirement for speech there has to be a dedicated space where that child can be pulled out to get those services and I don't think that's ever reflected because I'm seeing some of these schools where they where we say they're at 87% capacity in schools that I've worked in and there's not a room where you can pull that kid aside to give him speech therapy so when

[03:01:51] we're talking about those specialized services it might not be overall 24/7 dedicated space but that space would be used to maybe work with the speech therapist it might be used you know differently by sometimes a counselor it might be used differently with working one-on-one with a multilingual learner and I think that sometimes the need for space is not really reflected here in terms of the high need of some of our students which goes to why we need the funding if there were not these extra requirements that our students needed we

[03:02:31] wouldn't need these set-aside spaces and I think sometimes people misunderstand that so I want to just put that out there because that was just brought up but what I want to highlight is the important work that we were doing here I was working at Bucknell when that renovation was made and at that time there were schools around it that were over capacity and there was supposed to be a read a redistricting there was supposed to be a boundary change and I was told by a sitting school board member that that was not going to happen because it was the third rail and they didn't take up that work then and I was

[03:03:09] told we will not do this unless we do this overall and what I'm saying is that ball has been pushed down the field too long and I just want to say that I appreciate the work that all of my colleagues are doing here because we're having the courage to touch that third rail because it is what's best for our students had the changes been made then we would have already had some boundary work done kids that can walk to Bucknell are being bused to Bellevue and that's not right so I just want to thank everybody for taking for having the courage to do the work that we're doing because that should have been done back

[03:03:46] then and it wasn't okay we're gonna go on to third round and it looks like we're gonna keep it at three minutes because there are limited placards so dr.

[03:04:05] Anderson thank you can you speak a little bit about because I know I've raised this before and I don't know whether this is a policy that we need to review what the right sizing of our schools what they should be because I I think that would impact how large we build our schools.

[03:04:25] - Yeah, we do have a school board policy that talks about maximum size of elementary, middle, and high school. I just can't recall the exact numbers off the top of my head. - Are there recommendations from the industry or educationally speaking, Dr. Reed, that you can pull that talks about the right size for our schools to function most optimally?

[03:04:46] - I think there's been a lot of research around that and I think it's mixed in general there's a sweet spot schools can sometimes feel a little too small when I think of secondary schools the smaller the school sometimes the fewer the elective options are but then there's also a downsize if it gets too large then fewer students are able to access some activities because there's so many young people competing for those so I think there's some sweet spots often between sixteen hundred and two thousand is commented on for high schools I think a thousand to fifteen hundred for

[03:05:25] middle and elementary is five hundred to a thousand generally but there are bodies of research that crisscross all of that and there are ways to make very large secondary schools feel smaller by creating learning communities within the school houses and I know a lot of our schools use those practices so it's a little mixed I think it's an opportunity for us to have that research kind of merge with our policy because all of the schools that I've seen that we've renovated at the high school level they've been to be a 2500 2500 and elementary seem to be all over the place and we do have some elementary schools

[03:06:04] that are small in this division I think there's what two or maybe three tops remaining and if we're taking on this whole comprehensive work that has to be part of the conversation we can't leave what can be an impactful component out of the equation so perhaps Robin not to put you on the on the spot but just to add that to the governance list of policies to review the other thing that I wanted to talk about is you know we've primarily before the lunch break we

[03:06:40] had a fairly doom and gloom presentation with the CIP it seems as if there's no way out like we're stuck in this space and we're trying to figure it out it just seemed really dark what are the options and I know that we didn't have a slide on options but that's what I'm asking for for the public presentation because sitting in the space of oh well we're here we need 14 million dollars and we're just like popping different thoughts here or there it's unorganized I would like to have an organized slide with options things things that we can be sitting with and talking about and wrestling with and things that the

[03:07:17] public can also be wrestling with rather than the popcorning that we're doing right now is that a possibility dr. Reed so I I mean anything's possible if you ask for it I will make sure we find a way to provide it I would ask for a little more direction on options because recalling that the purpose of the presentation is to approve this five-year plan of projects so I think we when we began this we talked about this the purpose of this afternoon was to

[03:07:55] review the five-year plan and to talk about a variety of other strategies and to talk about sort of how we got here today and if we stay on this course where we're going to end up down the road so are you asking for options for future thinking and planning or options for this five years or it's actually both because the conversation today has gone beyond those five years you know the billion dollars of resources that we require is beyond that if we're limiting it to the five years i think we heard very loudly and clearly like how How can we maximize the resources that we have right now with the needs that we have right now?

[03:08:34] I'm going to add again to the chorus of do we have options for Dunloring? And I know sometimes we are already a little bit into the project. But is it worth it to perhaps, you know, lose a couple of million because we've had design or to kind of waste 86 million because we don't need the space?

[03:08:52] Just whatever it is that our task is in the conversation that we've had here, which has been way beyond five years I'd like to see a way out because otherwise I feel like I always feel in these conversations we kind of sit and we talk and we complain and we say the same things but yet the changes are not as the changes don't come in the way that I think we would like to okay so you're asking for then options for the five years and options for the future whatever seems to make sense I think we have a priority on the five years so maybe we'll

[03:09:29] start there just to move this conversation out of the space that we're in which is we don't have a way out to make our buildings the learning environments that we want them to be with the capacity that we want them to be so i appreciate that clarification thank you i do think the current cip proposal in front of you and presentation is essentially our um those are the options we're providing for the five years so I think if there are different options or options you want us to look at again the five-year options are what

[03:10:05] the presentation today is and I think we can certainly look at what's possible outside that moving forward but I think the five-year current options are the presentation today so I just want to make sure that as we go back to work before next week that we're clear on what options, if any, you want adjusted for this five years.

[03:10:29] That was my time, but I can talk about that in the go back. Let's just handle it now if you want to address that point. Yeah. Let me just take an example of what's here. On slide -- is it 30? On slide 30, where we're talking about the backlog, we know how important this is.

[03:10:48] What can we do here? What are some options for us to consider to address this? Is it only going to be year-end? Is it going to be some sinking fund issue? What can we do to address this that can be discussed when we have this public conversation? It's those kinds of options.

[03:11:04] It's not necessarily what we are definitely going to do, but we can't just talk about the issue but not have a plan to resolve it. Does that make sense a little bit more? Yes, ma'am.

[03:11:20] Okay. Great. Mr. Moon? Thank you, Mr. McClubin. Just a couple of questions. - Let me start with something smaller. The capital sinking fund of $9.5 million.

[03:11:36] How long has the fund been accumulating? Do we know? - So it's been three years. - Three years. - That we've started to receive annual year end from the county, so it's-- - The fluctuation, right?

[03:11:53] It's not-- - It's not-- - It's not guaranteed. Last year, to your point, was in that $9 million range, I think we had that shown on a previous slide, 9.5, yes. Do you know how much we have had in three years?

[03:12:11] I believe it was somewhere in that $9 million range each year. So if I had to estimate, I would say somewhere in between that $25 and $30 million total. And what can we use the money for? Right now, majority of that money is being dedicated to HVAC replacement work to getting us out of that backlog slide that we just saw.

[03:12:35] This year, we did siphon a little bit of it to do that elevator modernization program. So, in short, it is for critical infrastructure needs of the highest priority. Okay, and that is determined by use of them. Funding is determined by us, correct?

[03:12:52] Correct, yes. Not all of supervisors. Correct. Okay. With that done, I'm going to go back to enrollment projection. With the declining enrollment projected, I want to see how that is related to overall capacity needs. Because when we actually figure out, determine the capacity needs, we look at the program capacity as opposed to just a pure number in number of students. Correct?

[03:13:22] that's correct so even with the declining overall enrollment projection do you see that our program capacity needs is growing steady or declining along with enrollment projection decline i would say it's on a definite increase so i've been here two falls now and each fall we've worked closely with our partners at instruction and dss and we've been identifying many many new program needs that need to be put into schools and find that space um over the last few years so would you be able

[03:14:01] to because you are looking at the enrollment projection going forward for five years until 2019 or 2030 would you be able to also i mean this is going to be rough estimate about similar numbers related to program capacity needs?

[03:14:19] Sure, I think if I'm understanding you correct, I could look at historical trends on how many additional programs we've had to add per year and maybe come up with that rate of growth. Because I want to be able to share that with the public and supervisors, you know, if and when someone comes back to us and say that enrollment is declining, so program that capacity needs should also decline but our program capacity needs is does not actually is actually going the other direction correct okay and then if it could also provide

[03:14:54] some explanation as to why that is so okay thank you okay uh mr dunn followed by mr mcdaniel um just bottom line for my constituents it sounds like we don't have enough money to achieve the school board policy to achieve to renovate schools every 20 25 years is that right that is correct okay and and i also see in here on slide 33 for example that while we have commendable goals to achieve net zero goals for our future buildings we we also don't have enough money to do that

[03:15:33] either is that right just to clarify projects per the jet directives projects that are in the cip starting with design in FY25 and beyond, are being designed with the net zero technologies to make it net zero ready where possible. So you will see that number, that premium baked into the estimates and the cash flow that it's part of the CIP. And what does net zero ready mean? That's different from net zero. Yeah, so just to speak about it very broadly, net zero is when your

[03:16:09] your building consumes energy but then it's offset by solar production or renewable production so that the net is zero energy we say often net zero ready because maybe we design and construct a renovation and it's at a very low energy consumption rate but we haven't put in the solar or the renewables yet so I would say it's net zero ready so when the solar comes on it's reasonably feasible that we could add the solar to get to that zero status. And do we have the ESCOs in place to actually provide 1.35 billion dollars? We have the county has an ESCO contract that we

[03:16:49] have amended to ride so we have an avenue to do it and and the vendors lined up to to this chart it's an issue of funding it's the barrier to entry. And aren't ESCOs normally self-funding through savings and reduction in utility costs?

[03:17:10] Yes, that is correct. It's my understanding here in Fairfax County there is required upfront funding to implement the ESCOs. I think it becomes an issue of it counting towards the debt cap. So I do think it's probably a more nuanced conversation, but essentially you can get maybe more work for a lower cost amount of money if you leverage the forthcoming energy savings, but there is upfront money required as part of it.

[03:17:42] Do you know what percentage is required upfront? You know, I'd probably have to get back to you. I think I saw a proposal once that was probably in like the $20 to $30 million range worth of work, and the upfront charge would have been in that $8 million range, if that gives you a sense of scale.

[03:18:00] Is that just Fairfax County, or have you seen that in other jurisdictions as well, that that much money is required up front, because I've seen, I normally see ESCOs with $0 up front. - Yeah, I believe that's more for Fairfax. - So for swing spaces, we don't tend to use swing spaces.

[03:18:19] So we have phased construction, you know, students are still in the building while it's being renovated, but that has the effect of increasing our construction timeframes and increasing our construction costs. So can you talk a little bit about what alternatives might exist and for students to perhaps not be in the building while it's being renovated and how that could affect our construction timeframes and our construction costs.

[03:18:43] - Yes, and we did provide a follow on motion, the first follow on motion of 2024 for facilities, the one that was issued as part of the CIP in February that we answered in April that really started to discuss some of this, some of the considerations you need to have.

[03:18:59] Swing spaces, you do need to be very, very aligned to the academic year because you're moving up, picking up a whole school and putting them somewhere else. And so you need to make sure that space is up and ready and then when they come back, the space needs to be ready. But we did meet with cost estimators, some architects and contractors to kind of get a sense of how much time you could realistically save.

[03:19:22] So again, because you have to align it to the academic year, you're really looking at probably two years, right, for a typical elementary school stay. one year i mean construction would take way more than that three years you're already hitting what we're currently doing today so i would recommend that target be two years for an elementary swing space so then you kind of compare that to what the typical timelines have been running of you know 28 to 30 months and so we started to do some general cost estimating to say you have some potential savings in the general conditions of the contractor maybe a little less time having the

[03:20:00] architect out there during construction and then not having to bring out trades multiple times a little bit for phase one a little bit for phase two and so we could see some overall costs come down the things you got to consider is the cost to implement the swing option what it whatever it might be so if you're building a brand new temporary building you know that might not be worth or it might cost more to do that we're very interested in looking at some on-site swing options because there it's could be almost zero for swing space cost so if we have a site where we could keep the existing building up and running while building a new facility somewhere

[03:20:39] else if there's enough acreage on the property and then moving them over so in the second follow-on motion that was directed in may and we just recently submitted to the board we did a little little bit of an expansion on that so we looked at some of the schools in the current proposed CIP and did a feasibility study on where there might be potentials for that to take place I do think it's not a it's something else we need to flush out with the county making sure that we can meet far and floor area ratio requirements make sure we can get everything permitted appropriately but we have started to do some of that preliminary documentation

[03:21:18] - Have you also engaged with the county in any discussions about possibly co-locating facilities? For example, the recent Lorton Community Center combines a library, athletic facilities, meeting space, non-profit space with a large kind of playground area.

[03:21:34] And in the city of Alexandria, they just opened a school where the swimming pool for the high school converts to a community pool on weekends and evenings. Is that something that's, are there any discussions that are ongoing or been initiated to discuss those kinds of possibilities?

[03:21:52] - I believe there's been discussions in the past with prior boards and I know with planning commission and whatnot, but I do think that's something I've had the same thoughts on as reflecting upon this presentation, right? That we probably need to expand beyond and have good partnership with the county and see what's possible.

[03:22:12] And so I think that's something we could definitely look at together looking into the future. MR. DUNN, JUST A REMINDER, WE ARE GOING TO HAVE MORE WORK SESSIONS THAT DIVE DEEPLY ONTO THESE HUGE TOPICS LIKE SWING SPACES AND PUBLIC PARTNER, PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS, BECAUSE WE NEED TO ALL LEARN MORE ABOUT IT AND SEE HOW WE CAN DIRECT THE SUPERINTENDENT.

[03:22:36] THANK YOU. GREAT. MR. MCDANHAM? THANK YOU. AND YOU BROUGHT IT UP, AND I KNOW IT'S NOT STRICTLY LIMITED TO CIP, BUT MAYBE, THE FACILITY CONDITION ASSESSMENT, IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING, CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG, THAT THE IDEA at least is to assess all buildings not just school buildings it is currently written on our scope that way i think we potentially are looking at just getting an a la carte price so we can make sure that it works within our budget but the intent is to look at all buildings you're correct

[03:23:10] okay will that include um clifton elementary school i believe it will okay because we're putting buses there and playgrounds and we have utilities turned on and we're paying for security and all that stuff so is that going to be the building inside as well yeah the scope the scope of work is pretty straightforward for all buildings so that it's the same and that does include interior assessments perfect thank you okay miss marin followed by miss dixit yeah i've been trying to

[03:23:44] pull up the policy um class size four docs isn't loading so well it's not listed as part of the um facilities pieces and i should know it because when i first became a parent in 2015 i helped to advocate because my kids were never in an elementary school class lower than 29 ever and we don't talk about class size at all but we know that the lower the staff to child ratio the better the experiences for everyone again Loudoun County Schools has a totally different process if you move in and that school has hit its class limit for that class you don't go to that school what we do

[03:24:20] here is so not what's happening other places in the best interest of kids when it comes to our facilities work I don't know if anyone offhand knows that policy about class size but that is one too that we can control that you guys we can say no you know what 31 is too much and a middle school with 1200 kids is too much we can make these decisions but we have to have the thoughtful conversations the bond information you know mr. Dunn and miss Szymanski were talking about that construction management at risk which is something I'm eager to learn more about but you know is it best practices to use the money the way that the Board of Supervisors has organized it in a bond, which is to spread the cost out

[03:24:59] over multiple years. I can't seem to find any support or why that reasoning is still in place, but given this time and COVID, is it better to try and pay as much up front as you can, get it done, get the swing space, get the students and staff in and out, but the bond funding controlled by the Board of Supervisors is still saying it's going to be a years-long, you know, projection. So I'm really eager to learn more about that bond process. And just I'm wondering, I was somewhere PTA last night, and parents were asking me, you know, what's the timeline with the boundary review? And what's the timeline with the middle school start times? And then I also got the adjacent Coates Elementary boundary review. There's a lot

[03:25:37] going on, and I think our community could really benefit from a very straightforward, clear calendar of what's happening. So we've got the CIP. We've got the boundary review process. We've got middle school start times that started separately but now they've kind of careened together and people are wondering like how that's gonna you know end up and we're gonna talk about that in February and then other singular projects of interest so like the Coates review I guess the Glasgow review and then new school construction people ask me when is the new school being built can we have something that makes it clear for folks what's happening with all these facilities because people are paying attention which is great but there's There's confusion.

[03:26:17] I also just want to share some next steps that I'm thinking of adding to the chart. One of them is that the superintendent come prepared to the January 22nd governance meeting with a timeline of how to review the policies identified in the CIP follow-on motion, which was already responded to in April 2024, but I will say it's kind of meager, so I think it needs some meat so that the governance committee can dig in on Tuesday and really figure out which policies need to be regrouped or sunset and whatever.

[03:26:43] I'd also like to ask for a history of the Fairfax County bond amounts and when it's been changed over time. So I'll be putting those in, thank you. - Great, Ms. Dixit followed by Ms. Anderson. - So I like to bring everybody's attention to page 10 of the presentation.

[03:27:05] It's a five year membership projections and everybody's pointing it out that we have a decline and in the population, student population, birth continues to downward trend, hence we are building new schools.

[03:27:21] So, I just, even the slide previous to that, which is on page nine, you know, it says proposed FCPS CIP fiscal year 26 to 2030, and it talks about the primary factor that contribute chain membership includes and birth to migration transfer.

[03:27:44] But still, we are going back to this 17-year-old of queue of construction renovation. And that's just not sinking well with me. Because as we are seeing, like we are seeing the decline, obviously, we're seeing some population areas they have high capacity growth, and some are declining.

[03:28:08] And that happens over the last five to seven years, I think that we saw a lot of migrant population in some areas. We have huge migrant population in Sully District too, which we see in some of our schools.

[03:28:24] And yet, this is not reflecting in our queue. So while we have more students in 11th and 12th grade, that's what it says in the slide, we are building elementary schools.

[03:28:42] So I really want to re-look at that and would like to request Dr. Reed to just look at this a little bit more. And Janice, I wanted you to explain to me the slide 11, if you could.

[03:28:58] It is something that maybe I could not understand when you were presenting it before. - Sure, so let me just grab my notes here.

[03:29:14] So the columns, the different school years, those represent the CIP membership projections, and then the rows represent the year the student membership is from. So we continuously update our CIP.

[03:29:30] So each CIP includes five projected years. So that's why you'll see one to five projection accuracy in each column. So really, I guess kind of looking at that out year, that last kind of diagonal.

[03:29:46] So when we see that 101%, that was our accuracy from last year to how we actually hit for the certified student membership. So last year's CIP, we said it was going to be a certain amount, and then when the September certified membership came in, it was 101% off.

[03:30:04] And then you go up the diagonal again, two years ago, we put in a one-year projection, and when the certified membership came in, it was 100% accurate. There was like a hundred kids. Three years ago when we did the projections, the next year certified membership came in and it was 99%.

[03:30:26] Then you kind of hit that COVID year. That's where you see that NA from there on. - Okay, understood now much better. So the question was about the inflow of population, which we have, we're seeing either people are moving into Fairfax County or migrating, you know, there's refugees and et cetera.

[03:30:46] is it more than the lowering birth rate or kindergarten? Like, does it balance off somewhere? - I do think that the births are on a continuous trend on the decline, and that's one of the primary factors.

[03:31:01] And then to your point, we do need to still look at net migration. So it's people not just coming into the county, but leaving the county as well. And I think that is not outpacing the birth rate on the decline.

[03:31:17] We've done some recent, more anecdotal study. I guess we call it street data a little bit. But I think there are certain communities within the county that have more in and out movement than other communities. And often, I know in late July, I met with a number of students that it could be an entire multifamily complex that raises rent, for example.

[03:31:42] And when that rent hits a certain threshold, there are a large number of families, particularly with school-age children who are no longer able to afford to stay there. So you see an out-migration, or you see a migration to another multifamily living unit in another school zone that has lower rent rates, right?

[03:32:03] And so you see often families moving, and so we may not anticipate an increase, and it's honestly up to 100, 150 students sometimes that make these moves that a school we wouldn't plan for is suddenly much larger and then another school that's suddenly much smaller and when you get back to the root cause it came down to the rent rates right so I think there are a variety of topics and different zoning in different parts of the county density wise in terms of homes and what can be built and what can't so there's some variants but I do think we saw some surprising in migration

[03:32:43] in some schools in the last couple years that ran counter to the predictions based on birth rate? - I would tend to agree. Again, this is an overall county, but we're seeing that's not 100% spread out to be true. We're seeing still areas where there is growth.

[03:32:59] And I do wanna add to Dr. Reed's point, there's other factors that go into population growth or decline that would affect our projections. That's why five-year projections are very challenging. we might have a new program or an AAP center be built at a school.

[03:33:16] That would definitely impact the projections that we did four years ago, say. Or I think there was an example here in the county where there was a fire to a big multifamily unit. That would have a big impact. So there are a lot of factors that you need to consider and keep your finger on the pulse of that influence these projections.

[03:33:38] And that's why, again, I just want to reiterate, we update them every year as new data becomes available. But there's a lot that goes into them. - Thank you so much. And then my last comment today would be, I would really like to see the tax dollars going to renovation then, you know, less building new schools if possible and more academies spread across the county 'cause we have very few academies where students have and that's like a little bit excess issue.

[03:34:09] And so any of high schools, if they all can have their little academies, you know, that would be ideally what I would like to see. And that's where I think our population is shifting is we have middle school cohort are the biggest and high school cohorts are the biggest in the population as per the slide.

[03:34:27] So thank you. - Great, thank you. Miss Anderson. - I would like to say first that I see visions of an interactive timeline related to facilities. That would be pretty amazing we could get something like that done on our website so that people could know what was coming next I know it changes quickly and having it not in print form is probably going to be helpful page 44 of the CIP is the renovation Q status and I want and we've spent a lot of time talking about particular renovation projects and I had a question related to this since many of the ones that are in

[03:35:05] construction or future projects are in my area of the county I did want to talk about this a little bit when you're looking at those schools and it's not one of mine but when if you're looking at those schools that are 63 on the list they have waited all the time from number one and so we have to be really careful moving forward to make sure that we are not displacing communities off the renovation timeline that have been in that queue for a very long time and so I do want to think about that as we move forward because I know our renovation Q is 42 years right now and that we're aiming for 25 but displacing

[03:35:42] schools off the existing timeline doesn't actually help that happen my concern overall is well I have a couple of questions the first one is is it possible that some of these schools that we consider maybe not as necessary right at this moment due to new like the new construction is there any reason that those new construction spaces couldn't become swing spaces for renovations in that area and then they would be available to be used by the community after yeah I mean I guess it would depend on the specific circumstance but I think in theory that would make sense as something possible particularly as

[03:36:20] we're also looking at potentially figuring out how to move middle school into or out of sixth graders out of elementary school into middle school it would also make sense that you could do something like that where you created one that was a swing space that would then be able to be utilized as a full school after so those are that's one thing that I was considering the other one is I don't think we're there yet but I would very I am very interested to see what happens over the next year with our incoming administration to determine how that's going to impact capacity around the county based on some changes that

[03:36:56] have been proposed just publicly at this point and so I do think that considering whether or not the next bond could actually be partially for those improvements that we need to make based on just basic maintenance I think that that may be an effective use of that time as we determine what the impact of some of the changes in in and around the area are going to be great so we're done with third round we're going to go back to dr. Anderson followed by Melanie and dr. Reed wants to interject appreciate that mr. Michael mean I just want to go

[03:37:35] back to mistakes it you had asked and I was sidebarring with miss Marin you had asked me to review something before you went back to this chart with Miss Szymanski and I didn't capture it so I want to make sure I capture it I was just asking if we could look into the all the new constructions versus the renovation if we can funds can be moved to renovate our school which and somehow tackle that 25 you know the 45 year renovation queue and make it lesser than that because if we put more money in the renovation and updating the building

[03:38:12] our renovation queue sorry our the queue will be I guess maybe if not 45 years which is right now to like at least 240 it's just too many lot of money has been allocated or kept as a I guess for the new construction and I know only once school is getting constructed right now everything else is just a plan right Western High School has $400 million but we don't even have a land for it so those numbers are just numbers right now nothing is getting constructed but

[03:38:48] anywhere we can just see if that could be swapped thank you okay onward to Dr. Anderson thank you on page 14 this is the full report not the slide we're talking about that one of the expectations is that every school pyramid would have an AP center, and the Annandale pyramid has not had one.

[03:39:16] How close are we to achieving this goal? I think -- great question. I think probably that's going to be inherent in our boundary work, honestly.

[03:39:35] I will have to check in with Dr. Presidio on that, but I don't know if there was a timeline put in the follow-on on that topic. What page again? page 14 of the full document it's just one of the expectations and i know that's been an issue okay i think i suspect because there's not a date certain attached to it it's sort of morphed perhaps but i will i will check with dr presidio i would appreciate if there could be because this is one of the things my community has been asking since my first term in 2020. also another question

[03:40:14] that comes up quite a bit um is uh wondering regarding the collaboration between the county and um the schools when projects are approved that could potentially bring a lot of students and the one that comes to mind that continually continually comes up in the mason district is the project on columbia pike near the acura dealership people are wondering where are these kids going to go to school because we know the closest school park lawn we've already discussed is over capacity with 29 outside classrooms combination of modulars and trailers and

[03:40:52] glasgow is already where it is so what is that conversation if there's any there is and maybe it's more of a next part of those next steps and having us as staff have conversations with the the school board on how that works.

[03:41:07] So when we go through, when a development goes through, there's a plan amendment or a zoning application, FCPS works closely with the county's Department of Planning and we provide what we think those impacts are gonna be. We review any development that has a residential component because it could potentially impact membership.

[03:41:28] So maybe I would recommend just more information on how that works. - But is it that we just understand what the impact will be to us, or do we actually have input? - We make recommendations. So we look at the, we review the developments, we talk about what we think the membership impact is going to be, and we make recommendations.

[03:41:50] And then the county does the proffer negotiation and whatnot, but they use our recommendation to guide those discussions. - Thank you. One of the things that I think I'm struggling with little bit because we've been at this space where we have paused certain activities because of the pending boundary work I don't see that coming in here either because we still have boundary work that could be impacting where we need to house sixth grade students where we need to place schools yet we're moving ahead full steam with what currently exists and I'm struggling

[03:42:25] with that because I've had the Glasgow boundary adjustment that was in the CIP be paused be killed but yet I'm hearing that if it's in the CIP we have to do it which is it I'm not sure who the question is for I the board voted on the Glasgow piece wasn't staff well maybe it's something I'd like for my colleagues to share because I I'm struggling to see the consistency of process here can you

[03:43:03] talked a little bit in terms of the lease building the buildings that are least but our own but but that are owned by the county is that part of the data on chart three on this chart right here oh no no slide three on that report and do we treat that as our property because there's a few yeah for like gatehouse for example that we're sitting in we're providing payments but that's owned by FCPS we couldn't incur the debt so they yeah so

[03:43:41] the county did and then we're doing in payment installment payments to own this so in in that number we do consider buildings like gatehouse okay how do we go about putting the buildings that are not school sites on the renovation queue yeah that's a that is a great point you raise and so we are as part of the facility condition assessment assessing all facilities right school buildings administration buildings and in fact administration buildings weren't on this previous queue the one developed in 2008 2009 it did not consider admin

[03:44:17] buildings so what we found is a lot of the infrastructure and those facilities are in you know very very past due past manufacturers lifecycle when you look some of the biggest energy consumers per square foot the admin centers are right up there so we are going to provide all that information on the facility condition and something as we develop together the Q framework we can consider if we want to add the admin centers as part of that next next cycle because many of them have pretty good acreage and we already know that they could house a bill a school building because many of them were previously school buildings

[03:44:56] but being now serve centers for adult work and it just makes me wonder with the availability of office spaces but not the availability of land could we then make a swap where we use those spaces to return back to schools and move those workers into office environments where we can perhaps more easily procure an office building for that kind of work potentially yes that's four seconds left thank you I did also want to comment on the

[03:45:33] renovation queue and I know at least on one of the previous two CIP rounds I remember us talking about the renovation queue and should we pause it update it was at this board it was this board and when I look at this renovation queue and I don't see Luther Jackson middle school on here it's just really hard to to think that this is really an accurate reflection of needs you know this renovation queue was done it says you know based on it info from 1992 it was approved by the school board in 2009 yet another plug to review our work far more

[03:46:10] regularly I don't I mean I understand there are funding implications and the bond monies are tied to certain things but I do think we need to have the ability to be flexible if it's not if the renovation queue isn't working and I'm just again hard-pressed the Jackson is just such a great example and you've got kids from all over coming to that school and we did talk about last year the opportunity cost of say you know if we have already been in planning and design do we cut those losses for the greater investment of updating the queue so I don't know I mean I'd like some more guidance on it you know or more of

[03:46:47] a directive or a statement like what's the actual cost if we interrupt the queue and does the board need to really take consensus on this is this also maybe the kind of last time we do the CIP this way which is kind of the feeling that it was with the boundaries last year right some of us said we're not going to do one-off boundaries because we're going to do the boundary policy and the boundary review so maybe the CIP is turning that corner too we've got to kind of deal with it the way it is but we're looking to make it far more impactful in a lot of ways so I offer that for consideration I have maybe just a

[03:47:24] comment to add something I've been thinking about as we develop the new renovation queue because I agree and I just hearing the comments it does seem like a balance right putting something in making a commitment but then not having the flexibility as new factors arise over the years right one of the things we've been thinking about is while we might want to do a condition assessment to get a snapshot in time of all the facilities so we're starting off on equal footing how what is the end result of the renovation queue I i personally don't think it's a list of 200 schools because it will take decades and decades and decades to implement it and so if we are that

[03:48:04] inflexible on that list you know we might be decades in and we're committed to a certain ordering but there might have been another global pandemic or there might have just been other regular course of factors that would influence that list so again it's all about striking that balance right so what i think i would recommend as facilities is we take the data we review everything we get that snapshot in time and then the new renovation queue it's a little bit shorter it's a little bit shorter than 63 schools so that way we can offer the community some sort of stability and planning so they know they're number five and they know in a few years they're going to get their renovation and we can keep that

[03:48:42] commitment but then we're not also so locked in that we can't pivot and make other best decisions based upon new information so I just want to offer that up to the board is something that we've been internally discussing and we think could be a good potential solution moving forward as we do this new work and we actually are already moving in that direction because we did approve and now getting implemented the 36 outdoor classrooms in middle and high schools the 14 stadium bathrooms but again I will point us back to the policy and I believe it's 8258 which you know as you pointed out establishes a 20-25 year renovation cycle. So if we're telling the superintendent to renovate entire schools every 20, 25 years,

[03:49:21] that's what the superintendent's going to do. But if we say things like make sure that all facilities have adequate bathrooms, have, you know, classrooms wired to go for the future, you know, this is why that's so important because otherwise they're just going to keep doing this lockstep and we're never going to get out of this. Okay. Mr. Dunn.

[03:49:40] Yes. I just wanted to ask Dr. Reed, there are a lot of cues that are being developed and that's a positive, right? Playgrounds, athletic fields, and many others. And just for, it would be great to have just one piece of paper, two pieces of paper where all the queues are listed or, and like, I just don't know all the queues, but it seems like every couple weeks there's a new queue of some kind, which is not a bad thing.

[03:50:08] It's the right direction, but it's a burgeoning number, and I feel like I'm losing track of them, and I pay very close attention to facilities. So if we can just get like one document listing, yeah, queue of queues. Very well said. It would be great. And if there are dedicated funding sources for those queues, like the sinking fund for HVAC or whatever, it would be nice to know if there are dedicated funds that feed into those particular queues. And if not, if there's a recommendation to develop a dedicated funding source or some percentage of the bond funds every year for particular queues.

[03:50:46] We can establish a queue of queues. well as well as well as well as backlogs i know there's an infrastructure there's a maintenance if there are other backlogs as well that would also be good to include there again just for simplicity so we don't have to look at a 300 page document every time we're trying to figure it out on our own yes sir i i also think that the caution from miss anderson was wise because there's some schools and it's good to show every school so everyone can see where they are but it feels i I think I've heard from some school communities that at times as new people come and go and so forth, the cues shift, right?

[03:51:24] And so people lose their spot in the cue and then they don't feel good about that, right? Because something moves ahead of their project and in some cases feel like they've waited a long time. So while it's positive to have cues that are based on objective criteria that we all can see and track, they also make a type of commitment, I think, with our community once we queue them, so.

[03:51:48] - I meant more just like a simple list, like there are 10 queues, these are the queues, and these are the funding sources, but also having the backup saying, these are the schools on the queues, that would also be useful. - Yes, sir. - Thanks, Sid.

[03:52:05] - So I wanted to just point out that many of the schools which are, like Ms. Anderson said, on the list, 63 number, Virginia Run, then Populatory, Center Ridge, Cabran, they're all, they fall under Sully District.

[03:52:21] And I visited most of these schools and they definitely need to be renovated. So I'm just saying not that we have to fix, change everything, we just need to look at it and not topple this upside down or something like that and just create like entirely new list.

[03:52:38] But yes, we can maybe just look at the boundary and the other studies and research we are doing, but definitely these schools do need renovation. I just wanted to make that point because visited them and felt the need that they have never been touched since they were constructed.

[03:52:59] - Okay, so we've concluded fourth round. Dr. Anderson, do you have anything more? - Actually, if you could just talk a little bit about, 'cause I thought I saw the FPAC representative in the room at some point, and I know the language in this document talks about how they have some input.

[03:53:19] They're listed here. Can you speak to their cooperation, their collaboration, or their input into this document just for the community to understand that there are other individuals to go to to help push forward some of their concerns?

[03:53:37] Certainly, and I guess maybe just to start by clarifying that FPAC is an advisory council to the school board. However, that being said, myself and others, we make sure as staff that we're very engaged with them as part of that process.

[03:53:56] So we attend all FPAC meetings, we come there to share our insight, and then even selfishly maybe take some of that space so that as staff, I can gain some industry insight from the professionals that sit on FPAC that I might not be seeing or soundboard things off from there.

[03:54:16] So I do think there is a good working relationship, even though FPAC does report to the board and their charter and whatnot. And then FPAC also produces an annual report to the board. We definitely get a copy of that. And so this past year in particular, there was the annual report and then a couple specific memorandums provided to the board.

[03:54:39] I mean, one of the things that we did when we were revising policy 8240 was looked at that F-PAC report on the procurement methods and used it again. Staff guided that work on the policy red lines, but that was helpful information.

[03:54:56] We even looked at it too, again, when doing our follow-on motions because we were also asked to do alternative methods and find more creative funding mechanisms. Okay. Well, with that, that brings the work session to conclusion.

[03:55:16] next steps document which has been posted and the clerk will make a remark it it's been sent around for both the traffic safety and the CIP so you the board should have received an email already for the next steps as well as your calendar invites to remember the deadlines are a little bit different the deadline for inputting is this Friday 5:00 p.m. but because of MLK day the THE DEADLINE FOR SHOWING SUPPORT IS ON THURSDAY.

[03:55:52] CORRECT. STAFF DOES NOT MOVE FORWARD UNTIL THEY SEE THAT. THE NEXT STEPS ARE DUE TO INPUT SUPPORT IS FRIDAY AT 5:00 P.M. AND FOR BOARD MEMBERS TO SHOW THEIR SUPPORT FOR BOARD MEMBERS HAVE INPUTED IS THURSDAY.

[03:56:11] GENERALLY IT WOULD BE WEDNESDAY BUT DUE TO THE HOLIDAY IT PUSHES IT AN EXTRA DAY. THIS IS ALL NEXT WEEK? This Friday for inputting whatever next steps there are, and next Thursday for showing your support.

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