Coraggio Consulting Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, February 4, 2025 Date: Tuesday, February 4, 2025 Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia Length: 5h 6m (video) Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnCsvBC_M_s 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 2026-10-30. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [00:00:00] session. This part that will be moderated by myself and Ms. Dixit very shortly is the goal three report and knowing this is the heart and the meat of our work. We are here to, this is our raison d'etre, we are here to speak about how our students are doing academically. [00:00:22] That's the purpose of this entire organization. We do a lot of other things but this is the core and before we turn it over to staff i would like to turn over to dr reed for an introduction thank you dr anderson members of the board this morning our goal three report as dr anderson mentioned is our core work here in fairfax county public schools indeed it's the core work around our country right now and while all matters of topics are swirling it's critical that we stay focused on the education of our young people there's never been a time that [00:01:02] education has been more important in this country and this morning it's my pleasure and with great pride that I talked about the team that's going to bring us our goal three report and this team is critical there is no one department that is responsible for the academic success of all of our students here in Fairfax County. It is a collaborative effort. Learning happens best in community and our community needs to remain together as we focus on the needs of each and every one of our students. While we're going to look at some data that we're really excited [00:01:38] to show gains with, there will be other data this morning that we're making first steps in terms of addressing that we look forward to accelerating progress in the coming weeks and years but this morning i want to make sure that our community understands that our chief academic officer dr presidio our chief equity officer dr king and our chief of schools dr ponce are working together because all three departments are critical to achieving the goals here of a world-class education here in fairfax county public schools for each and every student [00:02:16] and frankly um our future as a nation depends on that so at this point i'd like to turn the presentation presentation over to miss neil who has guided the presentation pieces and then the board we have um all of our chief officers present at the table for questions and a discussion so thank you miss neil before we get started miss neil i have to bring one of our board members in mr dunn has submitted a written request to attend this morning's meeting virtually due to a personal conflict as he has a professional obligation as it is and is attending tonight's [00:02:51] meeting from i'm sorry this morning's meeting from mount vernon virginia all those in favor of approving mr dunn's request that is unanimous thank you mr dunn please check your audio and video mr dunn's not on yet we'll let you know so we will check when he comes just kind of a lay of the land folks this report has three components there is the reading component the math component and the advanced coursework component we will take each of these components separately and ask [00:03:28] questions after each one we will do one round of questions after each section and at the end depending on the time that we have left and you are free to go back and ask questions regarding all three components we will start each of those first rounds at three minutes and we will make an an adjustment at the end depending on the time we have left. [00:03:48] Ms. Neal. Thank you, Dr. Anderson, Dr. Reed, and good morning members of the board. We're going to go ahead, if we can get the slides up, please. And if we could -- thank you. Go ahead and progress to slide two, please. [00:04:05] All right. Our objectives for today are to provide the board with an update on our progress towards meeting our goal three measures, to talk about the work FCPS is doing related to goal three, and then to talk about the policy budget and strategic considerations for the board moving forward to achieve our goals. [00:04:23] We are today, our presentation is focused on goal three, which as was stated previously is our academic growth and excellence goal. There are six measures in goal three, and today they are all on the screen, and today we're going to be focusing in on measures C, D, and F, and the data for the remaining measures are in the full report that is posted on BoardDocs. [00:04:46] Several initial priorities were identified by division leadership to focus the efforts to both our schools and our departments with the understanding that these are key drivers for success across multiple measures within our strategic plan. And during today's presentation, as Dr. Anderson said, we're going to be looking at reading by third grade, algebra one by eighth grade, and advanced coursework in high school. [00:05:09] And as a reminder to our public, our annual goal reports include outcome data from last school year compared to our baseline data, and annual targets that we've set in order to meet our 2030 goals. of the data in these reports were aligned to a consistent student data source and match VDOE reporting methodology when it's applicable. And this report also provides contextual data and an update on our strategic efforts across the division. So for the first section of this presentation we're going to look at our reading by the end of third grade data. By the end of third grade our students are moving away from learning to read to reading to learn where reading becomes [00:05:45] a tool to gain and apply knowledge in a range of subjects. Reading on grade level is linked to other strategic plan goal measures including persistence in advanced coursework, graduating on time, and enrolling in college. So a sustained focus on reading in third grade should positively impact several other goal measures. The national research identifies several factors that contribute to reading on grade level, such as division factors related to professional development and systems in place to identify, intervene with, and monitor students who are at risk. Classroom level factors including the use of evidence-based literacy instruction and teacher knowledge and skills and student [00:06:25] and family factors including reading readiness such as pre-k access regular school attendance and ongoing support for learning including reading at home before we review the data I want to start with the key takeaways and then we'll further dive into to these we're currently using the SOL and the VAP data to measure reading by third grade and our report examines last year's SOL data compared to the baseline and I do want to remind everyone as Dr. Reed said this data represents the outcomes from last year's spring SOL testing that occurred prior to several significant shifts in practice and FCPS around [00:07:00] literacy. Last year's results showed that third grade SOL rates were up 1% from the baseline, which was three percentage points below our target for last year. No student group had a pass rate within five percentage points of the division average, which indicates a wide disparity in reading performance among student groups and a need to better serve our students who are not yet reading on grade level. [00:07:21] We are going to look more closely at our VAP insights on a subsequent slide. Over the past three years, FCPS has outperformed Virginia overall with regard to the passing on the reading SOL in third grade. When compared to Northern Virginia Waby districts, over the past three years, FCPS has shown similar results on the third grade reading SOL. [00:07:45] Overall pass rates on grade three reading SOL increased by one percentage point from the baseline. And the data reflects assessments given prior to the adoption of the BASIL, the adoption of the new VALS screener in primary grades, implementation of required reading plans, and implementation of additional required PD. [00:08:03] Students with 504 plans, white, Asian, and multiracial students, had higher than average pass rates. Multilingual learners had the lowest pass rate, followed by students who were economically disadvantaged and Hispanic students. Our Hispanic students who were not multilingual learners, however, had a pass rate of 61%, which reinforces the importance of examining intersectionality data, which is available in the full report. [00:08:26] It's also important to consider that 60% of the students who did not pass the reading SOL were economically disadvantaged. And then finally on this slide, in the last row of the chart, you can see the targets for last year, and in green you can see where FCPS hit the annual targets we've set for ourselves. [00:08:45] As we've shared in previous reports, the annual targets are based on the growth needed each year to remain on track for our 2030 goals. And this slide shows the growth lines from the baseline. Last year, our overall reading scores fell below our annual target, meaning we will need to make more growth this year to remain on track for our 2030 goals. [00:09:05] This slide looks at our VAP performance on the third grade reading. And as a reminder, the VAP assessment is given to students instructed with the adaptive curriculum beginning in grade three. Last year, we had 60 students participate in this assessment, and there was an overall decline in scores from the baseline. [00:09:21] The full report does have data by student group for the VAP, which in many cases was too small to report because of size. As you can see from the growth line, we're not currently on track to meet our 2030 goals and we'll need to continue to focus on this metric. [00:09:36] This slide examines third grade reading SOL performance as it relates to two other strategic priorities: chronic absenteeism and pre-K experience. Students who were not chronically absent had higher pass rates than students who were were chronically absent, and students with pre-K experience had substantially higher pass rates on the SOL than students without a pre-K experience. [00:09:58] This data reinforces the interconnectedness between our goals within the strategic plan and the importance of multiple aspects of student experiences on these outcome measures. This slide examines select intersectionality data with additional data available in the full report. [00:10:17] Students who are economically disadvantaged but not multilingual learners, the second bar in the gray, second bar from the top in gray, had the highest pass rates of this group that was examined, and students who are multilingual learners with IEPs, the final bar in blue, had the lowest pass rates of any groups examined. We do see that ELP level is closely tied to outcomes on the third grade reading SOL. So our students who are categorized as ELP level four had scores that surpassed the division average by 23 percentage points, and our former multilingual learners had a 98% pass rate on the reading SOL, the highest of any student group examined for this report. [00:10:55] Here we see differences in performance for our students with disabilities. As a reminder, students categorized as level one are those students that receive special education services for less than 50% of their instructional day, and level two receive special education services for more than 50% of their instructional day. Students categorized as level two had a substantially lower pass rate compared to level one and the division average. Now we're We're going to transition to talk about the work the division is doing focused on improving outcomes for reading by third grade. [00:11:30] So FCPS is currently focused on a combination of universal and targeted efforts to improve reading outcomes. Universal efforts are happening in all of our elementary schools and include the work that has been done to standardize curriculum and instructional delivery and to align with evidence-based practices. [00:11:47] Targeted work is happening at the school level, supporting schools with higher rates of students who are at risk or struggling with reading, and at the student level by providing personalized supports for students who have individual challenges with reading. On the next few slides, we're going to highlight several of the actions within this approach, and the full report does have additional details about these strategies as well. [00:12:09] So we've been working to standardize evidence-based literacy instruction across the division. This work began as a part of the Equitable Access to Literacy Plan in the division and then merged this year with the requirements of the Virginia Literacy Act. It includes the implementation of a common literacy curriculum across our K-6 classrooms. [00:12:29] That's our benchmark advance as a part of the division's implementation of a BASEL. And the literacy core teams who monitor their school's implementation of evidence-based literacy instruction and develop actions to improve implementation. To support this work, ongoing professional learning for teachers and staff continues to be provided. [00:12:49] To identify students who may need more support, the VALS risk-based screeners are administered all primary grade students at various points throughout the year and common assessments are also being used to monitor student progress consistent with previous years all of our schools continue to have a reading by third grade goal and associated action plan in their sip and finally we continue to utilize Lexia core 5 which is an evidence-based program that provides students with personalized learning pathway based on their placement test and progress within the program FCPS is providing targeted support resources and monitoring to identified schools where there are larger numbers of students [00:13:28] struggling with reading and larger numbers not making WIDA progress. Schools that had low growth and mastery in grades 1 and 2 in reading last year are supported through the Project Momentum early literacy focus. These schools have quarterly meetings to review reading progress and principals are required to provide teachers feedback a minimum of three times per week using walkthrough forms aligned to benchmark. Project Momentum schools that had less than 50% percent of students making adequate WIDA progress also receive support to ensure progress monitoring and the implementation of Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction. And finally our Title 1 schools have the ability to use their [00:14:06] Title 1 school budgets to hire additional staff to support literacy and also have access to centrally funded training opportunities and literacy support for school teams. Students who are identified as high-risk receive instructional and individualized student reading plans and an additional two and a half hours of intervention instruction per week. In some schools with larger numbers of students requiring support a walk to intervention model is also utilized where students are grouped across grade level based on need and then walk to their intervention group to receive targeted instruction during this block. This model puts additional staff beyond grade level teachers to [00:14:43] work with intervention groups ensuring group size stays as small as possible and the intervention for the group of students is specific to their need. And then finally last summer additional supports for at-risk students were provided through summer learning programs. [00:14:58] Our targeted student supports also include a focus on multilingual learners. In the Goal 1 presentation, we discussed many of the strategies focused on English language development, including the purchase of Benchmark Express as the new elementary basal resource for English language development, which aligns to Benchmark Advance, and continued training of teachers and Project GLAD strategies, which are research-based strategies and support language acquisition and proficiency in grade-level standards. [00:15:24] FCPS is also focused on targeted supports for students with disabilities. We have a dyslexia specialist who provides support for identifying and serving students with dyslexia and related disorders, and provides training and support to local reading specialists who serve as dyslexia advisors for their school. [00:15:43] In addition, FCPS is providing evidence-based literacy instruction training for staff who work with students who access an adaptive curriculum. And then finally, our reading by third grade goal innovation team will continue to identify ways to improve reading outcomes, in particular in the areas of concern identified in this report, and this will continue to inform future division-wide strategies. [00:16:04] And at this point, I'll turn it back to our meeting managers. Thank you very much for that very, very quick presentation. Maybe just slow down just a little with the next one. And we have our first speaker, Mr. Frisch. [00:16:23] Thank you. several rounds of Q&A. I just have a couple questions. Can you talk about the evidence that the universal approach and the targeted supports identified on slides 20 through 22 have effective? And secondarily, related to that, we've embarked on a transition to the science of reading, something this board is very committed to. I'd like to know what the typical arc of impact is on a transition like that. We're certainly not the first school division [00:17:00] to transition to the science of reading, when should we start seeing meaningful results from it? Well, thank you for those questions. I'll start and then certainly any of my colleagues, please feel free to jump in. I think your first question was really around like the efficacy of the strategies that we're using right now. And I would say to some extent in relationship to your second question, it's a little bit early to really be able to answer that question fully. [00:17:24] What we do know from the research base is that you, particularly as it pertains to the science of reading, you have to have a comprehensive viable curriculum implemented consistently in every classroom across the school division. So the adoption of benchmark advance is really huge for us as a school division because we didn't have that core curriculum for 20 years in the school division. [00:17:44] So we had a lot of variation from classroom to classroom. This obviously is the first year of implementation, so we're not going to see results of that. The earliest we would really see results of that would be the end of this year, but I think it's going to take more years before we see results. Sometimes when you implement new curriculum, what you'll see, at least in the evidence base, is an implementation dip where scores might actually go down because people are doing things in new ways, and they're still developing their own self-efficacy in that, and then you'll see a trajectory rise with outcomes. [00:18:14] What I will say, though, is we're not just looking at SOL scores when we're looking at success metrics on some of these things, so we have other ways to measure success. Some of it's qualitative, just what we're seeing and hearing from teachers and principals and how they're reacting to the instruction, what we're seeing and hearing with our students and with our families, and that's all really positive. [00:18:33] Additionally, we have more quantitative measures like our iReady results, which are the screening and progress monitoring measure that we've used consistently for a number of years at the primary grades, K through 3. And one of the things that we've seen just even this year in terms of growth is that students at the third grade level on the iReady measure are performing, More students are performing at that benchmark that would correlate with success on the SOL. [00:18:59] So we've established internally benchmarks with like a 95% confidence interval to say if a student achieves this score, they're going to pass the SOL. We've seen growth in the number of students that are hitting that target by around 4 to 5% at mid-year. So that's all signaling that things are starting to click. [00:19:16] And we have other data points as well. But the first thing is the curriculum. And so we're seeing some impact of that right now. I think the second thing is the professional development and training to make sure that everybody in our classrooms know how to use the materials and are comfortable with them. The work that we've done around professional development I think has been really strong. [00:19:35] Having that additional time for elementary teachers on Mondays to complete not just our professional development but the required professional development from the state has been very well met and well received by folks in our schools. So the curriculum, the professional development, and then the continued progress monitoring and support. [00:19:55] So again, we're looking at a lot of different data points, as I described, but it's a little too early, I think, to see results in the measures that we have here, but we can see them in some of the more discreet measures. And then the one thing I would say is if we're thinking about that third-grade measure with implementation of our materials this year starting at kindergarten, we're still obviously three years out before we would really see the full impact of students who have been instructed from the day they walk into FCPS as a kindergartner in science of reading with our new materials, our new strategies, and our new supports, it's gonna be three years before we see the full impact of some of those changes. [00:20:31] - I think I'd like to see when this comes to the board at the regular meeting, is some in the presentation, perhaps in the materials, perhaps, more about these indicators that you all are watching. I did write down dashboard. I wonder if they have a dashboard where they're monitoring things that we're not seeing. I had looked in the report for anything along these lines. [00:20:48] I already gets passing reference. So it'd be good to have two things in the regular meeting discussion. One, what are the indicators that you're monitoring on a day-to-day basis? We've heard a lot from the superintendent about the importance of not just waiting a year to see where we are, right? [00:21:05] And so what are those things? And then also how we expect to start seeing the impact here. You know, I don't think anybody is expecting things to turn on a dime, but we should be previewing for people when we're presenting this. People are not patient, right? [00:21:22] So we need to provide additional information for the context. Secondarily on slide 16, you had 93% for our multilingual learners who have English proficiency. And I'm curious, because they've had as much time with the new instructional support and materials as anyone else, is that a product of the more specialized and focused attention that they've received as multilingual learners? [00:21:49] And if it's not just that, what can we learn from this student population to impact other hard-to-move populations? Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. You know, obviously some of the things that we've done to support multilingual learners, I think, are showing up in this data set. [00:22:05] For example, when we purchased the benchmark curriculum, we also purchased Benchmark Express, which is English language development curriculum that focuses on listening, speaking, reading, and writing, right? All four domains of the literacy domains there. But what I think you're seeing in this slide, though, and why we included it in here is these trends have been true in previous reports, right? [00:22:25] We know that the more time a student has to develop their English language proficiency, the better they do on these standardized measures. And pretty much in any subject area, when a student has exited or is close to exiting multilingual language learner support, ELD support, they're performing at or above the division averages. [00:22:44] So this is really to say like a lot of students that are at that level one and level two, they have not had enough time to develop the academic language proficiency in English that they're going to need to be successful on some of these standardized tests. And we're seeing even in our data a slight shift this past year to having about 4% more of our students falling in the level one and level two category and about 4% fewer falling in level three and level four. [00:23:10] So we've seen even a slight shift of students on that lower end of proficiency, and this is just a signal that those are the students that we really have to track, we really have to monitor, we really have to support with individual plans to make sure that they're making progress so that we can continue to see these kinds of success rates, but also as much as possible, accelerate their academic English development. [00:23:32] So I think in some ways it's more probably a product of time. Well, and I'm not even just comparing level one to former or level two to former. I'm comparing former to the rest of the student body, right? 20% plus higher than the average FCPS student says something. [00:23:53] And I'm curious, and, you know, we don't have to get into it. I only have 30 seconds left. I'm curious what we can learn from that focused attention that they've received as ELP students or as multilingual learners. what we can learn for that for impact on other student populations that have been hard to move, even with the new materials. Thank you very much. [00:24:16] Mr. Moon. Thank you, Dr. Anderson. I am going to start with where Mr. Chairman was asking some questions on slide number 16. Is that from me? [00:24:34] No. - Okay. I am interested in knowing the demographics of level four and formal ML, whether it is skewed toward certain characteristics, and also if you could also share with us number of students, actual number, population, the end, whether we are dealing with a small number, or it's, you know, their performance might be at the top. [00:25:13] but it could be a small sample, small number overall. And looking at, since Mr. Chairman also raised, how level four and former ML could be substantially higher than our average, you know, passing rate of what, we have a 71%, 70%? [00:25:40] If we did exclude, let's say, from that our population, all of the multilingual learners, you know, students receiving a special education, what would that look like? [00:26:01] Whether they would mirror level four or ML, whether it's a similar demographic. So, and I also wanna see for the level one and level two and even level three, I wanna see the demographic information of those because I don't have a percentage with me now, but a substantially larger portion of certain group, you know, receive a English language, they are multilingual learners, [00:26:38] and whether they are the ones who may be requiring a lot more support from us to improve their language acquisition. So if you could provide with me with those demographic information, it would be helpful for me to ask some follow-up questions. [00:26:56] And I am gonna go to an earlier slide, number 10, which, you know, comparing our score with Northern Virginia, other districts in Northern Virginia for SY23 and 24, ours is about a percent below. [00:27:17] Is a percent below a substantial amount or is it very negligible or if it is? - Okay, you had quite a bit in there. [00:27:33] Would staff like to respond? - Yeah, we'll try to give a quick response to some of them. You asked about on slide 16 about the numbers. The numbers are on the slide, so it's about a couple hundred students. If we can go back in the presentation to slide 16, you can see for each of those years, the adjusted baseline in 23, 24 for each level, how many students we're talking about. [00:27:56] So we have a lot of students in level two and three, fewer students at level one and level four. So the numbers are there. We don't have the demographics. I think we're gonna have to, yeah, we can pull that up, but we'll have to do that offline and get that to you and board members. So we can do that for levels one through three. [00:28:14] And then you had asked about if we had looked at removing certain subgroups, I guess, if you will, from the reading performance and what would it be if we did that, we'd have to do that offline too. One thing I'll say though, just in terms of like speculating, like what are some of the biggest challenges in terms of moving the division overall rate? [00:28:34] one of the biggest challenges is our students that are economically disadvantaged, right? So then when we look at the intersectionality of students that are economically disadvantaged and multilingual learners, those students are really, really struggling, right? Or students that are economically disadvantaged and have disabilities, those students are really struggling. [00:28:50] So that intersectionality part of the report, I think, becomes really important, but we can provide that additional information that you requested by trying to remove some of the subgroups. - Dr. B. - Yeah, thank you, Dr. Anderson. [00:29:06] of our key strategies moving forward which we're just launching this year is the ability to look at common assessments across the division to actually be more laser focused on providing supports in real time dr presidio will you talk about the importance of that initiative please yeah it's incredibly important and i want to thank dr ponce and his leadership for really encouraging us to look at some other curriculum based measures we have things like i ready sols and other measures but having that curriculum based measure is really important because that's That's telling us how are the students responding to the instruction that they're getting in the classroom and what does that look like from classroom to classroom and school to school. [00:29:44] And that allows us within a school to identify those students using our multiple measures that need the additional support and that's part of our multi-tiered system of support process. When we identify students that aren't at the benchmarks that we would like them to be at on those common assessments and other measures, we develop individualized reading plans for students and ensure that they get additional instructional time. [00:30:05] So Ms. Neal talked about a minimum of 30 minutes of additional instructional time for students that are on those reading plans. But again, those curriculum-based assessments, those common assessments are really helpful to identify students, but they're also helpful for us to look at where are maybe students struggling across a particular grade level, across the county, and that helps us maybe provide more resources and guidance for teachers around the implementation of the new materials, or even adjusting some of our supports to schools that might be struggling across the school. [00:30:36] So having that additional data is incredibly helpful. We have created a data dashboard with that that we can look and monitor school by school in terms of their performance on that measure, along with some of the other measures like VALS and iReady. - So I asked Dr. Presidio to frame that because it's critical to understand that sometimes in our past, not all students had access to these types of assessments. [00:30:59] So therefore, the ability to determine whether they were at grade level in real time didn't exist. So right now, this is a critical piece of strategy that we're launching this year, that every child receives instruction at grade level. Dr. Ponce, you've had a lot of experience with common assessments. [00:31:15] Just briefly, would you share why this is so important for the board and community to understand the power of this strategy? - Yes, thank you. I know that some of you have been listening from some principles about common assessment and how we are being very intentional. [00:31:33] Two things that we are trying, number one is the on-time data where you will be able to modify the lessons and provide the intervention to the child accordingly. Something else that is gonna be, you're gonna see how the evolution will be the school improvement plan. [00:31:54] The school improvement implementation plan are a living document and that sometimes we have been just being very static, just having a goal, but not necessarily modifying accordingly with the strategy that we are doing, and so that's why it's very important. [00:32:14] I'm very pleased how principals and the region have been working all together. This is the first year. I know we have a lot of, as we move forward, you're gonna see a very strong program, testing program where we're going to have that data immediately so we can modify we will not be able we will be able to modify on time and not at the end of the school year when you already have long time to cover so we are very pleased in my past work we did it and it was very useful for teachers [00:32:51] principals and for the whole division to make sure that we do some changes accordingly. Thank you, Dr. Ponce. If I may ask staff, I know this is a very important topic for all of us, but if I could ask for a little bit more succinct in your responses, because we have a lot of speakers and two other components to go, and I want to be sure we get to all of them. Our next speaker is Ms. Marin, followed by Ms. Lady. Thank you. I want to start off by saying that the work of being literate does not happen solely inside our school system. We do not control how children arrive at our schools, whether it's at the start of [00:33:29] kindergarten or other ways. I also want to point out that dyslexia affects 20% of the population and represents 80 to 90% of all those with learning disabilities. That's according to the Yale Center on Dyslexia and Creativity. So it is the most common of all neurocognitive disorders. Now the good thing is that our literacy curriculum, it does help all readers because reading is not a natural thing. So all readers will benefit from a very strong foundation of literacy, but those who have a disorder will be identified earlier and get what they [00:34:06] need. So I keep that in mind as I review these results. I wanted to ask more about, to the superintendent, she mentioned that the common assessments across FCPS is a valuable metric given that our education policies are very at the state national level are very politicized right now I'm hard-pressed to put all of my confidence in the state standards and such I'm I do have confidence in the Virginia Literacy Act and what it's put forth but dr. Reed what metrics do you think are most valuable and have fidelity so that we can make [00:34:45] sure that we are doing the best at teaching our children to read well thank you miss Marin I it's really important that we understand that the most important work in the school division happens in the classroom right it's that interaction between a teacher support staff the student and the content presented it's critical that content at grade level be presented to every child regardless of the content area math right reading writing science etc what's then critical is that intervention or enrichment occurs following the grade level instruction so I think that what I think about when I think about assessment [00:35:24] is our teachers know the students in their class the best right because they're with them every day and so classroom based or embedded assessments I think are most critical in the classroom and for us as a school division by region by pyramid it's important for us to be able to look at how our students doing on what we are teaching in the classroom, which is why the common assessments are being crafted from our curriculum here in Fairfax County Public Schools, and so that our students are being assessed on what they're being taught, right? [00:35:58] So that there's an alignment between the written, taught, and tested curriculum. So these common assessments enable us to do what the board has really been requesting on a number of topics, and that's to move to more of a school system and less of a system of schools. [00:36:14] If we provide common assessments, whether you're in Franconia or in West Springfield or Centerville or whatever part of the county, we're able to look in real time to make sure, for example, that all second graders are performing at a reasonable grade level, and where they are not, we can apply resources strategically in real time. [00:36:40] So I think that it's really what's happening in our classrooms that we want to stay focused on, rather than NAEP, for example, which I'll talk about Thursday night, which tested fewer than 500 of our Fairfax County public school students, not even 1% of our children. [00:36:56] Well, thank you. And I'm just sitting here thinking about how complex it is to determine what we are teaching is what children need and what is best it's hard to kind of just pull this one thread out I will say I agree that the iReady scores are an optimistic signal anecdotally I hear from students and teachers that students are writing a lot more to the not-so-happiness of some students but I'm certainly happy seeing books of the consumables coming home full of writing it's really a marked difference so if just a few quick questions what are all the grades in [00:37:31] which Lexia is required for use and what additional grades is it offered as an option or tool thank you Miss Marin we are expecting schools to use this in grades K through 8 and I'm looking over at my team to make sure that I'm correct it's used in different ways but a lot of times during it can happen during the core block right the core time during small group instruction while some kids are having small group instruction other kids are on Lexia it can also [00:38:07] happen during the intervention block for students who who don't need to be in a small group with a teacher so it is used it is used across our elementary and middle schools yeah I mean and just for my personal experience I think it's a really great tool for students I don't see it quite as intentionally used in high school and I wonder about that because it still seems useful so we do have we do have it in a few of our high schools where we have the greatest need but it is not it is not a universal tool like it is at our elementary and middle schools got it is anyone we were in Richmond last week only it feels like it's been like a year but is anyone able to provide us what at this moment is the [00:38:46] status of you know regarding Virginia literacy act related work I think you know at points some things were slower to get to us the screeners and such and the funding is are we in a precarious position are things going the way we'd like them to go so we we have some expectations that will continue to get guidance about next year in grades four through eight. We aren't a hundred percent sure about the assessment. We believe a new assessment screener is coming that would replace iReady, but we're not sure if it's for all students. [00:39:16] So we know that there's expectations around grades four through eight, but not everything is quite clear yet, but we do continue to get monthly updates from the state, and I think they are trying as hard as they can to get information to us. Thank you, and when I hear that we may have a new screener to replace iReady, I mean I ready is a huge investment. It's a lot of money I think we need to understand more about that if it comes to that and finally you mentioned grades four to eight What is happening? [00:39:43] Well, maybe I'll just phrase it this way There are many people who ask me what is happening to help our learners after third grade Especially in middle or high who are not literate, so I won't ask for a response But I'm not aware of what the consistent plan is to help those students. Thank you. Please go ahead and respond Sorry, I didn't know if you wanted a response So we continue to well a couple things have happened the state has changed the standards of learning to be more aligned With the science of reading or evidence-based literacy instruction [00:40:18] So at the core for tier one there is definitely more expectations that all students are having a more having Instruction that includes more of the word work not just the comprehension work if you will our that we continue to offer do the tools that we're using we believe are aligned and so we continue to provide supports both through gen ed and special education for students who are showing signs that they need more support with gaining literacy our teachers in middle school just like our elementary schools our language arts teachers as well as our content teachers are engaged in [00:40:56] state training to learn more about evidence-based literacy instruction which I think is a real game changer because a lot of our middle school and high school teachers really didn't learn that in college and you know we know that there's some deficit with all of our teachers for having evidence-based literacy instruction in college but our middle and high school teachers for sure did not really receive instruction on how to teach kids to read so there's lots of independent efforts of course there's always room to do more you know the long-term goal is always that we will have less students needing intervention because of all the work we're doing but we recognize there are [00:41:31] students in our middle and high schools now that need attention it's your turn yes thank you for this report first of all basic pre-k is key it's obvious from the data but I have a couple questions related to the multi-language learners and our students with disabilities it was my experience when I worked in the system that when I had a counselor or even a teacher advocating for a student to be assessed for special education services who was a [00:42:06] multi-language learner that that was very much deterred the argument was always made and I was at the high school level that it's still it's the language it's not that it's not the learning so it was very frustrating because those sadly often those were situations where that child didn't have an apparent advocate or a guardian advocate they just had an internal school advocate and so I just want to make sure that that's not happening and hopefully elementary principals middle and high school principals you know and their staffs are empowered to say we need to do a language on this student we need to find out if there's more to what's going on especially in light of the fact that 20% of the population is dyslexic so I just want to put that out [00:42:43] there because I think it's it's a huge importance the other question I had is when we're talking about folks that are working with special education students who are also multi-language learners are we encouraging duly certified teachers do we have any situations where we have maybe perhaps a self-contained class that is special education and multi-language learners in isolation from other special education students because it seems like there's a little bit of a difference there in terms of instructional strategies to reach that [00:43:14] child so I guess that's an actual question so you want okay go ahead okay all right well I'll just give you my perspective and then turn it over to dr. I think your first question, I cannot overemphasize the importance of giving students, multilingual learners, the amount of time that they need to develop language proficiency. [00:43:45] We have to be careful about assuming, making assumptions about what multilingual learners are capable of early on in their educational journey with us. We actually over-identify multilingual learners for special education compared to state and national averages quite significantly and that's an area that we're looking at we're actually in the process with rich polio in our ESOL office working with the special education instructional team and procedural support team to look at all the procedures and processes that we have in place before a student would go through the eligibility process making sure that we really have done diagnostic literacy assessments with those students really to determine what the areas of [00:44:24] need and deficits are to determine if specially designed instruction outside of English language development instruction would benefit the student or not. So we're being very careful and thoughtful about that. We're reviewing all of our procedures right now. We're actually going to be asking our inclusion consultants that we're working with us on our inclusion project to look at all of those procedures as well because we think it's really important to get that outside lens and view on what we're doing. [00:44:51] So I just want to kind of clarify. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't identify a multilingual learner, and certainly we're going to be responsive to what teachers in the classroom are saying, what parents are saying, but we want to take the whole picture and we don't want to overreact. We want to make sure that we're making good instructional and sound decisions based on evidence. [00:45:07] On your second question about how we're educating our students, it's important. It's incredibly important. We just had a great all-county principal meeting with our inclusion consultants on this topic last Thursday that we're really focused on inclusion, not just for students with disabilities, for multilingual learners and other students as well in the gen ed setting. [00:45:27] So that is really the goal is to make sure that all of our students get access to high quality tier one instruction with the accommodations, supports, modifications that they need to be, I'm getting the, cut it off. So I'll leave it there for right now. [00:45:44] - I think that you said everything. It's very important. We have been working very close with Nardos and Sloan. what we call the Closing the Gap Team, Closing the Academic Gap Team. [00:46:04] And everything is being discussed. I agree, I get frustrated, especially that this is my passion when I talk about especially education and multilingual students and how we sometimes go by, sometimes it's just that we don't understand is not the language, but not the content. [00:46:28] and this is where overlap, and thank you. I know we have been working very close with Sloan, and this is something that I can tell you, the multilingual students here in Fairfax are doing much, much better than so many across the nation, and so I think that you should be very pleased with that, and also sometimes we can be very hard on us, but we're doing very well, and we are working together with HR to get more certified teachers, thanks. [00:46:58] - Okay, so another question also is part of an experience and a comment, but, and it's, I know this is all only through third grade, but we still have reading problems all the way through 12th grade. So it was my experience as a director of student services that I found too often that middle school counselors were not forceful enough in explaining to parents their children needed to take reading. [00:47:19] I will tell you what I did. I would get all the SOL scores from eighth grade, and if they failed, I would start with the lowest failures, and I would keep a spreadsheet of what elective they had picked that I took them out of and I put them in reading and I think that in my 15 years I only had three parents call me and say I didn't sign up for reading but we got those kids reading my frustration is we have a job to inform parents of where their students are and and I hope that sixth grade go into seventh grade if they need reading they're being put in reading like we have to do this people because if you're not literate you can't learn and then later in life you're going to be tripped up at every at every turn so that's kind of [00:47:59] more of a statement I need to ask what's going on but but hopefully people are doing that so directors don't have to spend a day tracking you know and making changes and schedules without calling home but that's just what I ethically felt like I need to do my last question is assessments in elementary school I am hearing from some constituents that they feel like their kids are being over assessed right now so can you talk to me about that yeah I mean I think that's a legitimate concern obviously we need to be responsive to our teachers and parents and students I think what's really causing that is the new state assessment in the primary grades the VALS assessment which requires a one-on-one [00:48:38] administration is taking a lot more time than the computer adaptive I ready assessment did so that is a stressor for teachers that are trying to cover a lot of content and manage a lot of competing demands we are required to use that assessment in the primary grades and as Noelle mentioned at some point where we believe we're going to be required to use that up through grade eight so more to come on that but I think again that just speaks to the need to make sure the teachers have adequate planning time so that when they're losing time someplace else they at least feel like they're getting the support and conditions that they need to be successful thank you Dr. Presidio [00:49:13] Ms. Seismalheiser followed by Mr. Dunn thank you I appreciate the conversation sorry I didn't want it was I have a loud mic I appreciate the conversation and I appreciate all the time that went into the report and the data, and I really appreciate the disaggregation of the data, you know, really teasing out which of our groups, you know, which portions of our groups, right, like the multilingual learners, the ones who complete our program or more advanced multilingual learners, are doing incredibly well, and I think that's important to point out that our programs are working if we can give our students the time to go through the programs, and I really appreciate you teasing out the level one versus level two with students with disabilities, because it goes to [00:49:53] something I've been saying for a long time because I would imagine if you crosswalk the inclusion data with the reading data and you would see level two students with disabilities are probably included a lot less and their reading scores are at 22% so you know I know people worry about inclusion let's pull them in intensive and pull them out of these classes and pull them separately but the reality is the data shows that hasn't been working we've been putting kids in intensive classes we've been segregating kids it doesn't work and there's so much research behind inclusion but there's so many crosswalks you see here so I always want to point out that crosswalk that it isn't just [00:50:32] sounds good but there's data behind it so I just wanted to point that out that same with I think we need to tell some stories around what's going on here for our funders in our community right we can say students aren't meeting you know we're not quite at our goals yet but our programming is working we're not quite out of goals yet but if the community and our funders would fund pre-k the data is so strong that it would get kids to my colleague's point literate which is important for everything right i think these need to be packaged dr reed maybe in some way that we can [00:51:08] start in our advocacy to our funders saying look here's all like we taught we have all these different reports with disparate pieces of data we need to connect all of them together into a story that we can explain to our public so i'm curious to see what you think about that yes ma'am I agree. I just think it's so valuable because there's lots of misinformation out there or little pieces here and we've got pieces everywhere so I would just recommend we work on that. [00:51:37] I'm curious what we're doing around family engagement with multilingual and economically disadvantaged families because we know the data shows so much about engaged families can really help support so I'd be curious to know what we're doing around that for specifically for the groups that have some of the most greatest gaps. Sorry I know I like to talk a lot about that I think that we have been very engaged with our families and indeed it's a very important it is imperative that our parents somehow we engage with them [00:52:11] things that we have been working working with Lisa Hall department and a chief of school office is so we have been visiting the schools also having some Saturday and Sundays coffee with with the chief of schools where we meet with some parents, and some areas that are very, I would say, undeserved, I don't want to put a label on those communities, and I will not mention those communities, but Saturday and Sundays, we go and talk, and we talk about things that they can do while they are at [00:52:48] home, that they have children, and some sources that we have here in Fairfax that they can utilize it English and Spanish little things like hey you can go to that website and you can translate into English you just with English through Spanish and everything that is the beginning they have been very optimistic and things that we are doing it and I think that I have been inviting dr. Reed as well we have been visiting some some communities there is one where we didn't [00:53:22] see one that coming back at time when they saw us it was like probably 300 people gathering around us and we have a lot of information for them so I think it's very important thank you and on the slide when it talks about slide 22 talks about targeted interventions it talks about dyslexia specialist that's kind of new we've had a dyslexia specialist for like 10 years this isn't new so like new actions in 20 it was his right here strategy eight new actions in school year 24 25 [00:53:58] tailored based tailored evidence-based literacy dyslexia specialists like what else is new that's not new so i apologize just to clarify the strategy itself is not new there are some new actions within there we're trying to pull out existing and new actions so i apologize if that was confusing that's okay that's what i was confused about i appreciate that and then um just one last quick question i may need to go back can you tell me more about the curriculum-based the common assessments and why we haven't been doing that before? [00:54:27] I'm probably going to have Noel or Diane talk a little bit more about what we're doing currently because in the new curriculum that we adopted, there are, at the end of each unit, developed by the publisher, common assessments that are easily implemented in schools. [00:54:49] Previously, we had tried it at different times, but when we had run, like, internal validity studies on the assessment in terms of correlation to other outcomes, we never got good results. So it's like it wasn't telling us what we needed it to tell us, and we had other measures that we were using. But now, given the fact, to Dr. Reed's earlier point, that this is an assessment developed by the publisher, completely aligned to what the instruction is and what the students have participated in, we think it's a really valuable tool. [00:55:15] But in the past, we just didn't have that. And again, we, you know, had a locally developed curriculum for 20 years. Mr. Dunn? Yes. It is your turn. [00:55:33] Thank you. um so i i appreciate all the great work that's been done i'm sorry i'm having trouble with my video but um appreciate all the great work that's been done um but what i it's not clear to me when we're going to get to the point where we have eradicated the achievement now and if we have a goal in that regard um because you know this seems a little bit like process and a little bit less focused on on outcomes and you know there were NAEP scores that came out recently showing just [00:56:09] uh abysmal uh winning scores in every state of the country for black students um in terms of their proficiency and we need to we need to do better we have so many school divisions across the country experimenting with different things over many decades and and so we should have figured out by this plan time in 2025 how to teach a child to read and how to teach uh children to read consistently across different income levels different uh backgrounds etc so i'd like to [00:56:42] understand um if if there is a year that is in mind and i'll build on the question of my colleague who asked you know i i understand um um um to pursue responses were early stages but i'd like like to know by what year we believe that we will have taught all of our children to read proficiently and that there won't be these persistent achievement gaps across different groups no matter how you slice and dice them. That is a large and very important question. [00:57:21] I don't have an easy answer to that. Obviously we've been working really hard not just in Fairfax But as a profession in education on closing gaps for a long time, we do have evidence on certain things that make a difference in closing those gaps. And this report is really trying to reflect what some of those strategies are, whether it's a comprehensive, coherent, viable curriculum implemented consistently in all schools, whether it's the assessment practices that we're using to identify students that are at risk and falling below grade level and getting them additional support before they fall further behind to get them caught up to speed and on grade level, [00:57:59] whether it's the training and professional development that we're providing to our teachers so that they're using the right strategies, whether it's the work that we're doing around inclusion, which is just beginning, but is going to impact a huge number and percentage of our students in getting access to high-quality Tier 1 instruction. [00:58:15] It's all of those things and a lot more. but when we talk about achievement gaps there are also those external factors that i do think we need to continue to remind ourselves of that we can't do this work alone the school system needs the community support we need our lawmakers support we need the funding that we need to be able to provide students with the resources that they need and we're always going to have students in this in society unfortunately that are going to come to us at varying levels of readiness And we need the resources to be able to target and provide supports to students at where they're at. [00:58:48] The research, for example, is really clear that economically disadvantaged students, those external factors that come along with financial issues and considerations, whether it's housing insecurity, food insecurity, stressors that exist in their lives, all of those things impact a student's ability to learn, whether it's the amount of time that students have been exposed when we talk about early literacy to language, Really, even pre-birth, pre-natal, almost. [00:59:15] And having strong birth to five programs in our communities that really support students and families in getting the enrichment that they need in the home to be able to perform well in the classroom. It really is a community-based effort. I really appreciate your question. I wish I had a better answer for you in terms of the magic bullet or the exact timeline that we would be on. [00:59:36] I mean, I would go back to just the measure that we're looking at right now with third grade reading. really looking at when those kindergartners that we have in our classrooms today take the third grade SOL. That will be the first cohort of students that have at least gone through our comprehensive redesigned literacy programming at the primary grades, and that would be school year 27-28. I've heard many stories, as have I think everyone on the board and Dr. Reed, about the difficulty of implementation of the new science of reading literacy curriculum [01:00:14] when do you feel that those challenges will be overcome and this new literacy curriculum will be implemented with great fidelity with all teachers fully trained and all students receiving consistent literacy education regardless of what school they attend and where they live to be honest mr. Dunn it's it's a continuing effort right it's a continuing effort we have hundreds of teachers at every grade level across multiple schools each year with an infusion of new teachers into the profession that we will continue to support and to [01:00:53] develop provide feedback and coach and we'll continue to work with staff I you know the the picture that you paint where we're all completely aligned and everything's perfect I hate to say I'm not sure that arrives I think it's a continuous work and we get better and better every year understanding we never get the perfection as as human beings but um is there a point at which you feel in the next two or three years you will be able to say for the vast majority of teachers you know who are not brand new out of teacher [01:01:31] school or for the vast majority of students that there will be consistency i just what i'm not understanding is what I'm hearing is from from a layman's perspective from a constituent perspective we're working on it and we're doing the best we can but that's not what parents want to hear parents want to hear when will it be done right understanding there will always be new people coming in these students new challenges but when when do we think the year will be when we can actually say we have accomplished the full implementation of this literate new [01:02:06] literacy curriculum I mean I do think that having been a teacher myself you live through the entire year right the first year everything is new though one of the strengths of benchmark is is there's a regular cadence unit by unit so I think as this year is going on teachers are building their own efficacy and their own understanding and building their their skills and and tools to implement with fidelity so I believe that after we get through this year the teachers who have have taught this year will be in a much stronger place next [01:02:42] year in year two often we see you know new teachers really thrive in year three right like when they start to not only implement with fidelity but they really can be more even responsive to the student needs right in front of them because they have a deep understanding and comfort level so it's not a precise answer but I think we'll see you know a great level of increase of fidelity next year and then year three is when I would predict that we would really start to feel like we own this product thank you Miss St. John Cunning followed by Miss [01:03:16] Dixon so I do want to address a comment that was just brought up because I have several colleagues that are reading specialists that have taken the training and are training it and are training other teachers and i think at the beginning of the school year it might have been a little bit difficult but i'm in the schools that i'm walking into i'm seeing that teachers are excited about this and that they are embracing this um and i understand that to a lay person it may be a little bit difficult i i get that but when you see that [01:03:53] although teachers you know it's an extra thing on their plate but they are happy with what they're doing. I think that says a lot when you've got that kind of energy, which makes the buy-in and the reaching the proficiency a little bit easier. So I just wanted to give that perspective of what I've seen and what I've heard when I go into school buildings and speak with some of the reading specialists and then talk to some of the teachers that they have trained. Thank you for the [01:04:30] presentation. I'm just going to be very quick and then just a comment for the next round from when my colleague said about the connecting the data and I wanted to ask Dr. Reed if we have any data dashboard which are public-facing to show some of our academics achievement numbers. I believe we have public-facing academic achievement data. I don't believe it's a live dashboard at this time so we're essentially reporting generally data a year and in some cases [01:05:08] two years after when we receive it officially from the Commonwealth I think when we started the conversation this morning around common assessments those are internal facing data that staff will see immediately and be able to act on immediately and that data is not forward-facing at this time okay that's That's good to know, but at the same time, I would just say, let's just put this out there if you're improving, and even if you're sort of improving in some areas, some not, but it's good to let the public also know what we are doing, and that would be, I think, [01:05:48] really good to have that data dashboard out. As a meeting manager, I just want to say we have a lot of pages, presentation left, and this is a very important topic this is the core of our schools academics um i don't know we're going to do justice to with all the colleagues have questions and so i would just uh wanted to say that next round i think after uh dr anderson if you could give the entire presentation at least we'll have them 30 minutes left for questions um and if there is an i would definitely would like [01:06:23] another work session if time permits and any in our future to come back to this topic mr. Frisch just the question of another work session there's no room for a work session before we're voting on this at the regular meeting but we do have a regular meeting where there will be opportunities for more conversation that's good and I do want before my time gets started I do want to confirm when mystics it has said this is our bread and butter and maybe next time we just give it a little bit more time and maybe perhaps we'll steal a little time from [01:07:00] budget if that's possible just want to put that on the table since we have three and a half hours for that all right you could go ahead and start my time one of the things that I was very interested in seeing is the information you provided on page 13 of the report where you highlighted how FCPS performed as compared to other school divisions you offered seven and the way B I don't know what slide it is I'm just looking at the reports when you look at all these eight school divisions where do we fall I we don't have that specific data we [01:07:37] could certainly provide that as a next step for the board yes I would be very much interested in that and one of the things and hearing the conversation here this morning I'm gonna veer away from my plans here I'm not as encouraged about the data as I think I I would like to be because looking at what's offered on page 15 across the board there's been very little movement across all of the categories I think we've gone maybe two percentage points in some areas but it's really been very little I'm always looking for where is it that we're having those successes because those are the places that we want to duplicate and [01:08:14] and continue with what they're doing so if you could speak to have you had the opportunity do you have access to looking at data with across the groups similar demographics like where are we seeing those big pockets of successes in our division I'm gonna turn this over to Diane Leipzig she is our principal in residence for literacy who can potentially answer your question dr. [01:08:43] Anderson we do have an internal dashboard that allows us to look very specifically at how schools with similar demographics are performing in each grade level on each metric and so it does help us to do some deeper analysis to look at where are we seeing pockets of success that we can then investigate so the goal 3 innovation team has actually identified a number of schools that we're going to be doing empathy interviews to really get a sense for what are the systems and structures in place at various schools that would [01:09:22] contribute to success in each of these areas so it is something we are investigating very closely and we do have a dashboard that allows us to look with that fine-grained detail I would be very interested in seeing that because that's where we can really point to activities that we can replicate because we know there's a lot of disruptions even with the best laid plans we have transiency we have students who have a substitute for a bulk of the year because there's maternity leave there are things that happen but if we can [01:09:58] duplicate whatever those successes are that is more helpful because I'm not a layperson to this this is my bread and butter so I am looking at this with a very different eye and I want to turn that eye to common assessments again good conversations about it I would like to know how are we aligning the comments the common assessment results to the results that we have to be responsible for? Because at the end of the day, whether we like it or not like it, the SOLs is where we are. What is that alignment [01:10:29] and what are we seeing? Well, it's too early to really see anything right now. But as I mentioned in one of the previous questions, we can do basically like a correlation study to show like at what point a student would have to score on the common assessment to have passed the SOL. But We can't do that internal validity correlation study until we get the SOL results back from this year. [01:10:56] And then it being the first year of adoption of the curriculum, we'd need to probably do that a couple years in a row. So we haven't had an opportunity to do that yet. But we do believe that the common assessment, because it's aligned to the actual curriculum that was taught, and it's gonna give us really helpful information to make those instructional adjustments in real time. [01:11:14] Not waiting for the SOL results to come back a year later, but saying based on this past unit, What are we seeing? What do we maybe need to reteach? Or what do we maybe need to adjust for the next unit of study? So it's more of a real-time assessment, if you will. - Have we done a similar correlation for I-Ready, which we've had for a number of years in terms of how it's coupled to SOL performance? [01:11:36] - Yeah, so I was mentioning that a little bit earlier too. I was trying to point out that we did do that study and we are seeing, again, when you take that cut score on the I-Ready that a student would need to achieve correlate with like a 95 percent confidence interval to passing the SOL test we're seeing actually an increase of about four percentage points of our students hitting that I ready benchmark this year so that's a good internal signal for us that we're on the right track thank you I looked at last year's report and I was really digging through the strategies that were part of that report which one of these strategies have we elected that are not having the [01:12:14] impact and we have to abandon what have we stopped doing from last year is what you're asking for dr. Anderson I think we could give the board a summary for for that section of what we've stopped doing I think that most of the work as we talked about in the introduction we were already sort of in progress when the Virginia Literacy Act came to fruition so much of that work just linked into and I would invite Noelle if she has anything to add into that existing work? So prior we were using our our curriculum right our FCPS curriculum so we've completely replaced the curriculum materials that teachers [01:12:51] are using. We were using iReady with our younger students and now we're using the valves so we've done some replacements most of it has been driven by the Virginia Literacy Act because that was so broad and sweeping. Okay thank you. You mentioned the use of Benchmark Express. When did we begin that work with benchmark Express so benchmark Express is our English language development curriculum that is aligned to benchmark advance and that started just this fall okay thank you on page 20 of the document the economic economically [01:13:31] disadvantaged intersectionality data all of the groups seem to have increased by a similar percentage points against except for black students what reflections did you have about that I think there is a need to dig deeper into this data and as part of what Miss Leipzig said is our goal innovation team is taking this sort of outcome data the intersectionality data and going out to schools to do some further learnings to understand where are we seeing persistent challenges where are we seeing improvements so I think at a cursory level the data is what the data is and we have to get behind the stories [01:14:11] of why we're seeing improvements or why we're not seeing improvements in certain areas is that something that would be possible before we have to approve this on date that I don't know, like Mr. Mr. Frisch is getting the date but I would just say the work that they're doing right now is an ongoing deep investigation and I don't know that we would have a comprehensive answer for you all in two weeks. Thank you that's February 20th it just I think a part of this is missing because we have to get to the why of this of why we are in the places that we are because we would we can do this all day and all night but [01:14:48] until we get to the root causes it makes a little bit superficial so I will stop here and then turn it back over to you miss neil for the second and third parts i do want to note we are supposed to end at 12 30. it is now 11 45. i am not seeing that we're going to be successful in completing these two parts knowing that we already have go backs on this first component so i just want to put that out on the table we'll may have to regroup in some way but please go ahead and start well I will attempt to be succinct so we're going to look at [01:15:25] algebra 1 by 8th grade as our next measure our middle school students who take algebra 1 by 8th grade do have greater access to higher level math and science courses at the high school level and the national research shows that students with strong math skills who take algebra 1 in middle school have higher test scores in both math and language arts and better attendance in middle school and are more likely to pursue advanced math in high school and to attend college. The research has also identified several factors that impact Algebra 1 participation in middle school including factors such as enrollment practices, teacher preparation, and student level factors such as readiness, [01:16:03] persistence, and habits like checking work. For this measure we are specifically looking at students who earn a verified credit in Algebra 1 by the end of 8th grade, meaning they both pass the class and the associated SOL at some point in middle school. When we compare this to our baseline data we did see significant increases in the percentage of students meeting this metric and FCPS surpassed the overall division target for last year. We do continue to see significant differences between student groups that we will examine further and when we discuss and we'll also discuss in more detail the strategies that have led to [01:16:38] these significant gains. There is not state data available on the percentage of students who earn a verified credit in S.O.L. and our verified credit in algebra one excuse me however we are able to look at differences in the number of students in eighth grade who take and pass any high school math S.O.L. [01:16:57] which includes algebra one algebra two or geometry to see how FCPS compares against other divisions in the state and as you can see from the slide FCPS has consistently outperformed the state overall on this data point and is also outperforming other Northern Virginia wavy school districts as well. So I'm going to go back to our metric which is looking at the percent of students receiving that verified credit in Algebra 1 by the end of eighth grade and we did see that increase by eight percentage points from 51% at the baseline to 59% last school year. We did see substantial gains across nearly all [01:17:33] of our student groups. Our students with a 504 plan, our multiracial students and black students all had a 10 percentage point or more increase from baseline and we also did see disparities in the rates of earning verified credits persistent with students who are economically disadvantaged students with disabilities multilingual learners black and Hispanic students having rates below the division average and again I do want to point out that our Hispanic students who are not multilingual learners had a rate of 57% which was just under the division average and again underscores the importance of us looking at our intersectionality data. On the bottom line on this slide again [01:18:09] you can see where we hit our annual growth targets last school year in green. We did see several student groups exceed their annual growth targets as well as some student groups that fell below those annual targets meaning we will need to make additional growth in subsequent years. And then again on this slide you see that annual growth line from the baseline that we need to remain on track for our 2030 goal. On this slide we're going to take a look at academic performance of those middle school students that finished Algebra 1 last year. So you can see overall 95% of students who finished Algebra 1 by 8th [01:18:45] grade last year earned at least a C minus in the course. While we do see some variation by student group all had rates of successful completion of over 80% and it's important to look at this data because it suggests that the primary driver of students not earning the verified credit in Algebra 1 by 8th grade is more related to enrollment versus underperformance once they are in the course. Returning back to our percentage of students who got that verified credit in Algebra 1, this is looking at intersected student groups. [01:19:17] We do see that students who are economically disadvantaged and not multilingual learners had rates that were close to the division average and our multilingual learners with disabilities had the lowest rates of any intersected group that we examine. On this slide we do see Algebra 1 looking at that what by ELP level. We saw that students categorized as ELP levels 3 and 4 had significant gains from the baseline and the most progress was made by our former multilingual learners who increased by 13 percentage points from the baseline. Overall our students with disabilities [01:19:53] saw a 7 percentage point increase on this metric. 53 percent of students with disabilities classified as level 1 received a verified credit in algebra 1 by the end of eighth grade compared to 8 percent of students with disabilities classified as level two the rates for both level one and level two have increased from the baseline with substantial gains for our students categorized as level one there were no differences in student performance on this metric by gender with rates and growth similar for boys girls and non-binary student rate that was too small to report for last year we do have that full data in the report and we know that national research has found that our [01:20:31] LGBTQIA+ students self-report lower rates of math identity, which is their own beliefs about their abilities in math, and less interest in enjoyment and the subject. And then within this student group, the research also indicates certain students may be less likely to take advantage of advanced math in high school. And these are barriers that can be overcome in environments where there is more support. Alright, we're gonna now take a look at strategies for Algebra 1 by 8th grade. We are currently focused on a set of universal, school targeted, and and student-targeted strategies, which include a focus on preparing all students for Algebra I by eighth grade and encouraging their enrollment in middle school, [01:21:11] providing collaborative opportunities for identified schools, and providing personalized supports for students who have been historically underrepresented in Algebra I in middle school. FCPS has made major changes to our approach to Algebra I by eighth grade. [01:21:27] The K-7 math curriculum is being revised to increase coherence, alignment, and depth, and complexity order to prepare all students to be successful in Algebra 1 by 8th grade, a multi-year plan that's been developed that maps out, compacting standards, the standard mathematics course pathway. [01:21:45] FCPS is also currently in the process of adopting a new basal resource for math and is continuing to provide professional development to support current and future changes. We have allowed students to enroll in Algebra 1 in 8th grade without prerequisites since However, we know many families may not be fully aware of this option, and FCPS is focusing on outreach and education to students and families about this policy and the benefits of Algebra I in middle school. [01:22:14] And then a math success dashboard that identifies more students who are ready for Algebra I, as well as a required SIP goal focused on Algebra I enrollment by the end of eighth grade, both support these efforts. We have an Algebra Access Network Improvement Community which is focused on increasing the diverse representation of students who participate and are successful in Algebra 1 by the end of 8th grade. [01:22:40] The participating schools use improvement science to examine school data and develop strategies to improve outcomes. Across all the cohorts that have participated in the AANIC, they have seen an increase in the percentage of students enrolled in Algebra 1 by 8th grade from 56% in the 21-22 school year to 70% this year. [01:23:02] So again, that's looking at enrolled students. To support students with disabilities, we're providing a new training for teachers. This training helps special education teachers with specifically design instruction and supports general education teachers with supporting students who are struggling with certain concepts. [01:23:19] FCPS is also aiming to increase the number of general ed and special ed teachers who participate in the Advantage Math Recovery, where teachers use a scripted intervention curriculum to support numeracy instruction. And this year, FCPS is also piloting a resource for Algebra I and instruction assessment in Spanish at Key Middle School. [01:23:39] And the impact of that pilot is currently being assessed to determine future implications to support our multilingual learners in accessing Algebra I by eighth grade. For students who have not been exposed to certain content when they are accelerating in the math sequence, the math team has included support materials address these gaps. FCPS offers math space skills check-in for all of our middle school students and this is a digital learning platform that provides students with customized content and practice. And we continue to provide professional development on how to leverage our measures in academic progress or map growth assessment to design targeted interventions for our [01:24:17] students. And then finally our Algebra 1 by 8th grade goal innovation team will continue to identify ways to improve Algebra 1 outcomes in particular for the things identified in this report. So we're going to continue on to our final section to look at successful completion of advanced coursework in high school. [01:24:36] Here in FCPS, we know our students have the opportunity to pursue a wide range of advanced courses while they're in high school, which includes college level courses such as advanced placement, international baccalaureate, dual enrollment, and other advanced courses that carry a 1.08, as well as earn CTE CTE courses that will help lead to a completer status and the research shows that completion of these advanced level courses is linked to higher rates of on-time graduation, college enrollment and completion, and higher earnings. We've also identified several factors within the research that influence rates of advanced coursework including divisions covering the cost of AP or IB tests or [01:25:15] enrollment and courses with associated fees, the availability of courses and the expectations at the school level around student participation in courses, and student factors such as family expectations, experience with post-secondary preparation, and student academic preparation. [01:25:34] We did see a one percentage point increase in the number of students in the senior cohort completing at least one of these advanced courses before graduating, and fell just one percent below last year's target. White students were the only group within five percentage point of the division average, with all remaining student groups significantly higher or lower than the division average. [01:25:54] And we'll talk about the strategies that we're focused on in the subsequent slide. This slide does provide some state and national comparisons. We don't always have that one-to-one to give you that context, but wanted to provide this. And this is based on the 22-23 school year, which is the most recent year we had the available national data. [01:26:13] And during that year, FCPS students who took an AP test had substantially higher overall pass rate, 73%, then the state overall, which was at 65%, and then the U.S. average, which was at 60%. So again, just to provide some context, and during the same year there were just over 4900 CTE completers in FCPS, which made up 11% of the shared statewide. The vast majority of our students, 85%, who were in last year's senior cohorts, successfully completed advanced coursework in high school. Again, that rate is up just slightly from the baseline that was 84%. [01:26:52] Our multilingual learners saw the most growth from the baseline, which was up seven percentage points from 44% to 51%. Our Asian, multiracial, and students with a 504 plan had rates at or above 90%. And students who were economically disadvantaged multilingual learners, students with disabilities, and Hispanic students had rates that were 10 or more percentage points below the division average. Again when we look at that intersectionality data for Hispanic students who are not multilingual learners we saw a rate of 80%. And then on the final row again in green you can see which groups hit the target for last [01:27:30] year. So again overall we fell just one percentage point below our target for last year meaning we're going to need to make additional growth to be on track for our 2030 goals. This chart breaks down the measure a little bit more by visualizing the share of students in that senior cohort who graduated with only that CTE completer status, which is shown in red, only AP/IB or dual enrollment or a 1.0 weighted class, which is shown in teal, or both, which is shown in yellow. And again in that dark blue you see the percentage of students who did not do any of those things. Our overall measure doesn't preference the [01:28:10] use of a certain course, AP versus CTE, to meet this criteria, which allows students to have the flexibility to choose the advanced pathway they prefer. But this slide is useful for us in understanding the role these different courses are playing in their performance on this measure by our student groups. [01:28:26] So consistent with the other measures in this goal report we saw that students were economically disadvantaged but not multilingual learners and students who are economically disadvantaged but not students with disabilities have the highest rates of all the intersected groups we examine which were both within four percentage points of the division average. And again, our multilingual learners with disabilities had the lowest rates of all student groups that we examined. The rates of advanced coursework do increase rapidly as we look by ELP level and we saw the most substantial gains since the baseline for students classified as ELP levels one through three. The rates for our former [01:29:05] multilingual learners were also within five percentage points of the division average. Our students who are categorized as level one had substantially higher rates of completing advanced coursework than those who are categorized as level two. Girls in the senior cohort were substantially more likely than boys and non-binary students to complete advanced coursework and the national research suggests that our LGBTQIA plus high school students tend to take fewer advanced course fewer college prep courses than their peers which is substantially explained by their level of connectedness to teachers and other [01:29:42] students. We also show particularly low rates in participation in advanced STEM courses. And then finally I'm going to talk about the strategies associated with our advanced coursework. So we're currently focused on a core set of universal and targeted strategies that aim to increase overall availability and variety of advanced courses and support students in intentionally planning for and enrolling in these classes. We see focused efforts at our high schools with lower completion rates and supporting students who have historically been underrepresented in seeking out and completing advanced coursework prior to [01:30:18] graduation. We are seeking to provide early and consistent exposure to learning experiences that help students make those connections between their understandings of coursework and future aspirations. And to support this ongoing intentional work, FCPS does provide resources for all of our schools to support the development of those personalized academic and career plans. [01:30:39] This year we began a pilot with ABLE that allows us to use data on high school student course taking patterns, grades, and test scores to help principals and their teams identify opportunities to strengthen students post-secondary readiness and we're going to highlight this more in our goal 4 reports and expect that these actions will help strengthen broader academic advisement practices and prepare more students to pursue that advanced coursework in high school. All of our high schools do continue to have a required CIP goal that's focused on student participation in advanced coursework. We also have developed an honors framework that articulates the elements of rigorous [01:31:18] instruction that should be embedded in all courses as well as how these standards are extended into honors level courses in the middle and high school and this ensures all of our students who wish to take those advanced courses in high school have that rigorous instruction that prepares them for these classes. We continue to add dual enrollment options in both schools that are have current dual enrollment courses as well as exploring new courses that can be offered in dual enrollment based on student interests. We're also increasing the flexibility of AP courses that can be used to satisfy certain graduation requirements and expanding that access to begin AP in ninth grade. [01:31:56] And then we continue to expand AVID, which as you all know is a national model program designed to support students in completing the most rigorous curriculum. Last year AVID was operating at seven elementary schools, 15 middle schools and 15 high schools, and this year access was expanded to 18 additional title one elementary schools. A new structure has been incorporated into the AAP screening application that provides documentation of support for our young scholars and advanced coursework and this information will continue to support access for these students in advanced courses and provide secondary teachers [01:32:33] with information to support these students when they are in those advanced courses. As we previously shared we have a project team that's focused on our 2E learners and is currently working to familiarize staff with our existing 2E handbook and to develop better tracking of our 2E learners and our student information system with the explicit goal of monitoring access and successful completion of advanced coursework. We did see those substantial increases in the inclusion and success of our multilingual learners in accessing coursework last year in part which was due to adjustments in the ESOP [01:33:09] programming and course sequencing that have really streamlined a path to begin courses required for graduation while focusing on ELD or their English language development and we believe the expansion of advanced course offerings will also continue to support our multilingual learners and finally we have several goal innovation teams that are working on outcomes that will support these efforts and these will inform future strategies that we'll bring to the board and with that I will hand that back over to the meeting managers thank you so much being that [01:33:44] it is currently 12:04 we're going to set the timer for 90 seconds so you might just get one question out and we're asking staff to be super succinct so hopefully we'll get to everyone and hopefully we'll have time after the budget to come back to the rest of your questions so without any further ado mr. Frisch followed by miss Marin 90 seconds please staff I don't mind the extra three it's fine okay wasting time all right dive right in so I appreciate [01:34:22] the information about not only how we're getting more students into algebra by eighth grade but also whether or not they're passing I'd love to get data on students who are passing at a B level at a C level rather than just getting by so it'd be great if we could have that data and obviously that's going to be impacted by the work on our pipeline dr reed can you talk a little bit about the work that we're doing to ensure that we're setting students up for success in algebra by eighth grade and the broader implications for that with your goals around math readiness and increasing our standards around mathematics i say this as many board members are getting ready to appoint members [01:35:01] of our community to the math irc committee thank you mr frisch i think math is critical right now as reading is math limits 40 or 84 percent of our career choices right now in this country the proliferation of ai and other large language models as well as quantum require a deep understanding of mathematics period full stop so we moved up our math curriculum work by a year this year the expectation is to come up with secondary materials and i do mean a book we're We're not gonna be strictly online. [01:35:37] We need math text for students to work with. We're gonna be looking at elementary next year, the same expectation for text. We also need to be really thoughtful about our sixth grade and the possibility of sixth grade being in middle school because really every elementary school should have a sixth grade section of algebra as well. [01:36:00] If we don't, we can't get to algebra trig until eighth grade. So we're working, our math lead here for the division is here to answer questions in more detail, but given time, I think I'll just leave it there. There's a significant pipeline body of work happening, different pyramids who currently don't have some of our strongest numbers are looking at K-8 models for adjustment to mathematics. [01:36:25] So it's really a full-court press right now on mathematics. Thank you. The math division average on this for former EL students is 50% versus 59% for the overall percentage, which is way different than our reading score averages where we were 28 points higher among former ELs. [01:36:50] Why are our former ELs performing so much better than the division average on reading but worse than the division average on math? It's especially weird because typically you would talk to experts and they would say math and science transcend language in some regard. [01:37:13] Yeah, I mean, I think that's true in some regard. I mean, what we see with the reading measure is those students that are former ELs have obviously developed complex fluency in multiple languages. So they're strong with reading, writing, speaking, and listening, right? This, to me, when we look at the particular slide that you're referencing, is more of an opportunity gap than anything else. [01:37:32] like having the opportunity for the multilingual learners at earlier phases to be able to actually access Algebra 1 by eighth grade. Whereas I think the other slide is more about students language development progression. So I think to me this is again a target area for us. We're working, our math team is working really hard to identify students school by school that could be accelerated into Algebra 1 and providing that coaching support to the schools to close that opportunity gap. Thank you. Final question for Dr. Reed on advanced coursework how are we shifting our approach to advanced coursework in light of the new accreditation standards we're intentionally looking at the three E's [01:38:09] instead of the CCCRI I can go into more detail later and we're working with our ABL consulting group and actually looking at students schedules so they have looked at the last two years of our graduates from Fairfax County Public Schools and their course schedules to look at the rigor of those schedules and what we can do pipeline wise and in advising to make sure that those schedules are more rigorous and we can add more detail to that work but it's very intentional work at this time. Ms. Marin followed by Ms. Eisemolheiser and then Ms. Lady. [01:38:47] I really just like being rushed like this. So I'm going to focus on advanced coursework and I'm really glad to see some improvements on communications and planning around coursework selection. To me the biggest thing that we can do is better advertise and explain what advanced coursework options are available to families and to students and so some of that's been happening I have still some more suggestions but I think that one of the issues also is the schedule you know students need to know that they can get around schedule challenges by taking summer coursework or online coursework that's not [01:39:27] universally communicated or clear the offering of career and tech work that requires travel that's a problem with scheduling and getting more opportunities in that gets to equity that's related to the equity issues in our boundary review that's part of what that factor of equity to educational options is it's if you have to travel and you're using up your time I think too if you do your four core academics plus a world language you're really down to the minimum and I've seen my own kiddo try and do this and she wants to try these things but she's really hampered to do that and then if you play an instrument or sing I mean forget about it so like what is really these are all [01:40:04] great strategies but until we really fix like a lot of mechanical things I don't really think we're gonna see much of a difference just some questions about how courses are selected and this goes back to when we approve some stuff in the few months ago I just got these questions from a consistent considering how did the school system determine what schools to offer a course at next how many are currently in a virtual version of it is it possible for teachers to split what's the best way to show interest from parents to demonstrate an interest in a course no universal responses that I know of to any of this so that would be [01:40:37] my feedback did anybody want to respond to miss Marin's comments in the interest of time I think maybe not the only thing I would say is if I was following your questions we have a standard set of courses that all schools offer right and there are the optionals that are more at a school level so um you know you've been you've been a great support like providing us those inconsistencies and i think we'll just continue to partner nice [01:41:11] moheiser um so i really love to see when we're talking about sixth grade and middle school i'm going to put a plug in again if there's all these benefits of it then i think we need to be careful of making sure that it's for all students who are in sixth grade i mean not just some um i am wondering, again going back to data points, if there's an overlap from the fact that Mr. Frisch mentioned about surprising data that our English language learners are less successful in math and the over-identification for special education services when you then also see [01:41:47] the level of math completion algebra eighth grade by our special education students. So I think when we need to pull these disparate data points together to look at why things are happening the way they are um i did have a question about earlier um supports we mentioned young scholars and twice in the twice exceptional handbook but these things have been around for a while so what are we doing differently with these programs i'll pause here so uh dr king could you respond to that [01:42:18] i know that's a topic in terms of closing the opportunity gap with the young scholars yeah i really don't want to waste any more of my time i only get 90 seconds i can i can say it again if my time doesn't start. Please have her restate the question without the time quickly. Yeah, the Young Scholars and the TWICE Accessional Handbook have been around for a long time and we're not seeing these changes so what is being done differently with those two programs now because I don't want to keep listing things we've been doing. I think we are seeing quite a few changes with [01:42:56] Young Scholars. We've got data that shows over the last three to four years we've increased the number of Young Scholars participating in AAP or in advanced courses depending on the grade level between 10 to 30 percent so we've seen a real increase and I think that's largely attributable to making sure that we had a line-item funding for some funds for schools to support young scholars some of the things that we've done to code and assist young scholars program and enrollment some of the things that we've done to really support our teachers with understanding the access and the strategies that young scholars need to succeed as well as full-time advanced academic resource [01:43:34] teachers at the middle school so we're seeing a lot I think with young scholars the TUI handbook again continues to be a challenge to make sure that everybody in the system really understands the effective strategies for supporting our TUI students but that's a big piece of our inclusion work and our inclusion model as we change programming and service delivery that's a large area of emphasis two points I'd like to see more stem enrichment in every elementary school. I think if you get kids excited about STEM, then they're going to want to do math at an earlier age. And I haven't heard any conversation about STEAM, actually, STEAM enrichment. And there's so much mix between arts and technology that I think you get kids who are into arts, [01:44:13] into technology, through things you're interested in. And I think we need to think about what gets kids interested and then infuse technology in that instead of the other way around. The Twice Exceptional Handbook, I haven't heard any plans on implementation oversight. Who is responsible for the implementation and the oversight to make sure it's being followed and understood and even known that it exists? [01:44:34] Two questions. So I can start. This is the first year that as part of the required PD, we had this, the 2E handbook was part of what teachers needed to look at and do kind of an attestation that they were even aware that it existed. [01:44:51] So that going from unaware to aware was step one. as far as who is holding it accountable I think that comes in we have a multi-year plan around 2e about how we first one of the first things that we've done this year is we've Ensure that we have data so we understand who our 2e students are as a county So then we can make sure our teachers know there's now a sis flag that lets teachers know that they have 2e students in their classroom that will hopefully and with the support of either ARTs and special ed people in the schools will help them make the connection I have two e-students here's a handbook to help me how and we get this [01:45:28] that we get this started I'm sorry I'm talking as fast as I possibly can I know this is not the best work that we're doing I just think we need to be clear as to where we are on these things and not just list them because it gives us implications I know but you were speaking so I just want to get to miss lady and then miss Dixit. As always thank you for the report. I would like to see some data if possible in the correlation between grades in in algebra one and SLL pass rates. I just want to see if our A students and B students are passing. I just want to make sure that we're measuring them and evaluating them [01:46:08] especially 100% retake policy because that should be getting you to a pass rate also online campus it's robust but we need to make sure we continue to fund it you know my fear is that and I've heard some conversations from principals that there's been some communications between online campus and principals that they're not going to be able to offer all the classes kids are requesting and we can't do that we have to offer them what they're asking for to make sure we have equity and access the other question is dr. Reed I'm very fascinated about the course taking patterns data I would love to see that [01:46:45] and my other question is you know what sort of follow-up is happening I mean you can probably deduce from that schools who are not who are under matching kids and/or counselors who are under matching kids to be quite frank I mean you could be in a school that's got great data except for one particular alphabet and I just want to know what kind of training is going on because I worry that we don't give quality professional development to our school counselors our school Counseling Office does a fantastic job, however, I don't think that they're owning to the fact that they need to, that they need to thoroughly understand a curriculum and how it maps to post-grad planning. [01:47:23] If you want to do this trade, what do you need to have? If you want to do this particular college for this major, what do you need to have? So your question is, I apologize, I was trying to hear the question. Teasing out the data and if there's any follow-up or feedback back to the Director of Student Services of a program or around specific counselors. [01:47:41] then I mean I'd be fascinated to see it yes ma'am we've got we my directive to high school principals as we worked collaboratively on this is that all high schools would be involved in this work within two years so we could have frontrunners this year and then everyone else needed to come on board next year and I believe we have 20 high schools this year and the remaining will join the work next year and yes we do have the data by high school for sure for the last two years and principals are really excited and I think this is [01:48:16] work our school-based staff have wanted to do and it provides data in real time to make it actionable for students and it's one of the I think most transformational strategies that can occur in real time without new resources without new funding it's just being very intentional in the work that we're expected to do. Dr. Ponce is familiar with the work. I've done the work in our prior state. I know Dr. King is doing, is part of the team, Dr. King, Dr. Ponce, and Dr. Presidio. Dr. King, as a former regional person, when you've talked with [01:48:53] some of the principals, what's their feedback? You know, I reflected back to when I was a principal myself, when I saw the data and how excited I was to be able to know right away, you know, how our counselors are pushing our students towards which classes, and then how you could double back and have conversations with them as the why. When we see students are capable of taking higher level classes and they're not being counseled that way then we need to figure out the why behind that. [01:49:20] So I think that ABLE is going to be transforminable like Dr. Reed said. So I just want to put a pin in that and a serious fine point to say that the equity work is not an intellectual exercise on this topic. It's simply a matter of looking at the data and making sure each and every student has access to course taking patterns that benefit them and that's why Dr. King Dr. Ponce and Dr. Presidio are working collaboratively on this it's critical thank you love it thank you for this very long presentation I know it was a lot so I wanted to first take [01:49:56] everybody's attention to page 26 which is the we have the higher rate of eighth grade-passing high school mathematics SOLs. This is why FCPS is one of the best school districts in the country in academics. We do well. I do want to say that this increase from 58% to 62% means there is intentional work done and we would appreciate the staff and the teachers, principals, Dr. Reed, whoever is [01:50:31] This part of that is great going, and we just want to see the skip number going up and up. My question is, do we -- we talked about math success dashboard on page 36 on the slide. [01:50:47] Would you be able to tell me what that is? Hi. So, we have been working with our IT department to develop a dashboard, formerly known as Algebra Readiness Dashboard, trying to broaden the scope. [01:51:07] It has several different pages. We have a page that just is about enrollment, where schools can look at where their enrollment stands with Math 7 Honors and Algebra 1 in middle school, and then we also have other pages that can be used to target different student groups, so filters that you can use as a school to determine, "Oh, of my students who are passing the SOL, what class are they they projected to be enrolled in and what class are they enrolled in right now, so we can do some reverse verification to ensure that students who are showing aptitude are enrolling in those more rigorous courses. [01:51:46] Elementary is also included in that. We have pathway. We actually have a very similar diagram to what ABLE has provided high schools. It's called a Sankey diagram, and it shows pathways of where students are coming from in elementary and where they're enrolling in not only seventh grade, but in eighth grade, So that pyramids can do some vertical looking at where are students coming from and are we making sure that all of our students are reaching their highest potential? [01:52:13] Thank you for the answer. And then quickly, and I want to have more questions, but I'll come after budget session. How FCPS is doing in advanced coursework as compared to neighboring counties? Well, I think Ms. Stixit that's something we would have to see if we could get that kind of information. [01:52:34] to at least show is some information to contextualize around AP exam outcomes to provide some context. That would be helpful. The CTE, AB, IB, and dual enrollment. Thank you. Picking up on the algebra, I was very excited to see this as well, but it also dawned on me. Most of the school divisions, their sixth graders are already in the middle school, and it makes me also wonder, and they're doing less well than us with that configuration. So it makes me wonder as well what is our data that shows how our sixth graders who are in middle [01:53:13] schools how are they doing and this endeavor can that data be provided can certainly add that to the list of data follow-ups you were about to say something I was I was recently at Poe Middle School and visiting with one of the math teachers there mr. Scheidler maybe Alex anyhow amazing math teacher amazing program principal Pannudy was showing me around and they are poised as sixth grade next year to have a sixth grade section of algebra at poe middle school so i think as they um recognize the opportunities and have the resources we're going to see a [01:53:52] significant shift even in our schools that already have sixth grade and middle okay thank you and this question is mostly to the achievement gap group which i believe the the three of you i didn't see any data in the report that shows how we are doing some back of the envelope math on my part in looking at math for multilingual students going from 11 and the highest performing group was 79 that gap was 68 and last year was 66 why do we not have that data a little bit more efficiently presented i think if you're looking dr anderson to see is the gap growing or shrinking [01:54:31] that's certainly something we could provide some information i think what we see in some of these measures is gaps are growing between highest performing and lowest performing student groups and then we have seen somewhere that gap has shrunk it'll be great just to have a form a sheet that actually shows that last piece when it comes on page 36 you're talking about the data here is the denominator the number of students up to eighth grade or the number of students who took the class but did not get us but may not have passed I'm sorry what can you page 36 not slide 36 I [01:55:09] have no idea what it correlates to this is looking at it looking at the percent of students who receive the verified credit is out of the class the entire eighth grade cohort so the so how do we and how do we incorporate students who may have taken algebra by seventh grade they would count in this data set so you're looking at anybody in that eighth grade this is everybody who's an 8th grader in Fairfax County last year yes thank you the last thing that I want to asked with my 13 seconds on page 34 of the report there's an equity statement [01:55:45] there it's at the very bottom it says from an equity perspective and it goes on and on I helped me to understand how this is applicable to us here so I think what this is in the research I'm going to do my best to try and synthesize the research is that using data to show when students are academically ready for algebra one helps reduce some of the disparity so I think back to an earlier question that we're asking about why are we seeing maybe fewer multilingual learners there may be an opportunity gap that we're not paying attention to so when we use performance data to objectively encourage all those students who admit meet a certain threshold to participate in algebra one the research [01:56:25] says you see less disparity in terms of the demographics of students who are participating in algebra one in middle school I definitely have a follow-up but I have run out of time miss Setlow should we be wrapping up this section as you had previously asked if we may come back to it after budget so we would need to reconvene the work session since the work session and budget are actually two separate meetings we would just you would need to reconvene it so we will just pause for right now because we do think we're going to have time okay so if that's the case then we should recess [01:57:02] this portion instead of end it so that you have the ability to reconvene and if it turns out that we don't have time after budget then you would need to come back in really quickly and close this session out okay then we're in recess way to their seats uh that would be great so welcome to the first work session on the budget a couple of quick housekeeping items um mr dunn expresses his regret but cannot make it today this is a really good opportunity for us to all have a deep dive into the budget and ask questions um it's also the beginning of a community [01:57:40] dialogue that i'm looking forward to there is not a next steps document we did not do this last year the next steps is the budget question process which thank you to lee and her staff we've really accelerated the response time on those so next steps you just submit a budget question and they'll be answered in uh in the queue after lee gives her presentation we will do round one three minutes per member and then a go back round and also three minutes per member so with that i'd like to turn things over to the superintendent thank you mr mcdaniel um this afternoon um it's [01:58:16] important to note that we're going to be reviewing our proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 and the team has been working hard on putting together the numbers which really pull together and integrate a wide variety of departments school needs topics that must be addressed and in particular it's nice to see the proposed budget alongside goal three in this work session because as we contemplate achieving the outcomes of goal three it's critical that we are resourced [01:58:50] to do that the first nine slides of the presentation are slides i reviewed um at the public meeting our last regular meeting so i won't review those in detail this afternoon but i would like at this point to turn the presentation over to miss burden who will begin with slide 10. if you're watching at home or listening from home you certainly can review slides one through nine and the presentation provided at the last regularly scheduled board meeting miss burton thank you dr reed um good afternoon and i'm just going to do a real quick [01:59:27] summary because you all already heard this on the 23rd when the superintendent proposed her budget but just as a little refresher so high up of course our budget priorities are providing competitive compensation meeting the changing needs of our students providing differentiated services and of course continuing multi-year initiatives next slide the FY26 proposed budget totals four billion which is an increase of 297.1 million over the fiscal 25 approved budget to support these investments we're requesting an additional 268 million in county transfer funds or about [02:00:03] 10.4 percent and that transfer request is about the same as we asked for last year if you go to the next slide and of course the first thing is compensation adjustments and that is a result of the collective bargaining agreement we've included 7% salary increase across the board for all employees as well as a change to the food service and transportation salary scales and then of course our health rate changes we also have some small retirement rate changes that total 5.5 million and then we always recognize base savings from [02:00:42] turnover so that the total of compensation is about 214 million next slide the baseline adjustments are recurring cost of adjustments that have happened at the quarterly fund reviews like substitute teacher incentives and middle school late buses esports stipends workers comp legal fees online campus those kinds of things that are recurring but we've been funding with one-time funds so we we need to really include those in the baseline and the The enrollment cost is about $20 million, represents about 208 positions, and Matthew [02:01:18] Norton, Assistant Budget Director, will go over that in more detail. And then $9.3 million to support enhanced summer school, and $3.6 million to address the backlog of maintenance projects, and those are both routine adjustments that we have every year included as changes to support that, the transfers to other funds. [02:01:42] And the contractual rate increases are cost escalations for maintenance contracts, inflationary increases, leases, those kinds of things, and the baseline adjustments total 65.2 million. Multi-year initiatives are at 4 million. Those are things that previous boards or this board have approved, but that we couldn't do in one year, and so we phased it in over multiple years. [02:02:06] That includes the inclusive preschool expansion, the human capital management project, fine performing arts stipends and certified athletic trainers next up are identified investments and that's 14.2 million and that's only two things the safety and security and that will fund i don't think it's been decided exactly yet which projects are the top priority but we know there's a need for exterior security cameras at 44 elementary schools expansion of the ratback program a panic alert system and security vestibule funding and then 4.9 million for differentiated learning [02:02:45] credentials which will support us offering micro credentials for universal design for learning and multilingual learners so then if you look at the revenue again it requests a county transfer increase of 268 million or about 10 percent and that's primarily to to fund a compensation adjustment state revenue again our budget includes what the governor introduced those funds increases total 23.2 million and that's the state share of a 3% compensation supplement increase in English language learner initiatives and [02:03:22] we we're we hoping that the General Assembly will allocate additional funding for k-12 and to make good on the work of JLARC and they have a little bit we'll go over that when we do the state update federal aid is projected to decrease by a million and that's just current federal awards for Carl Perkins and IDEA, which are the only two grants that support the operating fund. [02:03:45] All the other federal funding is in the grant fund, but those awards are expected to reduce by a million dollars. And then the other revenue increase is due to increases related to Thomas Jefferson tuition from other divisions and the city of Fairfax. [02:04:03] You should, you know, it's worth reminding you that, next slide, over the last three years we've had lower and lower rates of county funding compared. If you compare fiscal '15 to '19, the historical average was 52.7%. In fiscal '25, that dropped to 51.5, which was an impact of 64 million to FCPS. [02:04:24] So that's where we stand on that. And again, with the state funding, we began that conversation months ago. Virginia school divisions received less funding per student than the 50 state average and the regional average. And then many of our neighboring states been more per pupil, including West Virginia, Kentucky and Maryland. But for now, Virginia school districts have yet to see any meaningful change as a result of the JLARC study. JLARC estimates that we are underfunded by 568.7 million. [02:04:55] That's not the entire Commonwealth, that is just Fairfax County Public Schools. That equates to approximately three thousand one hundred dollars for each of our young people. They also have done some near-term recommendations based on their findings focusing on raising on elimination or slightly raising the support cap exploring enhanced support for special ed and the importance of dressing data infrastructure needs however at this point no concrete legislative reforms have been adopted [02:05:29] about the jlart study so we continue to wait on that and now i'll turn things over to matthew norton who will provide an update on enrollment and student needs next slide good afternoon school board members and thank you lee uh this portion of the benchmarks chart that is focused on student enrollment is shown on the chart before you hear you can see with the exception of special education that we are not projecting substantial enrollment changes and we'll go over each of these areas individually after i touch on the budget impact overall so next slide please as far as the budget [02:06:05] impact goes here you'll see a chart that should look familiar we've gone over at the last three or four years now and it's also included on our budget documents but you can see the bottom right of that chart shows with a 20 million dollar increase related to enrollment and student needs and if you look right above that total line you can see the subtotal for special education is 20.6 million and so basically special education is the factor that's driving enrollment and student need growth in this budget all the other items are basically netting to a fairly negligible amount in comparison or about negative 0.6 million dollars and again we'll go over each of those in detail as we progress. [02:06:45] Next slide please. We wanted to just start off with a quick chart just showing overall enrollment and how things have changed since the pandemic. You can see from this dotted line projected enrollment over the years since FY21 and then you can see the X's and the red X represent our actual enrollment in each of those fiscal years with the red being an estimate as we don't yet have final data this year there's a component of our enrollment data that's not measured until after march 31st although it's a very small [02:07:17] component so we wouldn't expect things to change very much for that fy25 where that is at 18333 and so that's just information for you on the overall enrollment next slide please we'll kick things off with the component of our staffing formulas that's related to free and reduced price meals so what we did is we kept last year's chart and moved it over to the left and then we've provided this year's chart for the the cost impact on the budget and again as I said previously special education is the area where we're seeing the most growth so you'll see pretty small dollar amounts on these [02:07:54] other slides but for the FRM component we have about a point two million dollar impact and that's largely because there are that for the number of schools that are increasing in their FRM band we have corresponding schools that are decreasing and so we really have kind of a net zero impact over the course of the entire school division you can see that we have roughly the same number of schools eligible for needs-based staffing at 122 it's actually down one from from 123 last year and then you can see that instead of a two percentage point increase we have a kind of negligible increase this year again all that kind of leads to that very small dollar amount when it comes to the [02:08:31] impact on the budget. If we pop to the next slide here you'll see a line chart where we're taking the solid line is that same information that was provided previously for overall enrollment and we're just juxtaposing it with a dotted line that represents free and reduced price meals and what I'd really like you to hone in here on is the fact that from FY 25 to FY 26 that line is relatively flat whereas if you look the last two years it had been increasing pretty substantially now even though that line's flat we still do expect our overall percentage of students to be eligible for free reduced price meals to pop up [02:09:06] to 37% so up 0.1 percentage point and that's because our overall enrollment is projected for a slight decline so even though you know the enrollment staying flat we still see a slight rise in the percentage of students eligible that's over one in three students eligible for free reduced price meals in the county and just for context I think when I started working here it might have been under one and four so it's definitely changed quite a bit in my tenure here at FCPS if we move on to the next slide we're into the multilingual learner section of the changes to the budget this year we have a shift towards the [02:09:43] lower levels of service needs so towards levels three and four whereas last year the growth that was projected was primarily focused on levels one and two a lot of the shift is actually based on how students came in this fiscal year and then we also have a slight decline at 421 fewer students projected to receive services those two things alone would actually be a savings to the budget but we are having to adjust to recognize that this the state had an SOQ hold harmless in this current year that we didn't have to completely meet the requirements set at the state level and so this is going to be the first [02:10:23] year where we have to meet the full new standards and so that's offsetting the savings that we have from the slight reduction in cost and resulting in a million dollar impact to the budget if we move on to the next slide you can see again we've done that same line chart again with overall enrollment and instead of FRM this time we're obviously juxtaposing with multilingual learner services you can see it's a little bit flatter over the time period and we actually have like I said that projected decrease from FY25 to FY26 And a slight downtick in the percentage of students who are expected to be eligible for services as a percentage of the total population. [02:11:03] And then finally, we'll move on to the special education section of the student needs portion of enrollment. And here's, again, where you see that $20.6 million cost. And you can see that the numbers this year are very similar to last year. We're projecting 1,486 additional students to receive special education services. [02:11:21] And that's very much in line with last year's number. The one reason the cost is a little bit lower this year, $4.6 million lower, is that we're actually opening far fewer preschool special education classrooms because the influx that we provided last year was enough to kind of meet capacity for even this coming year is what the projections are showing. [02:11:42] And so there is a slight savings compared to last year, but still a cost of $20.6 million. And again, same line chart that should be familiar by now, except we have special education as the dotted line and then what I would point out there is that that line continues to increase whereas the other two were leveling off or slightly slightly declining and so you can see that for the projections for FY 26 we're projected to be up to 70 17.2% of students eligible for special education services and that's up from 16.3% projected last year finally just to kind of wrap up a summary for you all what we've tried to do here is take all the [02:12:21] data that's been in this this portion of the presentation from the last four years and provide you with the impact each of those four categories so you can see we show the projected enrollment change in each of the fiscal years culminating with a four-year net of 7,700 fewer students we have the impact that the overall enrollment had on the budget which again was a huge savings in FY23 we had some student increases in 24 and 25 and now we're sort of leveling off but if you look at that four-year net it's a savings of almost forty six million dollars and then you can see that within each of the student need categories you know we did have a little bit of savings in FY 23 but we've had [02:12:59] you know tremendous growth in those areas and so we're investing in providing services to our most vulnerable students and that's resulting in that total budget impact that's the four-year net of forty three point six million and about four hundred and seventy additional positions I'll turn things back over to Lee for a compensation update yeah so go ahead and go to the next slide. For all of you that, just as a reminder, air compensation philosophy stems from a 2016 market study and aspires to maintain a 95 to 105 percent of the market [02:13:39] at the midpoint. That's our goal. As of fiscal 25, we've fallen just outside that window for the midpoint or even further away at the market max, and our ranking compared to the other divisions is less than ideal in all three areas, min, mid, and max. I think you all would agree we have incredible teachers and staff here at FCPS and we want to keep them by offering competitive salaries that allow them to live in our county. Beginning teacher salaries for the master's lane still lag behind other school divisions in the metro area, ranking fifth of [02:14:14] eight Washington Area Board of Education or Wavy participants. An increase of seven percent will propel our standing to first of eight beginning salaries for those with a master's degree and if salaries are not at the top of the region we will continue to lose excellent educators to other divisions. It is very valuable for us to be able to go to these job fairs in the Commonwealth and say we pay the most in the metropolitan area. You may or may not know that of the education programs at universities in virginia about 2500 people graduate every year with a degree in [02:14:52] education and here in fairfax we could hire them all and we want to so get them trained up and and turn them into lifelong employees of fairfax county public schools and the way to do that is to pay the most at least at the beginning salary so that's one of the reasons why we concentrate on that if you look at the midpoint or teachers at the middle of their career right now we rank seventh of eight wavy divisions but this budget will improve our standing to the midpoint to fifth of eight and then next [02:15:26] slide at the maximum we rank seven of eight and we expect to remain there even with the seven percent compensation increase but the collective bargaining agreement will address this issue a little bit because you may recall that the agreement shows that we will add one step at the top of the scale in fiscal 27 and fiscal 28 the surrounding counties with us have 30 or more steps on their teacher scale because it takes 30 years to get a full unreduced VRS retirement and we currently have 25 steps so you know we have made a con I [02:16:04] think we started at 18 the last time they did a salary study for teachers there was only 18 steps on the the teacher salary schedule and we've kind of been whittling away at that so now we're at 25 steps but we really you know have a goal of trying to get to 30 so that we we pay more at the top for our most tenured teachers and it also is you know enough years to get an unreduced VRS benefit and you know for all that we're comparing fiscal 25 because certainly at the time the superintendent proposed her budget we don't have a lot [02:16:40] fiscal 26 information. We have a little bit more now. So for fiscal 26, Alexandria has stepped out with 2.85 percent and MSA, but their MSA varies among different groups. So we don't have, they're giving it, but as far as a percentage average, we weren't able to get that from them. Arlington doesn't release their budget until 313, and they have not shared with us what their salary proposal is. Falls Church has included 5%, of course, us, 7%. Loudoun has included 6.5%, Step Plus [02:17:17] COLA. Manassas City releases on February 25th, Manassas Park on February 10th, and Prince William releases on February 5th. But Prince William has already released information to the media about their agreement with their union, and they have also agreed on 7% in fiscal 26 so we would expect this to say 7% once their budget comes out I guess that's tomorrow and so this is just a chart of the beginning salary the master's lane and again we anticipate the 7% catapulting us to first in the [02:17:57] beginning teachers salary in the region our improvement at midpoint and max again are not as favorable but that's something that we you know we're going to work on in the future the next slide is about the state and federal update we to provide you the latest information that we have which at least with the federal it's not much but we'll we'll tell you what we have but first let's talk about the state and on sunday february 2nd just a couple days ago the house and senate each released their amendments to the governor's introduced budget there are a number of similarities that suggest the reconciliation [02:18:32] process could be smoother this year both chambers maintained the vpi funding that the governor had reduced. They provide a per pupil add-on for special education. There are a couple of differences. [02:18:47] The Senate has called for the bonus to be provided in fiscal 25 prior to June 1st, while the House bonus would be in fiscal 26, so next year. But both would come with expenditure requirements, of course, in their respective fiscal years. The House provides about $100,000 for Title I enrichment, which the Senate does not. And you should note that the final vote on the conference budget is no later than February 22nd. Of course the governor has a bit of time to line item veto and then the reconvene session will be on April 2nd. [02:19:22] But we'll of course continue to monitor the state budget and culminating with their inclusion in the approved budget assuming there aren't any delays at the state level. And as many of you are aware there's been a flurry of activity with the new federal administration. While exact specifics continue to be elusive, it's clear that we may not be able to rely on consistency of federal funding, as has largely been the case historically. The new administration attempted to freeze federal funding while reviewing compliance with the president's numerous executive orders, but court challenges have resulted in a [02:20:00] temporary restraining order and subsequent withdrawal of the OMB memo that started all the confusion, but of course the executive orders remain. It's It's just the OMB memo that was rescinded. And that was the implementation piece about the pause. [02:20:18] And again, you all know that for K-12, the pause targets funding that are in support of initiatives that are out of alignment with the executive orders. And so for K-12, that's DEI initiatives, environmental issues, and immigrant primarily. [02:20:36] I mean, there's been a couple of executive orders since then about other things that weren't directly related to grant funding. Although, make no mistake, the other executive orders are absolutely contemplate leveraging this funding to get us in compliance with those two executive orders as well. We have over $160 million in federal dollars across our various funds. We don't believe that the majority of these dollars overlap with the the executive orders, meaning the DEI initiatives, the environmental initiatives, and the immigration initiatives, [02:21:15] those three things that created the pause. Not a lot of the dollars, the 168 million, are in support of those initiatives. So that impact, if it's as stated, won't be as significant as it could be. [02:21:33] Again, due to the lack of clarity and the potential for the administration to use funding as leverage, it's prudent to proceed with the utmost caution. You know, I'm horrified to report that nobody's still really talking about food services at the federal level. [02:21:52] I've not heard a lot of information about that, and that is particularly concerning because even though all of these funds, and you know, that that funds the operating fund is a very small amount of the four billion budget, that's IDEA and Perkins, And then of course, Adult and Community Ed, that's Workforce Development, that's just a couple of million. [02:22:14] The Grants and Self-Supporting, that's all of the titles, Title I, Title II, Title III, that's about 56.5 million. But the Food and Nutrition Services, the meal reimbursement is 58.2 million. As Matthew said, about 37% of our kids rely on free and reduced meals. [02:22:33] And for those kids, for some of them, that is the best meal they get all day long. and that makes up 60% of food services budget. So that is much larger impact than any of the other, you know, federal funding sources. [02:22:50] Again, you know, food and nutrition is required to maintain three months fund balance. So of course we can limp along for a few months, but I just can't imagine that cooler heads are not gonna prevail and that somebody's gonna decide that food services should also be exempt as Social Security, Medicare, those Pell Grants, the direct payments to individuals, and that somebody's gonna see the wisdom of that and exempt that from the pause as well. [02:23:25] But for now, we just have to wait and see. And now we're gonna do the Baldrige Award update, and Marty Smith is gonna take care of that. - Okay, and good afternoon, everyone. It's good to be back in the budget seat. I haven't been at a board presentation for a little over a year and a half, so it's good to be here. [02:23:44] I am going to provide a bit of an update for where we are in the Baldrige process. For the community and for the board, we are in the process of applying for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. For some background, it's an award that was established by Congress to improve the quality of American products and services in education, healthcare, business, and government organizations. [02:24:08] It's an opportunity for us to find efficiencies in our organization, particularly with our operations. The review is broken up into seven specific categories. I'll read them aloud for those who might be following along in the community. [02:24:24] We have leadership, strategy, customers, measurement, analysis, and knowledge management, workforce, operations, and results. Next slide, please. The framework includes a series of questions to get to the heart of our strategy and our process, such as how do we conduct strategic planning? [02:24:44] How do we listen to our customers? There are a lot of how questions that drive this work, and we'll be talking a little bit more about that with the presentation. To begin this work, we've developed cross-functional teams of principals and central office leaders to document our strategy and process in each of the categories I shared earlier. [02:25:07] And this month, our senior leadership team will begin the process of analyzing the work of these teams to look for duplication of efforts, gaps in our work, current efficiencies and inefficiencies. I will say that the foundation of this work will be looking at our dollars and FTEs by departments and offices and also by the tasks of those individuals in those departments. [02:25:30] and we're also going to be using the program budget. To shout out to Lee's budget team for all the work that they put into the program budget, we'll be using that program budget as the foundation of our work as well. At the conclusion of this full review, recommendations for streamlining our process will be presented to the superintendent for possible implementation during FY26 quarterly budget reviews and certainly for the FY27 budget process. [02:25:59] Next slide, please. It's important to note that the project is ahead of schedule. As you may recall, we were presented with the Spirit Award for our Organizational Profile submission, and we're currently gathering information for our 25-page submission. [02:26:17] And that application is about 50% complete. So again, those seven teams are working across the division to gather information for that application process, and we're about halfway there. And as I shared earlier, the senior leadership team will assess the information in each of these categories to finalize that application. [02:26:37] And that same team will gather information for our 50-page application to include results. And this application is due on or before December 1st. Next slide, please. And with regard to the timeline, our first 25-page application is due this spring. [02:26:57] And that feedback will be used for our submission for December 1st. Then in late winter of 2026, we will have Baldridge reviewers here at FCPS. They will have the ability to engage with individual board members, engage with members of our staff, members of our community to get feedback on our processes to see if the information that we shared with them is actually embedded in the work that we do. [02:27:27] And then the results of that 50 page application and any potential award that we will receive will be shared in the spring of 2026. Now, Baldrige has shared with us that it's rare to win an award on the first submission, but we are Fairfax County and we're shooting for that award on the first submission. [02:27:49] And regardless of any award, we will receive feedback for all areas of improvement on all of our application submissions. And I also want to note that we're beginning with a regional process so that our national application is well positioned as possible to receive an award. So these regional reviewers who are coming out they're highly trained examiners who will provide direct actionable feedback for the superintendent and the leadership team and then we will have the ability to apply for that national award with our submission in 2027. And with [02:28:28] that I will turn it back over to Ms. Burton. Y'all are familiar with their budget question process, and we're of course hard at work on the latest questions, although most have been answered to date. Right now we have 34 asked, 20 were priority one, 14 were priority two. Of the priority one, 19 of the 20 have been answered, and the one remaining doesn't have a due date till February 18th, so I'm confident we'll get that done within the 30-day time limit. And the priority two, they're all in development being worked [02:29:01] on and then the next slide we have a public hearing tonight my understanding is the February 5th one has been canceled you know you all need to be thinking about if you have budget in amendments because you know we'll need to cost those if you have some we have another school board work session on February 18th and then the school board will approve the 26 advertised budget on February 20th and we look forward to your discussion and can answer questions [02:29:34] thank you so I saw first miss Anderson without delving too deeply into all the nuances of what's going on at the federal level I did have some questions do we have any visibility as to what the food services impact would be for Virginia overall is there is there a place to get that information to determine for the state what it would impact is Michael Malloy here he's [02:30:07] probably yeah I think he's probably in Richmond no I do not okay because I would also be very interested in the title one I was looking and I don't mean to use you as Google I just was looking to see whether or not there was a listing of how many title one schools we had in the state of Virginia that that information doesn't seem readily accessible and I was wondering if you guys were tracking that because I do think that it's important for us to work with our partners across the state to understand that while this is a significant impact for us it could be even more of a significant impact for other divisions across the Commonwealth if we actually aren't all working [02:30:45] together to see what we can do to ensure that at least state funding can take over where the federal government decides to to not so I think that it would be a worthwhile endeavor for us to understand where those partners are located so that we can we can in our capacities go out and see if we can round up some help okay thank you and dr. Anderson just to pick up on what miss Anderson said as the legislative liaison I had the opportunity to participate in the Federal Relations Committee's work which is organized by the SBA and the [02:31:25] food and security and the impact to food and nutrition programs was the largest part of the conversation with that group yesterday with Senator Kane and so the coalition is out there I'm here today I'm missing the second part because I had to be here today but everybody who was on that committee is on the hill speaking to their respective congressional representatives, and some of the issues that we all have coalesced around is the impact of the food issue. So that is definitely out there and well in hand. Just to jump into my questions a little bit, and I'm going to [02:32:04] work backwards. The Balridge Award. I think I was a little confused. I think when the board had put forward in the budget from a couple of years ago to do the assessment I didn't realize it came with an award I just thought it was an evaluation has that always been the case that's always been the case so it does come with an award so the for the opera the profile organizational profile we did win the spirit award which was our first award in this process and we're hopeful to win the national award at some point first with the region and then move on to the national sure you know as one board member because we've been [02:32:43] talking about this since I've been on the board it's always talking about the efficiencies making sure we're maximizing all of our dollars the recommendations for streamlining processes that you mentioned on slide 44 will those be shared with the board you mentioned it will be shared with the superintendent so they will eventually through the superintendent be shared with the board one of the things that were that we are also going to do just this past Friday we shared an update with the board on our Baldrige work and as we move through those processes with all of the teams starting with leadership going on to strategy and those different category areas we'll be [02:33:23] providing the board and update from our work from those areas thank you and the next question is primarily for dr. Reed she is not here I'm so I couldn't even seat yeah how about I do that on one of the slides I can't remember the one that talked about that had the three-year view in terms of what our increased needs were as per student you know student enrollment no I think it's slide 30 yep [02:34:01] just got it are you anticipating is this am I reading this correctly to state that in FY26 we are needing an additional 207 positions is that what that means oh sorry I was distracted yes that's correct okay that's a lot okay Dr. Reed is here so I'll ask her my question again we have lots happening in you know in the world in the political climate how are we preparing for the [02:34:36] potential and I'm not saying it's going to happen but the potentially losing some of our grant funds how will we do we have a plan B that you're working on that will help to address the grant funded positions that we have and this is even outside of nutrition services so I think we're still it's early days on which grants and how they may or may not be affected we know that our major grants are front funded so they're good through June 30th so as we except for [02:35:14] things like our meals program which are not grants that are front funded so as we think about next year I think we're going to learn more this spring some of those grants require congressional approval to dismantle so I really I don't know that I want to speculate this afternoon but we're looking at a variety of scenarios should X happen this is how we might respond in a Y fashion should Z happened this is you know an H response but we're watching and monitoring very closely in between now and May when the final budget approval is required I [02:35:52] believe we'll have more information then to make more concrete decisions but at this time we're good except for meals and likely other non-front funded grants but not position grants other than our food and nutrition staff thank you I would appreciate that and I'll circle back to that in a few weeks speaking about the scales that are shown you've given us data for the master scales but I cannot find the data for the bachelor scales and I know that's not who we're targeting but it's good to have comprehensive information where can that [02:36:28] be provided in terms of our standing yes that can be provided we do compare a a little more favorably at the bachelor's lane. I know that, but we typically try to hire people with a master's degree, and so that's one of the reasons why we and the other divisions around us all concentrate on that master's lane. [02:36:49] But we can get you that data. That would be very helpful to have. Thank you, and I'll go back, please. - And Ms. Dixon. - Thank you for the presentation. For the budget team, it's a lot of work, and thank you, our budget chair, vice chair, for all the work's gone into it. [02:37:09] - My question is for our slide 15 on safety and security needs. I wanted to know how much is a wrap-back program cost out of this $9.3 million? [02:37:27] - I am not entirely sure. I know that Mr. Smith might be, if you've spoken to Mr. Malloy more recently. - Currently, it's about a half a million dollars. It's calculated at $1 per employee per month, so it's about $12 per employee. This is one of the things we have been discussing, and it's a very important part, like a request made, and it should definitely be funded, this program, because it just takes anybody who has a criminal background, applying with the prior states, applying to FCPS. [02:38:02] And it can be, and if they're doing any crime, I guess, anywhere, it comes back to us as well. The reporting is done. So I just wanted to know the dollar value because out of 9.3, it doesn't look like it is a big investment in that. [02:38:22] Actually, the question I wanted to ask is, is there a reason, and I think we have to discuss this more with our colleagues on the Board of Supervisors that on slide 17, that there is such a deficit of the percentage year after year. [02:38:42] it we are collecting less revenue from the county from our taxpayers that that's happening maybe that number if you could highlight the question is are we collecting less revenue from the counties of we are getting less transfers now well the actual dollar amount yes more but it's a less of a percentage share of the county resources that are available and there is any I [02:39:15] i guess we have to find out why i guess from our side so um lastly i my question and i think may i'll take and go back i haven't formalized all my questions on this slide on page 20 where we have okay page number 28 slide 28 we have 1486 additional students projected to receive special education service and then 15 new classroom preschool special education [02:39:52] classroom are coming we need at the cost of 20 million dollar cost I wanted to are we building these classrooms why is it 3 million per classroom so there may be some facility impact at a school here or there but it's not I don't think it's widely expected that we would be you know building additions for all 15 classrooms it's going to depend on the locations that the classrooms end up as [02:40:29] to you know how the school can handle the capacity and whether or not they're you know shrinking in a sixth grade class or something like that because we are seeing larger cohorts at the upper grade levels sort of move into middle school and high school and so I wouldn't say that there is a tremendous facility impact but there's certainly potential for some facility impact so this is basically for it's including the the facility enhancement and the staffing etc etc that's like a cumulative number the 20.6 is the [02:41:01] staffing cost only staffing cost only my question is I think to my colleague and I have 15 seconds and I will come back to that so the understanding about a universal learning you know we talked about that and then we have investing 20 million dollars in special classroom for preschoolers so maybe you can answer me later when i have my additional time thanks only three million is the pre of the 20.6 [02:41:34] three million of it is the priest is preschool and that's um 15 teachers and 15 aides to support those uh 15 new classrooms uh and then the other 17 million is the other special education students yeah k-12 thank you uh miss robin and then miss robin yes miss robin miss lady and then miss mirren thank you uh just comment slide 27 and slide 29 are identical so one of them has to be the easel data or the multi-language learner data and one has to be sped so you can check that out later [02:42:09] but then i'm actually going to speak from the resources that were provided by dr reed i believe i'm in the budget at a glance section of the book on page 15 where the breakdown is of the majority employees are school-based i'm assuming counselors fall under teacher scale yes okay so the other comment i need to make is while our ratios are good well decent for high school middle school that we need to lower the ratio of student to counselor at the elementary level we are losing elementary counselors every year to neighboring systems who have a better ratio and these people [02:42:45] are in the master schedule which is not what counselors signed up to do so i think we have a compounded thing here that we need to look at that ratio and add more elementary counselors page 19 also of the of the budget report i want to talk about average class size and perhaps i'm wrong but i i need average class size to be representative of not specials not not certified teachers in that building and my point is when you talk about some of these ratios they look incredibly low but in practice they're not and my concern is we're getting that [02:43:22] number but we're including the mass specialist the aap specialist a reading specialist steam specialist and dividing it by our total population instead of saying this is how many fifth grade classes we have third grade classes we have and dividing that by the population I think it's very misleading to our public and I personally have been hearing it from my constituency because they don't understand when they look at that number so I want to do the same thing at middle school and high school is is we can't talk about you know if I trade a teacher at the high school level because I need a 504 coordinator that's a certified person but they don't they're not fronting with kids they don't get a classroom of children so I just want to make sure we correct that [02:43:59] math because I don't I think this represents specialists in the building as added on to the number teachers and then divisible by the number of students in the building and just real quick miss Lee I don't think what document are you looking at? I don't think that's in the slide. I see staff furiously shuffling papers to find it. This PowerPoint called budget at a glance. [02:44:19] Whatever I was given, I think Dr. Reed gave us all of these and I put it in a binder. Sure. This was the first page. But again, I'm talking, the first comment I made, and I'm losing time, slide 27 to 29 of this presentation is identical data 27 so we have 27 it says we have 181 701 multi-language projections and it's down to one eight one oh nine one and that's the exact same [02:44:56] projection for let me just clear that up special education no no we we repeated the same overall enrollment line that's the solid line on all three okay okay the dotted line okay okay thank you that's my my mistake then so also on the budget at a glance page 355 I just feel like I just continue need to elevate this when we have schools of different size and we have one staff member in certain categories per school it's a gross inequity it's just a gross inequity when you have one SBIT at a high school at 2,900 and you have one [02:45:34] SBIT at a high school of I don't know 1,700 it's an inequity okay we fixed it with t-specs we fixed it with t-specs which is fascinating to me because they're they're not doing the instruction they're doing the hardware but we need support in the instruction but we also have one finance tech in a school of 2,900 versus an elementary school of 350 I mean we've got to fix this inequity thank you and I'll take a go back okay yep figured Miss Mirren and then mr. moon okay I first want to say I really appreciated the fact sheets which were [02:46:11] provided to the board that really tell the story of our funding and include everything from the particular line items to the jlark state funding recommendations in the federal landscape so this is really outstanding I also like that it's capturing in one place information about compensation changes it's providing a history of what the board has done it's really an outstanding document I want to it for me to see us be as strategic as possible and how we do our work you know the superintendent provides a wealth of information to the board weekly and then for each meeting and for me and reading these materials [02:46:48] over the past few months in particular regarding facilities and budget prep and all sorts of other things I'm seeing a nexus of connections that's informing my understanding and my questions and my intentions and my hopes for this board so I'm trying to look at things at a big level because there's tons of interesting stuff at the smaller levels but I can't keep on top of that and I don't think it's my job to. So my biggest takeaway right now is that the school system and the county government must work more strategically and collaboratively. You know maybe it's board to board but I think really it's executive to executive. Usually there's this dance with the budget. The [02:47:27] Board of Supervisors will increase a little bit and the schools will say it's not enough when really they're both through at the same time. This year and for the foreseeable future we have common challenges and I'll even say threats and efforts you know working against the success of our quality of life here in Fairfax so how do we as a board this is really you know for my colleagues I don't have questions for staff yet as much but how do we as a board determine where to spend our collective energy what messages and information should we all be committed to in sharing when we're advocating to other elected officials who may have a wider impact in voice and informing our [02:48:03] community for instance I think we need to keep communicating very clearly that we are filling gaps that are not part of our mission to educate students but it's critical to keeping them safe like wrap back this is a law enforcement matter that we are now burdened with providing because the governor won't that's half a million dollars we could use on instruction to do law enforcement work the cost of health care page six the cost of the pharmacy plans related to a contract this week that we're asked to approve for an extension for for signa tried to look up the profit margin for Cigna and Kaiser didn't get around to it [02:48:39] but you know we are beholden to this and the community needs to constantly be reminded that this is out of our control also the increases in international baccalaureate and advanced placement college board I also wanted to do a little bit of learning so on page 4 and this is where I'll ask my specific question and I'll use a go back to but on page 4 that middle of the fact sheets that the board has there's a story about staffing numbers and there are changes and some are quite large and some they go up and down and up and down and I'd like to know like what's the story behind that can we learn [02:49:15] anything about that decision-making why did we have so much fluctuation and how do we avoid that so that's really a question for the superintendent and staff I'll have staff start and then I'll complete the which chart there's like it's in the fact sheet that was sent to the board it's the middle one middle left so change from prior year the school board I mean it goes from 681 [02:49:50] to 324 to minus 321 what page is that okay yeah fact sheet page for the middle of the charts if the header is summary of position changes FY 26 2006 to 2026 and I believe the column that's tagged change from prior year SB and NSB those are our position changes overall so if you recall back to the for instance the presentation the part of the presentation that I delivered related to student enrollment growth we have 207 a position change of plus 207 related to enrollment and student needs for instance that's gonna be you know part [02:50:29] that number there right so we it's that that all that is is the the combination of all the various position changes that are made in any given year but what I would say is that any given year student enrollment is what's driving the bulk of our position changes so does that does that help answer your question can I just finish this topic real quick well can can I just finish this well we're on this matter so okay but like if you look at 14 15 and 16 I mean it's there's virtually no change in instruction and there's a change of 600 staff so I [02:51:06] understand the tie to membership what I don't understand is is this okay and is this what we want to have happening where we have fluctuations of 300 to 600 staff is that where we want to be and that because that seems like it would wreak havoc especially on schools thank you do you want to go back okay put you down for it the staff go ahead so I think you're addressing the it ranges is non-school based correct because they're not tied directly to enrollment in the sense that we have formulas that are applied and that determines the staffing but for the non-school based positions we began to allow permanent [02:51:44] conversion of traded positions to authorized positions back in 2021 so I mean most of the departments have had no increases in central office positions at least since I've been here in the last six years and it is my understanding long before that but we have been converting positions and when I talk about conversion it's like okay we have a position that department head has been trading for for five or six years in a row and the same person is in that position but every year they're they're renewed for one year only [02:52:22] because it's using traded dollars so we allowed them to convert them permanently so there was no dollar cost to the operating fund it was you're giving up these dollars that you've been trading and we're adding a position so that that person is a full full-time authorized employee moving forward and that's the case for two or three years that we allowed those conversions and that's largely what makes up the increases that you see in the last six years for non-school based positions is they're not adds to the bet me some of them are but it's very minimal amount most of them are conversions that was no cost to [02:52:59] the operating fund it was just the position authorization thank you and dr. Reed did you want to jump in on this sure I just I think another piece to remember when we think about enrollment versus staffing increases and dr. Presidio probably can comment on this as well when and I don't within the last six years I think the special ed department chairs for example were a new position maybe AART positions would be new and when we think about the size of school division the special department chairs for elementary alone would be a hundred and forty-one positions or an ART I don't know if those were elementary [02:53:38] middle and high but those I'll ask Dr. Presidio but sometimes you can have several hundred positions added when enrollment doesn't shift because there's a desire for a certain level of service or a certain initiative that's requiring that but Dr. Presidio do you want to comment on that please yeah just real briefly because I think you covered it the only thing I would add is with the AART positions it was largely expanding the elementary AARTs to middle to the middle school level so that was the big programmatic from from expansion from AARTs but those would be not enrollment driven those would be [02:54:15] initiative driven so I do want to note that and maybe we should capture some of those if your team Dr. Presidio could capture a couple of those initiatives perhaps where maybe we've had math specialists or reading specialists with new curriculum or however that plays out but that may be helpful in explaining the narrative there. [02:54:34] Great thank you and Mr. Moon. Some of the questions relate to what I had raised at the regular meeting at the last meeting but before I go there let me first go to slide number 29. It is a special education enrollment projections could, you know, since FIA 23 has been steadily [02:55:09] increasing and we are expecting another 14, more than 1400 special ed students next year. I'm assuming that's a number of students and number of services is is also increasing i'm assuming uh could you tell us why the increase of a special education student number of straight special students and number of services has been going up significantly [02:55:44] higher than other categories so i can offer a few ideas but i i do think there's probably a larger question there for us to consider um so what i'll start out with though is i think you know over the year yes sorry I speak a little closer I think over the years there has been you know better improvements in identification of what student needs are right and so we certainly saw like when there was a lot more awareness about [02:56:21] autism we certainly saw our autism numbers grow faster than other special education numbers and so that's one example I'll give for a reason for the increase I would say another thing that's been going on is that we've seen the number of students receiving preschool special education services increase over the years and those students naturally will transition into being kindergartners with us assuming they're still here you know as they move through their school age career so those are two things I can mention off the top of my head but I think you're probably also getting at a larger question about you know like like you know what other things are maybe driving identification or over identification or any of those other things that are you [02:57:00] know sort of sticky problematic things with any school system okay thank you you know when I ask these questions I you know try to keep in mind potentially what supervisors may be asking of us looking at this because they'll be looking at the same slides that we do and and we just want to be one of you prepared to respond I give them given the information they need as they make decision to fund us. With that in mind, I'm going to ask you something that I did ask at the regular [02:57:38] meeting is, you know, at times in the past, you know, supervisors, some supervisors regularly, on a regular basis, ask us, what have you been doing differently? What have you decided not to do? [02:57:55] Has there been any cost savings by doing something more efficiently? We never see those information when you make a budget request to us. So I wonder whether it is possible to include a slide or two somewhere when we go to the supervisor to tell them that these were some of the things that we are not doing, so we are saving this much of money by not doing this, or we're doing differently, so we are saving this kind of money. However, at the same time, [02:58:31] we need to do these things that's costing us this much money so overall it's going to cost us this much more so it's our way will help us in making our case to have those information presented to the supervisors and i would like to have those information for myself as well is it fair well we have not done you know a cut drill or a reduction process although every year we certainly talk about it but you know 93% of our funding and our employees are school-based and seven percent [02:59:10] is a very tiny piece of our budget and there nobody wants to touch school-based as far as reductions go because that means increases in class size that means less support less administrative support at the schools and you know of course they're clamoring for more staff not less and in addition to that you know we're hampered by being a labor-intensive industry and it's very difficult to do much more than compensation in any given year and every school division cfo that i talk to struggles with the exact same thing with 90 of your budget [02:59:46] being salaries and benefits it's it's very hard to do anything except compensation but you know we we have not did not do any new consider any new initiatives this year whereas you know in previous years we would entertain um consideration of new projects we do have the the chiefs are tasked with when they are reviewing their baselines if there is you know something they're doing that they've decided is no longer a priority but they have something new that is a priority they have the ability to repurpose those funds from one thing to the other but that's largely [03:00:24] invisible to you all to us because they submit their baseline it's they've made some moves around but we we don't track what things they have reduced and what they have added that's part of their baseline exercise you know mr. I'm not going to disagree with you that vast majority of our a budget going going into people, paying people and their benefits, granted that as a body making a case to a funding [03:00:59] authority, we need to provide, even though it could be a small amount of money compared to our overall budget, that these are some of the things that each department has looked at and decided not to do and include that information. What we did include, you know, we did not, there was, you know, 53 million in fiscal 25 that was funded by ESSER and those that you know those were items that even though you know we thought they were important because we funded them with ESSER we did not include them in the operating fund in the following year or absorb them as again I was not gonna use this word but [03:01:37] politically speaking it makes a political sense beneficial to us to show them something so that they could be used of talk to their taxpayers thank and would you like a go back? Absolutely, Mr. Budget Chair. All right, good. [03:01:53] Mr. Frisch. Chair Frisch. Just to pick up where Mr. Moon left off, I think one of the good things about the presentation this year is that it does zero in on many of the things that Mr. Moon identified. First, it talks about the Bainbridge effort and the efforts around efficiency aligned with being efficacious at the same time, right? [03:02:14] You can be efficient and really make things awful for student performance and for retaining staff, or you can be efficient with an eye towards being, you know, maintaining quality. And so that's what Bainbridge is hopefully guiding us towards, and we'll learn more about that. Excuse me, I keep, what is Bainbridge? Is that a furniture store? I think it's a furniture store. Baldrige, thank you. Bainbridge, Baldrige. It sounds like some weird law firm. Yeah. The other thing that I would note is in the early slides of the presentation, which we glossed over in today's work session is the percent not just the [03:02:52] percentage of money going towards staff but the percentage of money ending up in the classroom and the ratio of money going towards central office one of the things that I think this board has done well for board after board after board is keeping the the money going into central office relatively low and so as a result our ratios are better than almost every school division in northern Virginia when it comes to the split between classroom spending and central office spending. So if there's an indication as to if there's waste or not, clearly we are doing a better job than most in ensuring that we are investing [03:03:32] in classrooms and student success. I think that's slide 7. And I would also hammer home the note about ESSER. The work we were able to do with the ESSER money was not just fluff. It was essential support for students that we have had to cut because we did not have the resources to continue funding it and this is just one year's worth of cuts right there are lots of things that we have no that we've either had to scale back or eliminate entirely in previous years as the money is kind of dried up so we've done quite a bit on this regard and I think in every conversation we have about this I think we glossed over [03:04:08] it today because we just went over this at the regular meeting like two weeks ago but i think when we do talk about this in the future when we're out in the community when we're talking about it in our newsletters when we're talking to our supervisors when we're going to budget town hall meetings with our supervisors this is something that we need to hammer home at the beginning of the conversation and draw people's attention to thank you uh mr mckelveen uh thank you so much um so i would just and i i know this is common sense to everyone but this is the first budget that we've done as as this compilation of board members and [03:04:48] part of that brings me a little disappointment and that you know a lot of the multi-year initiatives in this budget which I which I support come from a prior board come from a strategic plan that the new board didn't have much say in so that's just to say that I'm disappointed that we don't have more of a mark on this budget as it stands one the first question I have for you is the in the comparison of top scale of master's level salaries the thing that really stood out to me was Prince William which has a top salary of a [03:05:24] hundred and forty nine thousand dollars how in the world do they make that work and how could we get to that point I mean I think that's more than our principals make I believe so yeah if you look at the class size Prince Williams class sizes are larger than everyone else and they are able to provide higher salaries as a result of that fascinating okay that's helpful next question is that on staffing formulas and I believe in the past we've been [03:06:00] provided with a location where we can look at you know our formulas for things like psychologists social workers where can we find it's in the appendix of the budget document and it includes our FCPS a staffing standard and alongside it the state SOQ standard got it okay that's it for now thank you would you like would you like to go back okay yeah just really briefly first I really I do appreciate mr. moon's comments I know the budget committee of the budget chair and Vice Chair, I had conversations with you as well [03:06:38] about talking about just fiscal responsibility that we're already demonstrating, right? Including also specifics about the differences between the real needs that we're funding through ESTER that we can't fund now. So I don't know if you want to comment on that, Dr. Reed. - I do, Ms. Seismore-Hyser. [03:06:54] And my apologies for not being clear about that at the outset of this presentation, but we did pair back over 50 million in expenses year over year because coming out of the pandemic we're still working on learning loss for a number of our students in different grade levels as we emerge from the pandemic. [03:07:16] So our needs continue and the federal dollars that supported those needs do not. So we had to stop doing some things to continue doing things that we funded with those dollars. And saving over 50 million year over year is significant for us. [03:07:32] So I do wanna make sure we have a, you know clear talking points on that moving forward yeah if you could get that maybe as a talking point as well in terms of some of the budget commentary that would be really helpful and if there's other things that we can because i agree i think demonstrating fiscal responsibility i mean there there's just a lot of pressures on our funders and a lot of competing priorities and and i know we're i know we're doing our part to be fiscally responsible but making it clear and evident what we're already doing is would be really helpful um i know i'm going to sound like broken record but hear me out I talk about inclusion I've talked about it for [03:08:08] 15 years right now we're looking at the greatest increase of our costs in the budget enrollment wise or special education students so I'm just going to read you something in the United States research has indicated that inclusion is 11% or 13% depending on which study you look at cheaper for special education students for total expenses at the federal state and district level for For school district-only levels, inclusive practices may be as high as 37% cheaper. [03:08:39] By the way, I said this to Dr. Garza. Research internationally has found similar evidence. In Bangladesh, reductions in wage earnings due to exclusive educational practices were estimated to cost the country $54 million per year, and inclusive education was estimated to recoup 20% according to the World Bank. [03:08:59] A similar figure of 20% was found in Nepal. In China, each year of education for people with disabilities led to a wage increase of 6.4%. So if you want to talk about how to save money for the fastest growing need of population, it is inclusive education, which also research shows is tied to better outcomes, both socially and academically and long-term economically. [03:09:26] So the costs may go up in the beginning as we change our practices to be more inclusive, But it is clear from 30 years of studies that is not only fiscally responsible, but an educational imperative. So I just wanted to put that in the public sphere so people know when we keep talking about taking kids away and putting them in these separate classes and all this stuff, intervention blocks and pullouts and things are also good. [03:09:51] We still have a continuum, but both from a fiscal, a moral, and an educational perspective, inclusive education is the way to go. To answer my colleague's question, the reason that we aren't there yet is because it's going to take time to take what we're doing. [03:10:07] This is why I keep talking about program delivery. It will save us money, and it will be better educational outcomes. We have to do that from a budget perspective and an educational perspective. I have more. I'll take a go back, but I wanted to put that in the air. Thank you. [03:10:26] I'll take a quick turn, then we'll go to go backs. As always, thank you, Lee, and your staff for this, and Dr. Reed. There's a lot of work that goes into this behind the scenes and I know you're staying on top of it. So on slide seven, I really like this slide. [03:10:44] I think this is a really important number that kind of tends to maybe get glossed over a little bit because I hear, you know, newspapers and things like that. You got all this administrative bloat, all this central office staffing and all this kind of stuff. So I actually asked staff, let's look at what the facts tell us. [03:11:02] And the facts tell us right there that not only are we the lowest in the region, we're the lower or the lowest and the second highest is a factor of two so it's not like we're tied neck and neck and it's as a wash it is a significantly less percentage of our staff is sitting in this building for the most part and I think that that you know it again it tends to get washed out but that's really important to remember slide 14 and I'm beating the proverbial dead horse here but I'll do it again stem stipends it's not a lot of money I think [03:11:38] it's the right thing to do for the people that sponsor our stem organizations because in order to get a lot of grant funding we have to have that role fulfilled and we're giving stipends across the board to other positions but our stem folks tend to get lost in this so perhaps i'll bring a budget amendment for that but i just want to throw that out there again on the baldridge award i'm I'm really excited about this. [03:12:03] Do we actually get a medal? We will actually get a crystal award if we get through the National. Okay, perfect. Thank you for all the work you've done on this. And again, something else you read in the newspapers. FCPS has never had an outside audit. [03:12:21] This is not true. Not only do we have outside audits every year from a financial perspective, the annual financial reviews every year by outside agencies, accountants, But if I recall correctly, and some of those have been on the board for a while, I think in 2013, the state mandated an outside review done by a third-party entity. [03:12:41] And if my memory serves correctly, they came up with $13 million in savings over an X number of years. So this Baldrige process is another look. It will be the second time in a decade, give or take, that we've done this. And it's the right thing to do, but it's the claim that, well, this has never been done before is not accurate. [03:13:02] And last question, on slide 34, this is about the master's number, if I remember correctly. It says after compensation increases, we would go from, I guess, seven to eight. [03:13:23] Help me understand after this increase happens where this number would go up to. I wasn't quite clear on that. [03:13:39] - 97,420, which I assume is 7% higher than what's listed here. - Okay, gotcha. I figured that was the case. I wanted that dollar amount. Thank you, perfect. All right, first up, Dr. Anderson. [03:14:00] - Thank you. I do want to kind of plug in and support what Mr. Moon and then I think other board members reiterated because it's something that I've said myself since I've been on the board. And if you recall, even Mr. Frisch, the terms that he used, which has never left me, is we have to show our homework. [03:14:20] No, no, no. Well, you've been saying this for years ago, but Bainbridge is new. We have to show our homework. And I will push even further for more than talking points. It has to be a slide. It has to be part of the budget presentation that everyone in our community who's going to pour into it will see that we are being as lean as we-- we are doing our work to be fiscally responsible. [03:14:47] Quick question, Dr. Reed. Our teacher trainees, are they folks with bachelor's degrees or without degrees yet? Walk me through that a little bit, because I didn't recall. So Mr. Solomon is not here. We have several categories of teacher trainees versus provisional. [03:15:06] I'm going to have to defer to Mr. Smith, who oversaw our human resources most recently. So our teacher trainees do have bachelor's degrees. It may not be in education, and so they're working toward certification in particular areas, but those trainees do have bachelor's degrees. [03:15:24] Okay. The reason why I wanted to raise this is because we have teacher trainees in our classrooms with bachelors, and I know we are going to hone in on teachers with master's degrees, but we also have to have the opportunity to sell all of the things Fairfax County has, and we have to sell the fact that we are highest with the bachelors because we have plenty of people coming out of schools with a bachelor's degree i know i was one looking for a job right away before you take a year or two to get your master's degree we need to make that part of the [03:16:00] presentation because when i look at page four we are number two just behind false church city which is tiny. We have got to share that story a little bit boldly and a little bit more forcefully. In addition, another piece of data that is on page four and this is of the packet, the fact sheets, is the benefit that we are the the benefit that we provide uniquely compared to any other division in the and Waby area, our additional 8% from ERFC. [03:16:38] I believe this is the slide here, Ms. Burden, where it says teacher salary with benefits comparison. Is this what is inclusive of the 8% of ERFC, the additional benefit package? [03:16:54] - Yes. - So if we were to put this out, we are, and I don't know what scale this is, but we're number one. And I get it, it is not all salaries. but we are missing an opportunity to advertise. - Recruitment absolutely uses ERFC as much as they can as far as when they're talking to new teachers. [03:17:18] But I can tell you it is my understanding after having done this a million years that brand new teachers do not care about pensions. They care about the salary and even being a couple of hundred dollars more is enough to get somebody to sign on. Now, tenured, it's really more of a retention thing because once you're in ERFC, and then once you get a little bit older, I'm sure that's true of all of us, you do start thinking about pension and realize that value of ERFC. [03:17:46] But brand new, 23, 22 to 23 year old teachers, that doesn't appear to be a big motivator. And as far as the bachelors go, another reason that we concentrate on the masters is because unlike back when you were in school, - These days, all the Virginia universities-- - That was not too long ago. [03:18:09] - All of the universities now offer a five-year master's for teachers, so that it's not like it was you know, in the past where-- - She's removing her foot. [03:18:25] - You know, where it's four years and then, you know, after you got a job, then you went back to school for your master's, most of them will try to, you know, wrap that up as part of their undergrad experience. - And I can add, after having attended many job fairs, for those teachers who are veteran teachers who might be thinking about coming to Fairfax County, retirement is weighing heavily. [03:18:46] And so we certainly have ERFC at all of our recruitment events, all of our job fairs. And I have actually had to walk several folks over to the ERFC table to talk about the value of ERFC for those individuals who might be coming to us from Loudon or Prince William and have at least five years of teaching left and very interested about that second retirement system. [03:19:11] - I'll take a go back, that was my time. - So on the second go back, time permitting, and we'll cut that down to two minutes if we have time. Miss Dixit, followed by Miss Leading. - Thank you so much. [03:19:26] I'm trying to stay awake also for that budget session after lunch was not a good idea. So, all right. always a fun thing yeah definitely numbers sorry i'm losing my time now is it okay i'm gonna go straight to the point where can we save money right because all the money is getting tightened and we don't obviously want to save uh lose any instruction of our teachers or so where is the scope and i think the people who are doing the budget probably you you know know a little bit [03:20:05] like where is a little bit of flexibility if you could if you look at the budget document in the back of the budget document it provides a listing of all of the reductions that the school system has taken every single year to reduce the budget it's an exhaustive list going back a decade I think I'm sorry just point of clarification is the budget document that is being referred to the fact sheets or something altogether different I presume it's the fact sheet that you're referring to? [03:20:41] No, it's the fiscal 26 superintendent's proposed budget, which is online. The multi-hundred page. Yes. Okay. All right. I got you. Thank you. Yeah. So we keep going back and forth between the slideshow and the fact sheet. So thank you for that. The fact sheet is just something that we provide to the board so they have some historical perspective that it's just mostly for you all to be able to know the history of the line items. [03:21:05] But you've got all the reductions by year listed there in great detail. you're not going to see a lot in recent years because as you recall we got full funding for I think five years in a row and so you're not going to see a lot in the recent years but historically we have reduced the budget by quite a bit every single year but the timing to do that is not typically with the introduction of the superintendent's proposed budget as you know the code requires that the superintendent provide a budget based on the needs of the [03:21:39] school system in the upcoming year and so we take that very seriously and the budget that we put together it provides the needs that we think is available but however the of course the local governing body is the you know appropriator and decides the level of funding and once they decide that if the funding is less than what we needed then we have to go back and reduce the budget and what you see in the appendix of the budget document reveals what we reduced in each year to align with the funding levels that were provided miss burden for the interest of i guess our community would you be able to point out where this document is on the fcps [03:22:19] website just easy access to it you can just go to the website and put in the search bar budget documents and there's like four or five years right there and then there's another button if you want to look to years previous than that or you can go to board docs there's a link there on the superintendent's presentation on January 23rd that will take you straight to the budget document. Thank you so much and I will include that in my newsletter for the community to consider reviewing. I also wanted to, you know, seeing our Mr. Gautam Sethi in the audience, I wanted to [03:22:58] also maybe check with you or maybe you can answer this is how could we use AI to improve some of the efficiency and productivity while assisting the staff which can lead to budget savings in any way is it possible or not possible i think we talked about a little bit about using technology tools to get efficiencies in and that can be universal beyond ai itself [03:23:33] our goal right now is to get training for staff so they can understand how to use the tools we You also have the tools available, which is part of our Google infrastructure. So there's a combination of things coming available, but changing your business process and how you use those tools on a regular basis takes a little bit of adjustment, learning how to use the tools. [03:23:55] We also had some early conversations with finance on using data and reporting analytics tools. So lots of opportunities. I don't know if I have a hard number to predict that these tools will lead to this much efficiency, that would certainly be something we're working towards. [03:24:13] - Thank you so much, and I didn't mean you to have to stand. So I think that's a really good way to think in the moving forward is how we can use tools and AI tools to improve our efficiency. And somehow it affects that. [03:24:30] Just like my colleague was saying that universal design of learning or inclusive classroom can lead to like 35%, 37 percent of savings we have to see elsewhere where we can use that those those things last question is about middle school enrollment I'm saw the on the data sheets which we are from the superintendent that they are and most of the regions have decreased number of middle school students so what is the [03:25:07] best way to I guess handle this in terms of allocating right resources to those schools and maybe maybe there's a potential of moving sixth graders now to middle school as their enrollment is also in and down on the downfall that's for acting dr. Reed for you to consider I know we are considering that movement of sixth grade for program purposes primarily in culture purposes right because when you have just seventh and eighth grade half of your student body turns over every year so I know miss Szymanski we've been actively looking at [03:25:45] that and that's one of the first scenarios we've asked to be provided in our boundary work okay would that help with some of our budget savings to dr. Reid I don't know that we haven't done an analysis of that so I'm not entirely sure if it would help us with the budget to do that I think our hope would be it would be budget neutral minimally but I don't know that I can look we can take a look at that thank you thank you miss lady and then miss mirror thank you slide [03:26:22] 29 I just had a question about the based on some of my other colleagues comments about the special ed percentage going up when we identified twice exceptional kids are they in that data for sped so that's also probably reason is we're identifying work to eat kids then I have another question in the proposed budget pages on page six I'm just curious I was surprised I guess I missed it that the co-pays for Cigna we're gonna go up and I'm gonna assume that's to absorb the fact that we're doing maternity and paternity leave this year and my question is are those projected to go up again next year the [03:26:58] co-pays and well of course that was you know subject to agreement by the Union just so you know that but we we did have to increase the co-pays and deductibles of our health care plan we had not increased co-pays in the number of years but the original rate that was conveyed to us by Cigna for health care was 20.5 percent as you know we're self-insured which basically just means premiums pay for claims our claim experience is is up and the calculation [03:27:34] that Cigna did for us in the October time frame which is typical was that we needed to have a 20.5 percent increase in health care and we bought that down to 15.5 percent by increasing co-pays and deductibles thank you so I just have a question when it comes to the budget questions I was just curious because this seemed like a I don't know it didn't didn't compute in my own brain there was a page four of the budget questions there was a question asked by by Miss Anderson related to the cost of STEAM classrooms and every single [03:28:12] elementary school and if I my notes are correct I believe that it was estimated at 29.4 million dollars then put that up against another one of her questions which was related to the cost of FLESS and in order to get FLESS in every school or no the current cost of FLESS in the 55 elementary schools is only it's only 4.3 million so right now I think there are 49 schools that have some form of STEAM or CS already established so to get that in 150 more [03:28:45] schools why does it cost 39 point 29.4 million it just seems like a weird number compared to what FLESS is costing us because it's mostly staff I would have to research that I don't I don't have the budget questions research with me and so we'd have to research that and get back with you okay because I ask that question because I think it's becoming more and more essential that we have STEAM in our elementary schools just because of, you know, as Dr. Reed has emphasized many times that math, you know, not having high-level math [03:29:23] prohibits 85%, I guess, of career paths. So we just we need to have that STEAM experience plus it's also demonstrating to kids how you utilize the things that you're learning. Ms. Lady, Matthew knows the answer to your question that I didn't know. Yeah, so specifically with respect to FLESS, there's actually interplay between how we staff a school for the FLESS program and how we provide their triple T staffing, so the art, music, and PE at the elementary level. [03:29:49] And so the reason that you're going to see a lower cost for expanding that is because as part of expanding FLESS, we would actually reduce the amount of art, music, and PE teachers that an elementary school has. Whereas when you start to look at the other question, there's not an offsetting reduction that we can make in order to provide that, like, specials time. [03:30:04] Why? Why would we reduce the number of art and PE teachers and music? It's because we had FLESS. Why? So the way that the current existing staffing formulas work is that an elementary school that has a FLESS program receives fewer art, music, and PE teachers because the students only have so much time in the day to be in those various classrooms, right? [03:30:24] So the specials that you're providing, if you have a FLESS teacher to provide that half hour, that's a half hour less that the students can be somewhere else in the building. All right, I'm dumbfounded because the arts are essential to the development of our youth as well, and maybe that's why certain middle schools can't maintain or sustain certain music programs, because you're not teaching it in elementary, and then it impacts that high school's enrollment. [03:30:48] I do want to specify, though, that there's still time in the day for students to have art, music, and PE. It's just that it's a less amount of time if they are electing to be part of a FLESS program as well. Then why wouldn't STEAM be absorbed in the same way? [03:31:04] So we don't have an existing staffing formula for STEAM. So we wouldn't just naturally assume that we would level that back out for the schools as part of the staffing formulas. So it's more about the fact that we have a tiered system between Art, Music, PE and FLESS right now that we don't even have a model for the STEAM portion. [03:31:26] So we wouldn't naturally assume that we would automatically reduce it. It could be part of the conversation if we were to try to develop that, but it's not natural assumption that we would make because we don't have an existing model in place all right well and I see I don't know if if Noelle or Dr. Presidio wants to add anything on that they're looking at me like I'm hopefully I'm not saying no I think I think Matthew captured it one other thing to remember is you know the specials time is when when our classroom teachers have their planning time right so during that specials time we know that all schools have time for art music and pee based on our standards some schools also have [03:32:02] plus some schools have determined to do also do steam but we have never as a division had a steam program that has been formalized or staffed in any way the rest or the remaining time for teacher planning is covered as you mentioned by counselors by experts by all sorts of people so if we were to have the funding to add steam into this formula right then perhaps it would loosen up those people being on the master schedule but with no real additional dollars to do that at this time you know that's probably not happening if that makes sense it makes sense I find it fascinating to me 49 [03:32:39] schools that have managed to do something so it can be done and I'd like it to be a budget priority in the future just because I think if we're being remiss if we don't have steam in our classrooms at elementary level and the other comment is another budget question that mr. Dunn asked which is related to the cost of AAP at middle schools I love the answer that if we had an AAP center in all our middle schools we would save money because of the transportation cost so let's make it so let's do it thank you and uh because of the back and forth conversation on the on the what we just had on this funding flesh art uh the superintendent's going to flesh this out a little [03:33:14] bit more in a friday letter response so thank you uh miss mirin followed by miss anderson yeah i think um you know world language is something we talked about at some point and we had data about what it would take and how it's not really you know offered in many of our schools and I feel like that's a whole other conversation and unfortunately it's not included in this budget but I also want to respond to some of the comments about hey Miss Lady these very like place-based things like we need a center we need a classroom I would say we should tread very lightly about demanding space for things because first of all we know that we're short on [03:33:52] space but second of all there's so much flexibility we have 36 outdoor classrooms and guess what you can do stem outside you could do world language outside you could do anything you want outside you can also do anything you want in other locations so I'm not supporting you know creating spaces for programs the whole one of the big impetus of the boundary work is to figure out how to more equitably have space I had someone asked me in a PTA meeting their night what is equitable access to programming mean I said well you know that wonderful Edison high school career tech program I don't have a single constituent for hundred mill that trucks down 495 to go to that location in [03:34:28] Springfield that's a problem that's equitable access so I'd like to focus on the programs that we want to we want to put forth and I do just want to point out the medical changes are not due to us providing maternity and paternity leave they're due to big they're due to pharma they're due to increases in pharmacy benefits and I or benefit costs so that is in those fact sheets that I sent again I just you know I am trying to help figure out how do we have the same sheet of music here and talk about the same things that are a challenge on any of these topics that we we want to look at I mean I look at the the information the superintendent has provided today and I see we've doubled [03:35:07] our legal costs now that's not a surprise given the litigiousness of this particular governor administration and other things however we need to analyze that we must and I wonder if the board would entertain a motion at the budget vote to have a follow-on directing the audit committee to figure out what the board's process is going to be to do this regularly because it has not been done regularly and it's time we figure it out these are the things that I think you know what can only the 12 of us do okay the superintendent can do lots of programmatic things I think there's also things we could do in our own communities you know there's spelling bees going on if you're interested in [03:35:44] advanced academics or literacy you know tout those go to them if you want to support robotics you know there's things that we can do individually but there's only a few number of things that we can do all together reviewing our legal costs asking for accountability on programs I'll say you know are we sure that everything in this proposed budget is actually being clearly measured for instance middle school after school program buses I totally support middle school after school programs however in one of the last goal reports from last year and I didn't get to pull it up there was really no description of what services were being provided to how many students is it the same 50 kids well I [03:36:21] mean that's great but like let's do the cost per dollars the same about on how many courses just with dual enrollment it's mentioned in here well what's the goal for dual enrollment because again we're certainly not advertising it equitably it's a lot of connections here that again only the 12 of us can can do something about so I hope we can focus on that higher level stuff thanks thank you miss Anderson followed by mr. moon I want to tread carefully about something and I'm probably not going to say this the best way but I've done a lot of research over the last two years I don't have kiddos within the special [03:36:56] education world but I have heard a lot from constituents that have moved here specifically for our services and so I don't I want us to be very careful as we continue to provide special education for much of the area including from the federal workforce that comes through with the military that we are we are an area where folks coming into Fort Belvoir we are identified as an EFMP family or location that can provide services at the highest level so I want us to be careful that as we're looking at these things that we're also tracking the number of kids that are moving in so that we just don't blame it on over [03:37:35] diagnosing kids or over identifying kids I want to be careful that we're not blaming special education service or families as we work towards figuring out how to increase the services that we already provide as we know from lots of conversations that we've had as a board we have work to do within special education to ensure inclusion ensure all the things that we're working towards and i particularly don't care whether or not it's a child that we identify here that needs services or whether or not it's someone that moves in as we had conversations previously they are our constituents now and I want us to make sure that we're doing the right thing as we move forward but I do want to paint the accurate [03:38:15] picture of what our division is providing as a as a benefit for many people around the Northern Virginia that move here specifically for our special education opportunities for kids because we know that more time in these in these inclusive environments give kids better opportunities as they as they progress in life so I just want us to be sure that we're careful how we're talking about some of this so that we don't provide any blame because it can be really easy that as we're looking here we can look at just an increase in special education students as the fault of the reason that we're in the budget [03:38:54] situation we are in and that's not true and so I just want us to be careful about how we're saying that thank you mr. moon and then miss st. John coming Thank you, Mr. McDaniel. The salary comparison, that chart really caught my attention, especially I think someone asked about Prince William County with a midpoint for the master's lane being $106,302 versus ours $91,047. [03:39:32] When you say midpoint, how do you define midpoint? Is that years of experience what is that it's a steps or how you divide it okay it's a very simple calculation that we've used for a million years and other people do too and it is the top of the scale plus the bottom of the scale divided by two top of the scale and bottom of the scale and that kind of streamlines the fact that you know there's 35 steps at prince william but only 25 for us and [03:40:08] you know 30 at loud and then 26 in Arlington that it accounts for all that if you do max and min and divide by so is that sort of like average of top and bottom yeah that's the midpoint you are using because okay I don't know that I would have defined it that way but that's your that's how you define thank you for sharing that because I was trying to find these numbers on scale and there isn't. Prince William County doesn't have 106,000 anywhere in the middle and ours isn't [03:40:45] 91,000 either. So unless this is explained somewhere, people will go to internet and Google it and then if they Google it, they won't find these numbers. So, you know, for example, if you go to Prince William County, which has 30 steps, which has 30 steps, step number 16, which is more than half a point on the steps is 98,680. And we put 106,000. So people say, wow, you are misstating [03:41:22] or misrepresenting to us. So that has to be clearly stated somewhere. Same thing with our own pay scale. If you use, whether it's years of experience or it's a number of steps in the right in the middle, it's higher than 91,000. So that has to be explained somewhere. [03:41:41] - Yeah, this is really the midpoint is really just a Fairfax thing that previous boards have been interested in. It's not something though that's included in the Wavy Guide. [03:41:56] In the Wavy Guide, we include the average salary, which is a completely different calculation. It's total teacher payroll divided by number of teachers. Then there is a specific step in grade that is identified in the Wavy Guide as the middle, but none of those account for the fact that they're different scales with different numbers of steps, which is why long ago, this is how Fairfax does it. [03:42:21] And so it's really just for this group. I mean, I don't even think we refer to midpoint in the budget document anywhere. So it's really just a kind of a Fairfax. - Again, my point is to explain somewhere so that people don't go and then come back to us and you're not stating the facts. [03:42:37] And secondly, since you mentioned the Wavy Guide, Wavy Guide does not give us information on a central administrative cost anywhere anymore. It used to long ago, but they're not reporting that. So my question to you is, when you talked about we are spending, I'm very proud we are most efficient in terms of central administration. [03:43:00] Where did you get those data from? - Those also came from the Wavy Guide. There's a position list that everyone adheres to far as how we count positions in every division that participates in WAVI because that's very important that we're all using the same methodology. And so that data also came from the WAVI guide because there's a management line item identified and then, of course, total number of staff, and that's what was the basis for the chart that shows the 1.1. [03:43:32] Could I have just 10 seconds? Yeah, I went to the WAVI guide. The WAVI guide doesn't say that. wavy guide doesn't provide those information anymore it only provides school-based non-school-based staff yeah so we calculated the percentages using the data on those pages the wavy guide that have school-based and non-school-based staff but you're correct that you're not going to see that 1.1 figure there but but that is the under the data that's underpinning that action so page 34 whatever this conversation offline because i cannot get that number anywhere and also uh it our even our [03:44:07] number 1.1 percent in one time was even lower than that so we'll we'll show we'll show the homework it's it's it's yeah it's there anyway uh miss st john conning followed by mr mckelveen so i don't know who directs this question to because i do want to follow up on the steam and i understand dr reed is going to flesh this out for us but for those schools that have a steam program right now in the elementary level they're on the rotation how do they work out that how do they work that [03:44:41] out with the ratios in terms of the music art and PE teachers do you know how that's done so what I would say is my impression is it's not done any way that's consistent different schools figure it out are you paying for time for kids are you talking about staffing staffing because the the numbers that were given to us were not they used a different model for flex versus having a STEAM program because there was no concrete way that we're doing STEAM so [03:45:20] then I went for those programs that are doing STEAM and I guess what I'm curious is if we were to use the same formula that we use for flex to save we had it in STEAM if we could get those numbers I know you didn't want to assume that but if we could use like if we were able to do that because it's an extra class I've worked in schools that have STEAM programs and they are in the rotation and I you know and they love that it's in the rotation because it gives the teachers that extra time for planning so my understanding is that schools sometimes can carve out some of their Triple T staffing to pay for part [03:45:57] of it some of them trade funds to fund the staff member and some of them might use title one grant funds to pay for esteemed teachers so that's where they get the actual people from and then they use that in their scheduling and yes the students as part of their specials time which is basically 60 minutes a day are slotted into that so I think what I'm hearing you saying is could we use the same methodology for FLESS and apply it to STEAM correct yes we can definitely we will work with Matthew to relook at that okay I don't know Matthew if you have anything to add no I would just say that in that in that FLESS model [03:46:32] that's intertwined with Triple T we do still you know hear from schools that it's not the totality of it's not sufficient to meet the needs that they one of me right so I don't think it's a silver bullet is I guess all I'll say right but we're just but we're trying to figure out what adding that class which would be very valuable to each elementary school would cost but you use different methodologies and there's two different things with the cost is versus the ratios I mean I guess ideally it would be perfect that we could have flex and you know steam in all our schools I mean that would be the perfect [03:47:09] scenario and then the teachers the kids could have the advantage of all of that wonderful enrichment and the teachers could have their time but I just like I don't feel that we're comparing apples to apples and I think that's what's difficult for me to wrap my head around yeah the only other thing I would add is you know the Triple T time in some schools are divided up between three specials right the art music and PE and some it's divided among four specials and these are four very different certifications needed to think about the triple T time that currently exists and and try and and make it into five certification five different people and it would would be challenging with the [03:47:49] existing staffing yeah I just want the same formula to be used for adding the steam versus adding flux great thank you mr. McElbeen St. John Cunning what a wonderful suggestion so you know I just think about looking back on the past year the number of times we've had conversations with Dr. Reed where we've talked about the importance of equity and making sure that we have STEAM and FLESS in every school. You know I think it's clearly time [03:48:22] that we reform TTT and you know to Miss Lady's point I think you know all of the above should be considered core not just extra you know music, art, PE, language, STEAM and you know I don't think that's up for much debate but my main question is have we ever considered blowing up or contemplated reforming TTT in any way and what would that look like so there there was a period in time [03:49:00] where we were moving towards the idea that as we expanded for us we would get every school to that same staffing formula that's the four specials and that I want to say it was around 2013 2011 moon and I were there yeah we've fallen off from that since then I couldn't hazard a guess as to the reasons why I'm sure there's many but yeah there was a there was a point in time where it was discussed centrally along the budget question is that does that just this goes back to the previous conversation does that just make it [03:49:37] prohibitively more expensive if we were to handle it separately as opposed to part part of TTT which then constricts the other programs yeah I mean certainly you would have a greater cost if you weren't looking at it that way but I'm sure you're asking a different question than that what I would say is in the conversations that I've had and Noel and I have actually spoken about this numerous times over the years we do run into a lot of implementation challenges with thinking about the amount of time that those four different [03:50:15] core teachers or five if you introduce steam to the conversation at some of our smaller elementary schools you would be talking about a lot of part-time folks and that's a challenge for the smaller schools so you just run into a variety of things that certainly none of them are barriers to doing the work but they do bring different challenges to differing elementary schools got it yeah i mean i think uh you know my daughter has steam once every two weeks ideally we would be having it once every week so i can't imagine that there would be an issue of having you know part-time steam teacher in an elementary school but i appreciate [03:50:54] the response and i hope we do consider this further thanks great thank you and uh we'll do third we'll do a third round because you guys have gone your second but miss sizemore heiser yeah thank you a couple points i want to make is i made this earlier with our goal three presentation but i'm hearing bits and pieces of talking points and painting the picture that we talked about right the fiscal responsibility we're already demonstrating on slide seven and i think slide 14 where we're showing our our central office staff is 1.1 percent and significantly [03:51:30] lower our class sizes and to my colleague's point about you know what is going to that class size number is it actual kids in a fifth grade class and a teacher or is it kids in fifth grade class and teacher plus reading specialist plus this plus that right i think it'd be good to tease those two things out to get a real picture of how many children do we have in a classroom per adult in the classroom with them full time i think that would be important to know right the 92.5 percent the challenges to our federal government like we need to get school boards across the country or talk to nsba because it's not just a virginia issue right the the amount of money we're going [03:52:09] to lose on our food nutrition services is a national issue and there are students all over the country that count on the food and may be the only meal and what are we doing to talk to nsba and other national school board associations the superintendent associations so first i think we need to put together locally our sort of funding story and our fiscal responsibility story and our goal story and the things that we are doing that are both fiscally responsible and best educational practices and put that together and partner with some national on some of the challenges from the federal i do want to put something out there just to clarify when you have twice exceptional students [03:52:49] they don't add to special education students twice we're just starting to recognize now that twice exceptional students are both students who would have already qualified for special education students due to an area of disability and also have an exceptionality so it's not like extra identification of twice exceptional students adds to the number of students with disabilities it's just that we're recognizing that there's also an exceptionality that we need to foster as well I did want to ask the 5% increase in students with disabilities, is that students with IEPs or 504s or both? [03:53:22] Just IEPs. Just IEPs. So do we know if there's an increase in students with 504s as well? It's not something that we track or use to inform the budget. So I can't answer. I think that would be good to find out if we are also seeing an increase. And again, I don't want to further -- I think it's just good to know from a budget narrative, like, these are the additional needs that we have that we talk about. But I agree with what my colleagues said and appreciate that you know we need to educate every student that walks in the door but when we look at you know the additional funding that we would get per pupil if we're funded with Arlington Falls Church Loudon and Alexandria it's you know 150 [03:54:00] million dollars if J Lark was fully funded it's 3100 dollars per student right we are I think being pretty efficient what we what we have but we've also done a lot to reduce what we've had in the area of increasing student needs and I'd like to see that somehow sort of consolidated with the ways we being innovative with what we have with both the baldridge study to be more fiscally responsible with the algebra by eighth grade the inclusive preschool i think we should put that together and say look at the amazing things we're doing what are the organization can be as innovative and as streamlined and funded the way we are so thank you thank you and that ends uh round one of [03:54:39] go back so we have time um we'll go to a final go back and i had first dr anderson yes very quickly you talked about average salaries where can we find that in these documents please pause my time that's just the data point that's in the wavy guide on the salary page it shows bachelors a bachelor step one masters step then average then max and there's just three or four data points on that page in the wavy guide and it's included there thank you and in the vein of telling our story I'm going to go back to this I think we have to tell our story [03:55:16] and the unique opportunities that exist with that additional 8% with ERFC so on page 32 that slide we can do what we do with CIP you know with and without so there's got to be a place where we're saying there's an additional 8% that is available across all of the scales and I don't think it's the 65,000 that's on page 4 it's 8% to wherever you are correct it's 6.8 not oh thank you I don't why cap thank you for for that whatever the number is it's a draw and we have to make sure it's present always it doesn't hurt us to have it in these [03:55:56] budget documents it doesn't we don't have to only limited to recruiting I'm sorry dr. Anderson it's six point six one percent is the ERFC rate okay six point six one thank you whatever it is it's an additional thing that is good on page 39 you also talked about a thousand dollar bonus that is part of the budget conversations can you confirm that that will not require a local match or would it require a local match [03:56:30] it does not require a local match but you side yeah the amount of funding that they provide is for soq positions only so it costs us 35 million if we give a thousand dollars if we did do it like we did it back in 23 which was a thousand dollars to every um fte employee and hourly contracted which is bus drivers food services and family liaisons they're the hourly contracted and then we did like 250 if you worked less than 10 hours as an hourly employee and 500 if you worked more [03:57:07] than 10 hours and the cost of that's about 35 million dollars so there is a cost to us there's not a local match and you know you could a decision could be made to not allocate to every single employee this bonus but you can't really do it based on the SOQ for example let's say that the SOQ and I'm making this up just for to illustrate says that we're supposed to have one reading specialist at every school and we have you know so that means we need 200 but we have 220 well it's not like you're not [03:57:47] going to give those 20 the thousand dollars i mean you you know you can't you can't use the soq to decide who is going to get the bonus you could eliminate some groups theoretically um but you can't do it like the general assembly has provided so then what would be the cost to us has that been cost it out or is that a budget question that I need to put forward it's about 15 million to do it just like we did in 23 which is everybody gets a thousand no to supplement what is being provided so if they are providing it for the one reading specialist per school and we have five reading specialists per school [03:58:26] the cost for us to and come and cooperate them the other four the state is providing 20 million for the SOQ it costs us about 35 to do it in the same way we did in 23 so air cost would be 15 million okay thank you I'll come back to that at another point another one of my questions is the preschool classes that you talked about I think there were 15 what will be the composition of those classes dr. Reed are you are those just to capture students [03:59:01] with special needs or is there an inclusive factor to those classes so actually we have several models and I don't know if you want to hear a description of each of those models this afternoon what that those 15 will be okay dr. Presidio would you please elaborate on that absolutely so we're right now we have 55 inclusion preschool classrooms as dr. Reed mentioned there's three different models which we can talk about but the data here is representing the number of incoming preschool students with disabilities that have been identified for service. Once we start placing [03:59:39] those students in schools, if we place them in a school, that new classroom to house students if you will, if that's placed in a school that already has general education preschool, then we can do an inclusion classroom. If that's placed at a school that does not have a general education preschool in it for facility reasons, like that's the only place we could put the classroom, then it will be one of those self-contained special education preschool CLASSROOMS. WE'RE PARTNERING WITH JANICE REALLY HARD TO TRY TO MAKE SURE THAT WE'RE SITING THESE CLASSROOMS IN SCHOOLS THAT HAVE GENERAL EDUCATION PRESCHOOL SO THAT WE CAN INCREASE THE NUMBER OF INCLUSION CLASSROOMS AT PRESCHOOL. BUT IT'S REALLY FACILITIES DRIVEN [04:00:15] IN TERMS OF ULTIMATELY WHERE THEY'RE GOING TO BE SITED. SO THOSE 15 CLASSES THAT ARE ON THE CHART REPRESENT 120 KIDS BECAUSE OF THE CAP OF 8 OR IS IT ANOTHER NUMBER? ROUGHLY I THINK that's correct i'd look to matthew who's costed it out can we put the that slide up i'm not sure which slide it was but i don't remember yeah so we we actually have um the one before yes we have [04:00:52] two separate preschool things that are happening in the budget we have the growth that is special education only focused which is what's documented here and those are those are preschool class based and preschool autism classes that are shown here in these 15. i'm really referring to the 15 new yep the 15 new so those are those are preschool class based and preschool autism classes across the the division based on growth in that number of students separately from that there is a investment in the budget to expand inclusive preschool and those are 11 classrooms and those [04:01:27] are the classrooms that you um would see either we we refer to as either um early childhood inclusion program or itinerant inclusion and so there's 11 of those that are that are actually beyond this 15 that are not part of this cost so if you look in the multi-year initiatives part of the presentation that was given last thursday night or you look in the slides that are today's presentation i believe it's um i believe it's like around slide 12 or 14 maybe 14 yeah so within that [04:02:02] multi-year initiatives that's actually the expansion of inclusive preschool no i appreciate that but my question was the 15 classes how many kids will we assume yeah so the the two different kinds of classes that are encompassed in that 15 are generally classes that would be eight students apiece or five students apiece and so it's gonna be some number between yeah sorry 75 and 120 no that's perfect thank you and the last thing that I do want to share is you know we've been talking about the AAP centers since I've been on the board and the savings have been astronomical. [04:02:39] If this is a focus in the boundary work, then let's make it a focus in the boundary work and save that money and spend it elsewhere. I could not be in greater support of that happening, particularly in places where there is no AAP center and that pyramid at all. [04:02:55] And those families have to leave their entire pyramid in order to get education, which we say that they're requiring. So I wanna put that on the table. And just like a final thing, since I have 11 seconds, are we saying for the schools that have FLESS, because it's part of the master scheduling, that those students have a reduction in music and PE time? [04:03:17] 'Cause I was a little confused as well. - So what I would say is that we provide a fewer number of art, music, and PE teachers to a school that has a FLESS program than we would to that same exact school with that same exact number of kids that doesn't have a FLEZ program. [04:03:42] I think that naturally means that they will have less time, but I just want to reiterate that we are still meeting the requirements of the regulation to provide a certain amount of art, music, and PE, as documented in the school board regulation. [04:03:58] But yes, there would be a reduced amount of time. - So maybe instead of three PEs per week, you have two, if two is what we have to meet. - Yeah, I believe the regulations specify number of minutes per every two weeks and so what I would say is every school is meeting that minimum number of minutes per the regulation it's just that a school that has a FLESS program is is then those students are getting FLESS whereas a school that doesn't may have those students in art music and PE more than that minimum in that regulation or they may have them doing STEAM or you know whatever else great thank you miss Mirren followed by miss Dixit oh I'm [04:04:36] sorry mr. Frisch who has not had to go back yet and then we'll go back to miss Thank you so when I was looking at this slide one of the things that I kept thinking to myself is you know I've been to a few of our inclusive preschool preschool classrooms and they've mostly struggled to make them inclusive and so consistent with wanting to continue these investments I'd like to hear from staff about the work that's being done with the consultant to address the inclusion model that will make this investment more worthwhile to the students it's intended to help thank you mr. Frisch I would just say when I [04:05:15] mentioned the 55 inclusion classrooms we have gone from one inclusion classroom three years ago to 55 right we've done that just within our existing staff working with our schools and providing you know central office directed professional development to do that our inclusion consultants just came on board contractually about eight weeks ago they were out here working with all of our principals last week and we're going to be working with a cohort of schools schools, probably about 12 schools, and I'm going to get back to the preschool thing here in just a second, K-12 schools, we're targeting schools, elementary and secondary schools, [04:05:52] middle or high in each region, as part of an early adopter phase to really work with the consultants. They're going to provide professional development to all the schools. We're going to provide coaching and support services to the schools to look at a number of different programmatic changes. The first is supporting students with more access to the general education curriculum, So that's more professional development and training for the general education teachers about how to meet their needs. [04:06:15] We're gonna be working systematically on our IEP processes and procedures to make sure that all students and families understand the opportunities for inclusion that are available to them and hopefully be able to support more students moving into an inclusion setting. And we're gonna continue to support schools through this process really over a three year period of time. [04:06:36] So we're starting with the smaller cohort of schools. Next year, we're gonna do the remainder of the half of our schools. Then the following year, we're gonna do the remainder of the other half of our schools. At the preschool level, our consultants will be supporting the development of some additional professional development that will support the inclusion efforts. [04:06:55] But largely, we're really pretty much in year one, if you've gone and visited a classroom, where the staff has basically received a minimal amount of training and support to do this work. We're really early in the work. But the consultants are going to be with us for a three-year period of time to try to help us in that transition, both pre-K through grade 12. [04:07:16] And I assume as part of the goal reporting and EL reporting, we'll receive updates on the progress of the work with the consultant? Yes, sir. All right. My last question for my go-back relates to the increased cost of different types of students. Certain things we don't track when we're looking at charts like that, right? [04:07:37] It costs us more to educate students who require advanced academics to have a fulfilling educational experience in our system, isn't that right? Yes, sir. And so if we were doing our job in helping these students excel at their best, to be their best selves, we might have a chart in the future that showed because of our success in bringing more students into advanced academics, our educational system is more expensive, even though our overall growth has been relatively flat. [04:08:05] Yes, sir, that's true. And so earlier today, during our Goal 3 report, we talked about our success in getting more students into algebra or higher in middle school. The logical conclusion is that that will lead to more students taking advanced math in high school, which will probably cost us more money. [04:08:24] Yes, sir. All of this is to say that every time we do something to help enrich the experience of a student in our system so they get the most out of our system, we are doing equity work. And so when we think about multilingual learners and special education learners and economically disadvantaged students, those are the three populations that we talk about all the time. [04:08:45] But when a teacher differentiates inside the classroom, they're doing equity work. Yes, sir. That's true. And it costs us more money to differentiate from the materials we provide the instructors to the time the instructors spend with their students. And so I just want to be mindful when we look at that chart with the same three populations, to Ms. Anderson's point, some in the community will point at that and say, well, we know who to blame. [04:09:10] No. To give every student an equal shake at life and to give them the best opportunity we can as a school system, whether they are on that group or in multiples of those groups, they can be multilingual and advanced, they can be 2E and special education, they can intersect on all kinds of fronts. [04:09:29] I just want us to be mindful that the differences that make our school system great are the things that drive the cost of our school system. Thank you. And now, Ms. Mirren, followed by Ms. Dixon. No problem. Yeah, I just want to underscore, too, I mean, we don't want to think about our kids doing, you know, now it's time for STEM and now it's time for advanced academics. [04:09:49] I mean, we've talked about this before, that things need to be integrated. And this even goes back to the previous board when we did the program audit. And we were trying to say, okay, we have a global classroom product. We have Get to Green. We have STEM specials. I mean, STEM really could be integrated through any subject area if it's done in that way. [04:10:08] And so, you know, it's been an inequity that some schools have a STEAM lab and a STEAM special. I mean, part of -- this goes back to even having outdoor learning spaces. I mean, Centerville Elementary had an outdoor learning special at a time when schools didn't uniformly even have -- you know, we weren't even talking about space for outdoor learning. [04:10:27] So I just hope my colleagues that you'll not, you know, think about we've got to bifurcate all this different learning when really the goal is to integrate it because like that's what we do in real life. We don't be like, okay, now it's time to do math and then I'm going to set that aside. Now I'm going to do reading and science. I guess my question, you know, continues to be in the dialogue I'm seeking is with my colleagues, which is where can we start looking for more money? [04:10:49] Because we are not going, we shouldn't expect that more is coming our way unless we make it. thoughts capital facilities we could look for outright funding through the processes we have and the new ideas to expand funding and we have some of that in the wings I'm following it from the CIP motions co-sharing responsibilities I mean how can we work with the the county board and the board of supervisors on shared things like energy goals and community use and preschool I just again these bifurcated siloed ways just you know how can we maximize each Fairfax County dollar and not look at it look at it as the school dollar and the [04:11:29] county government dollar it's a dollar that serves our residents so how do we look at the best way to provide the services and of course get the money with the state I mean we have a whole new session that's gonna start up before we know it in the fall I don't have much appetite to find distinct programs and things to tinker with I think this is as good as it's going to get I'd love to have world language I'd love to talk about a whole bunch of things but until we get more money none of that is going to happen so it's not a mystery would help students succeed great staff we got to pay them so I hope we can do that work together thank you very well said miss Dixit followed by Miss St. John [04:12:06] Cunningham thank you so we are having very interesting conversations some of this is really white what we do why we are here is to see how we can do the best for our students and provide the you know just have the fiscal responsibility as a board and I think this is what we're trying to do is where we can save but at the same time not at the cost of any program which is good for us but I'm gonna I'm gonna ask a basic questions about cameras I know [04:12:41] there is a line item under the budget for adding some cameras is it for any cameras inside the school if especially in elementary schools so as mr Lambert's getting the microphone I think we're still establishing the queue if you will since we're a queue rich environment but we're still looking at the queue for which security accoutrements we're going to be funding and also looking at the viability of some of these tools as we've read recently in news and reports [04:13:20] so mr. Lambert yeah thank you dr. Reed to answer your question yes we would look for the outside cameras at at the schools first and then begin to work inside we're generally covered on that at the high school and middle school levels there's always you know some room for improvements here there but the goal would be to bring all of the elementary schools up to scale starting with the outside there's also going to be a little bit of a time limitation as the vendors who install this can only go at a certain speed so we'll definitely have work with that as well thank you and where are we with our weapon detection [04:13:55] system evolve and things like that I know we were doing a pilot on that sure unfortunately we ran into some roadblocks with some legal language with one of the vendors that we were looking at so we've paused on some of those discussions and reengaged with a different vendor and hope to have some more information to you shortly we have some real promise and think that we can and make a purchase in short order. [04:14:20] - Okay, thank you. Again, coming back to STEM and STEAM and AAP, interesting topics there too. I think a lot of students or families live in FCPS because of also AAP classes or AAP centers. [04:14:37] This is something no other county around provides. It's a RUSP, so to speak. I wanted to ask, what is the cost of having an AAP class in each school, elementary school, local level, elementary I should say, instead of doing the centers? [04:15:01] Is it something we can come up with the rough numbers? Well, I'll certainly be happy to work with Matthew and Financial Services on that, but largely it's just the transportation cost because you're still educating the same number students who require the same teachers at the same staffing ratios that we're using so it's really largely just going to be transportation costs in terms of local level four versus AAP centers if go ahead Matthew yeah we do provide transportation so the last question is of course I think staff want to give you [04:15:39] some on that yeah what I would say is that the the local level four centers the way that they staff those local level four classes is through their general education staffing formula so it's exactly correct that there's there's really no staff cost related to those what I what I would add to that and maybe this is just something to chew on or think about a little bit is that we do have a number of AAP centers which there is kind of a separate staffing formula in our AAP centers and as we've expanded local level four and gotten some of those AAP centers have dwindled in size a little bit there is an economies of scale that you lose when you start to get fewer and fewer students [04:16:18] your AAP centers and so that's just something to kind of chew on or think about as we kind of have this cadre of various things across the division yeah I think this and the centers do pose some challenges to some families who are you know either have transportation issue or not able to so obviously we we wanted to look at having a sort of local center at each school but my last question and it is to our overachievers and I know some of us have those too that we do really good with our different classification center but i think we of students but i think we still have a [04:16:55] room of improvement when it comes to our student who are achieving all of the bars that they want to do get challenged more so um i can you know discuss this offline but i wanted to see we do have those students and we want to take care of them too thank you miss st john cunning so i just wanted to make a couple comments on this slide because my daughter was in preschool special education as a model student and i've spent a lot of time working with preschool education [04:17:30] special education and in terms of the past couple of years the amount of preschoolers that have been identified as needing these services has increased exponentially to where our preschools that are supposed to be at a max of 10 are far exceeding that so this is why we need this now there is a space issue and as as much as we want inclusion and i believe in inclusion if we don't have the similar preschool program there then how are we going to have a general ed program how are we [04:18:06] going to do that and i think that when we talk about all of these things we've got to think about what's really happening in our buildings these ideas sound wonderful but i've been in these buildings i've seen the preschools being exploding i've seen entire preschool teams special ed teachers quit not because they didn't love their job but because it was overwhelming and so we've got to look at all of this and say yes we want this but we go back to what our facilities are and what our facilities can handle with all of these programs with aap with steam if we want [04:18:45] steam in every in every school are we going to have the facilities for it if we want flex in every school so i'm saying this to calibrate the public again in a perfect world we would have all of this in a perfect world we'd have the money for all of these programs we don't these decisions are difficult to make and it's not that we don't want them and it's not that we're not trying i just want to tell you that we are limited my first priority is to get these special education preschool special education programs enough classrooms for all the kids that need it because right now there is the needs of a preschool child are so much greater so much [04:19:25] more taxing on those teachers and so we need to make sure there's enough classrooms for them first i could go on and on but thank you so i'm glad you mentioned that because in response the data I read shows inclusion is cheaper and so if we're going to continue doing things how we've already been doing them yes everything that you mentioned is reality but if we look at program delivery and if we look at how we're doing things it's cheaper so it depends on is it business as usual which is why when we've talked about the inclusive preschool we've talked about the models I've pushed back [04:20:00] so hard because it's business as usual but the data and the research shows if we do it right it's cheaper so one thing I'd ask Dr. Reed as we're opening these new 15 classrooms right one I'd love to see the data on preschool teacher retention versus k-12 teacher retention because anecdotally I hear what you're saying I'd like to see the data on it to see where we're at but one of the reasons we're having difficulty in retention of special education students is because our program delivery models are out of date and don't provide the best ways to support the teachers so yes absolutely if we continue how we're doing it and we're just looking at space and it's like that problem solving versus preferred future visioning, right? [04:20:39] But if we actually, with these new 15 classrooms, I think I see them as an opportunity. Yes, we absolutely have to provide those classrooms because these are for additional students who are being identified, right? But can we use these as an opportunity to create, start with a better model? [04:20:57] If we go to the old constraints, the old constraints are based around the old program delivery, right? So I feel like we're looking at this new program delivery but putting all these old constraints into saying this is not gonna work because we're looking at old program like we that's how you perpetuate old program delivery models by by putting the same constraints around them so what can we do now with 15 new classrooms that are like a blank slate it's beautiful what can we do so we're not putting the same 30 year old program delivery models the 30 year old constraints on a model that is both [04:21:32] fiscally responsible and educational best practices I put that to you oh thank - Thank you, Ms. Sizemore-Heiser. I do know next week, Dr. Presidio and I and Ms. Pilsen will be walking through preschool classrooms. [04:21:47] It's a focus for us next week with Nancy Pack and Jane Prine who are gonna be here to work with us on our preschool inclusive delivery models. And I think you put it, I think, really well. [04:22:02] I think if we have 15 new classrooms, one of the things we're gonna be contemplating is where, how, and what those could look like. And it looks like Dr. Presidio has something to add. - Well, I apologize for that, Dr. Reed. I just wanted to reiterate, as I said earlier, our goal is to cite these new classrooms, just as you said, in a school location where we can have an inclusion classroom so that we can open these programs under the desired new model that we're working towards. [04:22:30] So I agree with everything that you said. We're working very hard with facilities to be able to do that. - With all due respect, that's not what I said. What I said wasn't look at the constraints of the old model in that we have to have a general education preschool to cite it. That's the old model. I'm saying that is literally the constraint of the old model. [04:22:49] We can't do inclusion unless the preschool already exists in that building. I know I'm past my time. I will stop. But we've got to stop thinking of the old model constraints. Yes, ma'am. Great. Thank you. And Ms. Leidy. Yeah, I just was thinking as I'm also reading things that are flowing in my email that this came to mind. [04:23:06] Can we get some data on the percentage of 504s we have and how that has increased over time? And I bring that up because there is a cost associated while there is nothing allocated because it's not an IEP. There is a cost and certainly a time suck associated with that process. [04:23:26] So I just would like that data if we could look at it 'cause I do think it impacts our budget, like sort of indirectly. - Specifically, Miss Lady, which data? The 504? - 504. - Okay. - Thank you. [04:23:42] Okay, well, we're gonna wrap up a little early. As a reminder, our public hearing is tonight, six o'clock, and just really brief comments from me. I think what I see when I look at these slides and hearing the conversation around the table is that we're doing everything we can to meet every student by name and need, which is not only the right thing to do, I think that the data is also gonna show us it's the fiscally smart thing to do. [04:24:06] We're focusing every spare penny we have into the classroom, and the data shows that. And we're doing everything we can to maintain the baseline of services that our county residents have come to expect. So those three themes I think are gonna be, on my mind at least for the remainder of this budget season. [04:24:23] And with that, the meeting is adjourned. I will see you in about two and a half hours. - All right, just for folks to kind of switch their brains. [04:24:51] - I'm not running the next one, so. - Yes, Dr. Anderson. - Okay, let's target quarter till. How about that, that's seven minutes. everybody just get their brains recalibrated back to goal three. You need you need a transition period. I know there were a lot of questions that we did not get to ask regarding coursework or the math so I'm waiting to see some placards of board members who did not get the opportunity to to ask or ran [04:25:28] through their questions. I know it's going to take a little bit of time to to shift into this new conversation, and I'm happy to begin if nobody is ready. Okay. We're going to go to three minutes, and then we're going to call it. One of the questions that I had, it's kind of a very low-level question. I noticed there were changes between not just the adjusted baseline and the new baseline, but there were adjustments to the targets, because we had had [04:26:05] an extended conversation last year regarding Orsi's recommendation that there be five percentage points. Now they seem to be all over the place, and some of them are few, and I'm not worried about the ones that are more than five, because I think I could rationalize why, because we need to catch up a little bit more quickly, but the ones that are fewer than five percentage points that had been five percentage points in last year's, can you give some explanation as to why you've made that change? [04:26:30] Sure, Dr. Anderson. Well, as you said, some of those are much more than five percentage points, where we had initially come to the board with some thoughts about a five percentage point gain, and when we actually took the student data and looked by student groups and overall, in some cases we saw that the growth needed to be much more significant year over year. [04:26:49] I think in this report you'll see in some cases we've got students who need to make gains much farther beyond a 10 percentage point gain. And so what this is intended to reflect is this is what the rate of change needs to be each year for us to stay on track for our 2030 goals. [04:27:04] And if we exceed those targets, it means we may get to those goals faster. And if we're below those targets, it means we've got to put additional efforts in for those student groups or overall data where we're not seeing that we're staying on track of that line. I think I'm more concerned with the ones with the target goal of less than 5 percent. [04:27:22] Sure. What I would say is we're still making change. As we get closer to those 90 or 100%, those small changes are going to be harder and harder to make for us as a system. And I will pull the examples for you, because that's not the position of the ones that I'm questioning either, because I do realize that you had to maintain. [04:27:40] But we had some, for example, that were in the low 80s, and the 5% was going to bring them to the higher 80s, and then those were changed to be a 2% percentage point target. And I just wanted to understand. But I'll give you the specifics in just a little bit. - Sure, I would love to get a better sense on, you know, particularly coming out of budget, and it's already been here. [04:28:03] I want to get a better sense of the impact of the Young Scholars Program. I understand from earlier, Dr. Presidio said, we have more students in AEP. Quantify that for me, please. - So I don't have the raw numbers of students in front of me, but the percentages that I talked about, at the elementary level, we now have over 90% of our young scholars who are in advanced academic classes at the middle school and high school level over 80% of our young scholar students taking advanced coursework so we could work to get you precise numbers on that if you wanted that I would very much like that and [04:28:40] also I want to hone in on the practices that have gotten us there because to date it's been their flag is that the sole thing no one of the things that we were able to do several fiscal cycles ago was to take some staffing and create a young scholars position it's not the only thing that this person does but somebody who's responsible for going out and working with schools from central office going out and working with schools side by side to talk about best practices of supporting young scholars and accessing and achieving success in advanced classes so that's one thing we've also continued to have [04:29:20] opportunities for extended learning enrichment activities and schools for young scholars at the elementary level after school we've run a young scholars summer school program over the last several years. ESSER funding helped with that a lot. I don't know that we're gonna be able to continue that post-ESSER, but a number of factors like that have really helped us, as well as the full-time ARTs at the middle school level. Dr. Anderson, I am so sorry. We need to pause momentarily. For some reason, the Zoom meeting just stopped on us. Okay. Sorry, Dr. Presidio. People were so excited about young scholars. We just crashed the [04:29:57] whole system. Everybody was logging on to find out what young scholars were up to. That's a thing. Could be. At least you weren't telling me I'm ancient like Miss Virgin was. [04:30:16] Well. I will never let her live it down. Oh, we were talking about coming out of school, bachelor's degree. You know, that happened 900 years ago when I was. [04:30:28] We can resume. [04:31:08] Thank you. All right. Dr. Presidio, go for it. So just briefly to wrap up what I was saying, there's, you know, a number of factors that I think are supporting young scholar success. Additionally, what I would mention is our advanced academic resource teachers really receiving guidance and direction from our team, central office team, to do direct referrals for young scholars. [04:31:29] So not having to rely on a parent referral or a particular cut score to get the student into the pool to be considered for access to AAP, that's been really helpful. And then just the work, I think, at the middle school level and the high school level, really having somebody to advocate for those students when they're doing course selection and make sure that they're connecting with the student, connecting with the parents, and encouraging them to enroll in advanced courses. [04:31:53] Okay, thank you. One of the things I did want to highlight because I did share some disappointment with the reading data. I thought the math algebra data was really a highlight for three groups in particular. Even though the start to where we are right now has been significant for our multilingual students, students with disabilities and Hispanic students, and so I just wanted to make sure that I raised that because the growth is present, and so I wanted to share that. [04:32:21] can you speak a little bit to the level of data disaggregation that our schools have access to because when we're talking about the intersectionality and you're talking about intervention especially from somebody who was at a school you're trying to identify your bubble kids how much insight does the school site have with the kids that may be impacting any and all of these areas well that's an excellent question I mean when I think about what school administrators and support staff and teachers have to do today. [04:32:53] They need a high level of data literacy to understand and interpret all the information that they have access to. So they do have the ability to disaggregate and look at student performance by subgroup, by grade levels, by classroom, by teacher. There's just a number of different functionalities that they have. [04:33:10] And it really depends on the data set that you're talking about. But largely, any of our large data sets that are part of the strategic plan measures, they have the ability to disaggregate data by. We're trying to support our staff with giving them better tools and resources so that they can get the information without having to create their own spreadsheets and everything else. [04:33:28] For example, the data dashboards that we've been doing, we talked about the math dashboard a little bit in this presentation. The IT team has helped us develop a number of dashboards. Most recently, we worked with DIT to develop an early warning system, which is pre-populating a lot of information. [04:33:45] students that might have attendance issues or behavioral referrals or performance on SOLs or performance on some of the screening measures and being able to triangulate that data so that you can look at individual student performance on a number of different data points and then also group students different ways so we're trying to provide our schools with better tools because they are inundated with data and we need to really support them and using that data to make good decisions thank you and lastly we have a lot of things that are outside of our control in terms of what I mentioned earlier you [04:34:23] have teacher I mean classrooms where students have they have a substitute for a long time or they may have a first year teacher versus the teacher that's been there 30 years are you seeing any significance in terms of student performance when you control for those variables that is one of the things that our goal innovation team is looking at some of the differences in terms of performance that you're raising dr. Anderson okay i would love very much to see that and i'm trying to pick and choose here i think i'll stop here and [04:34:58] yield back the 13 seconds to the group um miss Sizemore heiser thank you and i just wanted to first say thank you dr presidio for coming and talk to me after about an inclusive preschool and understanding that it's not just where where the Head Start programs are, but really facilities that have space for gen ed and special ed students. [04:35:16] That's a good first step. So I just wanted to mention that, I appreciate it. I wanted, I think this came up earlier in our conversation, but I know what we're looking at is those who earn a C minus or higher in algebra as a success metric. And I think that's a good first start, but I would just be curious to know, for those who earn a C in algebra, what is their success rate in subsequent math classes or passing the SOL? [04:35:38] because the goal was successful in algebra. And to me, successful means you learn enough of the concepts to be able to be successful as you move on towards math, right? 'Cause that actually, so I would just be curious maybe for next year to know that. I don't know if you have an answer there. - One of the things I would say is in our work with ABLE, we're trying to look at some of the middle school academic performance specifically around math and world language and how that feeds up to advanced coursework at the high school. [04:36:03] So I think we'll have some future linkages, opportunities to talk about that data. - Great, that's perfect, I appreciate it. And there is good news here in the math numbers. Obviously, there's still those gaps that we want to see. So the next question, and this goes, I think, to the earlier conversation about increasing steam consistently throughout elementary school, but what efforts are we doing to encourage not just math access, but math excitement in the elementary school area? [04:36:28] And separately from the CT that we're trying to get CT completers, like CT exploration in middle school, I think, to kind of get that interest and excitement and knowledge at an earlier age. On that last part, you're talking about career and technical education? Yes, thank you, career and technical, yeah. [04:36:43] So starting backwards, we do have a career investigations course at the middle school now, so that's one thing that we do. The other thing is our academic and career plan, which we really tightened up the expectations for that program this past school year and developed a new curriculum that is supposed to be deployed in all of our advisory learning seminar sessions, grades 7 through 12 in every one of our schools, and students complete a variety of different career exploration activities as part of that new curriculum that we're using and then going backwards on your first set of questions actually maybe rephrase exactly what you want me [04:37:19] to address there just if it's it's just rephrasing just on what are we doing at the elementary school and maybe middle school to encourage my math excitement right like tying it to things that are real for students yeah so you know we are going through a new basal adoption, and we're very hopeful that, you know, our new curriculum will have some of those opportunities to have, you know, science, robotics, different types of activities, hopefully, STEM-related, embedded in the curriculum. I don't know if we'll find that or not, but we have in our curriculum this year that we're using currently, I should say, over the last [04:37:56] several years, really tried to embed some of those core STEM or computer science-type topics into the curriculum starting actually as early as preschool. So there are preschool classrooms that you can go to and you can see how students are sorting blocks and doing different things to sequence and that builds its way up in the curriculum K through eight. [04:38:14] So we have embedded computer science topics, computational thinking into our current math curriculum. We've also worked really hard with our Title I schools to get Math Olympiad and Dr. Ponce has done a lot of work on this with his team, offered consistently in all of our Title I schools as an extracurricular build excitement so I mean those are some of the things that we've worked on I think it would be great to even look at Mason partnerships there's so many tech companies in our area that want to bring enrichment to many of our schools and especially schools that may not have the the PTA infrastructure other infrastructures and I think this is a real opportunity to bring really fun [04:38:49] competition type things into our schools and and even using so gamification of math and things that are sort of new so I'd just love to see more of and bring more math-type skills that are tied to, like, data analysis and things like that that, you know, that are more tied to things that go across industries. So I think I would love to see some of that. I have a question. It says on slide 51, "Provide personalized and long-term academic and career counseling to all students." How is that different than what we're doing now? Like, what are you looking to do that's different? [04:39:23] Better look at slide 51 and see what that says again. If you could pause my time, please. Thanks. What did we say? I'm not actually seeing that on slide 51. [04:39:46] Universal strategies. Am I looking at the wrong slide deck? No, I think I'm in the same place. You know, we are continuing to try and have consistent application of our career and academic planning. Right now, we have a tool called Naviance, right, that we believe we could have more full use of and really drive students to making some of those longer-term goals and have more opportunities for interest inventories and things like that. [04:40:14] And we've built a lot of those lessons into our advisory period starting at the middle school level. I think that's great. I think we've talked to some of my colleagues and mentioned more counselor training, but also more support for our counselors. And so I do think that this is an area that we need to flush out more. [04:40:31] My experience in Naviance has been much more self-directed by students. And again, that might increase those gaps with the students who might have family members at home that help them use Naviance and others who may not have family members as present so maybe there's some room here also with the family engagement or the Family Support Center Family Resource Center sorry and trainings on Naviance on how to help students but I'm pretty sure there's a pretty big gap there but I think this is something that could be really flushed out even at those upper elementary school grades I talked about for students with disabilities but I really think for everybody so then when they get to those high school course selection in eighth grade they're really understanding the [04:41:07] full picture of what they could be looking at and I think there's some room to talk to families at an earlier age about how careers are changing and how math and technology is embedded across the spectrum of careers I think that's an important piece as well no those are great comments and suggestions the academic career plan actually is elementary middle and high I was really focusing on what we were doing a middle and high but we do start some of that investigation just in terms of you know what are your strengths what are your interests right really even in the primary grades so it is a elementary [04:41:39] through uh high school sequence um thank you miss lady thank you academic career plans i'm curious to know if we're investigating other products besides naviance we we are remember on all these technology tools i don't know that there's a perfect tool and when we sign a contract you know we've obligated funds so we have a expenditure period that we need to make sure that we're completing and being fiscally responsible on the contract but yes we're going to be looking at an additional time. [04:42:14] What's the current contract go through? We're in year one of a five-year extension. So we just paid it again? We are in the process of working with IT to set up the RFP and we are very close to actively looking for -- So just to clarify, when we sign the extension that we can sign that every year for five years. [04:42:38] We haven't committed to five years. We've committed for another year while we continue to look for other options available on the marketplace. So, because the other thing I bring, you know, it's been my experience that when I would invite my middle schools over to talk about academic advising, I wanted all of the counselors to come. [04:43:00] But they sometimes would only send the eighth grade because they're the ones talking to kids about ninth grade. I'm like, no, you're doing an academic career plan in seventh grade. Don't you need to know what my curriculum is in the high school? So the same critique I have had is that people need to learn our curriculum. They need to learn about all our opportunities. [04:43:16] And I don't know where that's being taught. It's not happening organically. And so there has to be some very specific training about course taking patterns and how they map to specific outcome goals. And we have to be exposing to kids what those are. Another question I have is aptitude tests. [04:43:33] I know that there's a fee that comes with those. I know that one of the built-in ones, and we've talked about this, is the ASVAB. I know the ASVAB will, the number of students taking an ASVAB will help our accreditation because it's in the new accreditation. Have we had conversations with our military folks around increasing the number of times we offer that? [04:43:52] Is there a capacity level for them around how many kids could take that? Because taking it gives a student a lot of feedback on their skillset, not just their interests, 'cause you have to combine the two. And I would love to see exponentially more of our students doing this, and are we engaging in those conversations yet? [04:44:11] - Yeah, we can get you some more details on that because Jen Glazer's been leading that project, but we are gonna be expanding access to some of those aptitude tests, like the ASVAB, for example. We worked with IT to make sure that we could get everything through cybersecurity so that we could administer the tests on a larger scale. So we're in a pretty good place on that. [04:44:28] We can get you some more details, though. - Thank you, and hopefully we're gonna expand it. And also, what else might be out there for an aptitude test for a high school kid that they could self-direct, perhaps do? I don't know. [04:44:44] don't know if we have the capacity with our tj students to create an aptitude test and not have to outsource everything i mean we have some pretty skilled people and with ai i don't know if that's something that we could but anyways i just think that the there's opportunity there but i think this is where our students fall short you know i i liked a lot of things i wasn't good at as a kid right so i had eventually had to hone the reality of okay well that's great but you have a reading disability so good luck being an attorney you could argue with people once you know your stuff but you're not gonna get there because you're not gonna do the reading right so we our kids are gonna have to need that feedback and I [04:45:20] think it's helpful thank you thank you miss Dixit so I have my question is actually on the same path you know discussion our colleagues are talking about career planning dr. Dr. Sloan you have mentioned a few times that there is a process in middle school high school when when students go over that could you please tell me which school it's getting implemented should be being implemented at all of our middle schools and high schools in the advisory block some schools will refer to that as learning seminar some have different [04:45:58] names but every school is required to have built into their schedule a time period where students have the ability to work with one teacher on a comprehensive curriculum that includes executive functioning social emotional skill development academic strategies and habits that we've taken from the AVID curriculum, since we don't have AVID in every one of our schools. We've taken some of their strategies, often referred to some of the, you know, like the Wicker strategies, note-taking strategies, study strategies, and then academic and career planning. So those are the three components of the curriculum that we wrote and developed for implementation in all of our schools, grades 7 through 12 this year. But it is the first year that schools have used that curriculum. So, [04:46:38] you know, if you have particular questions about your school, I'd say talk to your student's advisory teacher or talk to the counselor, talk to the principal, but we're working really hard on consistent implementation around that. So for the academic and career plan, it includes steps that are grade-level appropriate that sequence all the way through their senior year for students where they're investigating different career interests that they might have, aptitudes that they might have, thinking about the academic courses that they might want to take to be aligned with some of their career interests well in high school and then as we get into college they start [04:47:14] thinking more about post-secondary planning employment military obviously college and how to prepare to be successful through the the next step process of leaving high school and matriculating into next steps thank you for the answer what would the parents see basically in this process well that's a good question because again this gets back to this lady's question about most of these tasks are housed electronically, right? So, most of the tasks that students are completing for the academic and career plan are going to be in Naviance, so parents can log into Naviance through their ParentVUE account and get access to everything that's [04:47:50] in there, but I understand how, I'm getting looks around the table right now, I understand that that's confusing for parents, obviously, because there's a lot that you have to know about how to log into the systems, how to find the information, how to access the information, but right now it's housed electronically in that system. [04:48:08] - Thank you, and I just, you know, as a parent whose kids have been in a system recently, I can tell you this Naviance was not the best tool for any of those, they would call it selections, and seeing where your SAT scores is as per your, it was not the best tool I think we were using, and I thought maybe technology's not advanced, so maybe it's happening like this, but we know technology is advanced, And we've seen our IT so advanced now in FCPS. [04:48:39] So I think we need to just find a better program than Naviance. So my other questions was based on, I'll just continue questioning about the AVID school. [04:48:56] Could you give me an example of AVID school, which is implementing this program? I believe it's done up in my district. - Well, there's 15 middle schools, 15 high schools, and now 25 elementary schools, Title I elementary schools that are implementing the program. [04:49:17] So we have quite a few of the programs. Obviously, we have many more schools than that, but we do have quite a few AVID programs. You know, there are significant costs associated with AVID because there's the program costs that you pay to the company that produces all the materials. There's the professional development costs, And then there's the teacher cost. [04:49:36] And basically, that is a classroom teacher that's supporting students teaching that curriculum and providing some of the tutoring supports and strategies from AVID. So it is relatively expensive, which is why we've been really targeted each budget year to try to think about where are the schools, where the students have the most need for AVID. [04:49:55] And we've tended to place the, well, we have placed the AVID programs largely in schools that have a larger percentage of free and reduced lunch students. - Okay, all right, that's good to know. There are a lot of parents who don't have access to technology, so coming back to that Naviance and how to do this logging in, if they say they don't do that, is there a possibility to do those meetings with, like how we have at elementary school, I think we miss this, and I've said this a few times, is that in middle school and high school, parents kind of don't participate in the education of their students, like they are more on, [04:50:35] they can help with some sports or events and things like that, but really don't know much going on. In fact, my son went to IB school, I'll give you an example. I didn't know what IB school was until a friend told me about it and said, "Hey, we can apply to this IB school in Robinson." [04:50:51] And we live in Centerville, so we don't have an IB school within our area. So, but school, none of the school my son went to was talking about IB schools. So as a parent, I did not know about it. I think a fellow parent told me about it. [04:51:08] So I think the general mass, I should say, you know, of people who are working or busy who don't have so much time to go through FCPS website, I think we need to bring parents in the conversation and bring them early. And what are your thoughts on this? [04:51:25] - I think it's incredibly important. I mean, the research is really clear about the role of family engagement in supporting student success. I think it is complicated. I mean, I have two students, a senior and a freshman, and obviously work in FCPS, and there are things that are even confusing to me about what's happening in the school. [04:51:41] So I'm very empathetic to the challenge. And we're obviously continuing to strive to do better. I think what I would say is, one of the projects we're working on right now is trying to have a more comprehensive and consistent academic advising program, if you will, in all of our schools. [04:52:01] Ms. Marin's been very supportive and advocating for the need to do that and has given us some good recommendations as well as other board members. So we've developed kind of a plan, an outline, I guess if you will, of a plan to try to standardize that academic advising process over the next two years. [04:52:17] We took some, I think, pretty important steps this year in terms of standardizing the information that schools need to have on their websites, providing information to schools that they need to send out consistently. But Dr. Ponce and I are gonna be working along with Dr. King to try to standardize that work even more in the coming years. [04:52:35] So creating centralized communications that schools would deliver that really touch on some of the big areas or big gaps that we've received feedback from community members on in terms of areas that they'd like to know more about. So we're working on it. [04:52:50] Be happy to share more information offline with any board members who wanna provide more suggestions or have more questions about how to do that. But that's a work in progress right now. - I think I'm out of my time, a little bit left. Okay, so yeah, I think the parents without technology, I think still we have that open questions. [04:53:09] Would you like to say something to that? - Well, I think one thing I would say is the tools and resources that we're talking about are accessible via smartphone. So if a parent has a smartphone, but doesn't have a computer, they have access to the information we've been talking about. [04:53:24] The other thing is if students don't have access, they have laptops obviously that they can take home, but if they don't have Wi-Fi connectivity in the home, our IT department does have a process by which students can apply and get a wireless device so that the student and the family has that computer access while at home. [04:53:43] But unfortunately, that does require a student or a family to request that at the school level because we don't have information about who has it and who doesn't have it at home. But there are some additional supports that we can provide to families. - Okay, the Naviance, it's hard to even navigate the computer it's not easy going to be as easy on a smartphone that's just the system is like that but I think I'm done with my questions for now thanks I do not see any other placards so this is the last call for those of you who have [04:54:17] not and since okay well good yeah I was just waiting for other people still like you know chime in but I just have two very quick questions I want to know how many of our students have taken algebra one in seventh grade do we have any data on that we do we have about 2,000 students who have taken algebra one in seventh grade and then a much smaller number of students who've taken algebra one in sixth grade or fifth grade I think that's less than 50 students who have taken it at the elementary grade levels so these students who have taken [04:54:55] algebra one in seventh grade is it because they were advised by the school that they can now opt for, you know, course, or just more of the parents' advocacy? So where we currently are, the students who are in seventh grade, Algebra 1, have typically been our students identified for level four services or participate in advanced math at least in sixth grade. [04:55:21] And right now, we have sort of criteria that they must have taken advanced math in sixth grade, scored a certain level on the SOL, and also taken Iowa. we move to as we move through these next few years where we're changing curriculums and where algebra 1 to 8th grade will be default those things will will change a bit but right now it's one of the few places in FCPS where it's not open enrollment yeah I understand that there is open and roll enrollment for algebra in eighth grade so if a student has not done advanced math they can still go for it and what if they're fall short in understanding the concept [04:56:01] they're enrolled are they pulled back or they're giving it enforcements so there's a lot of things so in seventh grade students are typically in math 7 or math 7 honors and then in eighth grade some choose to take pre algebra but many as you've seen choose to take either algebra 1 or algebra 1 honors if students are struggling if they're in an honors class they might step back to a standard level if they're struggling in a standard often there are math intervention electives or they can receive help during intervention or after school and if they choose they could take a step back mid-year and move [04:56:39] back into a pre-algebra class the other thing is any class taken in middle school any high school credit-bearing class taken in high school parents do have the opportunity to choose to expunge the grade at the end of eighth grade and it disappears off the transcript and the student kind of gets a clean slate and can start over as a ninth grader okay thank you so much for that answer that concludes my questions. Ms. Anderson? Okay I wasn't gonna bring it up but I do have a question. How many of our non sixth through eighth grade schools [04:57:14] actually have algebra one at the elementary level? We'll have to triple check on that. I don't believe I think those students would be accessing it at their neighborhood middle school not at the elementary school again because or through online campus thank you know well because we're talking about less than 50 kids so I'm not aware of any elementary school that is teaching a section of algebra but if we are actually gonna get to the point where we have kids that are all the way through geometry and into higher level math at the end of eighth grade we're gonna have to figure out how to provide higher level math until we can figure out how to get those sixth graders into middle [04:57:53] school we're gonna have to figure out how to provide more consistently the opportunity to be able to take algebra one in sixth grade correct because we definitely have students that can do it it's just whether or not we actually have pursued those options for those students if you want the students to complete algebra two before leaving middle school then they would need to start algebra one in grade six if it's still at an elementary school one of the main concerns would be teacher certification okay thank you thank you ms. heiser thank you and dr. Reed I just wanted to mention just briefly to you as [04:58:30] following my previous conversations it seems like and this is my experience as apparent also that Naviance I understand contracts and this and that is one even someone who's very involved and it was not easy to navigate and it was it's not really all that helpful as a tool I think for families who aren't as familiar first-generation college students it's it's not all that useful I think we're talking about some really good things in earlier college and career counseling and academic path counseling I think we're talking about maybe some really more interesting ways in getting families engaged in the [04:59:10] importance of math and technology and the prevalence in society that it is now and also having sort of technology and math be fun is there like some sort of like working group we can put together within instructional services and maybe there already is one I'm not aware of that just has the time and space to say all right how do we really blow all this up and start over again right like how we really look at in not just fixing what we're doing but like creating new ways of doing things you know from an early or i mean i've talked a lot about transition programming for special ed students but i really think that that same theme is prevalent for all of our students especially as [04:59:50] our populations are changing and the needs are changing is there a space to maybe say let's put a group aside to say when should we start what kind of college and career counseling should we be doing i think it's hard to do the work like fly the plane and invent it at the same time right or build at the same time it's a better analogy and my poor pilot co-holic over here is probably laughing at me but um i'm just wondering what do you think of that idea is there space for that well um i there of course there is space for that i think that you're not wrong i think sometimes we keep doubling down on remodeling software programs that maybe aren't [05:00:29] meeting our needs and maybe starting from scratch makes more sense i don't know i do know naviance is used in many places around the country and often generates a similar response to what's around the table but it is sort of the product that's out there i don't know but to your point yes we can put together a group to because i think it goes to miss marron's concern also around calendaring and how we calendar both division work and how students and families plan and calendar their work over, likely from seventh grade on, quite honestly, right? [05:01:07] Because if you're not in certain courses, particularly around mathematics again, you get on a path and that arc bends with that path and it's too late sometimes to, by ninth or 10th grade, when you go, when you discover your deep passion for mathematics and you haven't had that opportunity. [05:01:26] - I mean, it happened with my daughter who was one point, I mean, who chose not to take long stories and some of her friends were in the same, I mean, she took algebra one, it was 1:14. Oh, sorry, so my time was up. [05:01:42] But I think when you don't know, when you're on a certain path, it can take you off other paths many years in advance. I think that causes problems. So I almost feel like we need a think tank with different topics, like an internal think tank with different topics to take the space to say, if I could just start over. [05:02:01] I mean, one thing that Dr. Presidio and I talked about with inclusive preschool, Ideally, you would just reconfigure all of our preschool offerings to make it more open to inclusive preschool rather than trying to do what we're doing now, which is fixing it, right? And so it feels like there's a space, like an internal think tank with topics that are given and maybe with community members, I don't know, to say, here's some ideas. [05:02:24] Maybe we bring in the families who are experiencing this. Here's some ideas how to fix it. We have some brilliantly, amazingly talented people in Fairfax County. maybe we adopt those ideas maybe we don't but we need some space to work through them because i think we get in this room together and we have great conversations and ideas are being pinged about and i think there's some great ideas but what happens to all that who has the space to think down sit down with all those so i think mr sethe often talks about tiger teams and we talked about that last year even a small group of people committed to a single topic who are able to move [05:03:00] nimbly right so perhaps we can center a Tiger team on this topic because there's obviously a high interest and we can improve what we're working on so I'll ask our instructional services team to put together such a team I think there's a department already committed to that work so it's really just thinking about what could we do differently and ask that we come back with something within six weeks ish at least an idea that I can forward in a Friday letter if I may make a request that's an inclusive Tiger team because if we're looking at transition planning we should look at it for all of our students and not silo the work because I think right now we have career and technical services and [05:03:39] there's just two different departments I would ask for that to be inclusive yes ma'am it'll be an ITT thank you thank you and just I'll take a quick turn before we close out because I think I'm the last one and just to add on to that I raised this to you Noel not too long ago we had a student who accelerated in math and when she went to high school was then being paused in math because there was nothing else for her to take I'm not asking for you investigate this in this room but to add to that conversation because we're all of the sudden we were pushing pushing and this child was able to handle it and was interested in it and then the parent is frustrated because now they're told [05:04:17] you have to wait a year like well I want more math and we are saying no you you cannot have more math. That just seems counterintuitive, but it is happening right now with a student at one of our local high schools. And the last thing is, a lot of the questions that I asked earlier were kind of bounced to the innovation team to say, you know, we're looking into this or we could look into this. If we could have, rather, if I could have a sense of what is this innovation team and what is their purpose and what can we expect to have from them? [05:04:51] So we have several teams that we've identified key priorities based on our reports. We've got, for this one in particular, one that's focusing in on reading by third grade, a team that's looking at Algebra I by eighth grade, and a team that is looking at, as part of our ABLE work, which is tangential to some of the things that you all are talking about today. [05:05:11] Each of these teams are representative of cross-departmental teams. We have a principal, we have a department lead, and we have a region lead who collectively work together with these teams, and they go through a process using the Harvard model, our PELP coherence framework, where they are going out and doing some investigations into root causes as to why we're seeing the results we're seeing in some of this data, getting closest to where we're seeing some of those challenges, so whether or not that is doing empathy interviews with teachers, with students, with families, and they're in that process of doing that investigation and coming back with a set of recommendations to inform our strategies for both long-term and mid-term strategies for next year thank [05:05:51] you is that innovation team working with the closing achievement gap team I like to understand better that interplay was that other three of you that team I'll let dr. King it's a separate team but we definitely have members of all of our departments on each of the innovation teams so there's members from my equity team that's a part of each of the innovative teams as well okay so the the work is informing each other. [05:06:16] - Correct. - Thank you for that. And I think we are finished. The session is over. We're adjourning. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Coraggio Consulting ยท aguyonx.com