Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Date: Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 5h 15m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki-qhH84jYc
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.

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[00:00:00] The Code of Virginia Section 2.2-3708.3B, which occurred on July 1, 2024, members of a public body who have a disability or are caring for someone with a disability now count toward the quorum as if the individual was physically present. In this case, Ms. Sizemore-Hyser has notified the chair and clerk of the board that she is using remote participation as she is caregiving for an individual with a disability.

[00:00:21] Thus, she will be counted as in person for the persons of quorum tonight and do not need to be voted in by the board. Thank you. this point i will turn it over to dr reed thank you miss lady and this morning um it's a great opportunity for our board and our community to have an opportunity to review goal four and i couldn't be more proud of the work that the team has done and continues to do all of our educators across the division and our support staff goal four i think we have some really great data to to share this morning and some information that's gonna drive future decision-making.

[00:01:01] So we're in for a treat this morning and really look forward to the conversation. So at this point, I'm gonna turn the presentation over to Ms. Neal, who's gonna introduce the team, and I hope it'll be a productive, interactive presentation.

[00:01:17] So thanks, Ms. Neal. - Thanks, Dr. Reed. Good morning, board members. It is my pleasure to introduce with us today, Mr. Howard Bell, who has been the CEO of ABLE since 2020, and Dr. Steven Gehring, who is the Chief Academic Officer for ABLE, and they are joining us today and will be co-presenting with us and supporting the board's discussion around the work we're doing to look at course-taking patterns.

[00:01:40] So our objectives for today's meeting are to provide the board with an update on our progress towards meeting our 2030 Goal 4 measures, to talk about the work that we're doing around Goal 4, and to have an opportunity to talk about policy, budget, and strategic considerations as it relates to our Goal 4 work.

[00:01:58] And just as a reminder, Goal 4 is our equitable access and opportunity goal, and the work is deeply connected to the goals within our strategic plan. There are five measures in Goal 4, which are all on the screen, and today's presentation is gonna specifically focus on Measures B, D, and E, looking at accessibility and participation.

[00:02:20] Today, we're going to share data that examines high school course taking patterns through the lens of academic intensity. and we will also look at accessibility of activities for students. At the very heart of our goal four is the notion that students are able to make informed choices about the opportunities they pursue, that those choices are aligned to their passions and interests, and that those choices support their future goals and success.

[00:02:44] This goal also recognizes that availability does not necessarily equate to accessibility or connection to student interest. Our student experience survey that is currently wrapping up provide some additional insights into accessibility gaps where students want to pursue things something that they're currently unable to do and the data from that survey will be shared with the board in may so we began a pilot this year working with able and 20 of our high schools to look at course taking patterns by examining transcripts for last year's senior cohort our pilot schools were able to see patterns of academic course taking for their students that correlated with readiness

[00:03:22] for post-secondary education we had dr. Reed yeah thank you miss Neal I just wanted to pause for a minute and I want to share with the board how this was rolled out because I think it's important we met with the high school principals Association a year ago we actually met last spring and we began to share the ideas that were inherent in this work and what I shared and I say this to the board because we've had a large discussion on being a system of schools versus a school system and so what I shared with the high school

[00:03:58] principals was every high school would be involved in this work but it would be a two-year rollout so this year would be the first year cohort and then next year anyone that didn't choose to start in year one because maybe they had other initiatives transitions whatever they could take a pass on year one but they would be starting in year two so when Miss Neal says 20 of our high schools were involved in this work of our 25 schools 20 said we want to jump in on year one the remaining five will jump in in year two and all high schools will be doing this work by the end of next well by the beginning of next year every high

[00:04:37] school will be engaged so I don't want to leave the impression that some schools are and some aren't they had an on-ramp to choose start in year one or start in year two and then all high schools will be involved. So thank you. Thank you Dr.

[00:04:53] Reid. So for our pilot schools we had teams that consisted of principals, high school directors of student services, school counselors, assistant principals, department chairs and other teachers that came together and participated in three sessions with ABLE to use the data and an internal tool so they could identify opportunities within their own schools data to strengthen post secondary readiness for their students. So in the first section of this presentation we're going to take a look at course taking patterns through that lens of academic intensity meaning our students are taking the necessary coursework to prepare for additional education after they graduate from high

[00:05:29] school so this is different from goal 3 where we looked at student completion of one advanced coursework this presentation is really looking at that pattern of course taking that's happening in high school and looking at this data allows us to ensure that all of our students are preparing for post-secondary path of their choosing and that their options are not limited because of the courses that they're enrolling in. As a reminder to our public our middle and high school students typically have the ability to choose coursework in two ways. So first students can choose the level at which they want to take a required course so for example they could take an English 9

[00:06:06] honors course or a standard English 9 course and then outside of those required courses middle and high school students may also choose elective courses in a variety of areas and this can include additional courses in required subjects such as taking an additional science class beyond the minimum requirements or courses in areas such as world languages the arts or CTE academic intensity is focused on the selections our students are making within the areas of math science social studies and English and world languages as these courses are the most predictive of post-secondary readiness so this This analysis does not examine differences in the decisions students are making outside

[00:06:45] of those academic subjects, with the understanding that the decision to pursue one elective over another is often driven by a student's personal interest and passion, and that each elective area has benefits to students based on their individual interest and goals.

[00:07:02] Academically intense course taking is linked to on-time graduation, college enrollment, and higher earnings. Research has identified several factors that contribute to students pursuing these courses, course availability and financial accessibility such as paying for AP or IB exams, recruitment practices and school culture, as well as student and family expectations and interests.

[00:07:24] Our key takeaways for this section are that 75% of last year's senior cohort had academically intense course taking patterns, and we do see significant differences in these rates across student groups. The greatest gap we saw in academic intensity was between our multilingual learner students who are levels one through four, and students who are not multilingual learners.

[00:07:47] And to address these gaps and improve rates, we are focused on five key strategies that we'll discuss further after we talk about the data. So based on Abel's analysis of last year's senior cohort data, we have set annual targets for academically intense course taking.

[00:08:02] And on this slide, you can see both the student group data as well as the 2025 targets. To ensure all of our students are accessing coursework that prepares them for post-secondary, we are also setting a target to close the gap, which will ensure our students who are not meeting the minimum readiness criteria are on track to do so.

[00:08:23] So to do this, we've set an annual growth target for all students to hit that minimum readiness standard that Stephen will talk about more, which does not prevent any student from going beyond the minimum. So rigor and readiness are on a continuum on which all students can continue to grow.

[00:08:38] So at this point, I'm gonna turn over the presentation to Dr. Stephen Gehring. - I'd like to start off with this quote, The schedule is the place at the secondary schools where all of this interacts. So as students start making those choices in terms of how many years of courses, what are their electives?

[00:08:56] The schedule is the place where students can access more intensity or oftentimes sometimes those inequities are memorialized inside. We started out with some of the work with the schools talking about where are the future of jobs.

[00:09:12] So we started looking at Virginia's economy, we looked at the national economy, talking about the shift in the United States, particularly over the last 15 to 20 years, towards post-secondary. Not all students need a four-year degree, but we talked about the need for students to have something beyond their high school diploma.

[00:09:28] About 70% of the jobs in Virginia require, it's actually a little bit higher in some of the latest projections, so talking about are we making all of Fairfax students post-secondary ready and talking about how this was based inside research around post-secondary preparedness.

[00:09:44] When you look at the research on post-secondary preparedness for high schools, the single biggest predictor out of all the metrics that you could pay attention to is academic intensity. So if you had to choose one metric for high schools to pay attention to, it's the intensity of the coursework that students are taking.

[00:10:00] It's particularly important for African American, Latino students out of all of the metrics to pay attention to. Second is grades. We also collected data on test scores, which we'll talk about, but the most important out of all of this is intensity so that's where we'll spend the majority of time today. How did we do our methodology? It's a holistic evaluation. So when we're looking at it there's not one right way. We talked about students having a mix of really rich electives to complement that. What we're looking at in their core classwork is how many years of courses are students taking? Are they going above and beyond the minimum Virginia and Fairfax County requirements? Did they

[00:10:36] access advanced coursework? Honors, AP, IB, college in the high school, dual credit. what mix of courses did they choose there and and we looked at their stem course progressions for example a lot of research around the highest level of mathematics that a student completes what was the highest math course that they got to and specific science sequences things like biology chemistry physics very important for students majoring in stem subjects out of that continuum we scored the the transcripts on a holistic scale very similar to how a college would score it on a 25-point scale. We're not suggesting all students need to get out to that 25 points, but we do have research that shows if the

[00:11:16] students can get to that 10 points, they're much more likely to move on. We also have benchmarks that we can talk more about in terms of GPA and test scores. Our methodology again looks at the five subjects students can score up to five points in English, math, science, social studies, world language. Lots of ways to do it. We keep reiterating with the team there's not one right way there's so many ways students can choose to add to their course intensity over their junior and senior year and we're really getting shooting for that score of around 10 which is highly predictive of a student enrolling somewhere persisting to their second year and completing some sort of

[00:11:52] post-secondary so if students can get to that level of intensity increase their momentum they're much more likely to move on and persist in some sort of post-secondary studies that's why we use that benchmark and why we've verified benchmark through research. So let's get into the data, the exciting part. So this is a continuum and I want to start out saying we work all over the United States with school districts we've never seen in course taking intensity this high. So definite compliment to the division. All of those students in that dark blue, so you're talking 75% of students hit that benchmark. That's very

[00:12:28] high and 61% of students are in that 15 to 25 range. Those students are probably ready for any selective or highly selective college in the US. So big story here, it's a very very high performing school district with the vast majority of students taking highly intense patterns of coursework across all schools. About one out of five graduates walking across the stage is a little bit lighter in their course taking intensity and we'll spend a little more time talking about them through the rest of it. There's two students, we're just using these two students to illustrate our methodology. This is a student in that blue and the

[00:13:06] The key thing to note is they're really strong core coursework. So again, as Marcy was laying out, students have choices, their junior and senior year in particular. This student chose to start French in eighth grade and move on to a third year of French, added some AP coursework, added some challenging coursework throughout their four years.

[00:13:27] This is an example of a student who has lots of momentum in our analysis, high GPA. The student will probably thrive in their post-secondary studies, lots of post-secondary momentum. The next student is an example of the 25% of students that's a little bit lighter, a little more at risk.

[00:13:43] Not that the student won't succeed, but this is an example of a Fairfax student who went through, met all of Virginia requirements, chose not to go into world languages, didn't access any honors, didn't access any AP, any IB, any dual credit, 3.87 GPA thrived, could have accessed some more intensity just trying to illustrate who's that student in that light yellow who's that student in the blue here's two examples of Fairfax students kind of give you a flavor of how the methodology plays out across the real transcript this is reiterating the point so in that green

[00:14:18] box you'll see you'll see a school with the the blue dot is your school the gray bar compares your school to similar schools across the United States big storyline on this graph is your schools are outperforming similar schools that we work with so if you compared the demographics of your schools to other schools across the United States Fairfax the story Fairfax students are taking more intense coursework across the board than similar schools across the US you guys have a very rich curriculum students are accessing that rich curriculum and completing some of the most intense coursework the blue dots way off to the right are showing how intense some of the schools are and

[00:14:57] see one school kind of right in that gray band but big picture idea this is a good to great scenario with really high performing schools across the board inside that so inside an incredibly high functioning school district with students taking intense coursework not all families and not all students are accessing the same level of intensity and you'll see different patterns here and you'll see some families some students not for whatever reason getting access choosing getting advised the combination of all of those things that Marcy talked about in the research and you'll see some student groups did not complete the same level of intensity and a little more at risk in their

[00:15:34] post-secondary studies. We don't show the overall data and stop there. We're going to show you what we do with the school. So this is a view of by subject. So we start here. Our goal is to aggregate the data for your schools and for your division. Play the data back so you all see where your opportunities are. This is showing you where your greatest opportunities for gains. The subjects that you have the strongest intensity is science, social studies, and English. Again, we haven't seen it course intensity like that. The areas where you're likely to see the greatest gains is math and world language. Those are the opportunities where if you wanted to move the needle a

[00:16:13] little bit, those are the places where you're likely to move the needle the most. And then we drilled down inside the schools to show them, we showed you there's three ways you can improve your intensity how many years you take do you access advanced coursework and then your progressions this is showing you years of course or or another way of saying that's persistence and you'll see very very high persistence particularly in the humanities students taking up almost up to four years the place where you can see the most gains is in your math and your science is getting more Fairfax students to sign up voluntarily again it's called an elective some families are choosing calculus as an elective or

[00:16:52] chemistry is an elective other families aren't so how do you help guide and advise students through that course selection process you'll see math and science are an opportunity to have more students take a fourth year as world language you could have more students take a third and fourth year and go beyond that second year lots of different ways to improve the intensity and we also look at the second way we looked at was our students accessing advanced coursework so the last one was persistence this is looking at advanced coursework and again very high levels students are taking advanced coursework in English and social studies at incredibly high rates the areas where you're likely to see the greatest gains on students accessing honors AP IB dual

[00:17:31] credit is going to be inside math and world language and a little bit in science for schools in the division we also drill down so this is giving you a taste of how we drill down into the data so this is an this is a breakdown by student group so you can see some families in math so we'll just do a drill down in math just so you can get a sense of what's in the software and what students or what schools were able to see in their trend data this is an example of not all students not all families having access the same level of advanced mathematics and varies by student group fairly significantly and you get to see the flow through the curriculum this is called a Sankey graph

[00:18:10] so you read this from the left to the right you'll see students coursework in their first year their second year their third year and their fourth year this is a group of students at a high school for example when we were working with them as they were digging into their data where 109 students didn't take math their senior really showing them you had an opportunity here's a here's an area where your school might want to focus and you'll see about half of those students were from algebra the other half were students who started already had started algebra in eighth grade and started high school in geometry so it was a mix of their students Some of them were accelerated, some of the students were on track.

[00:18:46] Really trying to show that high school, there's a group of students that you could really tap on their junior year as they're choosing their senior year coursework to really shape their post-secondary readiness. Mathematics in particular is one of the most predictive. And this is another high school, just trying to show you the types of data that schools and the division can see.

[00:19:06] This is a high school on the left, you'll see, this is their students who started with their very first course in algebra. So they had 181 students starting in algebra. You'll see the students progressing to a geometry sequence. Some of the students continued on into a multiple year geometry sequence, and some moved on to Algebra II.

[00:19:25] Big ideas, students at that high school who started in Algebra I, only 6% got into a pre-calculus course at that particular school. So we're trying to show them, here's an opportunity to really recruit students or to really market your courses. Trying to get more students into pre-calculus is very predictive, particularly for STEM majors.

[00:19:44] The graph on the right shows their students who came already completing Algebra 1, starting in Geometry, those 162 students. And again, an interesting pattern at that school, that's why we chose it to illustrate. Those students are moving through the curriculum to statistics, but not moving to calculus at very high rates.

[00:20:03] You would typically expect when there's 162 students starting Geometry, a higher yield or a higher percent of students moving on to Calculus at this particular school is only about 12%. So showing them, here's where your opportunities are, here's what's happening inside your curriculum patterns, and then here's where you might want to intervene as you're thinking about your course selection process and advisement.

[00:20:24] Yeah, thanks, Stephen. One of the things that I also want you to look at that we're taking a close look at on both slides is, you can see on the left side the geometry, the large group there, and then there's a group that takes geometry again.

[00:20:40] On the right side, you see the Algebra 2, and then you see a group taking trig. and really that should be the same class right so what we're seeing is a lot of duplicated classes in some spaces where as we begin to look at our schedule and our course offerings we have some real opportunities to tighten up this persistence because that yield to pre-calculus is not much i mean six percent is not high and even starting with geometry having a 12 yield to calculus is just unusual so I just we're going through this data fairly quickly and

[00:21:19] each of these slides really has a story that has some depth to it in terms of our ability to make this work actionable and as principals see the path in their schools it's really opened up some significant conversation I think so I just want to pause a minute and kind of take a look at that so thanks Stephen the other the other part and partly why I created this when I was a former chief academic officer I could see the enrollment in my courses and when I was a high school principal what I couldn't see was the flow through the curriculum it wasn't visible to me I knew like how many students were in pre calculus or

[00:21:57] how many students were in Algebra 2 this shows you the flow through the general to advance so sample high school in Fairfax you'll see 284 students started in general math the big story is there whatever you chose your eighth to ninth grade transition at this particular high school you're kind of locked in into that you're going to stay in the general track they did have a nice bright spot their senior year where 71 students did get into an AP course that's that's a real bright spot that we called out to that school this is great can you find more opportunities to move students into that accelerated path work that might be

[00:22:35] ready to benefit might have great grades it might do really well that's an example of how to use this data to really leverage it for your advantage Just piggybacking off of Steven's last slide, this slide shows a snapshot of our math data from last year, and it looks at advanced math in 6th grade, Algebra 1 in 8th grade, and the percent of our graduating seniors who had at least one math credit beyond Algebra 2.

[00:23:03] And it's important, this isn't cohort data, but it is a snapshot in time for us to look at. And what we can see is there are gaps in 6th grade between student groups. Those gaps are larger when we look at the data in the same year for our students taking Algebra 1 and 8th grade and those gaps are the largest in high school when we look at our final data point. We also see in this data that for some of our student groups they're able to take advantage of honors and open enrollment at higher rates and we certainly anticipate that as Algebra 1 participation continues to increase that high school data will also improve.

[00:23:37] We mentioned that we looked at two other data points so the academic intensity is the single biggest predictor, GPA is the next biggest predictor we have two benchmarks for you but we wanted to talk about test scores test scores are a useful triangulation point not to measure individual students as much as to measure the system and how how students are flowing through the curriculum the quality of the curriculum and we have a benchmark here of 1120 we collected from you all SAT PSAT ACT scores we converted them all to a common

[00:24:14] number based on our predictive analytics and we'll show you some data on how students are the interaction of their course taking and their test scores so first of all this is the test score data again very very high performing school district so about 45 percent of students walking across the stage hit that minimum benchmark have lots of post-secondary momentum and another 23 percent right on the cusp again this is all your PSAT ACT and SAT data this one was interesting so the little a little challenging the green bar is your course taking. So remember, 75% of your students are completing intense

[00:24:53] coursework. You would expect that purple bar to be a little closer to your green one, track a little closer. So for example, there's about a 30% gap between your course taking. Said another way, students are signing up for the right courses in Fairfax. They're not always hitting that test score benchmark even though they're enrolled in that coursework. So that's something to definitely watch. And when we drill down, this looks at the intersection of the two. So the bottom axis is your course taking. So for example, that 45% in that dark blue, those are students who took very intense coursework and they also hit that test

[00:25:31] score benchmark. They have lots of post-secondary momentum. It's about half of your graduates. That's the gold standard. The students, if students do not sign up for intense coursework at Fairfax, they're not hitting the test score benchmark at all. So that shows how important the course taking is and the electives are for students. The two that I wanted to really call out, that green box, those are students who signed up for intense coursework, 28%, but did not hit the test score benchmarks. It really starts talking about curriculum, quality of the curriculum, curriculum fidelity, instructional practices. The students in that gray box are the most at risk. They're taking not intense

[00:26:10] coursework and they're not hitting that test score benchmark. Definitely a group to focus on over time. And then this one we really wanted to call out. Different student groups are hitting the test score benchmark at very different rates.

[00:26:26] The one in particular that had the largest drop-off was African American students, noticeably larger than any other student group in Fairfax. And it's said another way, African American students in Fairfax are signing up for a very intense coursework. They're not hitting the test score benchmark more so than any other student group in the school district so we definitely discuss that with the division at this point we're going to talk about the strategies that we're using to increase academic intensity for our students so as we shared in goal 3 we're currently revising the K7 math curriculum and standards to strengthen all of our

[00:27:03] students readiness for algebra 1 by 8th grade as dr. Reed mentioned this data also provides FCPS with an opportunity to re-examine our current graduation requirements our course offerings and our enrollment practices and policies so we can remove access barriers and ensure all of our graduates are prepared for their future.

[00:27:21] In multiple goal reports this year and last year academic advising has come up as an area for the division to focus on and we have a team that's currently working on recommended revisions to the academic advisement process including activities during key transition years. And this work is going to include the collection of student and family voice data to help us ensure consistent high quality practices are in place at all of our schools including early and and consistent academic and post-secondary planning activities.

[00:27:49] This also includes an RFP for an updated college and career readiness tool. Our schools who've been part of the ABLE pilot are using this data to strengthen their practices and increase post-secondary readiness specific to areas of opportunity that were identified for their individual school.

[00:28:05] And as Dr. Reed shared, we'll be expanding this pilot pending board approval to include all of our high schools and our pilot middle schools next year. Finally, we wanna ensure all of our students are prepared for the rigors of advanced coursework. And during the goal three report, we talked about the honors framework that's in place to ensure rigorous instruction is embedded in all of our courses and that there are consistent expectations for extensions and honors level courses.

[00:28:29] We also talked about the adoption of the basal resources, including the math adoption that's currently underway, as well as common assessments to ensure alignment between the written, taught, and tested curriculum across all schools and classrooms. We've invested in increasing AVID in all of our Title I elementary schools to help our young learners develop those academic habits that will prepare them for advanced coursework in middle and high school.

[00:28:52] And finally, FCPS is also providing, already, no-cost SAT and PSAT testing to 10th through 12th grade students during the school day. And this year, we're also planning to pilot no-cost test preparation so students can demonstrate their readiness on college entrance exams.

[00:29:08] As we shared in the last school report, we continue to add dual enrollment options in both schools offering current dual enrollment as well as exploring new courses to be offered as dual enrollment based on student interest. We're also increasing the flexibility of the AP courses that can satisfy graduation requirements and expanding access to AP beginning in ninth grade.

[00:29:27] And then finally, to support all of our students with accessing academically intense courses, we continue to focus on identifying and resolving common barriers, including our work focused on twice exceptional learners, our efforts to provide academic support for students during non-elective times.

[00:29:43] So for example, the pilot we're doing to use advisory to deliver content that otherwise would have been provided in a strategies for success course. The ongoing work with our inclusion consultant to increase the inclusion of students with disabilities in the general education setting and to have more access to advanced coursework and electives.

[00:30:00] The updates to the ESO course sequence and providing professional learning to staff focused on asset-based mindsets and effective feedback for our students. So at this time I will turn it back over to our meeting managers. - Okay, we'll start with Chairman Frisch.

[00:30:20] - Thank you. Can we go to slide 29, please? All right, so as described on the left, we have geometry being repeated in a significant number and on the right, we have algebra two and trig, which should probably be the same class.

[00:30:42] I'm curious how much of this is because of our repeating content. You've talked a lot about how compared to other countries, our math programs here in the US tend to repeat a lot of the previous courses curriculum.

[00:30:59] How much of that impacts these two charts? - I think these are the posters for those charts, or these charts are the posters for that theory. I know Stephen and I have done a lot of work in this area, and often what happens, first of all, through K-8, there's just a lot of review every year.

[00:31:17] As we look at our math curriculum and our shifting basal resources that the committee's gonna look at, we should be able to minimize that and be able to support students in higher level of mathematics sooner.

[00:31:33] Having said that, we also know that there's a certain, there can be a tendency at times if people don't think students are ready for a certain level of math to create another math class or create a two-year class that's really a one-year class or create out of a good intention to be supportive And at the end of the day, the impact of that good intention is not a good thing necessarily if students don't get to where they need to be to persist post-secondary, right?

[00:32:04] So it's always thinking of that second lookout. But to your point, yes. I mean, this is illustrative of exactly that concept. - And one of the things that we're doing as a division to fix that is the new basal materials that you mentioned. - Yes, sir.

[00:32:20] - We anticipate that much of that will be in place for the next school year. - The secondary materials should be in place next year and the elementary the following year. - Will the transition for those materials be similar to our language arts materials or will it be less intense for the educators to pull off?

[00:32:39] - I think it will be quite similar, to be honest with you, because it's going to be new materials, new scripts, new manipulatives, I think it'll be very similar. - One of the things that I think has been different with the language arts is the transition to phonics, phonemic awareness as opposed to whole word and everything else.

[00:32:59] Is there a similar kind of philosophical shift in the approach that we would be having here? - I think so. I think that one of the things phonemic awareness and the science of reading provides is done well, there's a level of fluency that's possible, right?

[00:33:19] The learning of vocabulary, the intentional teaching of vocabulary gives voice and language that can increase fluency, which allows you to read more fluently. I think we need to remember the importance of knowing our math facts.

[00:33:36] And I know for a long time we maybe have shifted away from that being important. I'm not talking about Fairfax specifically, but just our nation in general. And I think we need to come back to the understanding that if you don't understand your basic math facts, your math fluency is impacted.

[00:33:54] And math fluency is just as important as reading fluency if you're gonna be able to be effective in a mathematics classroom. So, and we also are gonna move to, much like the basal reading materials, an actual text, math books, if you will.

[00:34:13] And I believe one of the things that I've shared with the team is I think homework is important. I think practicing math skills, not learning new material home, But practicing math skills such as basic math facts, it's critical to develop that math fluency and those neural pathways for mathematics.

[00:34:34] So I think it is a very similar shift to the science of reading. So it could be several years before we start seeing the dividends for the work. It could. Yes, sir. We should be stressing that as we have these conversations.

[00:34:49] I don't want people to see this as a panacea that overnight things are going to change. Can we go to slide 34? - All right, knowing what we just talked about, I'm curious if we have data breaking this information down by subject matter.

[00:35:07] Like how much of this or the lower numbers are representative of math scores being lower than language arts? - We definitely have that data, not for today's presentation, but we can get that to you. So to your point, the SAT and the ACT provide subject, we get a reading score in the ACT, a very similar one on the SAT.

[00:35:29] you also have a breakdown by mathematics, so we can provide more detailed breakdown. This is the composite score, to your point, and definitely warrant some further investigation that we can provide in the future. - Do you have anything that you can share that you might recollect from what that might look like in terms of the math component here?

[00:35:50] - The math component definitely lags in my recollection, so I don't want to be held to that without having it in front of me, but you're right. I think that in my recollection, and across the country, in the data in general, that math tends to lag behind students' reading scores in both in these exams. And that's usually the limiting factor that has students in that pink and that light red and not moving into the blue in general.

[00:36:11] Sometimes-- - Especially people on the bubble, I'm assuming, yeah. - Yeah. It's much more likely to be in mathematics than it typically is in reading. There are some students that are outstanding in mathematics and are on the other side, but you're right. In general, it's mathematics, it's the limiting factor. - Well, one thing I'd like to see as we bring this to the regular meeting is some information about, you know, when we talk about Title I schools, for example, we're always talking about the other schools that are on the bubble, but not getting the additional support, right?

[00:36:39] I'd love to know, you know, if we follow through on these changes to our approach on mathematics, what is the number of students that are on that bubble where with the additional support they'd tip into the next category? Because I think what I'm seeing throughout this part of the presentation is how important the mathematics component is each facet and so I think it expresses the urgency of the changes that are underway and perhaps even the the changes to graduation requirements that you've discussed so I'll be eager to see more on that yes sir and I I'm glad you brought up the graduation requirement changes I will be recommending to the

[00:37:19] board that we add two things one a fourth year of mathematics because in talking with our principals it would be so much simpler just to default to a a fourth year requirement which many many states in the country already have and we have students that actually are done in some cases at the end of their junior year and aren't taking any more math some at the end of their sophomore year and then secondly I believe algebra trig needs to be a graduation requirement it is the exam that apprentice exams are based on it's

[00:37:55] whether you're going into the military into work or into post-secondary it's a must to understand the principles in algebra trade and those two additions to our graduation requirements I believe would position Fairfax County Public Schools particularly here in the Commonwealth to be a leader because the Commonwealth doesn't require those and is clearly lagging in mathematics as we're 50 out of 50 states in the NAEP math scores but over 40 other states already require algebra trade as a graduation requirement so I feel like this is an opportunity for Fairfax County to say we're going to raise

[00:38:30] expectations not by changing how we measure kids but actually changing the experience for our children educationally and I think it's essential this data is a key piece of that but I just I really feel like that's something that our kids are capable of in our community you would expect so I'll be putting on the next text document next steps document a request for more information about the benchmark test data broken down by subject area not Not only in the aggregate, but also in the demographics broken down on slide 37.

[00:39:02] Thank you very much. Thank you, Chairman Frisch. Dr. Anderson. Thank you, and thank you for this very interesting presentation. I'm glad, and it's not a surprise that you found that Fairfax County is a high-performing school division, and I'm glad that you raised it before me that while it's a high-performing school division, it's just not uniformly so for all of our students.

[00:39:27] You made a point of highlighting the performance of African-American students who are accessing those higher level courses but not having the yields on the assessments. What are, in your analysis, what are the reasons for that? Yeah, I definitely have some hunches that we were following up on with the division, some of the internal conversations.

[00:39:49] Because it's not all student groups to the same level, one of the hunches that we have is somewhere around teacher expectations and teacher beliefs around students. So there's some great research around, for example, African-American teachers having higher expectations in terms of their own students, in terms of discipline, and feedback to their scholars.

[00:40:08] So that's one hypothesis that we were talking about around teacher expectation, teacher beliefs, teacher feedback, and quality of teacher feedback. So that's the first hunch, and then really looking at curriculum, curriculum fidelity inside some of the schools with higher concentrations to making sure that the courses are following the curriculum, following the curriculum guides, have the same expectations across the division, across the region, to make sure that those Algebra II courses, those Pre-Cal courses, are offering the exact same curriculum, the same standards, using some of the same benchmarks.

[00:40:38] So those would be the first two I'd start with, is teacher belief, teacher expectations, professional development around that, combined with some curriculum, curriculum fidelity, particularly in targeted schools where you're seeing larger test score drops. Thank you. Are you seeing also a consistent application of those African-American students in terms of where they're being the least successful around our division is this uniformly across all of our regions or their concentrations and spots concentrations in particular regions we broke the test score data down by regions not for this particular presentation but we did break it down by region and by schools and you'll see some schools are having more success than

[00:41:15] others some schools are less success and some regions so you can see concentrations that we provided data hopefully for the division to do some further investigation and follow-up tied to the strategic plan that Marcy laid on. - Thank you. Dr. Reid, I would be very much interested in seeing some of that information.

[00:41:32] And lastly, and I have a hunch that this is connected to your other hunches, what have you found as related to teacher experience, if anything? - Yeah, teacher experience nationally, when you start getting beyond four to five years, so there's definitely evidence in the first four to five years of teacher experience that there's a very strong correlation.

[00:41:55] After that, the correlation drops off pretty dramatically. So you're not seeing necessarily a teacher with 15 years of experience being three times more effective than a teacher of five years experience. That research just doesn't show up. So then it gets really down to instructional practices.

[00:42:10] But in the first, if a school is impacted by large teacher turnover, has large percentages of teachers in their first few years of teaching, there's definitely evidence you want to reduce the amount of teacher turnover and the amount of professional development, if that's taking place outside of that, then once you're past your fourth or fifth year, you're seeing really wide variation in terms of teacher practices, a less correlation to experience.

[00:42:34] - Thank you. I would also be interested in seeing what the teacher turnover rates are in those areas where you have identified as having greater issues with maintaining the level that is occurring elsewhere. So thank you for that.

[00:42:50] Dr. Reed, just a question that I wanted to piggyback on what Mr. Frischer shared. You talked about the basal being able to address some of these concerns. Is the basal also going to address the scope and sequence and standard? Walk me through that a little bit, I'm unclear.

[00:43:07] - You're referring to the basal math? - Yes. - Of course, the basal math has to be aligned to the Virginia standards, for sure. - So if the standards are repetitive in and of themselves, how would that give us the opportunity to kind of move ahead a little bit quicker?

[00:43:22] I don't know that the standards, you know, there's so many words to describe that. They used to talk about the cyclical curriculum. There were a lot of different terms for curriculum. And obviously, math like reading, you're still adding from the time you're in kindergarten until you graduate.

[00:43:42] Your addition is still something you do. But I think what we want to make sure is that we plan backwards from where we believe everyone should be. And at this point, the belief is based on all kinds of research that if you're in general education, you should be in algebra in eighth grade.

[00:44:00] And even the Virginia Commonwealth says that. I mean, I think the prerequisite is success in seventh grade, honors-level mathematics. I don't see Noelle, but I think that was what we discussed in the meeting. And if that's currently the Virginia trajectory, we should minimally be there.

[00:44:16] think what we're talking about is that for some children math is their Friday night lights right so we want to make sure we provide that extra experience and we know that acceleration for some children is just kind of where they are in mathematics just as you can go into a library and pick any book I can choose go dog go or I can choose of mice and men depending on where my independent reading level is but in a math class often I'm going to be in third grade math right and so what we want to say is look you can do third grade math which is going to be robust and rigorous and it is here in Fairfax County and if

[00:44:53] you're ready really for a fourth or fifth grade math skills we want to provide that as well so that if you want to take algebra in sixth grade that's an option here in Fairfax County regardless of the school you attend right and you we would like eventually I think to get to a point where you don't have to leave your school to go take algebra in elementary school but there are a lot of factors we're going to have to address to get there, but to answer your question, I think that we can, the idea of this duplicate algebra trig that you saw on the one chart

[00:45:24] of the duplicate geometry, that doesn't hold even, if you're, let's say for example, you're an amazing tennis player and you're going to go to college on a tennis scholarship, the NCAA Clearinghouse is not going to give you credit for two classes that are the same class.

[00:45:41] we're setting kids up for problems if we don't make sure that we have those discrete courses in a really discreet and thoughtful pattern no sure I I definitely understand and I also understand the the need to have a basic curriculum because it also levels the playing field a little bit in terms of what's happening in one classroom is consistently happening across all classrooms at that grade level but I I'm having a hard time figuring out how That's going to advance the work of, well, reduce duplicity and reduce some of the repetitive nature of what we're seeing here.

[00:46:15] I'm struggling with seeing that. Well, I would say that I'll make two other observations. One, if we in Fairfax County Public Schools provide a higher level of math than the SOL targets, we have to remember that standardized testing is a floor.

[00:46:32] It is not a ceiling, right? it's it's kind of a minimum that everyone should be able to master so if we end up with a basal math curriculum that actually is set as we do a reset here in mathematics to have if we move through things in a way that doesn't have as much review our kids are going to be fine right what I often notice not in Fairfax County so for those watching is I'm sure it does not happen here but there are places where sometimes they never get to the end of the book, right? And it used to be

[00:47:08] probability and statistics was at the end of third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade. And so by the time kids got to sixth grade, they'd never seen it because they never got to it because they got stuck on chapter four for umpty ump weeks and chapter five, and you've never seen that either.

[00:47:24] So it's not a Fairfax thing, I'm sure. But the problem is if we're not going to get to all topics, then the next year you'd think we would start with the end at the beginning but we don't we start with the reviewing everything so we don't get to it again at the end of the year so i think the standards are solid we just have to make sure we actually get to all of them every year sure i have lots of questions but the one that i'm going to hone in is kind of the the bigger picture this is all great and as you know i love this information this kind of data but i'm more interested in what are going to be those actionable steps one of the things that i'm thinking about as we're

[00:48:00] going through all of this is how do we prepare our students from elementary school to be ready to take algebra by sixth seventh grade instead of eighth grade to be ready to access all of these other electives at the at the high school level just kind of let me in a little bit on your thinking on where does this preparation begin and when are we going to start seeing those baby steps well I think to your point the preparation begins in the home right let's start there parents are a child's first teacher I will say high quality preschool also helps if every child comes kindergarten and school ready

[00:48:36] having said that kindergarten on is our relief primary focus at this point instructionally with materials that we're talking about we have a number of pyramids that are working really as an entire k-12 pyramid to look at this data we didn't talk today but this data is going to eventually move to a middle school project in the out years and then elementary so we see course taking patterns that develop from middle to high and that arc is really informative for regions I know right now the Justice high school pyramid in particular is

[00:49:13] laser focused on this work and we know that that laser focus matters every high school principal that's been involved has talked about data that they hadn't realized right like they're very supportive of this work we talked friday in fact about it and just the groups that aren't persisting in certain content areas so this data is like it's extraordinarily actionable because it's about conversations and beliefs and expectations and making sure that classes of equal rigor are available to students across the county

[00:49:51] and that the expectations are there of all of our students that's also a piece that is harder to and still and our staff then we could ask for it but it's harder to see that play out in the classrooms just very lastly with my eight seconds where we talked about homework we've talked about that many many many times what is going to be your plan moving forward next year because at elementary level we still have a lot of local decisions to not have any homework so i know our grading committee is underway and i i know that homework is a piece of that um i just think it's

[00:50:29] good practice i think we lost our way a little bit on that topic and we need to get back to the importance of the discipline of simply taking something home and bringing it back and practicing skills because that does mirror real life i actually do things at home for work and i i trust all of us do so it's just good practice thank you dr anderson miss anderson okay so if we could flip back to slide 31 you guys touched on something that i have been

[00:51:05] saying actually since my first meeting with Dr. Reed, the only group of students up there that doesn't have a choice is where they register is the sixth graders, because sixth graders don't get to choose whether or not they're in advanced math. It's related to where they're placed and there's not much parent advocacy that can happen. And anecdotally, I am seeing numbers drop for how robust our local level four programs are and how the level three designators are happening so if we don't have kids identified as level three right now in our current system if we don't have kids identified in level three

[00:51:40] then they can't get to the advanced math placement in sixth grade other than differentiation in the regular classrooms and so that is something that I'm seeing just at schools that were previously very high-performing level local level four programs that were that had robust level three offerings I'm I'm seeing that anecdotally happen in locations and I would like us to pay more attention to that as we move forward.

[00:52:06] The other thing that I would love to see here is how many of the 34% of our kids that are in sixth grade math, what is their flow chart look like? Because I think that is essential information for us to understand why it's so important that if we don't provide that higher level math in the elementary level, that they don't feel ready to necessarily get there.

[00:52:28] And I think that it's a hold up of ours that we need to, and you've got a bunch of kids that may be deemed as discipline problems that are just bored. And I would really love to see us challenge those kiddos a little bit more.

[00:52:44] So that's one thing. The other thing that I wanted to ask is, I know our focus right now is on math and I love that. I think that what we pay attention to is what we succeed at. And my question is, for world languages up to this point, what benchmarking have we done amongst schools to ensure a certain level of instruction for world languages across the board?

[00:53:16] I think I have a question. Is it about the instruction or about the access to courses? It's about the consistency of curriculum. I mean, we provide curriculum for level one through, I think, five. AP is obviously based on the AP curriculum.

[00:53:32] Right. sure so I know we provide that and we support teachers with that constant curriculum and we buy basal resources for those for those areas I think that again anecdotally I'm hearing a consistency issue with how those pieces of curriculum are being utilized within the classroom and how much autonomy different languages may have related to what they're instructing because I would be very interested to look at how our advanced course taking patterns even going up to level three are dropping off at certain I know I'm not going to get into certain schools here but I would be very interested to see whether or not we

[00:54:11] have trends going on with certain languages at certain locations that could be looked at to ensure whether or not the adequate instruction is being given at level two which would encourage kids to feel comfortable taking the level three classes because if we're seeing that as some sort of pattern towards a higher level of success I think your question is is is smart around like what are we seeing across schools because I know that graduation requirements drive a lot of the drop-off after level three right that's what students need to get their advanced diploma and they have so many other options they want to explore in the CTE or in other arts and all sorts of areas

[00:54:50] so but to your point if we're seeing a real significant difference across schools and especially like schools then there might be some questions there to look at. And the other aspect is if we see a significant number of students at a particular school drop a language after level two and switch to a new language then we know we we likely know that we've got an issue within that language particularly kiddos that have started in eighth grade so we I want us to look at some of those things so that we can pinpoint where the problems are and that way we can provide those teachers and those schools with the support that they needs so that the kids can be in those advanced because the other thing that

[00:55:27] does is that means that kids are taking four years of a language and it doesn't open them up to other opportunities into higher level course taking patterns so I would like us to spend a little bit of time investing any deeper and it could look guys I understand fully language arts is a like world languages is its whole its whole own ball of wax here and we're probably not going to be able to be perfectly consistent just because of the fact that different languages are different however I would like us to ensure that we're spending more time to make sure that the cohorts of teachers that sometimes are one-offs in different locations I would like to make sure that they're spending more time with their

[00:56:06] colleagues to ensure that across there's consistency across the board so I'm gonna stop there thanks miss Marin okay I don't know that I'm gonna talk fast on this one there's so much this is outstanding this is just I mean I I am simultaneously thrilled I'm relieved I'm overwhelmed but ultimately I'm motivated by this information as a school board member and as a parent with two kids in the system I'm also hearing the clear call to this board and future boards to hold the superintendent accountable and the school division accountable to best practices and research board policies and state

[00:56:46] guidance when it's not tainted by politics we have policies that are out of date that we are working on we have policies we're not following that cannot continue and we are doing the work I know in governance we are but that is the work of this board it's not all the other stuff that we tend to spend time on we've got to understand that they're recommending the policies that are going to drive the work so on strategy slides 39 and 40 strategy one the enrollment and placement policies and I've been wondering about class sizes because and there's a question I have for our researchers what are the implications of class size because that's been stagnant for a while and I know it's been 29 30

[00:57:25] in our elementary schools um the basal resource adoption again years behind where we're supposed to be i know we're fixing it though so that's the bright side because we've got dr reed here pushing the board the funding and this goes right back to our board of supervisors you know we cannot quibble about seven million dollars for this and that this is what it's going to take to continue funding our school system and we've got to better I mean I wrote down I want to clip your video remarks we've got to communicate that we are an outstanding school system and yet we still have 25% of our kiddos that have to reach that

[00:58:05] that goalpost I'm also wondering about the number of math teachers how do we do that pipeline I'm wondering about state colleges of ed the licensure the best practices I mean doctor you mentioned NCAA never even I didn't know that we need to know what the best practice research is on all the things that it's going to take for a graduate of our school to go on that's what I want to hear at a work session I want to understand I want to see this kind of data and modeling and you know my questions yes for four years of math I grew up in New York in the New York regions that took them in the late 90s it was no-brainer standardized tests four years of math I mean world language

[00:58:43] I don't know I know you've got a lot of other things you're doing but I'd love to hear what the plan is for that yes to homework the things I wonder about is the schedule the schedule currently limits how students can take courses and if they're going to an Academy then they're wasting their time on a bus so when are we where does that factor into this what what are the implications of this data on the inflammation of advanced academics level one through four and centers there's a lot of operational stuff here that I'm curious to know about and then fine so I would love to hear your responses to those two things

[00:59:14] But finally, Dr. Ponce, I think about when we went to visit our friends at Marshall Road Elementary and how they, our multilingual learner families, were really, you know, educated about how important it is to not just know their home language words, but their science and STEM words.

[00:59:31] This kind of data, I think, is what our families need to see, too. If they take algebra, where does it lead them? So, Ms. Marin, I'm sorry, which two things did you want me to respond to? Please, I'd like to know about schedule and how the schedule is going to be adjusted to allow for more intense course taking patterns and not wasting time on a bus, for instance, and the implications of this data for implementation of advanced academics, including centers.

[00:59:59] So I think those are good questions. I think that when we talk about access to programming, we're going to need to figure out ways -- like we've run the data across the school division, for example, at middle school for how many teachers are credentialed to teach algebra. And in some middle schools, there are not sufficient numbers to meet the goal we have. So I think we're going to need to look at options for program delivery that might look different. We may need to harness online options for some singleton courses or courses that aren't offered in one school

[01:00:36] but are in another. Because we can't keep driving to places, right? I think we're going have to think about how do we bring the program or the instruction to the students so i know that's a big part of the conversation right now as far as the implications for aap centers i think that that study the jonathan plecker study has certainly informed work here in the county and i know isd is looking at ways to support aap centers i think the curious data point is to take the 34 percent i think miss anderson said that we're in advanced math and where do they go right

[01:01:14] and where do students so i think that's one of the things we like to look at on those charts is where do students go from each um program is it predictable i think it is um there will always be outliers but i think it is predictable and where it is predictable and not acceptable we need to change the system thank you miss leismer heiser thank you i appreciate it um it's nice to to see you all first dr reed and staff this is incredible work um i love the date can you guys

[01:01:51] hear me can you hear me okay perhaps it's us i don't know but we still cannot hear you oh um i can hear you hang on let me let me change my microphone you test your mic again testing can you guys hear me that it's still too low i can turn mine up on my end can you hear me now can

[01:02:27] you guys hear me now well now i can't hear you either okay that's much better okay can you hear me now? Yes, please proceed. Okay. All right. Sorry, I lost my thought. Can I just, do you mind if I start my time again? I apologize. I kind of lost my train there. Your time is still at three minutes. Okay. Thank you. Oh, there I can see it now. I appreciate that. First, thank you, Dr. Reed and staff for this work. It's really excellent work. And I'm really excited to see the focus on intensity in math. First question, and I apologize, I had to come in a little bit

[01:03:04] late for a previous meeting, but what is the plan on really focusing, I know you're talking about new basal material, on increasing the intensity at the elementary school level? You know, I think one of my colleagues, Ms. Anderson, mentioned about sixth grade not having a lot of choice in who goes into advanced math, but also the repetitiveness you mentioned of the curriculum maybe causing students to get bored. And I actually think the message of you don't have to take four years of math sends a message about math itself. So what is, can you tell me a little more about plans about increasing the intensity from kindergarten on for all students and i'll pause

[01:03:38] there so uh thank you for the question i think that having uh new materials that are consistent grade to grade classroom to classroom school to school are going to be extraordinarily helpful and i think again remembering that whatever curriculum materials we select should as a matter of course lead students to algebra by eighth grade that is the general track in this country. So we believe that as we make the best selections of materials,

[01:04:10] that's where that will lead. And I think the ability to also enable students to soar in whatever way they wish in terms of more advanced mathematics at younger ages, I think it's going to require us to use some more creative interventions to do that. But minimally, the curriculum has to get all students to algebra by eighth grade okay and i think that's super important especially in an increasingly technology world i did have a couple questions you it starts talking

[01:04:44] about intensity and course taking you know course taking intensity but then and it in your first slides talks about intensity kind of in all areas right mathematics core academics world languages and other electives but then the rest of the slides only talk about core academics and world language is the only quote-unquote elective that you talk about it, and specifically slide 23 and 24, I'm kind of wondering why we're not looking at intensity in other electives, CTE, business, computer science, arts. It's only on world languages. I would maybe argue that if you're

[01:05:20] looking at intensity, there's probably opportunity in all of those areas, not just in world languages, for increasing that intensity. And I'll pause and kind of ask why only world languages was chosen and as an elective. - So we had to make a choice given the time of the presentation this morning about what we wanted to run to ground.

[01:05:37] And I think like we could have picked reading also in science, not just math, but we chose math because it has just some unique, it also connects to the goal three goal and it had some unique pieces to the arc, but we could have chosen any of those. It's more time that limited it.

[01:05:54] But Steven or Howard, do you want to comment on what choosing any of the others might have yielded? Multiple things. We did do research on CTE course-taking patterns as well, and we had that connected to students' intensity.

[01:06:10] That is part of the analysis that we did. We worked with schools, so that's definitely a component. We looked at high-growth, high-wage industries connected to CTE and to core academics. We just, because of time today, we didn't put that content in, but we could definitely share more on CTE course-taking.

[01:06:29] course taking in the electives is uh interesting there's a lot of research around students course taking in in the electives in terms of their engagement to school post-secondary connections mathematics less so around specific courses um that you see in the in the five core subject areas so in the five core subjects including world language you see some very specific course taking patterns and some very specific courses that are highly predictive of student post-secondary enrollment. In some of the other electives like music, for example, there's some great research on students who take music courses, sometimes do better in mathematics in particular,

[01:07:09] less so on specific courses though. So there's less evidence around taking orchestra versus taking playing a choir versus playing the trumpet, that one is better than the other in terms of post-secondary, where in mathematics there's evidence that pre-calculus very specifically has evidence around post-secondary preparedness so that's why we called those out in the core subjects and I know that there's some upcoming analysis around the electives and students extracurricular I'm that we could do as well yeah and Stephen probably didn't spend as much time on the setup I've we've been doing this work for a lot of years with this type of

[01:07:47] data and one of the things that when they pick the number 10 right as being being ready, that means that students don't just get into a college, but they get in, they go, and they persist, because we don't want our students leaving Fairfax County Public Schools with the key to get in, but not the skills to continue or the skills to complete.

[01:08:10] So Stephen, you want to just quickly describe why, I mean like this is more than just, hey, this is a great number, because as a superintendent, when I look at an entire roster of all schools in the division and you see the continuum of possibilities here, it's critical that every one of our high schools provide that because we want students that leave any one of our high schools to be able to successfully finish.

[01:08:40] A high school diploma is no longer enough. And too long, I think, around many parts of the country, not in Fairfax, but around many parts of the country, there's been such a drive to get graduation rates up that there's been, Steve and I used to call it credit grubbing, right? We'd find ways to just get kids across the finish line because then we could celebrate these high graduation rates, but if they don't mean something for our students, then we're really the division with no clothes, right?

[01:09:07] We have to make sure that when our kids leave, they don't just have a diploma, but that that diploma is a ticket to an incredible life and opens doors for them and not closes it. why this work is so important. So, Howard? The only thing I was going to add was, one, we limit the data here because of time. But to be really clear, every high school gets to see the complete array of data, and they make choices on where they want to focus as a school, and it could be in any one of the subject areas. So I want to be really clear. It's just a matter of what we can do in the limited time we have here. The second part, which I think Dr. Reed is talking to, is

[01:09:45] what we really want to create is sort of a national understanding that when a student shows up in any post-secondary setting, that they become identifiable as a Fairfax County student, that they know when they show up, they're prepared, and they're going to excel.

[01:10:00] That is going to be the real meaningful thing that I think continues to attract more and more people to this region. By the way, I know I'm introduced as CEO, but I am a Fairfax County resident. My son went to school in Fairfax County, graduated. He's now at UVA, graduating this year.

[01:10:16] We moved here from Connecticut 10 years ago, and I distinctly remember him saying at the time dad the teachers are better here um and the courses are better and it was unsolicited and so you should understand that what we're talking about here is a good to great move this this district is already good nationally but you know on the fringes is where we have this opportunity to create this additional opportunity to be able to say that anyone who comes into this school district will excel when they leave and so this work and i applaud everyone and the questions you're asking around what are we going to do about your elementary and what are we going to do about kids of color those are the right questions to ask because what we want is all boats rising and

[01:10:55] everyone to be available to you know whatever job military or course or post-secondary training they need to go to well i appreciate that and i'm very bought into especially on the math aspect of this and very bought into this work and i think it's very important that we do it my concern was that in this presentation the way it came across when i read it it felt like we're going down a path that i've seen other school systems go down that has me worried and in particular there's a lot of research around the arts and success in college and that persistence and that grit and having

[01:11:33] world language be the only elective that was discussed had me worried that one of the things i think fairfax is known for is the breadth and the intensity of its electives and so if we're going to talk about electives it'd be helpful somewhere maybe in the full report i understand time today is not you know there and computer science and sort of how we're going to make sure students access the intensity of those as well that also have data behind success beyond graduation and success in college and career so that was the point i was trying to make with that and it seems like to me that got lost in this and i don't know where i know you mentioned cte but i don't know if you have data around all of those other areas um and i in my 22 seconds i may take a go back i

[01:12:12] I wanted to mention, Dr. Reed, I'm going to put a plug in that in slide 40, you talk a little bit about the strategies pilot and some of these things that we're doing. But I applaud your team for doing this work around the math pathways, the math basal and the literacy basal quickly.

[01:12:29] If that other work isn't also done quickly in conjunction, you're going to continue to leave that set of students behind. I know my time is up. I'll take a go back. Yes, ma'am. And we had a meeting yesterday morning at eight of the team around the 2E learner data and this very specific bullet and I think there's a there is a strong sense of urgency but to your point that's not always transparently clear to families so we will the strategies pilot has been the work for five years so I'm just putting that out there that it's kind of have the same urgency or you'll leave them behind yes ma'am thank you miss st. John Cunningham

[01:13:08] we're sharing the mic today first of all I want to thank you for all the work that you've done this is really impressive and it's great for us to see this data having just come back from the South by Southwest educational conference and listening to what other divisions and jurisdictions are doing I'm not surprised that FCPS is where it is I mean I told my colleagues when we were there it's like we need to be presenting at these conferences because we're light years ahead of some of the presentations I'm hearing and and so that's always a very comforting thing to know having had three students that

[01:13:44] HAVE GONE THROUGH FCPS SCHOOLS AND HAVING WORKED AT THEM, HOWEVER, IT'S THAT GETTING TO GREAT AND WORKING ON THE FRINGES THAT'S IMPORTANT. ONE OF THE THINGS THAT I DID WANT TO ADDRESS IN TERMS OF HOW WE WORK WITH OUR MULTILINGUAL LEARNERS AND HOW WE WORK WITH FOREIGN LANGUAGES THROUGH OUR EMERGEN PROGRAM, HOW WE LEVERAGE THAT, I KNOW THAT FROM MY OWN EXPERIENCE WITH MY KIDS THAT WHEN THOSE STUDENTS AND SCHOLARS go through those programs, they opt out of college requirements for language, so that

[01:14:20] translates into dollars and cents for parents, let's face it, or for the ability for those kids to do a minor, have the space to do a minor. So that's a question I'd like to ask, how we leverage those opportunities in world language for our immersion students, but also for our multi-language learners, because the ability for them to retain and maintain their language and also have proficiency in it because once you start learning in another language, the proficiency in your native language drops.

[01:14:55] So those are things that maybe we can creatively look at and just asking how we do that in our system or if you came up with any data. I definitely wanted to follow up, I think your hunch is really wanted to follow up on your multilingual learners as a great opportunity to both encapsulate and formalize their written language in their native language and as an opportunity to see themselves as scholars if you see it as a strength so you all are doing some competency-based testing very robust competency-based testing but one of the recommendations that we had initially in the year is to take for example your Spanish-speaking

[01:15:31] students who are highly proficient and creating pathways for them towards dual credit not just getting competency towards dual credit where they then see themselves as a scholar and then hopefully add some intensity in some other areas so I think there's a great opportunity for you all to take those those speakers and there's some districts we work with that after a one year or two year on-ramp those students are passing AP Spanish language and AP Spanish literature giving multiple college credit money in the family's pockets and then seeing themselves as very successful scholars and then moving on to some other areas so I think that's a wonderful opportunity that you all could be capitalizing on a little bit more than you are with your

[01:16:10] competency-based exams all right seeing no other placards I'll take my turn obviously I love this presentation it's everything I do and where I live I just want to keep two words in mind at all times which is preparation and persistence everything we do has got to be around preparation and persistence the other thing I want to talk about is I want to highlight a couple slides in terms of academic intensity if we look at the two sample slides on 19 and 20 of the two students I really want to highlight

[01:16:46] the second student who you know has a cumulative GPA of 3.87 but has not taken any honors courses when a college is evaluating a transcript and they see grades that are this strong and they don't see any honors or AP or IB there's a couple there's two thoughts that go through their mind one is this is a student who's perfectionistic and they're maybe don't have the bump to be quite frank they have a mental health issue around fear of not getting a B I mean fear of not getting an A so they won't push themselves or they're in a situation where they don't understand course taking patterns and someone

[01:17:24] hasn't pushed them the other thing I would say is we talk a lot about backward design I think that we have to approach that with kids that math is four years I do have a question on the slide that shows geometry back to back two years in a row. When we drill down on that, is that really geometry, that code, twice? Or is that a geometry part one code and then a geometry part two code? It's actually two different courses there's a mix. Some of the students are repeating, but it's a very small percentage. You don't have

[01:17:59] really high failure rates. To Dr. Reed's point, what's happening in some of your course sequencing is some students are being identified as possibly needing extra support. One way that you could do that is to try to provide that intensity inside one school year and there's lots of strategies what you all are doing in this case is providing it over multiple years so you're taking the curriculum you're stretching it out over multiple years in some slightly different course sequencing that that's a an approach a strategy approach that that is causing some of those students and you'll see most of those students are staying in that particular pattern across the division yeah I just want to bring that up and I would also say we

[01:18:39] should never have kids spending two years in geometry with all due to respect to mathematics algebra one and getting to algebra two are essential we've got to figure out how to how to do this and again sometimes if we have to double block an algebra one first year so they're getting math every year and they get that solid foundation it needs to happen the misleading I'm going to invite miss Clemenco to to talk about this because I think we want to clarify that this is our AFTA course and so I think she can provide some additional context as well yeah I think we have some limitations in the in the modeling and so that it's been represented as two years of geometry which in some respects

[01:19:15] it is a another year before they get to algebra 2 right but we do have a course that is called after algebra functions patterns algebra functions data analysis and it is a step towards algebra 2 it's not a repeat of geometry at all it's not even in the geometry family it's in the algebra family and it gives students It's time to learn some of those algebraic concepts in more concrete and explicit ways to prepare them for algebra two.

[01:19:46] Don't disagree that maybe an on-ramp isn't a good idea, but it's the on-ramp we have. I just want to be clear that it's not a two-year geometry sequence, and the majority of those children are not repeating because they failed geometry. It's only been in place for, I don't know, I'm going to say, Robin and others might know, a handful of years.

[01:20:04] Five or six. we avoided it for a long time and at the urging of many we went ahead and put it in well and I think that key to all of this is the belief our teachers have in our scholars and I can't underscore that enough we've seen that with benchmark with reading a lot of teachers initial reaction to seeing the literacy and the benchmarking they were going to be teaching and reading was our kids can't do this and here we are a semester in a quarter in there were epiphanies happening everywhere they were like oh my gosh they can do this like we have not been stretching them to the point we need to and I'm gonna take a go back but

[01:20:43] also echo my colleagues comment about behavior you know as someone who got unsatisfactory okay when we had those back in school throughout third and fourth grade and just about everything especially self-control I was under challenged I was bored when you started pulling me out and you started moving to mean more challenge I was like all right learning can be fun so I see I'm out of time and I'm gonna take a go back the last thing I'd say real quickly because it's just a comment is I worry that too often our our students are not taking physics for whatever reason they're taking biochem and they're jumping into

[01:21:22] other courses and there are a lot of our selective institutions who want to see the three core mathematics I mean science courses all right we're gonna go to go back so I'm just gonna check with everybody just in case chairman Frisch you need to go back okay dr. Anderson okay dr. Anderson thank you firstly I'm trying to understand the targets that have been laid out in the document I think page 38 it doesn't seem to have the typical demographics that we use can you speak to that a little bit to seem to be missing yeah so I think the two they're missing are our economically disadvantaged category and in working

[01:21:59] through some partnerships with the ability to share data that's part of the reason that that's not included that's a sensitive data point to sharing so we're working through some of those things and then I believe the other one is 504 data I'm looking and I believe that's something that we've talked about trying to get for future reports some of this is how they're able to take our data and our categorization and use the existing data because we're looking at how able is benchmarking across other right other school systems we're looking at large aggregate data.

[01:22:30] So that's an ask that we have, Dr. Anderson. - Thank you, and it also focuses on seniors. The conversation that we are engaging in right now leads me to believe that there's an opportunity to have targets beyond that group. So what is the opportunity for expansion for us to kind of be a little bit on top of it before it's too late?

[01:22:48] They're seniors, they're gone. - No, it's a great question. I'll start and I'll have Steven jump in. So we recognize that this is the culmination, of course, taking patterns, right? What students experienced in elementary school, middle school is showing up in their transcripts which is why we're going to bring this work down to the middle school next year because we need to do some additional work on this topic so we see this as a starting point for setting some targets for ourselves but not the ending point and I'll ask Stephen to jump in as well another typical evolution in the implementation is we start with the historical analysis we also have tools to look at current students and for example we have tools in the software where it could recommend

[01:23:26] students who might benefit from an advanced course you can find african-american students at a school who didn't sign up after the course requests have come in and you could use it as a tool to recruit so that's typically in years two three and four as you move forward actual current students before they actually sign up for their courses the next year to your point to shape what they're taking before it's too late and they graduate so we start here to understand the trends and then oftentimes the division chooses to move forward and say we want to have current data on our students as the course requests are coming in so we can have an opportunity to correct some of those and to recruit some of those kids who maybe chose not

[01:24:05] to sign up for whatever reason and get them into those courses before they graduate. I would certainly like to see some other targeting some goals in that area because I think it's just too late with the seniors. Just speaking a little bit to some of our practices. Where does young scholars fit into this work? Because you talked a little bit a while ago, Dr. Reed, about when we are extending curricula across multiple years when they're intended to be a single year, we're kind of having placeholders of activities rather than going to the real thing. And to be honest, I've always felt that way about young scholars because

[01:24:41] our hope is to put them into advanced academics. We have this kind of separate thing. Where does it fit into this what has been the impact how are we seeing that it is motivating students to participate in these higher-level courses so I'm going to answer that question in a minute and I'm going to answer the question you didn't ask but is inferred in your discussion with Steven and Marcy which is to say we're actually exploring in some cases an opt-out instead of opt-in when we

[01:25:17] know a student's capable of a more rigorous course what we instead of recruiting we just need to put them in it and if they don't want to be in it then they can come back out of it so we do that with other courses we place students in without recruiting them into other courses often remedial courses right we place them so what we're talking about we had a very spirited conversation last week about having our default if we have data in front of us that says student X is capable, putting student X in that rigorous course period, certainly talking with them about it, but not waiting for them or tracking them down to find out.

[01:25:56] So that's a system shift we're talking about that is an implication for the conversation you just had. For young scholars, I'm going to ask Dr. Presidio, because we just did a paper on this for part of the conversation, to this very question. So Dr. Presidio?

[01:26:12] Yeah, no, thank you. And thank you for the question. So our young scholars are actually receiving advanced academic services, right? So we made a programmatic shift in that program a number of years ago. That originally was like a talent development program to try to get students to bridge the gap for being included in the program, but really young scholars are included in receiving advanced academic services.

[01:26:32] So to Dr. Reed's point, earlier point, when we look at the data for our young scholars, about 90% of those students, when they move from the elementary to the middle school and middle school to the high school level are continuing to enroll in advanced courses that doesn't sound bad 90% is good but to dr. Reed's point it really should be a hundred percent because those are students that were accessing advanced services at the elementary level so again we're trying to try to figure out like how can we change the way that we work through the course advising process to just make it a default setting so that those students continue in advanced courses and if they choose not to take for example the

[01:27:09] four honors courses in seventh grade and eighth grade then we can work with the family and the student through the advising process to respect their you know their wishes in terms of course enrollment but we want to send the message that the expectations that they continue with full-time services at the secondary level okay thank you for that another opportunity that I think we need to include in this conversation and miss Anderson started to talk about a little bit but I want to hone in on the local level four programs you and I had this discussion not even too long ago each and every single one of them looks differently from each other so that does not inspire confidence by parents that

[01:27:48] does not give us that robust data that we're looking at what could be the expectations in this area to have a consistent delivery of programming at the local level force so yes ma'am I know we just talked about that and I certainly there's opportunity for improvement in that level of consistency Dr. Presidio I know you guys have been working on a plan for several years I think following the plucker report so where are we on that yeah so I think a number of things just to remember first of all a student does not have to take local level four they still have access to the center so it's a choice if they want to remain in their base school to stay with their

[01:28:28] neighborhood students neighborhood peers then they can choose to do that and you're right there's differences not in the curriculum but there's differences in maybe how students access the curriculum to some extent in local level four programs because if you're in a school that has a large number of students staying back for local level four, you might have an advanced academic third grade classroom in a local level four program.

[01:28:53] But if you're in a school that has a smaller number of students, you might have a cohort model of students in third grade, so you might have six or eight students in the third grade classroom receiving local level four services. And obviously, that makes it a lot more difficult for the teacher because you're managing different groups of instruction for smaller numbers of students that are accessing that off-grade level or advanced grade level curriculum.

[01:29:17] So definitely there are differences. And I think one of the things that's important is that when we're explaining those differences to parents, that that's clear and transparent and that they understand because if they think that they're going to have something that is maybe a different experience than what they're getting, that wouldn't be what we would want to deliver.

[01:29:34] So we try really hard to make sure that parents understand they have the choice to go to the center or to receive access to the local level four program and what that experience would look like. So in terms of growing the number of students in advanced academics in a local level four program, I mean, we're serving 50% of our students right now in advanced academics in this county at either level two, three, or four.

[01:29:58] So that's a pretty large number of students. So we have to really think about what's the best and most effective and efficient way to deliver those services. In the past, we thought it was centers, but we perpetuated a large number of centers across the county, and oftentimes that created more barriers to access.

[01:30:15] So we opened up the local level four programs, and now I think board members and community members are raising questions about consistency of experience. So we're working hard with our administrators, we're working hard with our advanced academic teachers to provide clear expectations of curriculum delivery needs to look the same the instruction needs to look the same the supports extra curricular experiences enrichment activities need to look the same but that's an ongoing continuous improvement process and I wouldn't dispute that we've got work to do in some of our schools and sure thank you and I'm looking forward to see some of that work because as I understood it the last time we had this discussion the

[01:30:53] local level four it's like the Cheesecake Factory menu there's so many options that schools can engage in it that's not reasonable it doesn't give our families the rigor and expectations that they're looking for thank you thank you miss Anderson I know we have more to talk about so I'm only gonna ask one other question on slide 30 when we're talking about the throughput like the the kids that are going from general to honors and then hearing dr. Reed talk about some of our availability of teaching staff or is every child that

[01:31:31] will that signs up for an honors class able to take it or are there any that aren't able to take it because they haven't been part of the cohort so then they're not in the planning well honors courses are open enrollment so I understand that they're open enrollment but it doesn't necessarily mean that we have everybody that's teaching an honors course and so what I'm asking is is there availability if every student at the school decided that they wanted to take an honors class you're you know knew that next year would we have the staff available to teach those courses or any of those kids you would have the staff available because there's not a licensure requirement to take the course

[01:32:10] the only part where perhaps that might be an issue is let's say for example if it was an honors geometry course and you didn't have enough certified staff and dr. Reed was talking about this earlier that had the appropriate licensure to teach geometry that would be a problem we haven't run into that problem yet and And as Dr. Reid pointed out, we've run the analysis, we've worked with Human Resources to look at teacher licensure, particularly in math and then science as the next area of focus to make sure that we see those areas where as students are accessing more advanced coursework in future years, that we need to work with the school to make sure that their current staff either increases their licensure or that they're hiring to make sure that they're

[01:32:49] prepared to be able to offer everything. So we haven't run into a situation yet where that could happen, but if we're not thoughtful If we're not planning, that could in out years be an issue. So the reason I bring this up is I just want to make sure that as we're looking at these general numbers from year to year that we're not only aligning the fact that it's kids that are making a decision to stay in the general side.

[01:33:12] And kids stay in the general side for lots of different reasons. I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with them exercising that choice. I am very interested in the fact that there are so few that are bumping up to honors, And so it would be very interesting to me as to year over year why those, it's such a small cohort from this example.

[01:33:30] So thank you. I don't know if Steven wants to weigh in. He was talking about that a little bit earlier in the presentation about some of the reasons why, you know, when you start in a standard level class, making that jump becomes a little bit harder. So I didn't know if you wanted to add anything to that. Yeah.

[01:33:46] Oftentimes we talk about two types of barriers, the formal and informal. And Sloan was talking about the formal barriers have been removed. can sign up and then oftentimes there's informal barriers it could be issues around curriculum or preparedness or just not believing that I'm part of that track or not communicating that this it might be communicated in paper but the belief just might be that that's just not for me or I'm not welcome there or I can't really sign up and compete so how do you take the how do you take the informal barriers away and really promote those as opportunities you can

[01:34:23] do the automatic enrollment and do a systems move or oftentimes people do targeted recruitment and really actively reach out to students and families and say look at your grades look at your test scores we really invite you into this program and into this space because we think you'll thrive both of those strategies often can work if I could add to that cuz I have two high school students myself right a senior and a freshman and both of them when they do course registration the first thing that they do is what are my friends taking right? And then they come home and they meet with mom and dad and we talk about, well, what are your academic goals, right? So if every student doesn't have somebody pushing them, because obviously I

[01:35:02] know a lot more than the average community member about our course taking options, then we have to do it ourselves as staff members, as Stephen is saying, is really that intense personalized academic advising process, because left to their own devices, a lot of students are just going to go where their friends might be going. Well, and I speak from personal experience that I was also and FCPS kids so I was not identified in second grade so I did not receive advanced services in math until I was in high school and had to fight tooth and nail in order to get into those courses so I do understand that there are the informal barriers that absolutely happen and just being able to feel like you're

[01:35:38] prepared with the extra work that's done in a pre in the previous math class so I do think that spending more time to get those kids identified as as young as possible helps move them towards that direction Thank you. Ms. Seizmerheiser. I'm sorry. Ms. Maren. Ms. Maren.

[01:35:57] So I think, you know, I want to say I support community schools, neighborhood schools. Students should be able to receive what they need to their ability at their local school and not have to travel somewhere else. But, you know, just reflecting on the previous comment, I mean, ultimately, it's really about considering the approach with each scholar.

[01:36:16] And I love that word. And I'm going to use that more often, the vernacular, those things that really matters. matters but you know what does the scholar need how to expand the scholars achievement to their full potential each year with an eye on graduation and beyond that so yesterday I was meeting for my sixth grade son's IEP into middle school he's dyslexic and you know I know some things but I didn't know things about that transition so that's one piece about and that's what the one I want to get to but so he's gonna get fewer hours but now that I understand that he's going to be in English and whatnot like it makes sense but you know that was one conversation once a year and now it's going to get

[01:36:55] you know higher stakes right as he so I really see like if we could you know someone's advanced someone's dyslexic someone's autistic you know we have these labels and some of them are legal but how do we move beyond that to really get to the point where we are counseling our students and this gets to communication I'm really, I'm really, I don't want to say disappointed, but we haven't talked about families really at all, or communications, and as the over-reliance on students to transmit information home to their families has got to stop.

[01:37:27] I mean, these are 11-year-old children, 12-year-old children. They cannot articulate, and I'll tell you, like Dr. Presidio, I know some things, and I had many questions about the course selection process. driver's ed, IB credits, summer school, course, I mean, and I only got to meet with the counselor because my daughter amazingly asked me to join her. And is she going to have a different counselor next year and another one the year after that? I mean, there is so much, and you know I've been on this, the tactical part of it, but we can have all the access we want. But if we do not educate families about where the kids are going, every step, repeated messages, every year they know

[01:38:06] what to expect so their next kid goes to the same thing. And it's not different if their kid goes to IB or TJ or whatever. I mean, we just, it's got to be a school system on this. I will take another go back where I could finish now. Okay. Ms. Seismar Heiser. Hi, thank you. Can you guys still hear me? Okay. Yes. Okay. Great. Thank you. Um, just a couple other questions. I wanted to pick up Dr. Reed and where I left off in terms of, um, the strategies pilot, as well as, um,

[01:38:41] you know, you and I've talked about program delivery models, as well as, um, how education is being delivered but what's the plans on doing that in conjunction with this work i'll pause there well i know that the program delivery model we are doing the inclusion work there's going to be a cohort that begins this coming year i believe there was a meeting monday on that and the strategies pilot is continuing this year and i believe will be the model next year so dr Dr. Presidio, do you want to elaborate just briefly on both of those?

[01:39:20] Sure. You're doing a great job, though. So, pretty much Dr. Reed already nailed it. On the service delivery model, we have 12 schools in our phase one early adopter model that we're supporting. We have two special education consultants that are working with our 12 early adopter schools, and we're working to increase dramatically the number of students with disabilities that are educated in the general education setting so we have been working with those schools we actually have a full day planned of support and professional development this Friday with those 12 schools we're going to continue to

[01:39:59] support them throughout this the remainder of the school year of the summer and next school year doing intensive on-site professional development and coaching to make those transitions to a more inclusive service delivery model. The idea is to try to develop 12 model schools that other schools can learn from.

[01:40:18] So we've got six elementary schools and six secondary schools, either middle or high schools, in this pilot. And then in year two and year three, we will bring on the remainder of the rest of our FCPS schools in this process. And we anticipate that it probably would be about a three-year process to, within each of those schools, really implement all of the changes that we're asking them to make. If we can go faster, we'll go faster, but we're estimating probably about three years within an individual school. And then the strategies for success pilot, Ms. Sizemore-Heiser has been a great advocate for that, and she's right. It's taken us a lot

[01:40:54] longer to get that going than we would have liked. We're actively running a pilot in middle schools and high schools right now where students and families can opt to receive their strategies for success supports that executive functioning and academic support curriculum not in a standalone class but embedded in a special section of advisory and that allows them to open up another option in their schedule to take an elective class and that project has been going quite well and the goal and expectation is that we make that available to students in all of our middle schools

[01:41:30] and high schools next year and it will be based on an IEP team decision where the student and family would like to receive those supports either in a class or in this new alternative to the class whichever is going to best meet their needs all right well i would just recommend and i have a lot of other topics off this topic but dr reed really recommend on keeping those work those two work together and not siloed um because three years is not i think in enough time to get it done in time but i'll leave that there i also want to just look at what my colleague said about behavior and

[01:42:08] boredom i think there's a lot of students who could access advanced math earlier but then get turned off of it because of boredom for a very young age so i'm really hoping that part of that teacher training will be to recognize those signs and then recognize that maybe where we need additional challenge for the students as opposed to behavior intervention plans so i wanted to put that out there and um i missed the beginning are we going to talk about the extracurricular aspect later or is that part of this presentation as well we're trying to get to that we've not done that presentation yet okay all right i'll save my questions on that for later um and then the last question i really have around this when you talk about um four years of math are you looking

[01:42:47] at four years of math with standardized testing at the end or just four years of successful math because one thing i really do love is the philosophy of setting our students up for being successful in college because the college completion rate for fcps students i believe is somewhere around 60 65 and i'm sure my colleague knows that much better than i do um so what's the THE THOUGHT ABOUT SETTING STUDENTS UP FOR SUCCESS FOR COMPLETION IN COLLEGE WITH THE WAY WE'RE CHANGING HOW WE'RE DELIVERING OUR MATH CURRICULUM. AND I'LL PAUSE THERE. I THINK THE INTENT IS TO MAKE SURE THAT THERE ARE FOUR YEARS OF SUCCESSFUL MATH, NOT NECESSARILY. I WOULDN'T ADVOCATE ANOTHER STANDARDIZED TEST. I WOULDN'T, NEITHER. I JUST WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT WE'RE ON THE SAME PAGE

[01:43:25] THERE. YES, MA'AM. AND OUR ANALYSIS LOOKED AT POST-SECONDARY PREPARATORY MATH. SO WHAT WE'RE NOT doing in any of your subject areas is looking at your course that maybe meets a graduation requirement we're looking at courses that are post-secondary preparatory which is different than does it mean math doesn't mean English doesn't mean social studies which is why you're seeing some variation in the numbers there we're only counting courses that are likely post-secondary preparatory in our analysis as part of our intensity score okay well I won't repeat what my colleagues said too much but I also want to lift up what was said

[01:44:01] about local level four, I think that's a great opportunity to increase the consistency of math and opportunity to access more advanced math through local level four, as well as what we're doing in our other classes, but that consistency has got to be there. So I think that's an important piece of this, is to keep up the consistency of our local level four.

[01:44:20] Thank you for your time, and thank you for this great work. Mr. McElveen. Thank you. So I wanted just to pick up on where Sloan and Melanie were going on bringing parents into the course advising process. What are we doing in that area? And what do we envision doing in the future?

[01:44:43] Thank you for that question. And I'm not going to put Jen on the spot, but if she wants to add in, she's welcome to do that. Jen Glazer is our Director of Counseling College and Career Readiness and is leading a project plan to revamp our academic advising process to have an enhanced family collaboration component so the first part is just being more consistent from school to school so one of the things that we've mapped out is that we're going to create standardized materials that we use in every school so Jen's team will be creating those materials we're going to standardize the engagement process in terms of like family information nights

[01:45:22] and things that schools do some schools do a lot of things that are very robust others haven't done as much traditionally so we're gonna try to standardize that another piece is trying to be more transparent with what students are actually signing up for not just on an individual year but from year to year so I think you know this is the first year that we've required schools as part of the advisory program to really focus on the academic and career plan which is a multi-year way for families to actually access and see what students goals academic goals are and how the courses that they're registering for can support them in achieving those goals. Again, it's not 100% consistent

[01:46:00] yet. This is our first year trying to do that. One of the things that's been a challenge a little bit, people have some concerns about some of the technology that we're using to support the academic and career plan. So we've initiated an RFP to look at -- to see if there's a better tool that would be more user friendly for families. So those are just a few examples.

[01:46:18] Great. That's very helpful. Thank you. So a different topic is on -- when we -- when we when we're adding additional math courses that's inevitably going to squeeze out the arts which as we know coming through the pandemic are already suffering in terms of student numbers so do we have do we have any sort of sense of the impact that would have on those courses CTE courses other courses I don't know that it necessarily would impact a particular content area when you look at a variety of our students who are currently not taking a fourth year of

[01:46:57] math they're not taking a lot of other things either so when we look at the data I don't know I don't think the impact will be chilling on the arts in fact I think many of our students who are excelling in the arts are also doing four years of math so but I I think it's a great question because we don't want to resolve one issue and create another but I'll be happy to provide the data on that Mr. McElveen and that would not be an outcome we would want great and then just the the last thing I'll leave folks with is I know we chose world languages up here

[01:47:32] and that's very much appreciated but that's world languages is not just like math it's not a high school only conversation and I think when we think about world languages we need to be pushing earlier into earlier grades and doing so more robustly and I know we've had that discussion here before thanks okay we're on third rounds we're gonna get a minute dr. Anderson get some of my

[01:48:02] questions that I did not ask yet that second student in that transcript that we talked about I think it's an example we can provide you the data but that's a that's an example of a student who excelled in the arts and had plenty of opportunity and what we're talking about inside their other course taking there was still opportunity to really double down and this student was in advanced expand, was really interested in the visual arts, and they still had opportunities in their other subject areas to add some stretch courses.

[01:48:42] So we think there's opportunity for students with good academic advising, families with good academic advising, to have really rich opportunities in the arts, rich opportunities in their electives, and still take their course taking inside their core subject areas with some good academic advising.

[01:48:58] So it's both and. It doesn't have to replace and doesn't have to take up some of those opportunities in the electives. Thank you. Dr. Reed, can you speak a little bit to our students who are taking remedial courses? How will they have opportunities? Because I know we've run into that problem in a couple of my high schools, where it's not just necessarily strategies to success, but maybe it's an ELD class. How will that be remedied so that access can still be provided? Because your data shows that's the lowest group of kids accessing these advanced courses. We currently have a bit of a quandary

[01:49:37] with graduation even revolving around our multilingual students right now they have to graduate in four years for the new accountability framework and we've had some tradition of when they arrive putting them in six-year schedules to graduate because we were allowed to have something called sliders in Virginia that's no longer allowed so we've got students that are caught in the middle who are on a six-year track that need to be moved to a four-year track so right now, we're dealing with that as a graduation data point, and we're going to talk more about that moving forward. I know Stephen's looking at me. Other states didn't have that slide

[01:50:17] or provision. We had received students, and they had to graduate in four years in other states. But anyhow, I think that we have to be very careful that we don't over-remediate either. Students do need support, but what we want to try to do is provide the support within grade-level instruction. So I think that's one of the topics, for sure, that our high school principals, and subsequently counselors and DSSs will need to be wrestling with.

[01:50:44] - Okay, that is really terrible news to hear. I don't think I realized we had to change those students who were in that situation right now, essentially right now with no buffer. So thank you for that. The RFP that you're all talking about, is that to replace Naviance or is that something else?

[01:51:03] - Okay, that is very terrible to use, I would say also as a parent. - Oh, I had one more here. Oh, this is a question for you. You talked a little bit earlier in terms of how Fairfax County is doing very well among schools in its own that are similar.

[01:51:21] What is that grouping? What's the criteria that you use to identify similarity? - Because we're working nationally all across the country, we're able to look at the demographics of the student composition. So the percent of students by certain student groups, if it's provided to us from school districts around free and reduced lunch, so we can create similar type schools.

[01:51:42] So our data science team created similar profiles of schools. So when you're seeing your dot of your school way to the right on that one graph, that's showing you that in those schools, they're outperforming similar schools that we work with across the country in terms of the course taking pattern. Students are signing up in general, the average Fairfax student is signing up for more intense coursework than the average student in other school districts with similar student body composition.

[01:52:08] you mentioned schools that you work with, but not all of the schools that exist in that criteria. - Correct, schools that we work with. - So what's the N of the schools that you work with? - Right now, I think we're up, is that hearing me? Right now we're up to about 105 school districts around the country.

[01:52:25] - Okay, so it's a very small subset then of the schools nationally. - It is, but keep in mind that most of the schools that engage in this work are very large districts. Like we work in LA Unified, we work in Baltimore City, we work in Portland, we work in Elk Grove, worked in Houston so we've worked in some so it's a it is a small end but it's a large number of students overall thank you okay miss Marin okay miss Dixon all

[01:53:03] right Brian did you want to go back okay all right I'll take a quick turn this has been oh sorry sorry I'll take a quick turn and I'm trying to be quick here first of all I think that I heard an excellent argument from dr. Presidio around AAP centers being in all of our middle schools and probably all of our elementary schools the programming that we've created is pulling kids away if we just keep them at their home base we save money in transportation and we raise the the bar for all of our students and we can differentiate instruction much better secondly IB math there are some tracks that ends in junior year and I

[01:53:41] need those schools to be offering AP stat and AP calculus in their building although I do understand that that particular IB track doesn't necessarily prepared one for calculus and I'm not as familiar with that curriculum so definitely AP stat I also want to highlight slide 35 and this is my biggest point test scores 75% of our students from course taking patterns put them in an academic intensity and 45% in test scores that is a that is a bad bad data point and I'm going to argue that it is because we have not been doing homework and we have been doing test Corrections in mathematics at some

[01:54:18] schools for years and also reassessments up to 100%. And I'm going to argue our foundations are not strong. And I can't emphasize that enough. Can't emphasize it enough. Because before we got to this year's way of doing grading, you know, I was aware of practices at some of our schools and studied, you know, SATs. I mean, AP tests. I'll tell you, when I was at Chantilly, we didn't do test corrections. We didn't do assessment up to 100. Our AP scores rocked. Our kids knew their math and their math SATs rocked and so I'm just saying I think we need to get back to

[01:54:55] homework I'm not saying we shouldn't reassess I believe in it but we're talking about learning at that level we have to have expectations of our students because there's no retakes in college miss Marin yeah well good thing governance chair lady we are we did the governance policy and assumed the grading policy which now incorporates our homework policy so we are on the way board should have done it in the past but we're on the way you know I just saw little bit of an article in the Atlantic about teen engagement that really made me sad and I want to share it but you know just thinking about there was a comment made earlier about engaging ours our scholars and Dr. Reed you'll say you know and kids are engaged they're not on their cell phone and yeah that's true on

[01:55:34] the basketball court and go Southlake's going to the state championships this Saturday by the way but you know are they can they be can they be that way in math can they be that way in science we have science labs so there's all these things that engagement piece how are we you know engaging them the arts I agree that you know let's include world language but those arts we know are something so how do we incorporate that into rigor with the academic thing I opted out of rigorous course placement yes that's fantastic and three questions for dr. Gehring you'd said that teacher expectation is the biggest impact on student success was it I'm wondering about how the class is taught and the

[01:56:14] class size and my other two questions colleagues please did you investigate the counseling methods use the advising used in the schools they sampled and then how can we support our multilingual learners more question for you dr. Reed like do we teach in heritage language is it our ESOL program so you got that dr. Gehring class size and the advising methods so what you know how much does class size implement what's happening and how the class is taught and did you investigate the academic advising methods used in our sample and how does that affect the outcomes so not knowing the history of the conversation on class

[01:56:50] size in your school division I can talk from a researcher yes I can talk from a researcher perspective there's not a lot of evidence on class size having a large impact on student performance until you get down to around 15 and then there's been some studies that if you get to a certain threshold the big evidence appears around the instructional practices so not that class size has no effect teachers will definitely say it's around their workload and stress and I'm not saying but there's not a lot of evidence that changing the class size one or two students unless you change the instructional practice doesn't appear to have a large academic benefit in the studies that I've seen the second one

[01:57:28] was oh the advising we did not do individual studies so what we did we did bring to you all is best practices across the country around a library of strategies that we've shared with schools and with the division around best practices that we've seen in the country we didn't go to individual schools one of the things I was pushing your schools in the PD a lot of the schools continue to talk about and dr. Presidio talked about that with a new model continue to talk about counselors being responsible and it was continuing to push the schools a few counselors at the schools with the ratios that they have cannot

[01:58:05] solely be responsible for the academic advising if you guys are really going to move the needle and supporting all the families for all your scholars so you have to think about every single adult doing advising with kids now do counselors play a critical role absolutely but it shouldn't be counselors responsible for all academic advising all staff members and you have the ratios of adults to students and you have the model set up so if you can standardize that and really using your counselors as leaders to help support and train teachers and then using the counselors for the individual guidance and advising that are the really complex ones but trying to get away from the model where you're thinking about one

[01:58:43] counselor with 200 250 300 students thinking that they're going to have the opportunity and the time necessary to do the level of guidance and advisement okay we've had three go backs and we have another presentation and we're supposed to be done by one so i'm going to conclude this one and transition to mr. horn's presentation or i don't know who's doing it i'll defer back to dr reed thank you

[01:59:12] miss lady and mr horn why don't you join mr smith and let's go ahead and proceed time is of the essence all right i will try to go quickly through our slides today so actually before you go quickly i just want to say this isn't just about activities this is about student connections this is about mental health and this is about actually this well-rounded education that we think is critical here in fairfax so go ahead marcy all right for our second part of our

[01:59:50] presentation we're going to take a look at student access to activities and as dr reed set up so well participation in activities is linked to a number of positive school outcomes such as consistent attendance academic achievement and student well-being there are several factors that impact students participation in activities including school climate family and student obligations and student interest our middle and high school students can access many division funded after school activities in areas such as the arts academic enrichment community service or athletics and intramurals and our title one elementary schools also provide a set of title

[02:00:29] one funded activities including math and science olympiad as well as other enrichment offerings and then additional elementary school after school opportunities rely on our community and parent partners our current focus for this measure is understanding the extent to which there are barriers to which barriers are a factor in students participating in desired activities and this recognizes that students may choose to participate in programs in the community in lieu of school-sponsored events such as travel sports teams so to understand accessibility of activities we analyze data from the Virginia climate survey as well as the

[02:01:07] Fairfax County youth survey and based on the data from these surveys the majority of our middle and high school students are indicating they're able to participate in activities and most do so regularly the student experience survey is going to help us gather additional insights into participation barriers and will form the basis of tracking accessibility to activities as a part of our 2030 goals so the climate survey is an anonymous state required survey that's given to students in grades six through twelve the surveys administered in alternating years to students in grades nine through twelve and students in grades six through eight so according to the most recent survey which was last

[02:01:45] year 72% of our high school students which is looking at that green bar did not experience difficulty participating in activities we saw that all of our student groups and grade levels had similar results with the exception of our Hispanic students who are substantially less likely to be able to participate in activities. Based on those climate survey results we also can see that high school students were less likely to access activities if they were transfer students, so in other words they hadn't spent all of their years in the same high school, they missed 11 or more school days, they received an out-of-school

[02:02:22] suspension, they lacked a positive relationship with an adult, they experienced any issues with school climate, or they had recent moderate or severe symptoms of anxiety or depression so and it is important to note that these are associations and not necessarily causations so for our students who said they were unable to participate so thinking about the kids and the yellow bar from the previous slide this slide shows their self reported reasons for not participating in activities so if our middle school students the most commonly cited barriers were interpersonal factors and logistics while our high school students reported other obligations

[02:03:00] students, feeling they wouldn't fit in or be welcomed as their primary reasons for not accessing activities. So as I mentioned, we also analyzed the Fairfax County Youth Survey data to measure participation rates. So on the green bars on the slide, you can see the data from the climate survey.

[02:03:17] So again, looking at 72% who are saying they are not experiencing barriers to accessing activities. In the yellow bars, you can see that 62% of our students who completed the youth survey last year, participated in after-school activities two to three times per month, and this could have been in any setting.

[02:03:35] It was not specific to school. In the blue bars, we see that 49% of our students reported participating in after-school activities daily at their school. So what this data is showing us is that most students report no issues with access, however, that doesn't necessarily translate to school-specific participation.

[02:03:55] So, for example, when you look at our sixth grade students, they had the lowest participation in the daily after-school activities, that blue bar, but their regular participation in activities in any setting, which is that yellow bar, was actually one percentage point higher than the division average.

[02:04:12] So it suggests that these students are just as likely to have access to activities, but they're doing some of that in out-of-school settings. We saw that boys and girls had similar rates of participation in school-based activities, And while the youth survey didn't only include LGBTQ+ data for our students in grades 8, 10, and 12, we also saw that those students reported substantially higher rates of participating in daily school-based activities when compared to the division average.

[02:04:40] So currently, FCPS collects student-level participation data for both middle school after-school programs and Virginia high school league sports. And on this slide, you can see the percent of students who participated in the middle school after-school program for 30 days or more for the last two years.

[02:04:56] So last year we did see a two percentage point increase in students participating in the program at that level. We also see that 78% of our middle school students participated in the program at least once last year, and 30% of our middle school students participated in 15 or more days of programming last year.

[02:05:14] And there are additional details in the full report on this. And then this slide shows data on the percentage of high school students participating in VHSL sports. And again, we did observe a two percentage point increase in this data last year as well. Our student experience survey is going to allow us to report on the percentage of students who have no barriers to participating in desired activities, which will be a new accountability metric for goal four.

[02:05:39] And the target for this will be 100% by 2030. So finally, I'm going to highlight the division efforts in this area focused on accessibility to activities. We do have three strategies in this area. First, we're currently offering a variety of after school activities.

[02:05:55] This includes the recent funding of the middle school after school sports, the expansion of high school boys volleyball and girls wrestling, and the title one funded activities. We're also focusing on leveraging insights from our student experience survey, focus groups that we're conducting with students, and data that we'll be collecting from empathy interviews to inform future programming offerings.

[02:06:16] I know our middle school or our high school boys volleyball was out advocating in full force so their excitement and we'll get to see a little bit of that in our upcoming board report with our strategic plan update our second strategy is looking at understanding and addressing barriers to participation so in addition to that student voice we also continue to focus our efforts on school climate and belonging as we know those were core factors students cited as limiting their participation so this includes the work around social emotional learning and continuing to provide programs like our purple star student ambassador program that helps connect those new students who are coming in to their school as well

[02:06:56] as programs like our Our Minds Matters program that aim to reduce the stigma associated with mental health. Our work in goal 2 including the work we're focusing in on with discipline and chronic absenteeism is also connected to this goal as again those were key barriers that students cited that decrease their access to activities. And then finally we're leveraging our goal innovation team to identify and activate student preferences for activities to explore expansion of elementary school activities to improve some of our data collection practices and to leverage some of the insights from this report including ways to provide access during the school day and this concludes our

[02:07:34] presentation for this section I'll turn it back to our meeting managers thank you we have 15 minutes so we we're gonna have two minutes to start off with and we're gonna start with dr. Anderson thank you I'll speak really quickly on On page 25, you talked about the impact on students and their connections when they began schools as freshmen.

[02:07:58] I think that's an important point to raise because that's not something we cemented in our own boundary policy when we could potentially have moves. So I'd like for us to make sure that we are seeing that the data shows that we want for our students to begin in a high school and remain in a high school.

[02:08:15] And so I wanna raise that for a revisit by this board because we did not get the chance to cement that in our boundary work. Secondly, on page 30, no, is that right? On page 30, you talked about, I think I lost my page.

[02:08:34] Oh, page 31, you were talking about some of the activities. This is only sports, we don't have e-sports debate and some of the other extracurriculars that are provided. Can you share a little bit why? - Sure, so e-sports is included in the VHSL data, I believe, I'm looking at Mr. Orton.

[02:08:52] - Yes, for confirmation, yes. So eSports is in there. And Mr. Horne, I don't know if you wanna talk a little bit about some intended data collection moving forward. - So the category VHSL does include non-athletic activities that are sponsored through the Virginia High School.

[02:09:07] So eSports debate, forensics, theater, and then as robotics, if that school chooses to participate in it. So we will begin collecting what I would say, curricular, extracurricular activities, those attached to school day classes, that we have identified we're not currently tracking in the Office of Student Activities because they're curriculum-based band theater programs where kids spend an awful lot of time after school but we're not necessarily tracking it as an after-school activity because it's attached during the day. So we'll be improving the numbers of kids that we're... Well, I think that would be important because if I'm a child who's spending months and months on a theater program,

[02:09:46] I may not be available for some of these athletic programs and so it doesn't give us a full picture of how connected our kids are so i would love to have that information and i did find my place the last thing i think it's pretty timely that we're talking about middle school activities given the conversation that we've been having the past couple of weeks this is not a question it's just a comment i do appreciate and i think it's important to see that you've outlined on page 30 that 70 of our students who participate in middle school after school programs are economically disadvantaged and we have 20 is a 22,000 middle school students who

[02:10:23] participated back in 2023 and then that number just continues to increase it's just a point to share with the public what the impact of not having this program will do to our middle school students so thank you Mr. Moon I thank you I just want to echo the comments made by a doctor and listen about middle school, after school activities, especially if the funding gets cut, you know, especially

[02:10:57] for the families who are unable to provide their own wholesome activities for their potentially very vulnerable, you know, young students. I know this is not a budget work session, but we have to be, you know, I mean, I remain hopeful that County Board of Supervisors will do the right thing, but in case they doesn't realize that we'll need to make sure that those students are not negatively

[02:11:27] affected. Thank you, Mr. Moon. Ms. Marin? Yeah, only to say I do wish that we had scheduled this a little differently because this is an important part of our work and especially with the Board of Supervisors or County Executive proposing to cut middle school activities we really need to discuss the ins and outs of that so I appreciate the data I just hope that we can on future things, schedule things a little bit differently.

[02:11:58] Thanks. Thank you, Ms. Marin. Ms. Dixit. Hello, everyone. Thank you for the presentation. Actually, I have a couple of questions from the earlier presentation, too.

[02:12:14] And I'll just start from that. On the page 25 on the presentation, it talks about different courses students have taken. And it does not highlight any of the computer science courses.

[02:12:31] So I wanted to know if that is something you could share. How many of our seniors or students in high school take computer science? Great question. We can provide some follow-up data specifically on computer science.

[02:12:46] We do code a lot of your computer science and a lot of your STEM activities inside CTE inside this data. So it is including like your AP computer science, a lot of your computer science. We can dual code the courses and we do dual code so that it's showing up as math and science often so you're seeing it there but we can provide more specific data on computer science in particular and computer science pathways in future reports we have that data but it is showing up in this data more than you would think and we could provide the numbers of courses that are also dual coded not specifically called out yeah I noticed that I'm with my own son when

[02:13:25] he was taking computer science in high school it was under science as a subject not as a separate CES track, which I think it's really important given in our current environment that we should have a separate track for computer science and it should be tracked from middle school, from when students start taking a little bit of those AI computer science related courses.

[02:13:52] Then I have a question on slide 28, which is really surprising and I think not surprising to my colleagues who have been FCPS for long but seeing a data point a 29% of student do not take math during their senior years up it never happened in our you know when I was growing up math is the most important subject you can have in high school just because if you are especially if you're going into the stem related field and act so there has to be a better I guess emphasis given to

[02:14:29] that this number can drop down obviously we won't be able to get to zero because obviously some students prefer different tracks I think the algebra in the first grade Dr. Reed is a great approach for that so we can have students till high school till who will take math courses till 12th grade but we really need to focus as a group that algebra by seventh grade I think if algebra one by seventh grade is taken care of during our improvement of basal and all that stuff happening in next few years i think we'll hit that mark where students are going to be much

[02:15:08] more prepared for post-secondary education i'll stop there and go take a go back thank you miss nixon uh ms seismore heiser thank you sorry it took me a minute to get my camera working my zoom was frozen can you guys hear me okay i know we have just a short amount of time for this section so i'm not going to ask a lot of questions um a couple questions i heard you mentioned the beginning the data you currently have is middle school after school programming and then vhsl

[02:15:46] sports for high school participation is there a thought of how we're going to collect data for other high school participation or the co-curricular activities or other extracurricular activities i think that would be valuable data to have yes ma'am we actually a lot of the data we wanted to look at we don't currently collect and that would be around musicals theater music the scholastic arts um deca fbla right like so we're putting into place systems to collect that now so we can have a baseline you know things like speech and debate i know that some students are participating after school speech and debate we don't currently offer those as a class which

[02:16:25] i think is something you and i've talked about the importance of offering speech and debate in classes but i know those activities um international clubs all sorts of things that we have that it'd be good to know what students participate in and then i saw on slide 47 there's a data amongst high school students about 33 felt like they don't want to participate because they wouldn't fit in or be welcomed and i've heard concerns sometimes you know from students around this as well what are we doing to maybe make the after school activities more welcoming i'll pause there thank - Thank you, Ms. Sizemore-Heiser.

[02:16:59] I'm gonna turn it over to Mr. Horne. - Not a doctor. Candidly, Ms. Sizemore-Heiser, that's a number that is new to us and our office, right?

[02:17:14] And it is surprising and is unacceptable. So today, I don't know that I could say that we have a defined plan on how we reduce that number and attack it, but we have a commitment that no student, much less 33%, would feel uncomfortable with the programming that we're offering.

[02:17:32] So exploring how we're making connections in the buildings at the high school level, how we're making programming known to students, right? Which teachers, how do students get connected, the use of homerooms, school counselors, you know, there are a lot of avenues where we can improve their feelings about whether they would be accepted in those programs.

[02:17:55] - So the other thing I would add, Ms. Seismarizer, we have a hugely disparate level of pre-high school experience in these programs across the county and what we often hear is if I have if I'm a student who's never played basketball and truly we have some high schools where students come and have have to be taught how to dribble the ball as a ninth grader they don't want to come out they don't want to turn out for something they don't feel like maybe they have the ability to do because they've never had the opportunity to do it and that translates to debate or model UN or music or they

[02:18:34] haven't learned an instrument early because and as a ninth grader it's very difficult to pick up the viola and suddenly do you know play in the orchestra so I think a significant part of the 33% is providing earlier opportunities for our students across the county to experience these opportunities where there are fewer, you know, every kindergartner believes they're an amazing artist, right? And by high school, they don't want to draw anything in front of anybody for the most part. So I think where they have fewer inhibitions and fewer concerns when they're younger, that's

[02:19:08] when we need to make sure our children feel more capable. And I think that would also add to that, which is why, you know, after school and enrichment programs are so important for children. Yeah, that was actually what I was going to say. Partially, I think it's maybe some training for the people running the programs as well, right, in terms of how to build those communities and connections.

[02:19:29] I think it's some work with the students as well to kind of, you know, talk about acceptance and things like that. I think that's some work. But I do think that's why we need to have some consistency in what we're offering in elementary school. You and I have talked about elementary school theater programs.

[02:19:45] I think that would -- I think mirroring what we offer in elementary school after school to middle school after school to what you have in high school I think would help that through line as well. It's hard for a student to start doing theater in high school and they may not have that access in middle school. It's the only reason I pushed the strategies pilot for as many years as I have because students who don't traditionally access this stuff who are already getting segregated are going to get segregated everywhere if they don't have those opportunities when it's not as high stakes.

[02:20:14] So if we segregate them in middle school away from electives then they're not going to do them in high school and they're going to be more disconnected. Same with the after school programs. It's hard to go when you don't know anybody at all because you're the same six kids all day long so I would really look at intentionality between what we offer after school elementary school we offer after school middle school and how that has a through line to high school I know my time is up but thank you thank you miss lady one comment from the previous part of the presentation around executive functioning I love this idea of ninth grade advisory I think that should be universal in all of our schools I know when I taught at TJ I mean when I was a counselor at TJ we spent time

[02:20:51] teaching executive functioning in IBIT because they don't come with the skills the other thing I want to make sure our public understands because I have gotten a plethora of emails related to the funding of our middle school after school specialist our public needs to understand that that is a line item that has been that has been funded by the board of supervisors it is not in our Fairfax County school board budget it is in the Fairfax County budget they have decided as of now to eliminate that so I appreciate the advocacy in my email box however that is something that is completely out of my control if you drill down on their budget you will also find that they're

[02:21:30] eliminating crossing guards at several schools and they're also eliminating some of our nurses and I just want to bring that because this presentation around activities it's absolutely essential that our students are connected extracurricularly or co-curricularly because the more adults in their life then there's the greater chance they're going to see a kid who might be misstepping or being pulled by a peer perhaps in a direction that's going to take them off course of success the more adults that we have mentors coaches that we can have a kid's lives the greater they're going to meet with success so I have confidence in the Board of Supervisors that they are going

[02:22:08] to fund that but I want to make sure that people understand where that that budget item lies at the moment thank you I'll take a quick turn before we consider going to go backs in the interest of time. Ditto to everything my colleagues said, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out what I've seen across all of these graphs is the lack of participation by Hispanic students and to ask if there were any specific barriers identified that led to that. In this specific analysis we don't have the ability to provide that information, but

[02:22:46] when we have our student experience data back we will have that ability to drill in a little bit more thank you at this point we're two minutes away from our break and mystics it has a go back can we agree to take an extra five minutes before we go to lunch hey see no objection mystics it and I'm going to be quick I am looking at the slide of 46 which is again the one which talks about students self-reported risk factors where they cannot they're a less able to

[02:23:22] participant activities, no positive result, a relationship with adult. There was, you know, quite a bit of that section. I saw there's some room of improvement there. It's, it's basically when my son was in middle school, I, one of the principal at that time said that every student in the school should have one adult in the school building they can trust, and that builds that relationship and their trust factor and then that could also translate in them feeling more comfortable in the school and obviously it's not possible for

[02:24:01] everyone but that's something we is a champion for students I think they called it that time it's like a ten years ago I don't remember exactly now but it was in Rocky Run middle school speaking of Rocky Run middle school yesterday we had a budget town hall yesterday the students were amazing they all talked about their middle school after school program and they talk and they advocated for themselves they said we don't know about rules and laws and funding but we don't want our programs to get cut I really like that voice coming up to students themselves and and and it speaks volume of our kind of

[02:24:39] students we have in our schools they speak for themselves are really proud of them one last thing I would say is that some of one of the other program my son attended was a Westfield High School was doing a summer camp for elementary school students in the theater club and that's how he got introduced to theater so if our high schoolers clubs can invite middle schoolers and elementary and get them that one week of experience for different clubs I think they would really love it they'd absolutely love that program I mean my experience and

[02:25:17] And they did a show after the whole week of camp. So that's something I was going to suggest. What I really want to say, I mean, we have this limited time.

[02:25:35] And by no means does this indicate the lack of importance to this topic. We all know that extracurricular activities are what helps some of our students belong and what inspires confidence in them, which then translates into their academics.

[02:25:54] I would encourage my colleagues to look at the next steps document if they want more information about this because just due to the time factor, we were not able to spend the time that I think that this topic merits.

[02:26:10] And I do wanna say that just like everything else at Fairfax County Public Schools does, we have seen that some of our extracurricular activities are the top in the nation and we have award-winning students and teachers, so I want to mention that. But we do need to have more kids involved, and we have to move from that good to great.

[02:26:28] So seeing no other placards up, we will now recess for lunch. And thank you for all your work.

[02:26:59] - Session. So thank you everyone for being here.

[02:27:14] I would really like to thank the team for all the work they've done on the SRNR, and to bring back a report that has been very responsive to what the school board has asked, And I know that was a huge lift. I appreciate the efforts you have to increase consistency and equity throughout our division.

[02:27:33] And I think what's a really important point that when we look at the student rights and responsibilities, that we don't neglect the responsibility part. And that responsibility also extends to our parents. I just wanted to make that point as a former family liaison.

[02:27:50] I'd also like to welcome and thank our principals, who will be sharing their experiences on the execution of the new cell phone policy in their respective schools. And that was a new program that I think we're gonna find has been very positive. So without further ado, please start the report.

[02:28:08] - Thank you. - Thank you. I'd like to thank the board and those community members watching. It's an important topic. And I wanna introduce Dr. Nardis King, our chief equity officer who's leading this work. So Dr. King, if you'd introduce your team, please.

[02:28:24] Thank you Dr. Reed and thank you esteemed board members. We are excited to be here. It's been a nice long year of engagement. Robust. Inside joke. So greetings school board members, colleagues and community members. Today our time will be spent engaging in meaningful discussion regarding the students' rights and responsibility regulation for the 25-26 school year. This is the first of two work sessions on SR&R. The second work session will be held on April 8th.

[02:28:55] our work in refining the SRNR is not just about proposed policy adjustments it is about ensuring that our schools are spaces where students feel safe supported included and empowered where educators are provided valuable resources to make positive discipline decisions and community members relationships are further strengthened and all these efforts align to goal two our division strategic plan. Today's presentation is divided into two areas. First, we will explore the proposed

[02:29:29] discipline-related changes to the SR&R that focus on improving clarity, equity, and consistency in policy enforcement. After reviewing these changes, our team will pause and allow for a collaborative discussion and questions. Following that, we will transition to discussing proposed cell phone policy and storage changes to the SR&R, which have been guided by data from our cell phone pilot program all the changes presented today are reflective of extensive community engagement in this section you will also hear from school principals who will share firsthand experiences from the cell phone storage pilot at this time I

[02:30:07] would like to introduce members of the chief equity office who have been instrumental in leading this work Kathleen Waltz our executive director for equity and student relations Deanna Shin senior manager - for equity and Student Conduct, Alicia Martinez, Administrator for Equity Programs, and Lisa Forrest, Administrative Hearings Office.

[02:30:28] We have other members of our collaborative team from different offices sitting in the back and here to answer specific questions if they should arise. I invite Kathleen Waltz to begin our presentation and guide us through the foundational elements of today's discussion.

[02:30:44] All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Today's session is intended to achieve two desired outcomes, review and seek approval of proposed changes and recommendations to the SR&R, and determine alignment between school board and staff around community engagement feedback.

[02:31:07] The Virginia Model Guidance, which governs state discipline codes of conduct, requires that school board policy provide for the systematic review of local discipline regulations. As such, FCPS reviews the SRNR on an annual basis to ensure alignment with any state-mandated changes, staff-recommended changes, and community feedback.

[02:31:30] On May 9, 2024, the school board issued several follow-on motions which directed the superintendent and staff to engage in robust community engagement around the cell phone policy, a cell phone storage pilot, and an assessment of disciplinary practices.

[02:31:48] June 1st, 2024, the Chief Equity Office engaged the community through training, feedback forms, focus groups, web dialogues, office hours, surveys, and has provided mechanisms and tools to support the data entry of cell phone violation incidents into the student information system. This community engagement is ongoing. Our community engagement plan produced opportunities to hear from community members, including school-based administrators, teachers, central office staff, students, families, and community partners. To date, there have been 55,343

[02:32:28] touch points between June 1st, 2024 and January 31st, 2025, related to the five follow-on motions set forth by the school board on May 9th, 2024. As we consider feedback from these community engagement touch points, it is important highlight key emerging themes that have played a crucial role in shaping these changes.

[02:32:52] Feedback on SR&R revisions emphasized the need for consistent disciplinary focus that still allows for consideration of student context and ensuring serious issues are addressed rather than over-prioritizing minor infractions like cell phones and dress code violations.

[02:33:11] Community members called for more student education on disciplinary consequences along with continued expanded staff training to improve policy enforcement consistency. Regarding cell phones, feedback highlighted the importance of minimizing distractions while allowing for educational use and safety considerations.

[02:33:32] These insights are shaping policy updates to create clearer, fairer, and more effective SR&R guidelines. We will now begin our review of the proposed SR&R changes. in this review is Deonna Shin our senior manager for equity and student conduct good afternoon recent legislative proposals may require updates to srnr policies to ensure compliance with state discipline and conduct mandates senate bill 908 expands school board responsibilities by requiring

[02:34:09] stronger policies and procedures for preventing and addressing cyberbullying additionally house bill 1987 updates the drug control act by adding new substances to schedules one and nine these bills have passed both the house and senate and are awaiting the governor's signature in response to community feedback student srnr lessons and videos will be revised to better emphasize student rights and ensure their voices are heard these updates will include age-appropriate lesson plans storytelling videos with relatable scenarios and student assessments to measure understanding and and identify areas for reinforcement.

[02:34:49] Key learning areas will focus on student rights and responsibilities with materials made accessible through the district website and parent newsletters to keep families informed and engaged. Here we have summarized the proposed SRNR discipline changes.

[02:35:04] The updates include clarity and enforcement enhancements to ensure more consistent discipline practices across schools. The proposed discipline matrix would now feature clear definitions, cross-referencing for infractions, and detailed guidance on weapons policy and substance use to support context-based responses.

[02:35:23] Data monitoring has also been strengthened with required interventions, mandatory sys data entry, and 24-hour parent notifications to enhance transparency. Additionally, the Chief Equity Office will review key discipline cases to ensure fairness and enforcement.

[02:35:40] To support effective implementation, administrators will continue to participate in annual integrated discipline training, reinforcing consistent disciplinary practices. Now, we will review the SRNR discipline crosswalk.

[02:35:55] The crosswalk is a comparative tool that systematically aligns and contrasts our current discipline policies with proposed changes. These discipline changes reflect community engagement, relevant legislation, and feedback from our school board.

[02:36:12] We'll begin with our first theme, clarity and enforcement enhancements. The Chief Equity Office hosted three groups on the SRNR, Three focus groups on mandatory versus discretionary decision making, also known as May versus Shell, and a community forum focusing in part on the same subjects.

[02:36:35] Emerging as a universal theme from these community touch points, participants remarked that the SRNR was seen as complex. The following changes helped to make the SRNR, specifically the discipline matrix, easier to use. In terms of clarity and enforcement, as a current practice, the discipline matrix does not include a definition for the K-6 icon.

[02:36:57] steps on how to use the matrix, guidance on where to find additional violation codes information, the key found on each page, or mandate interventions. Instead interventions are described with the language that sanctions "should be paired with an intervention from the same level or an earlier level as appropriate."

[02:37:14] To address this, the discipline matrix will now include a definition for K6 that states K6 equals the required starting level response for students in kindergarten through grade 6. Finally, a more detailed guide on how to navigate the matrix will be included, offering step-by-step instructions for administrators on identifying violations, determining response levels, and selecting appropriate interventions and sanctions.

[02:37:42] As another change towards greater clarity, the updated SRNR will include an expanded discipline matrix. The matrix will house an additional column indicating where the page number of the corresponding narrative can be found. For example, BS07, the code for dress code violations, will contain a direction that additional dress code information can be found on page 13 of the SRNR.

[02:38:08] In our feedback, it had been requested that the discipline matrix key, currently found on page 20, be added to the top of each page where the matrix is found. However, upon beginning the redlining process, we realized that this would add several pages to the document and create issues with the formatting of the regulation and the SBAR code chart.

[02:38:26] What we are proposing instead is adding a note on each page where the matrix is shown, which would refer the reader back to the page number where the matrix key could be found. The narrative sections found in Chapter 1, Section 8, also known as the right to voice concerns, and Chapter 2, Section C2B8, around disciplinary procedures and interventions, will clarify that parent/guardian discipline concerns should be directed to a school administrator or region assistant superintendent, if applicable.

[02:38:56] Lastly, the matrix will mandate that whenever a student commits a reportable incident named in the regulation, the student shall be required to participate in prevention and intervention activities as deemed appropriate by the referring administrator.

[02:39:11] With improved clarity in the discipline matrix, we now turn our attention to another critical aspect of enforcement, the handling of weapons violations. Also emerging from engagement touch points, community members requested strong, consistent application of weapons violation coding coupled with consideration of student context the following changes reflect this community focus as a current practice the SBAR code BSC 27 provides some information about weapons covered by the code however this guidance could be expanded additionally current provisions do not require suspension for weapons violations or interventions changes now

[02:39:50] allow for the BSC 27 weapons code to include guidance that blades less than three inches and pneumatic weapons are included additionally weapons violations related to a possession or use of statutory weapons possession or use of switch blades machetes and certain other knives and use of other weapons will now require a suspension unless the referring administrator determines the student's age background intent previous infractions disability status and or other circumstances should not warrant a suspension, as well as a referral to the school-based risk prevention team to determine appropriateness for further

[02:40:26] risk assessment in accordance with Regulation 2111 and any other appropriate intervention. Having established clearer guidelines for handling weapons, we now shift our focus to another area, substance use. Humanity members' request for consistent application of coding also extends to student substance use. As a current practice, substance use violation provisions do not provide guidance on how to determine if a student is under the influence.

[02:40:53] Changes will now include a footnote in the discipline matrix that when determining students are under the influence, administrators shall refer to the signs and symptoms of substance use within FCPS overdose protocols for administrators before rendering a decision. While ensuring clarity in substance use policies is critical, it is important we now turn our attention to assault and battery offenses.

[02:41:16] As a continuing theme, community members requested strong, consistent responses to assault violations. The following proposed changes are responsive to community requests and feedback from this school board. As a current practice, there is no clear distinction in the narrative sections of the regulation between assault BES01 and BES01A and assault and battery BES02 and BES02A, despite the distinction being made in the discipline matrix.

[02:41:45] changes will include this distinction with the following specific provisions. Assault violation narratives applicable to BE-S01 and BE-S01A will now provide the VDOE definition of assault which is defined as intending to cause physical injury to another person. It will distinguish the assault violations, it will distinguish that assault violations occur without injury and require referral to one or more of the most appropriate interventions. Assault coding violations BES01 and BES01A will not make any changes to the current provisions discussing suspensions or referral to the division superintendent.

[02:42:23] Lastly, the sub provisions related to hazing will be removed from the assault section and placed into its own section titled hazing since hazing currently has its own SBAR code BESO11. Assault violation narratives BES02 and BES02A a will now be outlined in a new section of the srnr titled assault and battery the new section will contain the videoe definitions of assault and battery which is defined as causing physical injury to another person or staff member the section will provide that violations within this provision may result in a suspension from school for up to five days unless the principal makes a

[02:43:02] referral to the division superintendent in which event the principal may suspend for up to 10 days this language mirrors the same provisions discussing suspensions and referral to the division superintendent found in the assault narrative the assault and battery sorry the assault and battery violations also mirror the assault violations to include any involvement in a group assault and battery assault and battery upon another student or any other person other than a staff member assault and battery upon a staff member and improper touching of another person whether or not consensual for students in grades k through six an assault and battery

[02:43:37] upon a staff member identical to the provision may result in a suspension from school up to five days unless the principal makes a referral to the division superintendent in which event the principal may suspend for up to 10 days for students in grades 7 through 12 assault and battery upon a staff member shall result in a referral to the division superintendent and the principal may suspend for up to 10 days in the event of an assault and battery the referring administrator shall make a referral to one or more of the most appropriate interventions lastly an additional code would be added to the matrix to allow for the coding of group assault and

[02:44:12] battery. This code would be listed as BES01B. Now that we have addressed clarifications and assault-related violations, we will review enhancements to discipline procedures and oversight. To ensure accountability and enforcement of proposed changes, SR&R revisions include new requirements for data entry, parent notification, and oversight by the Chief Equity Office. As a current practice, there is currently no formal requirement that administrators enter all disciplinary incidents into the student information system also known as cis or notify parents within a specific time frame additionally there is no current practice

[02:44:50] that provides monitoring to ensure weapons and assault violations adhere to set regulations the revised srnr will mandate that all disciplinary actions be entered into cis and that parents slash guardians be notified within 24 hours of any discipline incident barring extenuating circumstances lastly a section will be added to the introductory portion of the regulation titled monitoring and enforcement that requires the chief equity office and the chief of schools to conduct a semester review of all discipline cases involving weapons assault and assault and battery to determine use of required intervention and or factors considered prior to issuing a suspension

[02:45:30] for the related violations to ensure that all these policy updates are implemented effectively it is essential that school leaders continue to receive comprehensive training and professional development we will now review changes to the srnr governing administrator training the revised srnr includes a commitment to ongoing training for school leaders as a current practice the regulation requires that school-based administrators receive semi-annual srnr training the revised srnr will now require annual integrated discipline training for all school-based administrators and will cover integrated discipline practices to include changes to the srnr srnr scenario processing

[02:46:09] and procedures policies related to division superintendent referrals title ix bullying and harassment bias and discrimination discipline data entry and turnkey professional development for srnr training with school-based staff we will now turn our attention to recommended editorial changes editorial changes refer to revisions in language formatting or structure made to improve clarity consistency and accuracy there are three proposed sorry there are three proposed editorial changes these changes focus on hate speech stealing and stakeholder terminology current practice does not

[02:46:48] include symbols as hate speech or religion as a protected class the revised definition of hate speech will now explicitly include symbols as a form of hate speech and ensure that religion is a protected category alongside other identified protected classes next current practice uses the term "stealing" in the discipline matrix to describe property-related violations. However, the term "theft" is used in the narrative regulation sections and CIS. The revised SRNR will replace "stealing" with "theft" for consistency purposes. Lastly, current practice uses the term "stakeholder" throughout the SRNR to describe individuals or groups with vested interests in

[02:47:25] the school community. However, the term has historical connotations related to land ownership and exclusion. The revised SRNR will replace the term "stakeholder" with "community partner" or for community organization. The next set of updates focuses on expanding the glossary to provide clear definitions for terms frequently referenced in disciplinary policies.

[02:47:47] These additions aim to eliminate ambiguity and offer administrators and families a consistent framework for understanding SRNR enforcement. Current practice does not include a definition for the following terms in the glossary. Additional consequences, alternative education programs, assault and battery, force, group assault, individualized education plan, intent, progressive discipline, and region.

[02:48:12] The revised SRNR will now include these terms. The revised SRNR will also include updated, expanded, and/or established definitions. These changes include updating the definition of assault from an act, criminal, or tortious that threatens physical harm to a person, whether or not actual harm is done, to the VDOE definition of assault.

[02:48:33] Establishing a definition of assault and battery reflective of the VDOE definition of assault and battery. Expanding the definition of drug paraphernalia and transitioning it to drug and tobacco paraphernalia. This expanded definition includes tobacco products, electronic cigarette products, and marijuana.

[02:48:51] Establishing a definition of force, which defines it as any physical action used to compel, restrain, or harm another person or to damage property including, but not limited to, physical contact, use of objects, threats of physical harm and restraint. Accidental contact or contact that is part of a school activity that is not considered force unless it exceeds the normal expectations of that activity.

[02:49:14] Expanding the definition of restorative justice conference to include guidance that restorative justice conferences are voluntary and may only be facilitated by FCPS certified facilitators and conducted in accordance with protocols set forth by the Office of the Chief Equity Officer.

[02:49:29] And expanding in the glossary the definition of weapon found in the narrative regulation sections. This definition is pending final approval from Division Council. - We appreciate the time and dedication of our school board members, staff, and community partners in engaging with these important updates to the students' rights and responsibilities.

[02:49:51] Your commitment to fostering a safe, equitable, and supportive learning environment is essential as we refine our policies to better serve our students and schools and to achieve goals outlined in our strategic plan. As we have outlined, these proposed discipline updates are designed to clarify definitions enhance enforcement consistency, and ensure a more equitable application of the SRNR across all schools.

[02:50:17] By refining the discipline matrix, providing clear guidance on weapons and substance use policies, and distinguishing between different levels of assault, we are strengthening the consistency and enforcement of disciplinary decisions. Beyond the disciplinary measures, we are also reinforcing data tracking, timely parent notification, and comprehensive administrative training.

[02:50:41] These systematic improvements will enhance oversight, promote consistency, and ensure that disciplinary actions are informed by best practices and a commitment to equity. At this time, we would like to open the floor for questions and feedback regarding these proposed discipline-related changes.

[02:50:59] Your insights are invaluable in shaping an SRNR that will be clear, equitable, and responsive THE NEEDS OF OUR STUDENTS AND SCHOOL COMMUNITIES. WE LOOK FORWARD TO YOUR THOUGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS AS WE MOVE FORWARD IN THE PROCESS. THANK YOU. I'LL TURN IT OVER TO THE MANAGERS. THANK YOU.

[02:51:16] DR. ANDERSON? THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS ROBUST PRESENTATION AND ALL OF THE DOCUMENTATION THAT YOU PROVIDED US EVERY TIME I WENT TO MY MAILBOX. THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE FROM THE EQUITY OFFICE ON THIS MATTER. I'M SO APPRECIATIVE OF THE INTENTION TO BE MORE CONSISTENT IN OUR PRACTICES because we know this is a concern in order to provide greater clarity I think there's so many things that you've just outlined that will be so very helpful in this division not just for the administrators who have to carry this out but also to the parents and I'm glad that we're having

[02:51:54] that conversation regarding not just the responsibilities of our students but also they have the right to particular things and we've all sat around this table and talked about the concerns that we've heard from our students about activities at schools and bathrooms that cause them to be to feel unsafe and so i see that this work is to intentionally address that so thank you one of my overarching concerns regarding this and this is not going to be new because it's what i shared in the two by twos that we had which i was also very grateful for

[02:52:27] because a lot of my questions were answered there where um and one of the doc it say it states under each I think the weapons and a couple of other areas that the administrator shall suspend for up to 10 days unless the referring administrator determines the student's age, background, intent, and previous infractions, disability, etc. do not warrant that.

[02:52:54] And I know the intent of this section is to provide flexibility, but to me it raises like a big old flag a red flag regarding inconsistency of practice just like everyone else in our division you know we just talked a little bit ago about teacher expectations of students where it's not the same across our student body I see the same thing happening with our administrators so I'm very concerned this will further raise more disproportionality because of how I view a certain students age of how I view a certain students background that's

[02:53:32] all very different and so very subjective this one is giving me some heartburn so I would love to hear a little bit more about your thoughts here well thank you for that question dr. Anderson when we completed our focus groups one of some of which were on the SR&R and we got just general understanding around perceptions of the folk of the SR&R as well as the concept of May versus Shell, one of the universal themes that emerged from that was that we did want consistency in the application of policies, but we still wanted to be able to take into account student context.

[02:54:09] And that was something that was really strongly enforced by parents as well as by students. And so this policy is trying to be responsive to that request. At the same time, to address your concern, one of the things that we've done is put in required monitoring tool specifically for weapons and assault violations that have this provision in regards to unless age disability status etc and then that proposed change is a partnership that exists between the CEO and the chief of schools to monitor those specific provisions to make sure that those factors are being put in place during a suspension and if we don't see those

[02:54:47] particular things happening then we're able to provide supports to schools so So it's paired with the monitoring kind of enforcement. So the office, whomever is responsible, will be monitoring every one of these referrals? We will be monitoring weapons and assaults, correct, according to those provisions.

[02:55:04] Those that have been reported for a 10-day suspension and those that have not? Because if you don't have both sets of data, it will be hard to determine where there might be some concern and place a bias.

[02:55:20] That can be part of our report, certainly, that we can make sure that we have that comparison data between those which are ten days five days in regards to weapons and assaults and providing support to schools I think that would be important and the other thing that I would love to hear more because you've talked about all of the opportunities for for staff training and I also want to hear why you went from a semi-annual to an annual admin training but I don't know what that's going to exactly entail in the areas of making this section less nebulous and also ensuring that folks are being cognizant of implicit bias is

[02:55:57] that going to be incorporated in your work yes it absolutely will be incorporated into the training so the the annual training the shift from semi-annual to annual fits within the schedule of how we are operating trainings throughout the division as well as just being responsive to administrative requests to kind of have training at the beginning of the school year so that's why we've we've created that shift but more importantly in terms of the SRNR training it is absolutely going to include training around implicit bias harassment discrimination and how to make sure that we're equitably enforcing these policies and an understanding of these changes to the

[02:56:37] SRNR as they are extensive and impactful in our schools so the training will occur at the beginning of the year but you'll capture new administrators throughout the year is that the plan absolutely okay 48 seconds what can I get through one of the things that I also want to highlight is the notification that you talked about of parents it's so important that students are not the first reporters of what occurred and that that is happening in a timely manner how is this being monitored how is this being recorded is

[02:57:12] are we on the honor system I did it is there a checklist somewhere or we'll hear about it when a parent complains yes so we have already started conversations in anticipation of these proposed changes with the Department of Information Technology in order to be able to make updates to SIS to ensure that there is monitoring of the parent notification and the 20 per hour requirement, as well as many of the other proposed changes.

[02:57:37] So, what I think I'm hearing is that once the communication has been made, there will be a checkoff and a date on that in SIS, so there will be affirmation that it did occur. Absolutely. Okay, thank you. Lastly, if you could speak to, you mentioned there was an organization part of the tool that you said you were unable to do.

[02:57:56] I kind of missed why, and I'd take a go back, please. Could you give us a bit more information on that? When you were talking about reorganizing the columns, there was something that the red line was going to make for extensive pages.

[02:58:13] I didn't capture all of that. So we've already started editing the SRNR for next year and redlining it. And one of the things that we have realized is that when we try to add that key that's on the top of page 20 to each and every single page of the matrix, it significantly alters the formatting.

[02:58:32] So instead, we're gonna be creating a footnote which redirects them back to the initial page of where they can be able to find the key instead of altering that specific chart, matrix chart that's there. - Thank you. Chairman Fersh.

[02:58:50] - Thank you. On slides, pages four through six here, We have some changes from may to shall it seems. Am I correct in saying that this is part of the response to the board's follow on?

[02:59:06] I think what's hard for me is that it's not really a shall, not even close, right? It's using shall language followed by a giant unless, right? I can't think of another category that we could include to make it broader in terms of what the discretion of the administration is at any given school.

[02:59:29] And so if our intent is to bring some uniformity here, I don't think this does it. Even if we do keep the data, it doesn't, you know, increase necessarily the uniformity of sanction. Even though the word shall is there now, without the word may, we might as well say they may do this providing X, right?

[02:59:55] Because shall implies that this is how it is. You can have this is how it is with a unless. any response to that I definitely see your point we want to make sure that when students are sitting before administrators I'm going to give an example a kindergartner brings a knife less than three inches to school he doesn't understand that he brought that knife that he wasn't allowed to bring the knife to school and we want to make sure that principals have autonomy in

[03:00:30] and ensuring that their age is taken into consideration as to why or how they're going to be disciplined. - But it's not just age, right? It's a whole battery of potential mitigating factors. And if it was age, couldn't we just say, here's the penalty in this age group, this age group, and this age group?

[03:00:48] - We could. - All right, well, that's all I have in terms of the substance. I think the work is obviously very well done. I do want to talk a little bit about how we get here every single year. It's perplexing to me that our board is this deeply involved in the drafting of the SR&R for the superintendent or others who may know from looking at other SR&Rs or whatever they call them in other divisions.

[03:01:14] How do other places do this? - Well, in the state of Virginia, the VDOE does require that there is review of the discipline code conduct by the superintendent and the school board.

[03:01:33] So other divisions may not engage, such as something process as we do with two work sessions and et cetera, but there is a process of it that does happen by the superintendent and of course by the school board as well. - Do any of these school divisions delegate the responsibility to the superintendent?

[03:01:51] There's a lot of portions of the code that say the school board must that we then delegate to the superintendent. - Some do. - All right. I ask this because there's probably another way of doing this work and getting similar results without taking an absurdly large amount of this board's time compared to the other work that this board focuses on.

[03:02:15] I mean, where else do we have room for two work sessions on a single topic, let alone a two-by-two with that and then a board discussion at the dais and then a vote? That's almost, I mean, that's comparable to the budget. So I think I'll be talking to colleagues a little bit about our approach here and seeing if there's a better way.

[03:02:36] I'd much rather have some very specific guardrails in the executive limitations work that we do that spell out exactly what we're looking for with the SRNR, and then we can hold the superintendent to account, and then she'll have to come up with a method. Maybe that does include two by twos and other things to get there, but I'd be much more comfortable with that.

[03:02:56] And then the slide about the feedback from the community. I'm just gonna reiterate what I always say when we get these slides, is that there's no scientific information here, so it's informative, not instructive. It's a large sample. We should be able to break that down into segments of the school population that are scientific in nature to tell us what we're looking at here.

[03:03:20] Otherwise, we are bound to have over-representation of certain school communities than others or parents who have multiple kids and so on and so on. - Thank you so much for that comment, Chair Frisch, and good afternoon to everyone.

[03:03:38] We embedded in some of the reports that you all have received via the Friday letter about the composition of those who are included in all of our community engagement efforts. And I will say that we were very intentional in partnering with an external party, a third party, to ensure that there was representation by race, by pyramid, by school community, by language spoken at home.

[03:04:01] We really were very intentional in doing a census opportunity, but making sure that those who attended our respective focus groups and community forum were indeed representative of our Fairfax County community. - I don't doubt that. And you don't get to 55,000 without doing that, but it also doesn't give us any scientific value, right?

[03:04:20] There's no weighting to those different numbers based on who's represented in that sample, for example. - Yes, I agree with that statement that it may not be scientific. However, it was a census opportunity in giving everyone an equal chance to participate.

[03:04:35] And we did work very closely with our partner to ensure that all of those voices were heard representatively and proportionately at those respective community engagement efforts. So that was our best effort to do that.

[03:04:50] - Thank you, Ms. Dixit. - Thank you for the presentation. I think my two by two was a bit, I did not go much in detail. My two by two was some time constraints, but I read through the topic.

[03:05:08] What I was looking for is a more restorative justice in our discipline actions. and I know it's not possible in every section, but to emphasize that in SNR that we advocate for that as we feel like students are in that age group which can be given the right direction, which can change the course of their life.

[03:05:33] Especially students who are coming from low income family or broken homes or other history where they're seeing some situations and which they think is normal, but it's not normal. So I definitely feel that is a consideration we should make as a school system.

[03:05:54] And I agree with my colleagues that this is very much in detail, and we should just continue to work with Dr. Reed to just put the EL in place and then leave it to the schools to monitor this and continue this path.

[03:06:14] I did want to ask the language. Some of the language is, you know, as a parent, if I am reading SRNR document, and if I don't have a very good language skill, it's a difficult language for a lot of people.

[03:06:34] So how do we make it simplified? And how to reach out to more parents to collect data? Because I saw in some languages, it was only like one person responded to survey or two person responded to survey, it's not enough.

[03:06:53] So maybe your viewpoint on that. - Sure, thank you for the questions, Ms. Diskett. I definitely want to have Ms. Shin respond to the restorative justice. You know, as you know, Dr. Reed invested time, energy and training into ensuring that every school in Fairfax County has two certified facilitators for RJ.

[03:07:13] That's how much we believe in RJ. and Ms. Shen can share with you as she oversees the RJ team some of the work that they've done. And then we'll respond to your second question.

[03:07:29] - So thank you for that question. I was far into the first portion. So one of the proposed changes in the SRNR is to require interventions. It is a requirement per the VDOE that every single disciplinary action has an intervention. And so of course one of those available to administrators is restorative justice.

[03:07:47] And we do have an expansive restorative justice program that we are able to support schools with. As Dr. King mentioned, we have our central office facilitators as well as two facilitators in each building. And I'm happy to report that as of Friday of last week, 100% of our schools have one trained FCPS facilitator and 81% of our schools currently have two certified facilitators.

[03:08:12] And we just finished that on Friday, so we'll be able to have updated numbers in regards to that. So the application of that and the opportunity for that intervention is available to schools. Additionally, we have seen about a 10% increase in our referrals at the central office level right now.

[03:08:30] We have a target to have about 30% of our cases be school-based, and we've met that target for the year consistently, 36% of our cases are school-based. So schools are using restorative justice and we'll continue to support them in that. In terms of being able to support accessibility of the SRNR, we do have our quick guides, which are available, which provide very quick snapshots of understanding the SRNR.

[03:08:57] We are also going to be expanding our SRNR student lessons and videos, and of course, they'll be available on our FCPS.edu website for families. They'll be also translated into the same languages that the SRNR is translated into. And then lastly, we are in development for an SRNR AI-generated chatbot with the Department of Information Technology, which also has language services translated into all of the languages that the SRNR is currently in, so that administrators, parents, teachers, community members can be able

[03:09:32] to access and understand the SRNR. - I think the last thing I would say is, and I have a minute, okay, that the reporting to the authorities, in which level of assault or any kind of progressive, you know, repeat offenders and things like that, When does it go to the authorities?

[03:09:59] But I mean to say they report it to the police. - Certain offenses that are required reports to police when it's a malicious wounding, sexual assaults, those are required and listed in SRNR as mandatory reports to police.

[03:10:21] But a minor physical altercation between students are not required to be reported to the police. So we had an incident last year and I guess a sixth grader was, you know, police came and took the sixth grader away in handcuffs.

[03:10:41] Wanted to ask, does every school sites and principals and the people handling the situations are aware that of the, again, student situation and did they have any special needs going on is a it's a before reporting that to the police so I mean to say if some student just hit another person and they did not know they were doing it was many fit you know it was one of the special need ish cases how do you then

[03:11:16] address that and I'll stop it certainly school administrators are trained in assessing a student's cognitive ability and whether and we also train on what an assault is and so if a student has special needs and it's escalating and makes incidental contact with a person even if it harms that person that is not considered an assault and battery and therefore we provide that training to school-based administrators to identify when it is indeed an assault and when

[03:11:54] there is just physical contact and so we make a very intentional effort for administrators to know the difference between the two. Ms. Leidy. Thank you.

[03:12:14] Thank you for this great report. Just a couple things. One, and this is all related to disproportionality and what I believe is created by a lack of reporting versus over reporting. I think there are too many situations where things are not entered that are part of the SRNR. I'm not going to into more theories related to that but having worked in the system I've observed it firsthand so I one question I'd like to raise mostly to principals is an ask that

[03:12:50] you audit your discipline entries by alphabet or by grade depending on who that administrator is to see if I mean it could be that you know the A through C's are the ones who skip class the most or have self-home violations the most or it could be that people are not entering things with the fidelity that it's expected because I do believe that's the underreporting that's creating a lot of our disproportionality across our system so I just wanted to bring that and since we do have some of our most esteemed fantastic principals sitting with us maybe they can take back to their colleagues but I can tell you that some of the schools I worked in the faculty would have loved for you to

[03:13:27] audit that because there are situations where faculty say well this student is in this particular person's alphabet so it's not even worth my time to write the Discipline referral. Thank you. Ms. Levy, thank you for those comments. I would like Ms. Shin to talk to you about a new process that we will implement for next year that will address just that. Thank you for that question.

[03:13:49] One of the initiatives that we have currently in development is what we are calling CORE, which allows for us to be able to monitor and be able to assess and provide an audit for discipline infractions and how they have been entered.

[03:14:04] the way the process works is we work with the Department of Information and Technology who provides us reports, weekly audit reports, or at least monthly reports, which shows schools which have audit errors, meaning they've entered a disciplinary incident incorrectly according to the guidelines.

[03:14:22] And then once we provide that, we give that information to region assistant superintendents who then support administrators in correcting those errors. And that looks like, one, engaging in a root cause analysis to understanding why those errors are occurring and providing a corrective action plan to make sure that they don't continue to occur and then the actual correcting of those errors.

[03:14:44] And then we monitor that to make sure that those audit errors are declining and are not continuing to happen and then issue of course reports based upon our findings. So that is currently in development and we are working with the chief of schools and department of information technology and making sure that that is launched before july one when our administrators begin the new school year i appreciate that and the integrity of things being accurately reflected based on what the discipline codes are however if i don't bother to enter anything i'm not going to come up in your core audit i'm asking for an audit but principals can do this to see who's inputting and who's not because i believe that our disproportionality

[03:15:22] is and i'll say this again is lack to people who are not who are not who are under reporting but But thank you. Ms. Levy, if I can just share the reason why we made this change to the SRNR, that you have to implement because it was never in the document itself.

[03:15:38] And I agree. And we'll look into CORE and see how we can add that as part of it. Thank you. Dr. Anderson for a go back.

[03:15:54] Thank you. The other thing that I wanted to highlight when you talked about the student videos, I think that is so important because in talking, and I'll even ask Dr. Roland to even speak to this if that's possible students don't seem to make the connection between what's in the SR&R and what they are doing at the school building they seem to think the scenarios are not clear to them and we also have to realize some of our students are very young and so I would love to hear a little bit more in terms of the scenarios that you are intending on building and with the assessment which is great it's kind of a check for understanding which we do in

[03:16:34] a lot of things and this is probably one of the most crucial things for us to do it in because not following what is in here could remove students from their schools so we want to be sure that there's clarity about what is it that they understand that is being provided to them I would also like to advocate for kind of pacing that out a little bit because as adults we can sit here and read this SRNR and being completely overwhelmed by it and not really build the understanding that we really need to I see it kind of counterproductive to

[03:17:11] just kind of throw all of this at kids all at once so I'm hoping there's some opportunity to chunk the learning and to do those check for understanding and of course I know this is something you'll put on your radar for the beginning of the year but also when we come back in January where in many places we tend to to have a whole new crop of kids.

[03:17:31] So I would love for Dr. Roland to kind of talk about some of his experiences, if he could, regarding kind of the disconnect in terms of kids' understanding of what their responsibilities are based on what we are instructing them.

[03:17:49] - Hi, good afternoon, everyone. I would agree with you. We see a disconnect at every school I've been at, specifically at Justice. There is a lot of issues with understanding what the SRNR is. Some of that is language barriers. Some of that is tied to chronic absenteeism and not attending when we're doing SRNR sessions or the particular makeups.

[03:18:07] But I would agree, generally speaking, with the scenarios, oftentimes the way that it is currently presented, our students will laugh it off, not necessarily pay attention to the degree that they should. And that might be a way that we are presenting it that might be worth revisiting. - Thank you.

[03:18:24] - So thank you for that. One of the things we've been responsive to this year that came out of our focus groups is exactly that idea, hearing from our students, there's a disconnect with the SRNR that they don't necessarily understand it that it feels very complex and so in order to be able to support that we are completely revising our SRNR student lessons so the videos which currently exist will actually now transition to a video storytelling format so that it has more relatable scenarios and stories for students that they can be able to identify with additionally we're going to ensure that we create lesson plans that are attached to

[03:19:03] the videos and which have a longer duration we are recommending that schools of course do that like within a week period and they take their time going through those lessons and those lesson plans those lesson plans are also going to include interactive activities as well as discussions and we have enlisted instruction teachers and instructional coaches to help us in the planning and the development of those lessons and lastly we are we are aiming to ensure that students actually review those lessons before we post them so that we can actually get student feedback to see if these lessons are even likable or relatable so we certainly want to be able to hear that from

[03:19:39] them and then we do of course have the sr in our mid-year review and that will can schools are able to alter um to determine their their mid-year review based upon their discipline needs but they they can use those same lesson plans and videos to be able to support students. - Okay, thank you.

[03:19:55] I would imagine that you plan on delivering those lessons during advisory. I also think it's great to use that time because that's where we want to send out information because the curriculum does not really allow us a lot of flexibility.

[03:20:10] But I also wanna say not all advisory periods are created equal. Very often a lot of the things that we're trying to push out as a division through that period, They're not coming through consistently to all of our students. It could be because they had a sub, it could be a number of reasons, but we also have to keep that in mind that not all advisory periods are created equal, and I have experience with that as well.

[03:20:37] Just one last thing. At the end of the presentation, Ms. Shen, you talked about some changes. Religion, you mentioned that, and I kind of missed that. Can you also articulate that for me? - Yes, certainly.

[03:20:53] So currently right now, the definition for hate speech included in the glossary does not include religion, and it does not include symbols. And so we want to add those to the definition for hate speech to allow those to be able to receive interventions, of course, under the hate speech definition.

[03:21:11] - Okay, I'm gonna mull that one over a little bit. Thank you, that's it. - Ms. Maron? - Yes, hi. - I guess I just wanna share maybe three things.

[03:21:27] One is the theme of engagement. And we talked about that this morning when we talked about developing the core pathways. And students will be interested when they're engaged. And this is tremendous effort. And I was actually thinking about the first year I went through this. It was during COVID. I was outside somewhere listening to this call.

[03:21:43] And I feel like it's come a really long way and it's super thoughtful and it's evolved with our students' needs. I do think it has a place in being part of the EL and the superintendent reviews it closely. Our policy is currently redlined and our governance committee's gonna talk about that next week and I'm really excited about that because the current policy is a paragraph and we could probably put more in there about the board's values as expected by the community to do the work there.

[03:22:09] So, but with the engagement piece, I wanted to call upon one of our principals, like, there's so many here, thank you. But Dr. Mizell of Langston, you know, I saw firsthand when my daughter was there, the level of engagement and so like on the one hand we have this very specific document with all of the things so we're ready when something happens but i actually would like to call on dr myzell to talk about what he and his team are doing to prevent the needs of a lot of the use of a lot of this so would you mind dr myzell like talking about how you are engaging students to

[03:22:45] avoid some of the infractions and just what your data are showing about discipline particularly i remember leaving the school dismissal time it was one of the first data points you told me about um so i'd love to for you to share with the board please being visible throughout the day hallway transitions huge in the cafeteria so if you make sure your

[03:23:19] cafeteria is intact that solves many of your problems again we're just all over the building the kids hear us over the walkie every transition my admin team we just spread out i'm on the red hall i'm on the blue kids hear it it's a good thing the other thing is we're consistent and clear with our expectations we're not out to get kids as i often tell parents our goal certainly is not to make learning punitive just like i implemented hall sweeps students have three

[03:23:56] minutes to get to class the goal is simply that to protect instructional time and get kids in class and kids will do precisely what you ask them to do and so i often tell teachers you have to accept what you allow so again clear consistent um expectations would you mind sharing the data about how you um adjusted the dismissal and the results you got from that do you remember it was Just a year and a half ago.

[03:24:26] Right, well, with dismissal, the school was releasing around 1,100 students simultaneously. So I implemented staggering dismissal, more so with buses. Rather than have 1,000 kids walking out on the bus loop, we released 10 buses at a time, and it works perfectly.

[03:24:46] We have three waves, two waves of 10 and one of six. So it works really well. Teachers see that our building is empty by 2:30. And so if we don't have a staff meeting, teachers are more than welcome to leave.

[03:25:05] - I also recall you sharing that scurries-- - The other piece, not to cut you off, Melanie, I will say we have multiple ways in which students know buses are being called. We project a bus board. Every teacher is expected to project that bus board. Students have access to the bus board on the Schoology page.

[03:25:23] So they can pull up the bus board as well at dismissal. So they hear the buses as well as they see the bus board. I can even monitor the bus board. That's what I was just doing, watching dismissal. - Well, thank you, Dr. Mizell.

[03:25:41] Not to mention the school culture that he's created. The students, the first month you were there raised $60,000 in a chocolate selling event and 30 had to go back to the vendor, but they now have beautiful murals, an outstanding chorus, theater.

[03:25:58] guess you know it's when people a lot of times now they're saying what can we do to help public education it's the school leader it's can we take the things that we know work and make it can then this trajectory it just comes back to the same theme system of schools or school system if this bus board strategy is working can we implement it I mean I'm not trying to tread on anyone's authority or but like it worked it literally changed the school over a matter of days so again we need to have all of this but um i am just worried i am just wondering

[03:26:35] about consistency the last thing i'll ask about is i'm glad to see the hate speech definition updated we need to be bold and instruct our students on the matters that we're dealing with right now and we know that that's involving the situation with israel and palestine and our jewish community and our palestinian muslim americans arab americans we are not going to do better until we figure out how to facilitate the respectful learning of that we've been dancing around it for a year and a half and anti-semitism is the highest rate it's pretty much ever been since world war ii and we know that our other parts of our community don't feel hurt as well

[03:27:14] thank you thank you before we move on um i just have a few words to say i just echo thank you for including the symbols as well because those weren't included before and i know of situations where nothing could be done when there were certain symbols.

[03:27:33] And now the fact that they're included is going to be really helpful for administrators. And I'm also really happy to see that there is going to be guidance on documenting everything in CIS because I know that that has been inconsistent. And the thing that I would like to advocate for is the training that goes to our administrators is wonderful.

[03:27:56] it's a lot on their plate sometimes and and not you know throwing any shade at them sometimes it doesn't filter down to certain teachers or certain staff members and so how we can bolster training for the staff members I think is really critical because that's where I've seen a gap and no fault to our administrators because they do a great job but that's where we start to see the inconsistencies with certain staff members and teachers um and i know it's a lot for everyone to

[03:28:31] do and i hate to be the person that is adding more to an over full plate for everyone um but if we start doing this systematically then i think it'll become more routine and not as um not as it i want to say not as heavy of a lift once we get into a pattern of doing it so thank you thank you for that question um one of the changes to the annual training for administrators is going to include a turnkey professional development for staff members so as part of that training they will

[03:29:09] get their materials their supplies they'll get a script lesson plans etc um on how they can be able to turn that training around that they got and get right back to their administrators i'm sorry to their stress to their staff and then we're going to pair that with our acknowledgement form which which has already launched this year, ensuring that those SRNR lessons with staff members are being done.

[03:29:29] And we asked administrators just to complete that acknowledgement form so we can verify that. - Thank you. Also, I failed to see Ms. Sizemore-Hyser's hand raised. So go ahead, you've got the floor.

[03:29:46] - Thank you, and no worries at all. I spoke a lot during our two by twos. I have a couple of questions. I appreciate all the hard work. I know this is a lot that goes in here and a lot of thoughtful work went into doing this. I also agree, I think having the consistent reporting and training will be very, very helpful just to kind of even get a lay of the land, right?

[03:30:04] Of where are we really around discipline incidents once we have a little more consistency in that reporting. A couple of questions that I had, one was around MDRs. I think one of my colleagues asked earlier about special education students, and I know you talked about principals are trained and understanding.

[03:30:23] Can you speak a little bit more to what training goes into for principles around understanding, you know, the causes of behavior as well as how to conduct an MDR? I'll pause my time, please. Dr. Axler, are you prepared to share that? I mean, I don't see anybody from SPED here that can go into detail.

[03:30:44] No? Okay. I just think that's important to know because one of my understanding, and hopefully someone can correct me if I'm wrong, is part of what gets looked at in an MDR is the IEP. And I've mentioned this to Dr. Riti before, and I think maybe Dr. King and I have had some conversations too, but I find it problematic that we're using the IEP for an MDR when it's not written for that purpose.

[03:31:11] So my next question would be, what training do we give to IEP teams in writing an IEP to make sure that is also included along with the other goals and requirements of an IEP to make sure that families know and IEP team members know that, hey, if your child is involved with a discipline incident and mdr is needed make sure that iep documents what you want that mdr team to know so what training or what consistency do we have around iep meetings to make sure that proper information is documented hopefully it's never needed right um but if it is we want to make sure our mdr teams

[03:31:46] have the full information they need so what goes into those iep meetings for mdr purposes so thank THANK YOU. I'M GOING TO PHONE A FRIEND. PRINCIPAL TRACY PHILLIPS IS GOING TO TALK ABOUT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE ON THE GROUND.

[03:32:02] BUT FOR SURE, OBVIOUSLY WE WANT TO BE THOUGHTFUL, SO PRINCIPAL PHILLIPS? I WOULD LIKE TO CLARIFY, WE DON'T PARTICULARLY LOOK AT THE IEP NECESSARILY IN THE MDR MEETINGS. WHAT WE LOOK AT IS THE DISABILITY. WHAT IS THE CHILD -- WHAT QUALIFIED THE CHILD TO RECEIVE an IEP so you're looking at the disability under what their qualification was and then having a conversation does that disability impact the behavior and the decisions made in the process and so we're not looking at what's written in the IEP versus what their eligibility area is so you're talking about what their eligibility is and then talking

[03:32:40] in those conversations did that eligibility impact the decisions they made in their actions and their behavior I think some of the and what we do also is that you know you have somebody from the clinical team you have teacher representation you obviously have family members that are there at the MDR at the table having those conversations and answering those two questions related to the MDR process I think it's pivotal for it really important for MDR teams to have those staffings ahead of time to review any questions or concerns that that might arise before we get to the actual table you're not predetermining the outcome of the MDR but making sure that you're clarifying any questions prior to

[03:33:19] getting to the mdr table uh with those staffing meetings in advance with the staff that are going to be attending the meeting um but yeah i think i hope that answers your question we're not talking about iep we're talking about their area of eligibility no that's actually super helpful because i've always in other formats when i've asked i've been told that the team looks at the iep so that's the first i've heard that that isn't the case so that is super helpful to know i guess the other question i have in follow-up with that is when you look at the area of eligibility i mean some of the areas of eligibility have a wide range right and how they present right for example adhd or autism you know it can be varying differently from each student to student

[03:33:59] so how do you have familiarity familiar people in the room i think you saw you talked to some staff but who do you have in the room that might be familiar with how the student um you know presents on a day-to-day basis and what roles do the families have in providing information for that - Yeah, so sitting at the table, the parent obviously has their input regarding what they see regarding their child, as well as, you know, you have the general education teacher and a special education teacher who are familiar with the child to talk about what they see in the classroom.

[03:34:27] And we try to have the case manager present to be part of that discussion as well. So almost, you know, all those teacher input of behaviors and actions they're seeing, and if there's, you know, questions that remain, we try to get those answers prior to making the decision those two questions that we're giving at the table okay I appreciate that so it's it's not just the eligibility but it's really talking to teachers and staff familiar with the student regarding how the that out that disability might manifest for that student yes that's correct all right that's helpful I appreciate that and then I do think that it's also important as we're looking at

[03:35:06] the SRNR to really figure out what are our roles here and how we balance our roles because this document is quite large and we do get quite in depth in that. So I agree with my colleagues. I just wanted to kind of give some voice to that and kind of maybe rethinking this process around the SRNR. That's all I have for right now. I appreciate it.

[03:35:24] Thank you. Thank you. I think that we are now ready to move on to part two of the presentation. All right. Thank you. And thank you for that conversation. It was very helpful to us as we move forward in the process. I'd like to introduce the principals who've joined us today. They are part -- they were part of the cell phone pilot process this year. Whether they had a storage unit or not, they were still part of this and provided great feedback to us throughout this process. So I want to say thank you publicly to all the principals who signed on to do this journey

[03:35:58] with us. So we have Tracy Phillips from Robinson Secondary, Sean Rolland from Justice High School, Herman Mizell from Hughes Middle School, Matt Mao from Twain Middle School, Cindy Conley from Irving Middle School, Mandy Burke from Edison High School, and Dr. Ellen Riley at McLean High School.

[03:36:15] So I want to thank you again for joining us as we transition from the broader discussion on discipline We now turn our attention to another key SR&R issue The cell phone policy and storage based on extensive and I mean extensive Community engagement and feedback the proposed changes seek to balance minimizing distractions in the classroom While acknowledging the role of cell phones and students safety and communication in this session you will also hear from school principals who will share first-hand experiences from the cell phone storage pilot. At this time, I'd like to introduce Dr. Alicia Martinez,

[03:36:53] the Administrator for Equity Programs, who will review the key data metrics collected from our community engagement efforts related to the cell phone policy and storage options. Thank you, Dr. King. I have the pleasure of walking you through our community engagement efforts over the course of this school year. As shared in a previous slide, our team had over 55,000 touch points in our comprehensive community engagement efforts related to the five follow-on motions.

[03:37:24] There were 18 focus group convenings, which involved close to 800 voices in our Fairfax County community. One community forum where we gathered final input on the proposed option set, which included voices from community partner organizations, students at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, parents and caregivers, a representative sample from central office, and several school-based staff members including teachers and administrators.

[03:37:54] The final community engagement effort reflected the collective feedback we received across all of these engagements spanning from September of this school year through the community forum and final input received from principals participating in our cell phone storage pilot many of which are here today either as a comparison or control school or school piloting one of the three cell phone storage options this school year our team partnered with a third party k-12 insight to develop the srnr and cell phone policy survey which was open from january 17th

[03:38:27] through february 3rd this census survey was sent to all fcps parents and caregivers fcps staff and in middle and high school students. The survey was available in English, Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

[03:38:46] We have participation details presented on the following slide, which I will present in a few moments. Overall there were 14,592 responses. Key findings are presented on this slide and indicate 49% of parents and caregivers preferred to keep the current FCPS policy. 57% of staff favored the governor's recommended policy.

[03:39:12] The majority of secondary students, 85%, preferred to retain the current FCPS policy, and when broken down, that represented 74% in support among our middle school students and 90% support among our high school students. While 63% of parents and caregivers and 77% of staff either strongly support or support FCPS creating some kind of cell phone storage policy, fewer students do, only 13 percent.

[03:39:43] When asked about their top choice for cell phone storage, the highest percentage of parents and caregivers, 66 percent, staff at 57 percent, and secondary students, 35 percent, indicated that elementary, middle, and high school students should all use cell phone storage options during instructional time.

[03:40:04] Recognizing the importance of inclusivity, the survey was made available in multiple languages, which I already shared. This helped ensure equitable access across all community members to share their perspectives. In terms of participation, our team is most proud that we had the ability for people to participate in the survey in multiple languages, and as you can see, while the majority of participants opted to complete the survey in English, there was participation in each of the seven languages across all three participant groups students parents and

[03:40:35] staff I'll now turn it over to Kathleen okay to assess the effectiveness of cell phone storage solutions 14 middle schools participated in the middle school cell phone storage pilot which launched on September 3rd 2024 the pilot was designed to evaluate two approaches schools implementing structured cell phone storage yonder pouches and comparison schools maintaining current policies without a formalized storage system. Seven middle schools volunteered to participate in the pilot using the

[03:41:13] magnetic yonder pouches, and Alicia has one for you to take a look at. These schools included Frost, Irving, Jackson, Poe, Robinson, Thoreau, and Twain Middle Schools. In these schools, students carry their pouches with them throughout the day. At the start of the school day, students place their cell phones inside the pouch and then are instructed to lock their pouches. The pouch remains locked until the student leaves school, ensuring that phones are not accessible during instructional hours.

[03:41:47] Students with IEPs, 504 plans or medical conditions who are eligible for a medical pouch were provided one. With the exception of the locking mechanism, the medical pouches look the same as the non-medical pouches. This approach was selected because the existing FCPS cell phone policy already requires phones to be away for the day at the middle school level.

[03:42:11] Seven additional middle schools were designated as comparison schools, meaning they continued enforcing the current cell phone policy without using yonder pouches. These schools included Franklin, Holmes, Hughes, Kilmer, Lake Braddock, South County and Whitman Middle Schools. The Office of Research and Strategic Improvement selected these comparison schools to ensure a balanced study. This allowed for an accurate comparison between schools implementing yonder pouches and those enforcing current cell

[03:42:47] phone rules without additional storage requirements. At the high school level, a similar pilot program was launched with 16 high schools participating in structured cell phone storage solutions during class time. However, unlike the middle school pilot high school students retained access to their phones during passing periods and lunch as consistent with the current policy. Eight high schools volunteered to participate in the pilot implementing the structured in class storage solutions beginning September 3 2024. Two different storage options were tested. Calculator storage bags at Edison High School and McLean High

[03:43:26] School and hanging holder storage at Falls Church, Justice, Lewis, Madison, Robinson, and Westfield High Schools. Under these storage methods, students are required to place their phones into designated storage areas at the beginning of the class period. Similar to the middle school pilot, eight high schools were selected as comparison schools, meaning they continued enforcing the current cell phone policy without implementing structured storage solutions. These included Chantilly, Fairfax, Lake Braddock, Mount Vernon, Oakton, South County, South Lakes, and Woodson High Schools. As with the middle

[03:44:05] school selection process, the Office of Research and Strategic Improvement determined the comparison schools to ensure a fair and balanced comparison between pilot and non-pilot schools. On the slide you can see the various tested storage options and their cost per unit or cost of unit per classroom. Perceptions Perceptions of cell phone storage options at the elementary school level revealed key insights.

[03:44:32] The highest percentage of secondary students, 50%, indicated that FCPS should not create a storage policy, whereas 32% of staff indicated that they do not have a preference, and 31% of parents or caregivers prefer a door-mounted storage unit.

[03:44:51] When looking at perceptions among community members about cell phone storage options at the middle school level, the highest percentage of secondary students, 54%, indicated that FCPS should not create a storage policy, whereas 28% of staff indicated that they do not have a preference, and 28% of parents or caregivers perform a door-mounted storage unit. Finally, when looking at perceptions of cell phone storage options at the high school level, 72% of secondary students indicated that FCPS should not create a storage policy,

[03:45:28] whereas 28% of staff indicated a preference for door-mounted storage and 29% of parents or caregivers indicated that FCPS should not create a cell phone storage policy. I will now turn it over to Deanna Shin who will guide us through the relevant legislation in the next section of our presentation. Thank you.

[03:45:50] To provide policy context to this discussion, recent cell phone free education legislation was reviewed executive order number 33 mandates that Virginia public schools implement cell phone free education policies to protect the health and safety of students in Virginia's K through 12 public schools as an expression of this executive order the Virginia Department of Education issued guidance to every Virginia school division and local school board to review existing policies and or work to create or revise cell phone policies that adhered with

[03:46:24] the provided minimum guidance lastly state bill 738 which has passed both house and senate and is on its way to the governor's desk for signature requires each school board to develop policies that restrict to the fullest extent to restrict to the fullest extent possible student cell phone possession and use in the classroom during regular school hours and expressly prohibits any student from being suspended expelled or removed from class as a consequence of any violation of such policies research on cell phone restrictions presents a complex landscape of

[03:47:00] benefits and challenges a 2024 new york times report found that cell phones can contribute to school fights as students often use them to provoke record and spread videos of incidents schools that implemented classroom cell phone bans alongside increased security saw a noticeable decrease in fights similarly the virginia pilot in 2025 highlighted evidence from indiana and new york city showing that restricting phone use leads to improvements in academic performance student engagement mental health and participation in extracurricular activities feedback from fcps

[03:47:35] principals participating in pilot programs aligns with these findings with many reporting fewer fights and reduced bullying particularly in middle schools that introduced storage pouches mental health research further supports limiting cell phone access in his 2024 book the anxious generation Jonathan Haidt reported that teen depression rates have surged, rising 145% in girls and 161% in boys.

[03:48:02] He recommends implementing phone-free school days where students lock their phones upon arrival to create a healthier learning environment. The FCPS Youth Survey for the 23-24 school year reflects similar concerns, showing that 29% of 6th graders feel persistently sad, while 25% of older students report feelings of hopelessness.

[03:48:22] However, research on the effectiveness of phone bans is not conclusive. A BBC study in 2025 found no clear link between restricting phone use and improvements in grades, behavior, or overall well-being. Likewise, the survey that was conducted by ORSI among students participating in one of the 30 pilot schools findings revealed no significant difference in digital stress between students in phone-free and phone-regulated environments.

[03:48:49] Many students also expressed concerns over needing access to their phones for safety emergencies and communication with their families ultimately while reducing cell phone use can enhance school safety and minimize distractions it must be paired with policies that address student mental health and security concerns i will now turn our presentation over to dr nardis king to review our proposed changes to the cell phone policy and or storage options thank you the chief equity office recommends the updated cell phone policy reflect extensive community engagement with a strong emphasis on student voice. Feedback from students, parents, and educators highlighted the need for clear,

[03:49:28] equitable enforcement of cell phone rules while ensuring that policy support a focused and distracted free learning environment. For elementary and middle schools, the CEO recommends a bell-to-bell ban on cell phones and cell phone accessories, ensuring that devices remain unavailable for use throughout the entire school day. There will be no instructional use of phones and students who violate the policy may have their devices confiscated. No confiscated phones will be kept overnight under any circumstance. All devices must be returned to either the student or the parent by the end of the school day, depending on the severity of the frequency of violations.

[03:50:06] No student will face suspension or expulsion from cell phone related violations. Recognizing the importance of accessibility and equity. The policy includes accommodations for students with IEPs, 504 plans, or for medical needs. For high school, the CEO recommends a bell-to-bell ban with one exception. Students may access their phones during lunch in designated areas. This adjustment directly responds to student feedback, balancing the need for students with the reality that older students often rely on their phones for communication and personal management.

[03:50:43] As with younger grade levels, instructional use of cell phones will not be permitted. The confiscation will be available, excuse me, and confiscation will be an available disciplinary measure. No confiscated phones will be kept overnight under any circumstance.

[03:51:02] All devices must be returned to either the student or the parent or guardian by the end of the school day. Suspensions and expulsions will not be used as consequences for policy violations and accommodations will be made for students with IEP 504 plans and medical needs. To ensure consistent and equitable enforcement of the cell phone policy, the CEO recommends a progressive discipline model. First-time violations will result in a confiscation and parent notification, while repeated offenses may escalate to detentions or temporary loss of phone privileges. Confiscation of phones will always be returned at the end of the school day, either to the

[03:51:42] student or the parent depending on the violation history, but no devices will be kept overnight. The positive discipline approach embedded in the policy reflects community engagement feedback, advocating for fairness, restorative justice, and student-centered interventions. Rather than punitive measures, enforcement will focus on corrective actions, restorative justice, and support through multi-tiered systems of support, what we call MTSS referrals. Importantly, all cell phone violations will be classified as level one infractions, meaning no student will be suspended, expelled, or removed from class due to cell phone related offenses

[03:52:21] unless required by the SR&R. The CEO recommends align with student concerns about fairness, access, and enforcement consistency while also addressing parent and educator priorities regarding academic engagement and school safety.

[03:52:37] By integrating community feedback and student voice, these recommendations create a balanced, structured, and student-focused policy that supports both learning and well-being across all grade levels. If the school board mandates cell phone storage during the instructional time, three options are under consideration.

[03:52:58] Flexible school choice will allow schools to determine the storage method that best fits their environment, providing autonomy in how cell phones are managed. Uniform storage would require all schools to implement the same storage solution, ensuring consistency across the district. The third option, policy enforcement only, would eliminate the requirement for physical storage but mandates strict enforcement of existing rules that prohibit phone use while not permitted. If storage units are mandated several options are available including individual locking pouches which would prevent student access throughout the school day. Other

[03:53:38] options include classroom storage cases or wall mounted storage holders which which would provide a designated space for students to place their phones during instructional time. While these storage methods offer physical solutions to the issue of phone use, they also introduce logistical and financial considerations that must be addressed.

[03:53:59] The CEO recommends option three, policy enforcement only, ensuring that schools strictly enforce a bell-to-bell ban without requiring mandatory storage unit. This recommendation directly reflects the student voice as students overwhelmingly express that they do not support mandatory storage options.

[03:54:20] Feedback indicates that storage requirements could create unnecessary logistical challenges, increase transition time, and add complications to an already structured school day. Additionally, students raise concerns that mandatory storage could lead to loss or damage of personal devices and create unintended barriers to access their phones when needed outside of instructional time.

[03:54:44] A key reason for this approach is that bell-to-bell bans limits the temptation for students to access their phones during passing periods when distractions, social conflicts, and unauthorized phones that tend to escalate rather than diminish.

[03:55:02] By prioritizing student feedback, academic engagement, and equitable enforcement, this This recommendation ensures a structured, distraction-free learning environment while respecting student concerns about storage mandate. I will now turn this over to Ms. Shin, who will guide us through the Cell Phone Policy Crosswalk.

[03:55:24] The Cell Phone Policy Crosswalk provides a detailed comparison of the current policy and the proposed policy for elementary, middle, and high school students, focusing on three key areas: use, storage, and access outside of the bell-to-bell school day.

[03:55:43] These proposed changes reflect anticipated legislation and community engagement feedback, with a particular emphasis on reducing distractions and ensuring equitable enforcement. Under the current policy, elementary students must keep their cell phones silenced and stored in backpacks for the entire school day; however, teachers may allow cell phone use for instructional activities with principal approval.

[03:56:06] In contrast, the proposed policy eliminates all instructional use of cell phones, reinforcing a strict bell-to-bell ban on both phones and accessories. Regarding storage, the current policy requires phones to be turned off and stored away from the student during school hours, but in practice, students may still access them in their backpacks.

[03:56:25] The proposed policy mandates that phones remain off and away for the school day, preventing any unauthorized use. For use outside of bell-to-bell hours, no significant changes are recommended. Elementary students may still use phones before and after school and on buses.

[03:56:41] They may text or listen to music with earphones, but cannot make phone calls unless in an emergency. Middle school policies follow a similar shift. Currently, cell phones must be silenced and put away for the school day with limited instructional use allowed at the principal's discretion. The proposed policy eliminates any instructional use, enforcing a strict bell-to-bell ban on both phones and accessories.

[03:57:02] For storage, the current policy allows phones to be kept in middle school students' backpacks, which means they remain accessible. proposed policy strengthens enforcement requiring that phones be off and away for the entire school day to prevent distractions regarding use outside of school hours there are no changes middle school students may use phones before and after school and on buses they may text or listen to music but cannot make calls unless in an emergency the most notable changes occur at the high school level the current policy allows cell phones to be used during passing periods lunches and before and after school with teachers able to permit phone use

[03:57:38] during class for instructional purposes. The proposed policy significantly restricts access requiring a bell-to-bell ban on phone use except for lunch in designated spaces. Principals will determine these spaces based on student enrollment and school capacity. The proposed policy eliminates any instructional use enforcing a strict bell-to-bell ban on both phones and accessories except during lunch. The storage guidelines also shift. While the current policy requires phones to be silenced and put away during class the proposed policy mandates that phones and accessories be completely off and away throughout the school day except during lunch reinforcing clear enforcement and

[03:58:16] minimizing classroom disruptions for use outside of bell-to-bell hours phones may still be accessed before and after school but they will no longer be allowed during passing periods a change aimed at reducing hallway distractions and potential social conflicts the proposed operational guidelines for cell phone policy violations establish a progressive discipline structure ensuring that all violations remain classified as level one offenses then this means that students will not face suspension expulsion or class removals as a result of violation of the cell phone policy instead the response follows a tiered approach escalating in consequences based on repeated

[03:58:54] infractions while prioritizing corrective actions parental involvement and student support for the first violation the phone and/or accessories confiscated by an administrator and sent to the front office. The student can pick up their phone and/or accessory at the end of the school day. A parent or guardian is notified pursuant to listed SR&R discipline notification policies.

[03:59:16] The violation is recorded in CIS detailing the confiscation as the sanction, the corrective warning as the intervention, the assigned violation number, and the parent notification. If a second violation occurs, the phone is confiscated by an administrator and sent to the front office. The student may retrieve may not retrieve the phone until the end of the school day a parent or guardian is again notified and additional sanctions include a one-day detention and confiscation of the phone for the remainder of the day under no circumstances will phones be kept overnight to reinforce expectations the student will also participate in an administrator student conference and the parent

[03:59:53] will be required to engage in administrator parent conference this incident is recorded in cis ensuring documentation of the sanction, intervention, logged violation, and parental notification. For a third violation, the phone is confiscated by an administrator and sent to the front office.

[04:00:10] However, this time, the student may not retrieve it. Only a parent or guardian may pick it up at the end of the school day. Sanctions increase to a two-day detention, and the phone must be returned to the parent or guardian rather than the student. However, under no circumstances will phones be kept overnight. Interventions now include restorative justice, requiring either an individual conversation or a formal conference led by an FCPS school-based certified restorative justice facilitator.

[04:00:35] Additionally, an administrator student and administrator parent conference is conducted to address ongoing concerns. This violation is documented in CIS, including all sanctions, interventions, and parent notifications. For a fourth violation and beyond, the phone is confiscated by an administrator and taken to the front office, with the parent required to pick it up at the end of the school day. However, under no circumstances will phones be kept overnight.

[04:00:58] at this stage the student will receive a three-day detention and further consequences include the loss of phone privileges for five to ten school days during this period the student must report to the front office each morning to turn on their phone and retrieve it only at the end of the school day this structured loss of privilege is designed to reinforce expectations while avoiding exclusionary discipline additional interventions include a mandatory administrator student and administrator parent conference along with a referral to the mtss team to to develop behavioral goals and monitor progress.

[04:01:32] The student will also be referred to their school counselor for ongoing support and check-ins. All details of this intervention process, including MTSS referrals, counseling services, and disciplinary sanctions, are logged in CIS for tracking and follow-up. By maintaining a level one classification for all violations, this policy ensures that students receive appropriate interventions rather than punitive disciplinary actions.

[04:01:55] The tiered progression reinforces clear expectations prioritizes corrective actions and involves parents and support teams to address concerns proactively. Now we will hear from pilot principals who have played a key role in implementing and evaluating the cell phone policy pilot program in their respective schools.

[04:02:15] Each of these principals have firsthand experience navigating the challenges and successes of enforcing the FCPS cell phone policy, managing storage solutions, and assessing the impact on student behavior, engagement, and overall school climate.

[04:02:32] They will share their insights on what has worked well, areas for improvement, key takeaways from their participation in the pilot program, how great we were. I'm just caught it. We will begin with our middle school cell phone pilot principals, who will speak in the order in which they appear.

[04:02:50] - Good afternoon. I'm Cindy Conley, principal at Irving Middle School. And I will say, we started as an away for the day school in 2019 and so we have been working on trying to have cell phones be away for a number of years and so when the opportunity to participate in this pilot came about we jumped on it because we've had a number of ways we've been trying to keep the phones away and so I'm excited that we were a part of this pilot pouch program what worked well I felt like our implementation went really well utilizing the pouches was really easy and we were able to check them out

[04:03:29] very quickly our students we were able to amend our schedule at the end of the day to make sure we're at 1,217 ish students in my building and so we were able to quickly amend our bell schedule just a little bit and stagger our dismissal so that students could get access to the magnets really quickly and then move on so we let our eighth graders out first and then our seventh graders and it seems to work really smoothly we on the even on the first day we didn't have a delay in our bus departure so it was that it was that easy to implement the students are using the pouches we do know some students might not put their phone in the pouch but they're still putting it in the backpack

[04:04:09] and they're not coming out and so there is seems to be a little bit more teeth to this we're not chasing phones as much as we used to chase them on a daily basis teachers have reported that they are not seeing the phones out because they're in the pouches in the backpack I think one of the areas that we still are you know trying to work through as students who don't have phones some of them didn't really want the pouch to carry and be responsible for through the year and some who didn't have phones wanted the pouch so they didn't stand out for not having a phone we've had a lot of students who report they just don't bring their phones to school anymore because they didn't like the

[04:04:48] hassle of doing the magnets but that was kind of their choice after they went through it a little bit overall our staff is really pleased with it I think our students are used to the routine now and then I would just say I really would love for it to continue we have had like I said from 2019 till now those previous previous years we didn't have those patches and I think having the pouches just adds a little bit more teeth to it and keeps that temptation especially for middle schoolers we're really you know that prefrontal cortex is still developing we want to make sure that they don't have that temptation

[04:05:24] thank you I'm just gonna ask our principals to use their school voice and speak up so that we can all hear you including those people listening at home okay well you know this cell phone is the center of a middle schoolers world I will say we are a school not implementing pouches but it has gone really well. I go back to being visible, vigilant, making sure that your expectations are clear, consistent, make sure that teachers understand it. The

[04:06:01] other piece is, I don't want, I try and deter teachers from confiscating cell phones. Simply submit a support call and allow an administrator to show and confiscate the cell phone. It is going really well at Langston Hughes. Again, I just think it's a matter of being visible vigilant consistent with your expectations thank you thank you all for the opportunity to be a part of the pilot and to share Twain middle school's experience with you this afternoon a lot

[04:06:40] of what I would share would echo certainly Cindy's experience the implementation although on the front end was a heavy lift we were supported by dr. King's office throughout that and that made that work much easier our our our faculty and staff enthusiastically, I think I'm understating that, were a part of the pilot.

[04:06:57] They were excited to try something new to combat an issue that they've been dealing with for years. Twain already, similar to Cindy's experience at Irving, before I arrived, had a strong policy in place. The issue was consistency, and that word has come up a lot in our time together this afternoon, not just in this conversation about cell phones.

[04:07:17] The tool, the cell phone pouch, has allowed us to be more consistent. It has taken some of the interpretation out of the equation for our staff, whose energy I need focused on instruction, not on the minutia of did I see a phone, did I not see a phone, is that kid checking the time, is that kid someone who I can trust truly was getting a text from their parent, or were they engaged in social media?

[04:07:41] So it has allowed for instruction to flourish in a way that we haven't seen in years as cell phones have become more prominent for our middle school students. It has reduced our incidents where we have students recording each other when in conflict, which is of course a gasoline on the fire of conflict.

[04:08:02] Once a phone's out, it becomes hard to walk away for our young people when they know that there'll be, that video of them walking away and potentially looking weak will be shared with their peers. It has reduced our incidents of student meetups to skip class and to vape.

[04:08:18] and that, of course, is central to our making sure that the environment at Twain is safe for our students. I don't intend to speak in hyperbole, but I will say our students are addicted to their phones. This is a tool that helps address their addiction, and I am a huge supporter of Student Voice, and it does not surprise, I don't think anyone in this room, that they didn't like this policy, but I would make the argument that our students that don't like the policy is because they're addicted to their cell phones.

[04:08:52] It's reasonable that they're not gonna like a policy that restricts their access to those cell phones. Thank you. - Thank you principals. We will now hear from our high school cell phone pilot principals and I'm gonna ask when Tracy speaks that she speaks from the perspective of a secondary school.

[04:09:11] Amanda. - Hello, thank you for having me here today. In case anybody wants, this is, I call it AKA the lunch box, but it holds about 30 some cell phones in it. absolutely please take it so some things that have worked well at our school first of all as you can see the collection holder is easy to go so if you have to leave a building you can grab it and go and we practice that with fire drills you see every teacher walking out with their lunchbox and heading out the door so the kids know their phones are coming with them so that has been great students and teachers report increased engagement and less cheating in the

[04:09:49] classes uh one thing i'm also going to speak to i'm sure many people know we had a crisis at edison not too long ago um not having the phones out why that was going on allowed us to focus on the crisis and not manage all the calls coming in and the increased anxiety that calls from people communicating back and forth that may not be in our building so for me that was key in everything that happened in our building that day and allowing us to solve what was going on areas for improvement teacher enforcement is always an area of improvement there is inconsistencies among classrooms we do my students when

[04:10:29] I asked them what I should say today they wanted randomized cell phone holder checks which I was surprised to hear from kids so I just think knowing that you know that that expectation is there is an area that we all could improve on they associated with the door locks teachers locking doors when they're in there the first year we jiggle handles and see whose door wasn't locked and then this year all the doors are locked and so we have to use our keys to get in as far as a safety measure so that has been great some takeaways kids have seen the value both academically and socially they'll tell you that they interact more with their peers even in the hallways when they can still have their phones so

[04:11:06] they have seen that that is increased they also say their overall screen time is down just for some numbers our fights with no injury last year we're at 33 by the end of the year we currently have only had five this year one of those being in the cafeteria for being in the hallway so if we're looking at where we might limit for high school hallway is an area that we're still trying to figure out as far as the phones go for I'm gonna put vaping alcohol and drugs all in one category we had 88 incidents last year this year at 28 so there is a a direct correlation between them not being on their phones and how behavior plays out in the school and it's a positive one I started the school year

[04:11:46] with my teachers having to have some hallway duty to monitor hallways we quickly saw that with the cell phones we didn't need that anymore and they gained back their time as far as not having to monitor the hallway and I think that that's all I've got yeah okay um so hi I am the unique I like to say one of the unique beasts in FCPS with the three secondary schools because we have I have two different policies under one roof with all three of the storage options going on in my building I already kind of ratted myself out to Nardis a little bit earlier in the school year because we realized really

[04:12:25] quickly that the over-the-door pouch solution did not work in PE classes and so how are we gonna securely store items in PE so we bought a couple of the lunchboxes with rolling carts that have locks on them that all the PE teachers have the keys to so they take them from the PE students put them in there and AND THEN THEY GO TO THE LOCKER ROOMS TO CHANGE AND THEN COME BACK AND GET THOSE.

[04:12:46] SO OVERWHELMINGLY, LIKE ALL OF MY COLLEAGUES HAVE SAID, I WOULD ECHO ALL OF THEIR SENTIMENTS. IT HAS BEEN SUPER EASY TO IMPLEMENT. WE'VE SEEN GREAT PROGRESS WITH STUDENT ENGAGEMENT, WITH THE REDUCTION IN DISCIPLINE ISSUES ACROSS THE BOARD.

[04:13:02] I THINK FOR US WHAT HAS GONE WELL, THE COMMUNICATION BEING EARLY AND OFTEN, NOT ONLY WITH OUR STUDENTS BUT WITH OUR PARENTS AND OUR COMMUNITY AS WELL AS IS WITH OUR STAFF, BEING CLEAR ON OUR EXPECTATIONS. WHEN I SAY OFTEN, THAT'S IN MY DAILY ANNOUNCEMENTS TO REMIND STUDENTS TO PUT THEIR PHONES IN THE POUCHES AS THEY ENTER THE CLASSROOM AND FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS TO PUT THEM IN THE YONDER POUCH AND FOR TEACHERS TO CHECK THOSE POUCHES EVERY SINGLE DAY.

[04:13:25] WE ALSO DO REGULAR POUCH AND STORAGE CHECKS AS WE GO THROUGHOUT THE SCHOOL YEAR. SO I PUT IT ON MY ADMIN TEAM'S CALENDAR AND WE ROTATE THROUGH OUR AREAS IN THE BUILDING LIKE WE DO A FIRE DRILL AND WALK INTO CLASSROOMS AND OBSERVE WHAT WE'RE SEEING. And so teachers know we're checking and kids know we're checking.

[04:13:42] And then teachers can remind students, like, "See, they're checking on me," to make sure that we're all consistent with the rule. So we've been very clear in that. I think we do see a difference between the middle school and the high school in terms of compliance. High school has been a lot easier to manage.

[04:13:58] I think some of that is maturity, and they also know that they have access between classes and at lunch. So they have been much more compliant. I think if you look at my data in terms of entries and desist, it's... very different from the two schools middle school they're a little savvier they don't like to use the pouches as some of them stated but for you know it is often away and then they're in their backpacks we aren't seeing them as much but we've seen burner phones we've seen just cases in the pouches but what we did we created a generic email address robo phones and it goes to about 25 people

[04:14:33] in my building and so as we said we don't want teachers having to have those conversations and and battles, they just simply send an email to robo phones and one of us responds and deals with that situation during that school day, during that class period and implement the consequences or confiscate the phone either way.

[04:14:52] So all of the same things, I think for me, removing the class change will be a challenge when you have 4,500 kids in a hallway somewhere navigating like, hey, put your phone away or I'm trying to collect this phone, there's 20 going by at the same time, you're not going to be able to consistently enforce that so I think we have to lean one way or the other I will share today we did have an all-school pep rally with all students in the gym and it might have been the best pep rally I've seen in my 10 years at Robinson the students were completely engaged there weren't cell phones out there were singing there was dancing there was clapping and so we do see the effects across the board some of you have visited with my principal's

[04:15:31] advisory council they shared with you like while they don't love it they like it um they understand and recognize it's been beneficial for them um and see you know the outcomes within their peers and in their classrooms so i fully support what we're doing thank you hi i'm ellen reilly i do not have a teacher voice i used to teach american sign language so bear with me so um so um i'm going to talk to you in two ways teachers and then i'll talk about the students so with teachers when i told them we were going to be part of this pilot at the beginning of the

[04:16:06] school year literally a standing ovation like they're like cheering and they were so excited and then what happens is what we call in our school teacher on teacher crime right that this teacher is going to be consistent and this one's going to be the fan favorite so what happens is they start falling one by one by one um and what happened was i would say that consistently they were at the door they were taking them and they were watching the kids put them in and then they they were like get engaged in conversations and then kids started not putting them in and then kids started noticing oh I don't have to put it in it

[04:16:45] just I can't have it out in the classroom so because we told the teachers don't say I need your phone it needs to go in here don't engage in that fight so they didn't so then when we would come into rooms and look there would be beginning of the year there would be 30 phones and then probably three four weeks in there might have been 10 15 phones in there and now if probably go in there probably would be less and it's some kids who just are like I know I cannot have this I need to put this up so in the classroom when you're in there you will not see phones you don't see kids out on their phones

[04:17:20] during the instructional time what the problem that is incurring is that they are then keeping it on themselves and then they go out into the halls and then they're in the hall and then they come and then they run into me my shoes Crews usually give it away, they hear me before they see me and then they know to put it away.

[04:17:39] But a lot of the times it will be that give me your phone and then I have to walk them back to class and I say put this in there and then the teacher has to write the referral. So that has been our biggest problem. Teachers don't want the phones in their classroom but they also don't want to monitor it.

[04:17:58] They would like me to just make it go away and I need them to do those things. the consistency is the hard part with the adults maintaining that so that's the part this what the teachers will tell you also is the chatter in the classroom has increased dramatically dramatically beyond like they started having kids answering questions and started like there's laughter back in the classroom there was so much happening more in the classroom that they enjoyed being with the kids again today we had sophomore talks where they came down to listen about career talks and we told the students to leave their

[04:18:37] phones inside the classroom and the teachers to lock the doors and they did I only caught one student who had their phone out and that was it so we had a pep rally we let them take it to the to to the pep rally because we were like well they still need to be kids they have to have some fun memories of high school you know or picture but I looked up in the stands and the kids weren't on their phones they were just engaged in what was happening because they just don't realize that they weren't using it as much so with the students they they want you to take their phones but then they don't want you to take their phones

[04:19:11] they know it's the best thing for them they know that this is what I need to have happen but they still think they can manage it and and and they can't they're they're really there have a problem they they see one person on it and then it goes so a teacher will describe that class period last year as whack-a-mole put your phone away put your phone away put your phone away like their trends their thinking loses its train of thought because all they do is see kids with phones out and so it becomes very difficult so putting it away has been very helpful I will say that I don't know how it happens but we

[04:19:49] just had a major cheating scandal a child during class was able to take her phone and take pictures of six pages of a test and I'm like to the teacher I'm like what were you doing you know like how can you miss something so blatant and if you had just held on to that phone in the beginning we wouldn't be here or if you had just gotten up and walked around the room we wouldn't be here so we still have a lot of learning to do and a lot of you know just because we say put the phones away doesn't mean they're really going to go away and we still have to do the monitoring for PE class what we do is we have a cage we've We've always had this big cage and all the kids put their backpacks in it and then they

[04:20:28] get locked up. So all their phones and everything is in there. So PE has always been pretty easy to do. But overall, we're very happy with it. We really only have the problem out in the hallway and that's about the only problem that we're having with it so far.

[04:20:44] Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you to everyone that was a part of creating this pilot program. It's been transformative in so many ways and I'm very appreciative to be a part of it. Starting from the initial part, getting started, parents were unanimously supportive, teachers were unanimously supportive, students were unanimously opposed, by and large, too much of this.

[04:21:06] That data is not surprising. Starting the school year, myself and my administrative team, we went to all of our class meetings with every single grade level and talked about the importance of this cell phone pilot. I read The Anxious Generation over the summer and that really changed my entire perception on this and shared a lot of data with the students from this.

[04:21:25] guys are spot on this is an addiction for our kids and they don't necessarily see it that way because it's just an extension of them in so many ways but removing that from our classes i have yet to go into a classroom doing an observation this year and i've seen a phone it's incredible and it is a game changer our dialogues in our classes are higher the amount of laughter that you hear is higher the kids are definitely engaged with each other in a way that i have not seen in my career I did a survey at our February staff meeting asking staff how they felt this was going in the classrooms and outside of the classrooms. 89% of our staff felt it was going very well

[04:22:04] in the classroom. Only 49% felt it was going well in the hallways, and I would completely agree. We are seeing the same exact things that Dr. Eiley just discussed. We have the calculator pouches on the back of our doors or over whiteboards. At the very beginning, they were jam-packed and filled with phones. We quickly realized that this was putting teachers in a contentious position with students and we did not want our teachers in that position, we wanted to be able to deal with it ourselves.

[04:22:28] But what we have found is as time has gone on, the storage pouches are not being leveraged in the majority of our classes unless it's a student that really knows that they just can't have their phone on them. So we went from 30 or so in each of our classes down to a handful, but you don't see phones.

[04:22:43] They are often away. The problem is they're often not in their backpacks, they are on their person and what this has led to at Justice is a lot of students leveraging bathroom breaks and being out on their phones in the hallways and airpods as well constant we are playing whack-a-mole in many ways in our hallways right now and we try to be as present as we possibly can it has definitely we have definitely seen a decrease in our like videotaping fights which has led to a decrease in fighting overall like there's definitely positives of that but the hallway issue is definitely concerning um i definitely am in favor of a total ban as best as we can in our our school buildings because I don't think we have the ability to police our

[04:23:22] hallways without that but the consistency is huge the support and knowing this is happening at multiple schools has been tremendous and the students the constant line they'll give me is we hate this but we get it but that addiction is very very very serious and I've had several students that have had disciplinary consequences for other reasons because they would not let go of their phones and it has led to some contentious situations between admin and students teachers and students and we've had a lot of parents come in and they're basically begging us in our offices to help them with their cell phones so I think one part of this that we're really thinking about it justice is how can we

[04:24:01] better educate our families on what they can and can't do as well but these phones have completely consumed that parenting dynamic in many cases and it's by the time they get to high school it's really hard to pull back on that if the parents have not been as top on top of it throughout the entire time we've had 40 students that have hit the fourth violation so we've only had 40 that have made it that far we have put in some restorative practices anytime there is a violation and so far our data seems to stop students around two not getting past that for the most part but only 40 throughout the course of the year given what I've been told it was like in the past is definitely an improvement for us

[04:24:40] And so we are very happy to continue to be a part of this and thank you all. Dr. King, if I may add, it looks like I'm the only school here that's non-pouch. Let me just add again, I just want to emphasize it's a matter of being visible and vigilant.

[04:24:58] I will tell you, our students use their cell phones during lunch for vending machine purposes. And I've shared this with Dr. King. I want to make sure students eat. eat. So cell phones throughout the day are put away, but I do allow students to use them during lunch, and my Langston Hughes Panthers do a fabulous job with it. They know that we administrators are in the cafeteria, we're monitoring what you're doing, so students will take it out, use the vending machine, and put it away. The challenges with this is occasionally you will get a stubborn recalcitrant student who's determined to use the cell phone and constantly, and

[04:25:34] And then you may reach out to a parent who will say, keep the phone overnight. Now, I have had parents to tell me this or a parent to not show. So what do you do in cases like this? Now, we as principals, the last result is suspending a student.

[04:25:50] That's the last result. Students are not learning when they're not in school. We want them in school. But that can be very difficult if the cell phone is a constant problem. And you will have a handful of students who are determined.

[04:26:06] They're at that 20-day limit. And it's very difficult to tell a child that you should not bring your cell phone to school for 20 days. And some parents don't support it. So that's the part I ask you all to look at very closely. Keeping overnight.

[04:26:22] Again, when a parent will tell you I'm not picking it up, keep the phone. Or two, again, our last result is suspending a student. But sometimes we're forced to. Now, cell phones lead to other things. They make copies of tests, they videotape each other, they drop them messages and pictures in other places, which leads to other things.

[04:26:44] So be mindful of this when you're having this discussion. Again, let me reiterate, Langston Hughes is not using pouches, and my students are doing very well. I just think it's a matter of being visible, vigilant, consistent, and clear expectations.

[04:27:04] Thank you to all. I asked them to share their truth today, and they did just that, and I appreciate it. I do want to clarify, when we say that they cannot be suspended, it's for use of the phone and possession of the phone, but any violation of the SR&R, if they use their phone, then SR&R takes precedence over that.

[04:27:25] As we conclude this presentation, it is important to recognize the significance of SR&R changes and the impact it will have on our FCPS students, families, educators, and staff. recommendations are more than just policy revisions they are collective efforts shaped by the voices of those we serve every decision from refining discipline policies to the strengthening of cell phone guidelines has been driven by our commitment to create a learning environment where every student experiences an equitable school community student health and well-being are prioritized and student voices centered first our recommended discipline policy changes mark an important step towards ensuring clarity consistency and

[04:28:04] and fairness in how we support students while maintaining a high expectation for behavior. By refining intervention strategies, bringing clarity to discipline provisions, and reinforcing equity monitoring, we are providing clearer, more focused tools for equitable discipline.

[04:28:22] These adjustments will help reduce disparities in enforcement, ensuring that every student has access to a safe and supported community. Accountability and support are not mutually exclusive. can hold students to high standards while also guiding them towards growth the proposed cell phone policy reflects the overwhelming input from students families teachers and administrators who have shared their perspectives on how cell phones impact learning our team has crafted some possible recommendations at the elementary middle and high school levels to protect the integrity of the

[04:28:56] classroom foster deeper student engagement and minimize distractions we are reducing the temptation to disengage from learning, eliminating unnecessary social conflicts and ensuring that instructional time is maximized and protecting student mental health.

[04:29:15] The decision to strictly enforce the policy without requiring storage units also reflects the voice of students, many whom share that mandatory storage would create more logistical challenges than solutions. Instead, we are reinforcing clear expectations that will be consistently applied across all schools. I'll call that the MISEL method.

[04:29:39] To our students, these changes are designed to support our growth -- your growth, I'm sorry -- keep you engaged in learning and ensure that your voice is heard and respected. To our families, this is about ensuring that every child in FCPS has access to a structured, focused, and safe learning environment. To our staff, these updates provide clarity and consistency needed to enforce policy fairly and effectively. And to our school board members, this is a step towards building a stronger approach to student rights and responsibilities and a learning culture. Change is never easy, but when it is driven by shared vision

[04:30:18] for improvement, it is powerful. These updates bring us closer to the FCPS we all collectively believe in, one that is fair, structured, and centered on student success. With a clearer, more focused and more equitable framework for discipline and cell phone use, we are ensuring that every student has the opportunity to thrive. Thank you for your time, your engagement, and your dedication to the future of FCPS community.

[04:30:44] We will now open the floor to your questions, comments, and related cell phone policy storage changes. Thank you for the presentation, and thank you for all of your amazing feedback. Almost everybody has a question, so I'm going to start at two minutes because i think this is going to be a robust conversation i want to get to everyone and i want everyone to at least have their first if not their second go back uh we'll start with uh dr anderson thank you firstly i'd like to thank the principals for the um detailed accounts that you've provided so i much appreciate it um dr reed given what we're hearing from the

[04:31:23] principals particularly regarding the teacher experience i i think i'm a little surprised by by your recommendation. Can you speak to that a little bit? - Certainly, Dr. King, since that was a recommendation coming from your office, do you wanna share the response? - Absolutely, one second.

[04:31:40] So that is not a recommendation that you have? - This is coming from the Chief Equity Office. - So what recommendation do you have? - I'm gonna reserve judgment on that and have Dr. King answer that. - All right, the reason why we made the recommendation that we did, one, was because we believe that if we ask the students throughout this entire process what they wanted, right?

[04:32:04] If we totally ignore and have a complete ban, at least at the high school level, then why would we ask the students to begin with, right? That's one part. The second part when it comes to the storage unit, we know that because we had office hours with our principals every other week, so we heard from them, we knew that some of them really wanted to keep the storage units, but our team in looking at all of the information that was provided back to us came to the conclusion that if we ban cell phones, right, for the entire day with the exception of lunch, and we asked the students to engage with their cell phone every period by taking it out of their phone, putting it away, putting it up on something back and forth,

[04:32:43] then we're asking them to engage with their cell phones. And we wanted to eliminate the engagement with cell phones as much as possible during the day, with the exception of lunch at high schools, and teach our students and hold them accountable to the policy. We have an example of principals who are able to do that.

[04:33:01] And yes, we know that it is challenging, particularly in our bigger schools and the hallways, but students rise to the occasion. If it's consistently applied throughout the entire district and everybody recognizes that cell phones are not allowed in Fairfax County Public Schools, we didn't want to send a secondary message by saying, oops, take it out of yours to put it in something, then put it back, then take it out and put it back.

[04:33:23] Because every time they do that, they're gonna stop and look at their cell phone and they're gonna engage. So that's why we made the recommendation that we did, not that we don't support what the principal's like as well. - Sure, and I appreciate wanting to give voice to the student voice, but it seems as if you're not giving voice to the staff voice, to the principal voice, to even to the parent voice, even when you showed that chart earlier.

[04:33:45] I'm trying to figure out why the student voice has become the driver in this measure. - Well, the student voice only became the driver at lunch during their time during the day, right? not asking that students engage with their cell phone any other time during the school day and the parents overwhelmingly well not overwhelmingly a majority wanted that as well and so did the teachers the teachers wanted to make sure that students didn't have their cell phones during instructional time we did that the parents wanted us to limit it as much as we could during the school day and the students wanted access to their phone at least one time during the day and that's why we provided the lunch time I misunderstood some parts of

[04:34:22] it I don't think I heard from the principals either that they wanted for for at least the high schools, because middle school is different, for students to not have access during lunch. What I thought I heard is now without the storage option, the responsibility shifts and returns to what we had last year, which is teachers inconsistently supporting the initiative.

[04:34:46] And so they're playing whack-a-mole, that's what I heard. And the meeting up in the bathrooms for vaping, which we know is a concern. The hallway behavior, which we know is a concern. So I'm not clear on how we are supporting those challenges that have been raised by the people who are serving our schools and leading our schools and are being very articulate in terms of their concerns.

[04:35:09] Absolutely. And that's why one of the options that we provided to you was to also allow principals to determine whether or not they want a storage unit and use. Our recommendation was based on the overall feedback that we received from all levels. Well, I will definitely be leaning into the recommendation that seems to serve the purpose of the principals that are sitting here talking with us about what they need to have a successful school where students are engaged and teachers don't feel the burden of having to be the enforcers in the way that they have been without the storage process.

[04:35:42] Ms. Andrews, can I just say one thing? IF YOU LISTEN TO THE PRINCIPALS, THEY TALKED ABOUT AT THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE PILOT PROGRAM, THAT STUDENTS WERE PUTTING THEIR PHONES IN THE STORAGE UNITS, AND I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT THE MIDDLE SCHOOL, I'M TALKING -- WELL, EVEN THE MIDDLE SCHOOLS, RIGHT? AND THEN THEY STOPPED AND THEY SAW LESS. SOMEBODY DESCRIBED THAT THERE MIGHT BE THREE OR FOUR SONES. SO IT'S THE POLICY THAT'S IN PLACE IS WHAT'S GOING TO STOP PEOPLE FROM PLAYING WHACKAMOLE, RIGHT, BECAUSE IF THE STUDENTS WERE NOT USING THE STORAGE UNIT TO BEGIN WITH, BUT THEY WERE PUTTING THEIR CELL PHONES IN THEIR BUSINESS, backpack like the teachers asked with the exception of the few then I did not

[04:36:19] see the need for a storage unit to enforce the policy that we have in place I think I may have captured some different things but I will hold that for my go back but I also say dr. Reed I'm a little confused about the recommendation that is provided by staff not being your recommendation because your staff I I'm confused as to why that's a divorced activity I'll pick that up on my go back thank you chairman first and i would ask i would kindly ask for staff to be more concise i know we have a lot of questions and i want everyone to have a chance to to speak and get their questions

[04:36:57] out all right uh i was deeply confused by the presentation because i didn't get what i thought i would which is the results of the pilot um i got suggested changes and a survey i assume of the entire community not just of the schools with the pilot and then I was grateful when the principals began to share but what I heard from the principals was pilot went great going very well heavy lift but enthusiastic allowed for more consistency great increased engagement fights are down don't see the instructional interferences more engaged overwhelmingly

[04:37:36] easy and then the issues that were raised were teacher enforcement high schools having easier access burner phones halls and bathrooms and I don't see how any of these suggested recommendations address any of these shortcomings that were raised by principals and if we're doing a pilot then I would expect that we would get a report back on the pilot that tells us THE EFFICACY OF THE PILOT, WHICH WOULD BE MORE THAN THE RECOLLECTIONS OF PRINCIPLES,

[04:38:11] IT MIGHT BE A SURVEY OF THE PRINCIPLES AND STAFF TO SAY HOW DID THIS WORK AND HOW DID THIS WORK? BUT I DON'T SEE HOW YOU CAN MOVE AWAY FROM A PILOT THAT EVERY PRINCIPLE SAID WENT REALLY WELL. I ALSO DON'T THINK THAT YOU CAN GO BACK TO WHAT WE HAD BEFORE. SO ON THE QUESTION OF THE SURVEY, WHAT PERCENTAGE OF THE SURVEY RESPONDENTS WERE FROM PILOT SCHOOLS?

[04:38:33] WE DON'T HAVE THAT, BUT WE HAVE THE INFORMATION, BUT IT'S NOT IN THE INFORMATION THAT WE HAVE TO DO. would encourage staff to stop saying the students wanted this the staff wanted this the parents wanted this that is not true the respondents wanted this we're talking about like 13,000 people out of you know well more than 200,000 possibilities without weighing this information to tell us its value it has no real value other I mean clearly the students have a point of view it's very lopsided so even if you pulled all of them it'd probably be very similar but But without weighting this information against other, you know, scientific information for

[04:39:13] a bigger value, we have no idea what this information means. It's 13,000 people out of well more than 200,000. I know a lot of work went into gathering that information. A little bit more work could have gone into weighing what those numbers actually mean.

[04:39:29] Not just saying, because these students who responded said this, that is what all students think. Or that is what 50% of students think. Would you like to go back, Chairman Frisch?

[04:39:42] Yeah, the most valuable part of this was hearing from our principals and what I hear them saying is phones being away is best but the recommendation seems to put us right back where we started, which is teachers enforcing. So there are two things that we need. Well, we need consistency. That's number one. I mean, this is again one of those universal themes system of schools, not a school system. We can't have different rules in different places and it can't be subjective. We need two things implementation and enforcement consistency for implementation.

[04:40:13] IT SOUNDS LIKE PERHAPS HAVING A HEAVY DOSE AT THE START OF THE SCHOOL YEAR WHERE MAYBE WE'RE TEACHING KIDS, MAYBE THAT'S PART OF IT. BUT THEN THERE'S ALSO ENFORCEMENT. BUT I HAVE TO SAY THIS IS NOT A DECISION FOR THE BOARD TO MAKE. AND I KNOW WE GET A LOT OF INPUT ABOUT CELLPHONES BECAUSE, I MEAN, I GOT A 9th GRADER OR 6th GRADER, I GET IT, OKAY?

[04:40:32] BUT THIS IS AN OPERATIONAL THING. THIS IS -- I'M SORRY, DR. KING, I TOLD YOU I WASN'T GOING TO GO THIS WAY. BUT I'M GOING TO GO THIS WAY BECAUSE THIS IS A REGULATION FOR how the superintendent's going to do the work and i am concerned that in this case there's been bifurcation between the superintendent and the chief equity officer because our directive is always to go to you dr reed not to the staff so i need from the superintendent to recommend what we're going to do um i think we've got to weigh the trade-offs i also think just like this morning that like having principals talk this way is super powerful and more people should hear this

[04:41:12] sharing the video clips you know hearing that our children are addictive that there's more laughter i mean that makes me want to cry you know i think maybe we can there's something that's got to give here between the trade-off of lost instructional time with educating people about what's going to be gained when we get the cell phones under control and i also think there's a bigger role for this board to advocate for our kids again this is an outside problem that comes in but anyway at the end of the day we need consistency of implementation and of enforcement And I do believe it's the superintendent's job to operationalize that and for her to make the decision.

[04:41:51] Mr. Moon. Thank you. I'll try to talk quickly. Since we seem to be giving our individual preference on which way to go, hearing the principal from all of the schools, especially one from Houston Middle School, I think one thing that's been repeatedly mentioned was being visible, vigilant, and consistent.

[04:42:20] However, those are gonna require someone's efforts to be visible, vigilant, and consistent. Among the different options, which one is gonna make it easier on the part of staff to be visible, vigilant, and consistent?

[04:42:36] With storage options versus without storage options, even though, even with the storage options, you may feel that there are students toward the end of semester, end of school year, less and less, fewer and fewer participating. I still feel that storage, you know, giving them storage space storage will make their job easier than not having and still expect them to be consistently enforcing the cell phone policy.

[04:43:05] With that, I will not be able to support at this point in time our CEO's recommendation. at least we need to give in our schools at least the optional as an option as a flexible choice depending upon schools whether they want to do a pouch whether they want the lunch box whether they want you know war what do you call that wall hanger door hangers but you know i think at least having that will make teachers job or ministry job easier to be visible vigilant and

[04:43:41] consistent. Thank You Mr. Moon. Mr. McDaniel. I don't know if I've told this story before in this room or this context but I was at Hayfield several months ago I think probably October give or take and I was doing a presentation in AV government class and I was up in front of the class and the teacher said ask questions he's the one that's cracking down your cell phones so that was an interesting conversation but well I was trapped at that point so I

[04:44:20] did not run but laughter is back is what I'm hearing and kids are engaging not just with the teachers but amongst themselves you know the fact that the kids were at the pep rally and really weren't concerned about getting pictures I think that speaks volumes and what Miss Mirren said I agree with completely that's impactful so you know I could critique some of the stuff that's in the recommendation but enforcing the rules as they're written is key to this we can have the best policies and the best rules but if there's not enforcement

[04:44:57] mechanism there it doesn't really matter at the end of the day so I do support the policy recommendations that are in this document I especially support the fact that it says so at high school and of course middle elementary school cell Cell phones shall not be used as an instructional tool, and I think this was one of the questions that we had going into this program, into this pilot program, whether or not cell phones would be needed for academic purposes, and it seems like the answer to that, at least based on this recommendation, is no.

[04:45:33] That is one definite outcome and one decision point that in my mind I've made up my mind on. I agree. I don't want to take a step backwards by not requiring some type of storage solution. I don't want to get into the weeds on what that exactly looks like.

[04:45:49] But I agree with Mr. Moon, we need to have options on the table and have expectations that those options are utilized. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Anderson? So, as someone who has taught at the college level for 14 years, like, I have a lot of experience dealing with kids and trying to get them to do certain things for you, particularly when they're older and are cranky. I want to say thank you to the principals because I think that what you guys did more than anything else is enforce the policy that we had and that worked. And so I guess my point has always been enforce the rule that we have and then

[04:46:28] see where we need to go. And so all this told me is that when we enforced the rule that we had, we got where we were trying to go. I am deeply concerned that no one is talking about the fact that these kids are smart and they are already using their school device for things that we don't want them to.

[04:46:50] Please do not for a second believe that fights will stop happening or vaping will stop happening because their cell phone is no longer with them when they have a device that we have given them that they can share a document with anyone they want within the school system.

[04:47:06] So we are taking it off of something that their parent owns, that their parent can control, And we're putting it on our system, which we don't want either. So I am deeply concerned with the fact that we are headed down this path. I will ask a question though.

[04:47:22] If you flip over to slide 20, I believe it's on this deck, can you tell me, for State Bill 738, which part of that are we not in compliance with right now?

[04:47:39] That one right there. So, 738. so we are generally in compliance with sb 738 with the exception of we currently allow cell phone use during those passing periods during lunch etc and sb 738 says that we restrict to the fullest extent possible that cell phone possession and use in classroom during regular school hours so i mean we are in compliance with that we're just allowing it outside of like those classroom hours and the srnr does currently um mention that you can only their suspensions are

[04:48:18] not permitted for cell phone violations so we are generally in compliance with sb 738 so what i see what it says is that you can't use a cell phone in a classroom it does not say that you cannot use a cell phone cell phone in a school building during school hours so we are already in compliance with this and all it did was take teeth out of enforcement. So the law basically says that we are removing consequences from cell phone usage in in spaces that it deems inappropriate and so it actually is going to make our enforcement harder in the long run. I sat in on some of those student groups where the kids are

[04:48:55] talking about the fact that they want to be treated like responsible members of our community and I really really strongly believe that we should listen to them so i will not support anything that takes it less than lunch at least miss dixon so this is a very interesting conversation um i agree with my colleague miss anderson that we need to enforce their policy my son was in high school in fairfax county central high school few years ago he just

[04:49:32] graduated in 2024 central high school has a great enforcement policy he would never text me during the school day he he had a rule that I he has to put the phone away for maybe only the time was lunchtime but he would sometime message I feel like there should be some place for students or high schools to have their phones too because they're working there have extra classes and other plans some of them support their younger siblings so a lunch hour or any break hours they could

[04:50:08] a few minutes here and there they should be able to get to their phones but at the same time if the rules are very clearly laid out and and the school is enforcing them it is possible because i have seen that with my own child in the school and i never told him don't use your phone at school i'm going to get mad because obviously i have no re no way to know what he's doing at school it was a a school doing that and and he was just following the rules so I think it can be done so for me I do like the recommendation made by the equity

[04:50:44] office that you know we may give them storage units or even not but the whole thing is that the full the phone should be away during instructions that's where I'm going to stay stick with and I'll support that thank you miss size more heiser thank you um i appreciate it and i won't take too long i fully support the statements of

[04:51:17] my colleague miss anderson um on this i think you know and i appreciate the principals being here i appreciate what you've shared i appreciate that you're talking about joy and laughter back in the classrooms but everything i'm hearing goes to enforcement we passed the cell phone policy that we currently have i guess three years ago now right 2022 and policy is not new and so it's really been from then till now, how do we make sure it's clearly enforced? We can keep tweaking our policy, but the board can't manage enforcement. That's not on us, right? That's on the staff.

[04:51:53] And so I appreciate that, you know, having storage units may help with enforcement, but I'm going to put the thing out on the table that I don't think has been talked about yet. At least I haven't heard it. And if I did, I apologize if I missed it. But some of the options for storage are much less expensive than others and we are facing a pretty significant budget shortfall right now and so if we're gonna go down the path of storage perhaps the lunch box over the door but let's look at the math of that as well especially when up what I'm hearing is the students are using it less and less anyway which goes back to my first point of enforcement right if the students are using less

[04:52:30] labor stories of students putting burner phones and yonder pouches ripping them open, finding magnets, all sorts of things. So the students are smart. How do we empower everybody to have that consistent enforcement? If we need a pouch storage, let's look at one that is going to be used, but let's not spend a ton of money on something that is getting used less and less anyway. Let's be realistic about what we need to do to support consistent enforcement of the rules that we've had in place for three years. Thank you. And one last thing I'll say, I agree with Ms. Anderson, I don't think I mentioned going any less strict than we have.

[04:53:08] We already have bell-to-bell for elementary school, middle school. We have band in classroom for high school, which I totally agree with in the classrooms. I agree with taking away from instructional use. But we've got to teach our kids to be responsible adults in high school. I know my time is up.

[04:53:25] If you don't want to see comments on that, I appreciate it. But otherwise, I appreciate the chance to talk and share. Ms. Lady? Thank you. I appreciate the principals and understand. One of the things I came, when I first got on the board and asked for was exactly what you all did in all of our high schools this year.

[04:53:45] I feel strongly about a band. I feel strongly about how schools changed in the course of my career and we lost laughter, we lost joy, we lost engagement learning, we lost self-esteem. The detriment of what these instruments have done to our kids is awful and heartbreaking.

[04:54:03] Yes, we have a cost to containers, we'll deal with that. We have to maintain, and I'm going to go back to Dr. Mizell in terms of visibility, being vigilant and being consistent. We need courageous leaders, and we need courageous leaders in our classrooms, and we need people who understand this and who are, you were respected by your students when you do the right thing.

[04:54:22] When you try to be their friend, they don't respect you. Everyone, it's simple, it's simple. And a couple quotes from earlier today, and I think these might have been also, back to you, Dr. Mizell, You have to accept what you allow in your classroom, and the lowest level of behavior you accept becomes the standard.

[04:54:40] We have to establish a standard. I support kids having phones at lunch. I personally support them being away in between classes, and that includes earbuds and phones and all that. It's hard to do. I also want to talk about the Google Doc problem and the other ways they're using this piece of technology to get around it.

[04:55:03] This is an IT problem that has to be addressed where they're creating a shared Google Doc that we can't get into because they didn't share it with anyone on the instructional side, but they are planning things. They are passing notes just like I did back in the 1980s, but they're doing it via a Google Doc with this.

[04:55:21] And just back to Dr. Riley's point, I'm not sure how a kid took six pictures of a test. We've got to get up out of our chairs and walk around when we're in our classrooms. We've got to get up and walk around and pay attention to what our kids are doing. It's hard to police, but we need to enlist IT to help do that.

[04:55:37] The last thing I'll say is to parents out there, when you give this to your child and you don't monitor it, you give them the opportunity to go anywhere in the world without your supervision. And as a parent, I don't recommend you do that.

[04:55:53] - Thank you. I'll take a quick turn. As school board members, we're asked to support our staff. I mean, we're here to support students and support what they're doing, but one of the most powerful thing we can do is support staff.

[04:56:10] And I think these principals here told us, and one of the principals said, we now have the power of the school board behind us. And even though this has been a policy, the problem has been enforcement. And when this came down with a plan, then that gave them greater power.

[04:56:32] And I think that's what we have to recognize and realize that our job is to help support the staff that is supporting our students. What I heard from everyone was that staff, teachers love it, and even some kids.

[04:56:50] I've spoken to some kids at high schools who have said at the beginning, oh, I really don't like this. And afterwards, well, yeah, it was a good idea. I'm talking more to my friends. And I'm hearing that from students. I agree with what my colleague just said. We have to have courageous leaders in the classroom because that's where it falls apart.

[04:57:10] The policy has existed. practice of enforcement hasn't and how we can help support you to work with those teachers that are telling on each other or whatever is going on let us know what we can do do we need an srnr for teachers i mean i don't know for teachers to follow the plans because at the end of the day the positive things that i heard were game changer laughter joy engagement that's what it's all about that's what we're here for and this is addictive not just for kids for adults

[04:57:49] we know it if it's hard for an adult to control this we need to help our kids first go back dr anderson oh i'm sorry mr mckelvie you did that while i put it up and i didn't get to i can't multitask thank you so much so first of all i'm so glad that uh for the first time in probably nine months uh we're actually engaging in conversation on this we've been told to wait for the SRNR and it's finally here so thank you to Nardos and team for all the

[04:58:25] work that you've done over those nine months to survey to to implement and clearly the the principals appreciate the support of your office so I just want to acknowledge that so that frustration aside I do also want to thank you for putting student voice at the forefront I know some of my colleagues have some concerns with that in terms of not acknowledging other groups but I think you've done a good job acknowledging all groups and my biggest frustration at the start of this was that we adopted this plan through a budget amendment without any outreach to students to teachers to principals to anyone so I'm glad we're

[04:59:05] finally hearing that voice almost a year into this so so something mr. Moon said if we were to take a different approach at each school I think that that goes down to the purpose of having a chief equity officer, which is it's inequitable, right?

[04:59:22] We're giving different resources, some potentially much more expensive, to different schools. So I don't think I support that at this point, whether it's a lunchbox or a pouch or whatever. Miss Lady brought up the idea about related items, and that's one thing that I have not SEEN HERE, WHICH IS HAVE WE, THROUGH THE PILOT, FIGURED OUT HOW TO DEAL WITH AIRPODS OR THE NOTE PASSING OR THINGS LIKE THAT?

[04:59:51] BECAUSE WHEN I TALK TO STUDENTS, THAT'S ONE OF THEIR CONCERNS IS THAT THERE ARE MANY WAYS AROUND THIS. SO I THINK THAT WOULD BE THE FIRST QUESTION I HAVE FOR YOU. THAT'S WHY WE ADDED ACCESSORIES TO THE POLICY BEFORE ACCESSORIES WEREN'T EXPLICIT IN THE POLICY BECAUSE WE KNOW AND WE'VE HEARD FROM THE PRINCIPALS IN THE PILOT THROUGHOUT the year, the same concern. Watches, earbuds, students are finding a way around that even when they put their phone in the pouch, they still have access to it through their, you know, listening to music. So that's why we explicitly put in the policy that it's not just cell phones, it's

[05:00:26] accessories as well. In terms of enforcement, that's challenging, right? Yeah, I think all of this is going to be challenging, right? But I think that it's doable. You know, I think back to when I WAS PRINCIPAL AND WE FIRST HAD CELL PHONES, STUDENTS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE THEM IN SCHOOLS. WE ENFORCED THE POLICY.

[05:00:45] WELL, I THINK THIS IS CLEARLY NOT THE LAST DISCUSSION WE'LL HAVE ON THIS. AND JUST FINALLY FOR THIS ROUND, I LIKE MY COLLEAGUES, I'M THOROUGHLY CONFUSED ABOUT THE DIFFERING OPINIONS AMONG STAFF AT THE TABLE. SO I HOPE BY THE END OF TODAY WE CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT'S GOING ON. THANKS.

[05:01:06] THANK YOU. DR. ANDERSON, ONE MINUTE GOBACKS. - Yes, thank you, I'll be quick. What you've outlined here in terms of having the ban, yes. What I've heard about the storage being needed as an enforcement, yes.

[05:01:23] I think that's where we need to get to. But I also have to say this, Dr. Reed, our direction of the board is to you. And as Ms. Marin said, we are looking for you to give your recommendation, your guidance. I'm one confused that your recommendation may, what I think I'm hearing, and maybe I'm wrong, that it may be different from Dr. King's, because I expect when staff offers recommendation, it's been done under your guidance and your blessing, it's coming forward with your full-throated support, because we delegate to you, not to her office.

[05:01:58] So I'm confused regarding why you won't even give us, give an opinion about what we're talking about here. - So what I think is important to think about is my response earlier was I would reserve comment until we got further into the presentation.

[05:02:17] I support the recommendations. Dr. King brought this to senior leadership. This was a conversation around the table with senior leadership and the recommendations passed senior leadership muster.

[05:02:33] And so she is bringing what senior leadership felt was an appropriate path forward. - Thank you. With my last eight seconds, what I will say is this, and this is just my perspective, perhaps it's not that of others, but when there's a staff recommendation, I see it as your recommendation.

[05:02:53] I don't divorce you from that work because we delegate to you. So that's the lens that I bring to anything that says staff recommends, it might as well read Dr. Reed recommends. So that's how I view it. So that's why I'm in this turmoil at present.

[05:03:09] - Chairman Frisch. - With my one minute, I wanna talk about burner phones. i heard about that about as quickly as the policy started or as quickly as the enforcement of the policy started rather creative i guess the putting in the empty case was a new one that i had not heard should there not be a different penalty for that kind of premeditation or maybe an award i don't know thank you for that feedback right well you know i think we're going to have another one

[05:03:48] of these conversations i'll be eager to talk to colleagues and staff in the weeks ahead But my preference is to enable more ready enforcement. And I think that happens with more uniformity. And I think lunch is an important place for access to phones.

[05:04:05] One thing I heard from a lot of parents is that they didn't mind students having the phones taken away, but they wanted them accessible in case of an emergency. And so I think the yonder pouches would be out for me. And the door hanging or the other versions the door hanging for non you know for PE and whatnot would be my preference as well but I do want consistency not because I don't think principals should have discretion but because I want to enable the easiest way to have enforcement and and I think that's probably the best way to go but I have some next steps in there about wanting more information about any kind of report backs on the pilot and we'll see where I end up mr. fish on page 95 of

[05:04:45] the information that we provided you and this is questions from the pilot to the from the pilot principles so if you look at page 95 on this there's information there but we can provide you more if you need to miss marron yeah i i wish i had some more clarity as well i mean some of us have been in this room for six hours today i wish i could leave today understanding what the next step is and we get here often what's the recommendation if staff is recommending this then if the board should take a consensus and i know that we have next steps but do we agree of keeping the violations as a level one do we agree with no instructional use do we agree with

[05:05:25] high school lunch only do we agree with no phones overnight if we should even give that input again i know it's hard for us to like rip ourselves away from this very intimate topic but i just what's the outcome of today so we're going to put some more questions i have questions too but at the end of the day i trust staff if they're listening to the principles and the the principals are saying you know I just how do we get past this I don't see why we would need another work session in April 8th I don't know what is left to dis or make it April 8th I don't know what's left to discuss and maybe that's a board thing maybe it's a superintendent thing

[05:06:00] but we're on the same team so can we figure out how to move this forward and be done and let everybody move on with you know life um I'd be open to taking consensus on various things Ms. Anderson. So I have a little bit of a different perspective that I want to share really, really fast and start my time so I don't get in trouble again. So what I've been hearing over and all is the phones are the problem, the phones are the problem. And then I saw, I heard about a study

[05:06:39] that I'm going to track down that actually talked about the mental health issues going on with our kids are related to the fact that they have no ability to disconnect themselves from us. And what's happening is we have driven them into the only place that they're not monitored 24/7.

[05:06:58] And what's happening that's so interesting to me is that, I don't know about you, but I was thrown out of the house at 10 o'clock every morning and nobody expected me to be back and no one knew where I was and I could make a whole lot of mistakes, but I knew my parents were there to protect, you know, that I could go back to if I made too big of a mistake and I needed help.

[05:07:17] And the problem is that our kids don't have that opportunity anymore, and they see the phone as the only wasteland of when they don't have that opportunity. And so I worry about having it be one more stipulation that we're putting on them as to monitoring how they pass for classes, being that they can't listen to music as they walk to the next class.

[05:07:38] So I worry about how close and how much we're going to have to monitor them to make that happen. Dr. Anderson, do you want another go back? Oh, I'm sorry.

[05:07:53] sorry I didn't see I'm sorry I didn't see mistakes it mistakes that I'm sorry that's okay there's a lot to manage so I quickly wanted to add to the music point a lot of students do math with music and there's a connection it works with when you're listening to music and you're solving math problems some some students find it very helpful so when I when you somebody said about taking the music away and the earbuds I was thinking about my own son who has earbuds all in his you know ears all the time and and really focused a student

[05:08:29] that is not trying to do anything you know out of out wrong here just listen to music but I did want to say about the parents pipe or a part here it's a big role and I think the parents voice in this survey is little bit weak a lot of parents do not support FCPS should have a policy and some don't care and this is actually spot their children graduating from school and going to college and get a degree and and for the career so I feel like we need to bring parents more

[05:09:04] into this conversation because I just saw a very limited support from just in this particular survey I'm not saying in general thank you miss lady as the representative on Shaq the Student Health Advisory Committee I think I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about this is their priority pretty much their number priority of this year that overwhelmingly they have read and been done presentations on this and I believe I don't want to misrepresent Shaq but I would say the majority of the representatives that we have put on that

[05:09:44] committee are very invested in in the in the banning of cell phones during all levels of schooling I just need to uplift that just because you know that's their charge that's what they've been working on they've been doing a lot of in-depth research and they don't get a seat at the table but I don't want to misrepresent them so I'll come back if I'm wrong but I maybe they were okay with lunch but I think they pretty much were arguing a lot or not arguing but having a dialogue about the ban for all day for all levels that's all thanks dr.

[05:10:19] Anderson do you want to do you want to take a few minutes and I'll call on miss Aaron 2016 that's the last time the policy for the student rights and responsibility was revised the reason we are here just like we are with with grading and boundaries is because the policy has not been updated and even I'm tired of hearing myself say it like I am okay like can we just do the things that we're uniquely qualified to do which is evaluate the superintendent executive limitation eight superintendent's relationship with the

[05:10:57] board executive limitation 10 learning environment relations with students executive limitation 13 safety and security we have the opportunity each of those meetings to publicly hold her accountable that's where our power is as well as the governance committee in one week from today will be reviewing that 2601 policy which would be great to update it before its 10 year anniversary that is where we need to spend our energy I'm really hoping my colleagues can consider that I've sent some emails out I really feel like we will get where we want to go if we could focus on the foundational things that we are charged

[05:11:30] with doing yeah just very quickly the school that used the little lunchbox thing how much did those cost $45 oh okay that is much cheaper than the yonder pouch and I know there was conversation earlier regarding students accessing the the pouch back in the phones back and forth to put them in the hangers but at your school it's not as if they put it in the in the box the whole day they

[05:12:08] still have to do it in every class okay thank you I will reserve the rest of my comments for next time. Thank you. Mr. Moon. Just a quick quick comment to one Miss Merrill has stated about this particular policy. Are you talking about policy not the regulations? Okay I was looking at the policy 2601. Okay understood because and as far as regulation itself is concerned annually school board reviews it and then when a adjustments or a change needed to be made we school

[05:12:47] Board has been making it. The latest version shows effective date of August 1, 2024, means that back in August, school board must have done something to make something effective as of that day. Chairman Frisch?

[05:13:07] You're right. We did do something last, we approved the SR&R, which is abnormal because it's a regulation, and in every other facet of our work, we have the superintendent create and edit and change regulations and she does that as a result of the policy changes we make so to miss Marin's point I'm grateful that governance committee is picking up that work I may swing by for the meeting and participate although I won't be voting because I'm not a member of the committee but I look forward to it coming to the full board so that we can perhaps start a new path forward on how

[05:13:42] this part of our work is done you know I suffice it to say I don't think that we should be in the business of doing the regulations we should be in the business of judging the superintendent based on the regulations that she does so I really want to thank the principals all of you for being here it's a huge chunk of your time and of your day which I know you're more valuable at your school site so it really means a lot to us that you were here I'm sure you were missed I hope you

[05:14:21] don't have any fires to put out when you go back to schools but thank you for your time and your wisdom and your words and know that we're here to get your feedback all the time not just now please reach out to us because you help inform our work to the team that put all of this together thank you so much and I think there's been a lot of discussion here please for you know go back to your next steps and I think that the board has to discuss some issues in terms of what is policy and what is regulation. Thank you and I am very happy to say

[05:14:59] that my partner and I were able to finish this on time and one last word to Dr. King. Thank you. As far as next steps are concerned, normally we would start to redline the SRNR but we got no direction so I just want to put that on the table so that for the next work session we can present a redline version of the SRNR. Thank you. I will discuss that with the chair.

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