Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 5h 7m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb4yaH-pkN8
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 2026-10-29. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:00] call to order at 10:30 a.m. I call on Dr. Reed and her team for a presentation of goal one, strong start, pre-K through 12 report. - So thank you, Madam Chair. We're excited this morning.

[00:00:17] We're gonna have our first goal report of the current academic year. So what better way to start off an October morning? So for our goal one report, it's been a team effort And I'd like to have Ms. Neal introduce our team members or have them introduce themselves and then we'll share our goal one report.

[00:00:39] We're very excited to share it with you and our community. So Ms. Neal. - Thank you, Dr. Reed. I'm Marcy Neal, the Assistant Superintendent for Strategy, Planning and Learning. I'll have my colleagues introduce themselves. - Good morning, Sloan Presidio, Chief Academic Officer.

[00:00:55] - Good morning, Nardis King, Chief Equity Officer. - Giovanni Ponce, Chief of Schools. - Good morning, Candace Hunstead, Executive Director for Strategy and Planning. And then we have several colleagues who are with us today as well from various departments as well as our goal innovation champions who are joining us today who are gonna support the board's discussion.

[00:01:21] So good morning to the board. We're gonna go ahead and jump right in. As Dr. Reed said, we are really excited. This is our first of our five goal reports for the 25-26 school year and we're just very excited for today's discussion. We're gonna make sure our clicker is working.

[00:01:43] There we go. So our objectives for today are on the slide. We're gonna provide you all with an update on our progress towards our 2030 goals, as well as share some additional contextual data related to the measures in goal one. We're gonna talk about the work we're doing to make progress towards these goals and discuss policy, budget, and strategic considerations as we work towards our 2030 goals.

[00:02:05] Today's presentation is goal one, which as a reminder to our community, it is focused on a strong start pre-K to 12. For this year's goal reports, we're going to focus on eight themes to organize our reports and presentations. And these themes are gonna allow us to continue to focus on those initial strategic plan priorities while also broadening the discussion into other strategic plan measures.

[00:02:29] So goal one has two themes. We're gonna talk about school readiness and multilingual learner progress. Goal one recognizes that all students need to have a strong start to their educational journey no matter when they enter our schools. There are six measures in goal one and today's presentation is gonna focus on those on the slide that are bolded.

[00:02:50] Data for all the measures for goal one can be found in the appendix of the full report that's posted on BoardDocs. So new this year, we're also using a color-coded system to allow for an easier comparison of our performance on our metrics with targets against our baseline.

[00:03:06] When we meet an annual or 2030 target, you will see the target met designation. When performance is approaching our 2030 target, so generally 90 to 94%, you will see the approaching designation. When performance has improved from the baseline but does not meet the previous two criteria, you'll see the progress designation.

[00:03:28] And then finally, when performance has not improved from the baseline, you will see the baseline designation. So for our first section, we're gonna talk about school readiness, and in this section, we're gonna look at fall and spring kindergarten readiness, pre-K participation, and data specific to our FCPS pre-K programs.

[00:03:47] So we know that kindergartners with basic school readiness tend to be at an academic advantage as they progress through school. They score higher on standardized assessments, they're more likely to graduate on time, and they have better attendance. Because of this, we expect a focus on school readiness will impact several other goals in our strategic plan.

[00:04:07] The research also highlights several factors that contribute to school readiness, including transition and pre-K participation, both of which we will focus on today. So in FCPS, school readiness is assessed at the beginning and end of the kindergarten year, and we look at three dimensions specified by the Virginia Kindergarten Readiness Program, including reading, math, and self-regulation.

[00:04:30] We measure readiness by looking at students who met the benchmarks for all three of these domains with grade-level expectations that are higher for students in the spring than in the fall. In addition, we also assess readiness for our own pre-K students on the same domains.

[00:04:45] Last year, the literacy screener for kindergarten students was updated from the PALS assessment to the VALS assessment. and this change was a result of the Virginia Literacy Act. The VALS is a more rigorous screener that better predicts reading risk and allows us to better identify students requiring early intervention.

[00:05:04] So this change in screener directly impacted the rates of readiness observed in the fall for our kindergarten students, which was also consistent with what was observed across the state. There are key differences between the two assessments that you can see on the slide, with the VALS being aligned to what the research says are the greatest predictors of future reading difficulties.

[00:05:26] So here you can see our fall kindergarten readiness for those students who met all three of those benchmarks. Overall, we did see a decline in readiness rates with 14% fewer kindergartners meeting all three readiness benchmarks last fall compared to the baseline.

[00:05:42] This decline was primarily driven by the change in the reading screener. While math and self-regulation data remained relatively stable from our year prior, we saw a 16 percentage point decline for students meeting the readiness benchmark for reading. Given the timing of these assessments, which are within the first three to five weeks of the school year, fall readiness scores tend to be a reflection of the skills students developed prior to entering kindergarten.

[00:06:09] And because most students do not, most of our kindergarten students did not attend an FCPS pre-K program, there is limited ability to influence this measure, and thus no target has been set on this data. Assessing kindergarten students' readiness in the fall allows us to best support them throughout the year.

[00:06:28] This slide provides some additional information to show how the new literacy screener identified students who were below expectations in the fall and throughout the year. The increase in students meeting literacy expectations from fall to spring is tied to both the new literacy curriculum provided to all students, as well as strong interventions provided to those students showing reading risk.

[00:06:52] Because of these efforts, we were able to increase the spring readiness levels for our kindergarten students. This is especially impressive given the lower rates of readiness in the fall and the more rigorous screener. Saw small but sustainable progress from the baseline. However, disparities still exist and require continued attention given the impacts of early readiness on future success.

[00:07:16] We know one of the key drivers to school readiness is high quality early childhood education. And it's also important to note that pre-K is not compulsory in the Commonwealth. This slide highlights the impact of pre-K. About one in four kindergarten students who entered FCPS without a pre-K experience met the fall readiness benchmarks last year, compared to 65% of those with a pre-K experience.

[00:07:42] Increasing the percent of kindergartners with pre-K experiences is a shared endeavor with other community partners, as the majority of students continue to access pre-K outside of FCPS. Overall, we saw substantial growth in the percentage of kindergartners with pre-K experience.

[00:08:00] All student groups made progress from the baseline and many met the target of 80% or higher. The largest increase from baseline was for black students up 11 percentage points, followed by Hispanic students up 10 percentage points. Last year, we also began collecting some additional data from families of our kindergarten students who did not have a pre-K experience to understand what barriers, if any, existed for our families in accessing pre-K.

[00:08:26] What we saw in this first year of data collection is that pre-K experience is driven by both preference and logistics. About 800 families, or the light blue box you see on the screen, did not reside in Fairfax County the year prior to kindergarten, thus we could not have had an impact on their pre-K experiences.

[00:08:45] About 700 families, or the light yellow box on the bottom left of the screen, did reside in Fairfax County, but preferred not to have their child in pre-K. And this is pretty consistent with what the national research says. And around 500 families, the light yellow box on the bottom right, live locally and had a potentially unmet demand for pre-K.

[00:09:08] Our full report does provide some additional details on the reasons why children were not in pre-K as reported by their families. And one important insight is that our families who are economically disadvantaged cited preference more frequently as a factor for the child not accessing pre-K than cost.

[00:09:24] We also saw that families who were not economically disadvantaged cited cost more frequently than some other factors. So there are some important implications as we think about the collaboration with the community to address that unmet pre-K need. So these findings also have important implications for our pre-K experience target, as meeting it in some cases would require more families making the choice to send students to pre-K versus solely focusing in on barriers for families accessing pre-K.

[00:09:55] So now we're gonna take a look at FCPS-specific pre-K programs. And as a reminder to our community, We currently provide pre-K services to students with disabilities and as space allows to students who are economically disadvantaged, homeless, in foster care, or those who have other educational risk factors through slots that are funded by Early Head Start, Head Start, and Virginia Preschool Initiative or our VPI grant programs.

[00:10:22] About 29% of last year's kindergarteners received a pre-K education either through FCPS programs or county VPI programs. The rate of students attending other programs has remained relatively flat, so you can see on that top line in blue, while the rate of students accessing FCPS and county BPI programs has been rising steadily since 2021-22.

[00:10:44] So this data shows that the investments that this board is making in pre-K are helping to close the access gap for our students. Students who are served in our pre-K programs are also assessed on readiness in reading math and self-regulation.

[00:11:00] And this slide shows the spring outcomes for our students who are getting ready to transition to kindergarten. Overall, 45% met all three readiness benchmarks last year. And as with kindergarten readiness data, it is useful to look at other factors to contextualize these results.

[00:11:16] In 23-24, which is the last year for which statewide data is available, all of our early childhood programs met the state quality standard of 400 or above. On average, the quality of our programs exceeded the state average and fell within the range of other divisions in Northern Virginia.

[00:11:34] In addition, the vast majority of students with disabilities in FCPS pre-K who entered the program below age expectations made substantial growth in three key skill areas that are monitored by the VDOE Special Education Performance Report. VDOE and FCPS also monitor inclusion, which is another important element of pre-K for developing readiness skills.

[00:11:58] We've seen steady growth in this area with almost 12 percentage point increase in over four years. For the last year, we estimated that 28% of our pre-K students with disabilities met the definition for VDOE Indicator 6A, where students receiving the majority of their services in a regular early childhood program.

[00:12:17] As a result, we do expect to exceed the VDOE target for last year. To continue to see improved rates of school readiness, we're focused on four strategies, and I'm going to provide some highlights on the actions associated with these strategies, and the full report has additional details.

[00:12:34] So FCPS along with the county and our community providers all play a role in addressing the demand for pre-k. This past year we served 80 percent of our income eligible students who applied for our pre-k programs and have successfully expanded our capacity to serve students as measured by an increase in both pre-k classrooms and the number of income eligible students served.

[00:12:57] Compared to our baseline we're serving almost 500 additional students. This increased capacity has has been a direct result of investments that the board has made in our early childhood programs. FCPS also continues to advocate through SCIPT or the Successful Children and Youth Policy Team and as a part of the board's state and federal legislative program to make pre-K more accessible to students.

[00:13:21] Second strategy focuses on expanding opportunities for inclusive pre-K. We know students with and without IEPs both benefit from these inclusive classrooms. The increase in our 6A inclusion rate, excuse me, inclusion rates, is the result of an intentional focus on expanding inclusive pre-K by introducing and expanding three inclusion models.

[00:13:44] To support these models, we continue to help teachers earn the early childhood special education endorsement through university partnerships and our Grow Your Own program. And this year, we're continuing with our community peers program at FCPS sites where programs are not co-located.

[00:13:59] So while this model does not meet the criteria for Indicator 6A, it does provide students with disabilities more opportunities to learn alongside their typically developing peers while we continue to address barriers to co-locating programs. Strategy three is focused on strengthening school readiness through evidence-based curriculum.

[00:14:19] We continue to provide training to pre-K educators in evidence-based curriculum in the areas of literacy, math, and social-emotional skills. Our pre-K program of study is aligned to the Virginia Early Learning and Development Standards and the program of study that students will experience when they enter kindergarten.

[00:14:36] In addition, we're piloting a tier one executive functioning curriculum in five schools, serving approximately 225 pre-K students, and we will be collecting data throughout the school year to inform future expansion of this program. And finally, we have a new Montessori program at Bucknell Elementary School, serving 125 students in grades pre-K and kindergarten.

[00:14:57] And our final strategy is focused on transitions and developing foundational skills once our students are in our kindergarten classrooms. We continue to provide school readiness and transition programs to children in the community. This includes programs such as hippie, early literacy, family literacy, and bridge decay.

[00:15:15] And we use fall readiness assessments to provide early interventions to accelerate learning for students who need additional support. So as you can see on the slide, the gap in readiness based on pre-k experience narrows from fall to spring, with both groups experiencing substantial increases in readiness.

[00:15:33] And then finally, for our public, the school board maintains a state and federal legislative program that articulates the board's position on a variety of topics, including school readiness. And this slide outlines several relevant positions from the 2025 program. The 2026 program is currently in the process of being adopted.

[00:15:51] So in closing out this section, you can see that compared to last year, our kindergartners had higher rates of readiness in the spring, which is significant given the more rigorous screener and the lower rates from the fall. We saw more students coming in with pre-K experiences that are driven by increases in FCPS and VPI pre-K participation, and this is important as we continue to see the impact of pre-K on school readiness.

[00:16:15] And finally, we anticipate meeting the state target for Indicator 6A for pre-K inclusion when the official VDOE data is released. At this time, I will turn it back over to our meeting managers for questions. My apologies.

[00:16:37] Are we doing one section at a time? Okay. Yes. Thank you. Good morning, all. for this I heard you say something but I think I missed it regarding the factor in which we had no target because we don't have control is that the kindergarten is that the preschool it's the fall kindergarten readiness assessment so those three different assessments are given to kids sort of that three to five week range of when they start school and so we did remove the target for this year recognizing that we do not have a lot of influence on the outcome exactly coming as they are what I would like to see and I don't

[00:17:14] I don't know if I was able to mine this here. Can you show the comparative data between where they are in the fall and the progress in the spring? Because that we can impact. - Yes, so if we go, we can go back a couple of slides. It is on our strategy four, slide 27.

[00:17:37] - What page is it in the report? - I will find it for you. - Okay. - Yeah. Thank you, nurse. What you can see, Dr. Anderson, on this slide, this is showing the fall to spring, and it's based on, the blue is the overall, we went from 57% hitting those readiness indicators to 69 overall and then the other bars are showing by pre-k experience so you see the kids who had the pre-k experience went from 65% readiness in the fall to 74% readiness in the spring and then for our students without pre-k it went from 26 to 47 I did see this do we have it disaggregated by subgroups I let me double check

[00:18:14] because I think that might be interesting another piece of data that I'd be interested to see is the performance of students by subgroup who are, who did have kindergarten experience, do we have a disparity there as well?

[00:18:31] So that's a curiosity, so if you could provide that, that would be helpful. Yep, you just answered that question. We can't put targets on that. On page 10, let me make sure I gather my question.

[00:18:50] On page 10, this is the spring readiness for students. And again, just looking at it year over year, I see that we've had just a little bit of growth from 68 to 69%.

[00:19:06] We have three categories that did not experience growth, economically disadvantaged, 504, and Asian students. But most importantly, the achievement gap continues to grow. And again, I know the spring is where we've had some impact. Can you speak a little bit to the strategies that you are employing to close that 39 point achievement gap?

[00:19:30] - Yeah, no, thank you for that question. And I think, you know, what we're trying to do is make sure that we have evidence-based strategies and supports in place for supporting students. You know, kindergarten obviously is a key educational experience for all of our students.

[00:19:49] The expectations that we have for kindergarten students continue to increase along with the Virginia Literacy Act we now have expectations that students you know are hopefully coming into school with some background understanding and background knowledge and letter recognition numeracy basic numeracy but we know many of our students particularly those that don't have pre-k don't have that background so for a lot of students we have a lot of ground that we have to make up so we do that by trying to make sure that we've got an evidence-based curriculum that's aligned to what we're doing if the subsequent grade levels so if you think about the kindergarten curriculum has to be aligned to what students are going to do in first second and third grade in

[00:20:28] the primary grades as they're working to develop proficiency in early literacy skills so that's the first thing making sure we've got evidence-based curriculum across all of our classrooms and all of our programs the next thing is making sure that all of our kindergarten teachers are trained in evidence-based instructional strategies so one of the things that we've been doing the last several years and again the Virginia Literacy Act accelerated a lot of this was making sure that all of our staff are trained in evidence-based literacy instructional practices so we've been partnering of course with the University of Virginia that's really leading that work making sure that all of our

[00:21:04] teachers complete training that's accessible both in an online format and then reinforced in our schools with our school-based staff and then making sure that we have good data to be able to monitor and identify where students are at in terms of the progress that they're making or the progress that they still need to make so we've created new dashboards to help teachers really track and monitor how students are doing as they go through these assessments that we're talking about here today so when we're talking about kindergarten readiness remember we're talking about three assessments we're talking about the VALS which is the Virginia literacy language and literacy screening system

[00:21:43] We're talking about EMAS, which is the math assessment that they take. And then we're talking about SIBRS, or the Child Behavior Rating Scale. So it's all three of those measures, when we look at this data, that students need to be proficient in. Just as I was talking about evidence-based curriculum with literacy, same thing with math, getting early numeracy skills.

[00:22:03] And hopefully, you know, making sure that students are able to, you know, count to 100, for example, have that basic number sense before they move into first grade. And then making sure on the child behavior rating scale that students are developing those skills, executive functioning skills, to be able to manage their impulses, make good decisions, stay engaged while they're in class, be good citizens in the classroom.

[00:22:25] And all of that coming together, the curriculum, the training for teachers, the monitoring of data, and then providing supports and interventions to students that are falling behind is the approach to make sure that students are making growth. But like I said, it's three measures when we look at this data that they have to be proficient in.

[00:22:41] And for a lot of our kids coming into kindergarten with no pre-K experience or even limited in terms of if they had a pre-K experience, what that really was. It might not be a program where they have licensed staff with an evidence-based preschool curriculum. It might be more of a daycare setting and situation where they're not as engaged academically or even socially.

[00:23:02] So there's a lot of growth that a lot of our students have to make. So you pointed out we're not where we need to be, but I mean, we are optimistic that we're seeing growth that's being made across the year in kindergarten. And then we're also seeing that long term growth from baseline. Thank you. It seems from what you've shared, the training, the curriculum, those have been in place for a while.

[00:23:23] What seems to be new from what you've detailed are the dashboards. Can you go into greater detail in terms of what that's going to provide teachers the opportunity to be able to accomplish? So I think, you know, like everything, we continue to enhance what we're doing.

[00:23:39] So our school support, our professional development is stronger and tighter than it's been in previous years. A lot of that's, you know, something that I really appreciate, the partnership that we have with Giovanni, the chief of schools office, the region teams, to really make sure that we're providing those targeted supports to schools that we know have a lot of students that are at risk.

[00:24:01] So even though we've done some of the professional development, we're doing more, we're going deeper, and we're really making sure that we're aligned across the system. We're also getting additional training beyond what I guess I would refer to as like base level training. So the evidence-based literacy training that I talked about, that's for all teachers.

[00:24:20] But we're also making sure that we can get some additional literacy training in things like letters, which really helps with students that might not be making literacy growth due to reading difficulties like dyslexia. So we're trying to get as many teachers as possible trained in letters so that they're providing more effective interventions.

[00:24:39] So some of these things have been going on, but we're continuing to, you know, I think, take that work to a deeper level. The data question you asked about is making sure that what we have is an early warning system that allows schools to look at if students are falling behind in math or literacy or attendance.

[00:24:58] Basically getting a light to say, this is a student that we need to be paying attention to so that we don't have to do as much of the legwork to collect the data, analyze the data. We can provide it to them in a dashboard format, and then they can respond to the data and be more efficient in their time.

[00:25:14] Oh, I think it's important for them to be able to identify who those students are. But I would be remiss if I didn't share my concern with reaching the target that's been set for this year. Because over the last three years, we've gone from a baseline of 67 to 23-24 school year of 68 to 24-25 school year of 69.

[00:25:32] And now our target is 75. The trend doesn't seem to be favorable to you. So I'm just wondering how will that be accomplished? - Well, one thing just to reiterate, particularly for folks in the community, and Ms. Neal mentioned it, you have to remember the change in the literacy screener that we introduced in school year 24-25 as part of the Virginia Literacy Act.

[00:25:54] So the state required a new literacy screener that is more difficult to reach proficiency targets on than the previous screener, which was the PALS. Both of those instruments were developed in partnership with VDOE and the University of Virginia. But the new screening system that we have, the vowels measures things that the old system the PALS did not measure so it measures for example not just decoding words but encoding so when you hear a word can you recognize the letter sounds and does that help you with your spelling so for example if you take the word dog d-o-g we want to be able to isolate letter sounds and not have d-a-w-g for dog right so there's additional

[00:26:33] encoding and additional other literacy tasks that are included in the screener and it's also time The PALS was not timed, so you can think about for students like multilingual learners that need as much processing time as possible to be successful on some of these instruments, that you would anticipate with a more rigorous screener that the scores are going to have a dip as we try to adjust to that new standard.

[00:26:57] No, I appreciate that. That's very helpful. My last question at this end is to Dr. Reed. Given that we know that there's a huge gap between some of our students, Even the goal targets still maintain a 30 point gap. How do we see that we can leverage the extra time of perhaps home activities to help shore the gap with some of our students who need a little bit more support?

[00:27:24] - So thank you, Dr. Anderson. We are working really hard right now to leverage time outside the classroom. And that includes evenings, weekends, breaks, and summers. i think that the team we got off to a sort of a field testing start last summer with sending laptops home over the summer and i was really proud of our instructional team for beefing up our resources online that families could access because as you know with the esser

[00:27:59] dollars going away we had fewer summer school options for students so what we're really hoping to do is utilize those breaks in time to support really authentic best practice instruction around literacy. We've got a number of programs that are very strong in those areas. What that often is going to do is that's going to hit kindergarten to first grade. It may not hit this kindergarten assessment, right? So I think that if we're patient, I think we're going to see the fruits of our labors. But I think that we have to recognize that when children are coming in

[00:28:38] in very different places, some children are reading in kindergarten and some children, it's honestly, they're picking up a pencil for the first time. So as we bridge those gaps in Team Kindergarten, if they're listening, which they're probably not because they're working with their littles, the Team Kindergarten, I mean, they're some of the most incredible educators that we have anywhere in this country.

[00:29:00] These are able to take a group of very young children and start in a hundred different spaces and be able to, by the end of the year, show tremendous improvement. So I know the team has got a lot of ideas for how to use outside of school time.

[00:29:17] We're also trying to make sure that our grant involved and our community partners support tutoring. We know that high-impact tutoring assists children in their academic development, and the more of those partnerships we can set up, even for our very young children, I think the better start we're gonna be able to provide them.

[00:29:39] - No, I appreciate that. I think my, and I appreciate kind of taking advantage of those out of school time. I think my question was mostly speaking to the daily out of school time. There's some wonderful things that could be done with kindergarteners as they go home just to help practice those very skills that Dr. Presidio just mentioned with decoding and encoding, my wondering is how are we taking advantage of that?

[00:30:01] I'd like to go back, please. I'd like the question, an answer to my question, but I do want to go back. - Yes, ma'am. I think utilizing our community partners, again, is important, our public libraries.

[00:30:16] I know I had a chance to visit our public libraries this past month, and every Fairfax County public school child has access to our public libraries, and they have tremendous resources. I think that we need to be more explicit about those opportunities and make sure that our children are able to access those opportunities.

[00:30:36] Team, do you have some other thoughts on, I know you've been working, one of the things I'm really proud of is Dr. King, Dr. Residio, and Dr. Ponce are working regularly. It's a close achievement gap group, and Ms. Neal and Mr. Smith sit in on that as well, but we're taking a very strong cross-departmental approach.

[00:30:54] So why don't you guys share a couple of the ideas that I know that you're working on, that we're moving from this, I think, status of we're working on it to actually we're gonna do it. So we are implementing these strategies in parts of the county to assess their effectiveness before we just bring them to scale.

[00:31:13] If they're not providing the impact we want, we don't obviously wanna bring them to scale. But team, why don't you offer up a couple of the ideas that you're working on right now? - Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot of different factors, as Dr. Reed was saying, right? So one of them is making sure we're providing schools and teachers, most importantly, with resources that are ready to send home so that they don't have to create things, right?

[00:31:32] So that's when we can look at personalized learning software like Lexia or Summit, which is a program that we're using for multilingual learners, which we can talk about in the second component of this work session. But making sure that there's tools, resources, whether they're digital or whether they're hard copy materials that teachers have that are going to reinforce the skills and concepts that students are with.

[00:31:54] Another big thing that we're really leaning into is family engagement and making sure that families understand the resources that they have access to and the best practices for supporting students at home. So that's an area, again, where Dr. Ponce and Dr. King are helping to really engage our families and make sure, again, that they feel really empowered to not just advocate for their children, but to be their children's probably first and best teachers at many times.

[00:32:22] And then it's, you know, making sure that schools obviously are getting the supports that they need from central office in implementing any of the practices that we're asking them to think about how they can extend learning time. So Dr. Ponce, for example, and his team last year looked at some innovative strategies to think about how to extend the learning day.

[00:32:42] Spring Sprouts, you'll probably remember, is a program to extend opportunities when we were on spring break. You know, we're trying to get as creative as we can with extending learning opportunities in a lot of different ways, through resources, extended time, and family partnerships. Thank you. Mr. McElhain?

[00:33:04] Thanks. On slide 21, you share our ranking and comparison to the surrounding jurisdictions in terms of performance of the programs, I believe, and quality rating.

[00:33:19] My question is obviously Alexandria and Arlington score significantly better than we do. So I'm wondering what they do differently and what lessons we can learn and how we can learn them. Well, it's a great question, and it's something that I would say, you know, we're still investigating ourselves to some extent, to be honest with you.

[00:33:41] The first thing I would point out about this slide is the state target is greater than 400, right? So all of the Northern Virginia districts that you're looking at here and the state are above 600. So really understanding that range in terms of how that really works is one of the questions that I think we need to dig into a little bit more deeply.

[00:34:01] But we have collaborated with our local partners like Arlington and Alexandria. One of the things is they have a lot fewer students in their program. We have thousands of students in our pre-K program, even though it's a small percent of the overall population. So it's a little bit easier, I think, sometimes to have coherence when you've got a smaller number of classrooms that you're working in.

[00:34:23] So I think that's one of the things, again, making sure that we're consistent in the evidence-based practices that we talked about a little bit this morning from school to school. But there's no magic secret that we've uncovered in terms of why those northern Virginia districts might be a little bit higher than we are.

[00:34:42] But again, that scale, I think it's also like trying to understand the statistical significance when you're 250 points above the state target, but maybe five points off from a surrounding division. Does that have statistical significance or not? We're still trying to figure that out. And my last question is more, I guess, theoretical.

[00:35:05] The SCIFT was founded how many years ago? well, maybe 12 years ago, with the purpose of expanding our pre-K seats. And by my observation, it has strayed so far from that initial goal that it's, to some extent, lost its meaning.

[00:35:26] I'd be eager to hear from staff who represent FCPS on that committee their thoughts about SCIPP, does it need a reset, and what can we do to move that conversation forward. Well, I've been working with SCIPP for quite a few years now, i'm looking around the table a number of board members current board members i've partnered with on skip because skip has two county board of supervisors and two school board members on it as well as staff and then folks from community-based agencies you know you ask a question about does it need a reset i think that might be a question that you might want to have with

[00:36:02] supervisors to see you know if we're continuing to really meet the targets and the goals because because SCIPP was developed, I think, 15 years ago, actually now, with the initial focus being on expansion of pre-K. There are now five different areas of focus, all very worthy.

[00:36:19] You know, we look at, for example, Opportunity Youth and supporting students, or excuse me, I should say, supporting youth age 16 through 24 that are either undereducated or unemployed currently, and there's a number of different work streams as well. So that might be a question if Skip is really focused on the strategic priorities of both the county board and the school board.

[00:36:41] But what I'll say with respect to early childhood education is I'm actually more optimistic than I've been in recent years because last year we partnered with the county to develop a new equitable school readiness plan. It was time for them to refresh their plan.

[00:36:57] And one of the things that we argued for very vigorously was a direct goal around increasing the number of pre-K slots, not just increasing the number of early childhood or child care slots in the county. And the county was very open to that.

[00:37:15] We were able to actually get that written into the plan. So we do have a measurable goal. Now the question, I think, becomes is there any additional county funding to be able to support us moving in that direction? And I know that the county is in active discussion about possible opportunities for future bonds, even directed at early childhood expansion.

[00:37:37] So I'm more optimistic than I've been in recent years. Mr. Moon? Thank you. I have a few questions. Thanks for the presentations. I am going to start with slide number 17.

[00:37:55] And at the bottom of that slide is a sentence states that small unmet need. the characterization of that unmet need being small, that how we want to characterize nature or state of extent of unmet need?

[00:38:20] - Yeah, I think when we say small, we're talking about relative to the entire kindergarten population, but I would say it's clear between wait lists and the reporting that we're hearing from families is that there is unmet need within the community. - I worry about what-- - The word small. - The word message we are, one message we are sending to the community that, it's a small, so people may say, oh, it's a small, so we don't have to worry about it.

[00:38:44] I don't think our unbanned need is that small, not to worry about it. So I wonder whether we can perhaps revise that slide at the bottom, how we state that. Okay, thank you. With that, I was trying to find this information in the report itself, but I have not been able to.

[00:39:04] So, and what I heard earlier as part of your presentation regarding no pre-K for other reasons, 42%. Were you saying that those from the families in poverty did not necessarily indicate financial reasons but the families who are not in poverty tend to indicate financial reasons for not having pre-K services?

[00:39:34] That surprised me, so I-- - So on page 14 of the full report-- - Okay, 14, okay. - Yeah, we provided a little bit more of a breakdown of what families were self-reporting. And I think it's important to keep in mind, this is based on a family's status when they're kindergartners. So we don't know what their economic situation was prior to.

[00:39:53] But for our families who were, if you look and it's in figure 10, for those of you who are looking in the full report. For our families who were not economically disadvantaged, 19% of them that didn't have a pre-K experience that said there was a barrier said cost was a factor.

[00:40:10] whereas for our families who were economically disadvantaged who reported barriers, it was 11%. So I think it's important to note that we've got families who maybe aren't falling in sort of an income eligible criteria, but are still saying pre-K is out of reach for them.

[00:40:26] - Okay, with, I am gonna go back to, will we have, okay, let me see if I can do, assessment data, meeting four versus spring data.

[00:40:46] what are the slide numbers? 11 is the fall data. So when we have a grade level expectations for the fall and then we have a grade expectation level data for spring, is the level expectation same in the fall and the spring or expectations change?

[00:41:17] - That's an excellent question because the expectation does change on some of these assessments, right? So again, you're looking at three different assessments here to be considered ready. The literacy, the math, and then the child behavior rating scale, which is basically.

[00:41:35] And there is a difference in expectation from fall to spring, because those assessments are state-developed assessments with state-developed standards, similar to the SOLs. So there is a higher, slightly higher expectation in spring than fall.

[00:41:51] - I mean, people don't naturally think so. - Yeah, which means the growth that we're making there, that's actually more growth than maybe it looks like on the chart because not only are we meeting that fall standard, but now we have to meet that spring standard in the spring when you see that growth.

[00:42:06] - Okay, just, you know, slides were not that clear whether we are talking about same standards, same expectations or different expectations at different timeframe for different areas. And even with that in mind, I think this is some of the things that Dr. Anderson was probably asking to get, you know, more answers from more information is that when you look at whites, Asians, and blacks, and overall, et cetera, that from the far, the spring achievement gap has grown.

[00:42:45] And that concerns me, obviously, because the students are now in our schools under our control, and that we teach them. And we, of course, we want all students to improve in their achievement.

[00:43:00] We don't want to see, what we don't want to see is while they are with us, the achievement gap to grow. And I want to see, I want to know whether this is true in all schools, most of our schools, where some schools do a much better job and not having the achievement gap grow, and if that's the case, whether there's anything that we can learn from the schools who are doing better jobs.

[00:43:27] Could you put me on that? Thank you. - I appreciate that. those were probably more suggestions than questions in a sense, right? So we didn't include school-by-school-level data in here, but we do have access to be able to look at the results on a school-by-school basis, and that's the work that we try to do across departments, really in partnership with Dr. Ponce, Dr. King, Ms. Neal's accountability team, to look for those outlier schools, the ones that aren't making the growth that we want them to make and prioritize as much support as possible there,

[00:44:03] But just as important, we look at schools that are making maybe growth that we wouldn't even expect them to make for higher growth than other schools and trying to share best practices across schools. So that is something that we do. Ms. Sizemore-Haisemore.

[00:44:22] Thank you. And thank you for this report as always. It's very interesting and lots of, lots of details. I think we could talk about this for hours. So thank you to the team for all the hard work. I have a couple questions. I looked in the main report as well as in the presentation.

[00:44:38] But when you look at the readiness benchmark, you have reading, math, and sort of self-regulation in one data point. And then you mentioned that the decline was really mostly due to the reading scores. Is it possible to get that disaggregated by subject, not just for the readiness, the fall, but also the subsequent ones so we could see where the gains are made?

[00:44:58] So that was the first question. I think we can take a look and see if we can provide that. Okay. That would be helpful just to kind of see. And then especially, I think, for our teachers to be able to target, you know, well, if it's reading was a real issue, in pre-K, those that we have for pre-K, and maybe as a parent engagement focus, we could use our family resource center to target specifically reading skills at that pre-K level to help partner with our families.

[00:45:22] So I think that's an important thing to look at. And then it would be really helpful to have it also disaggregated by subgroup, right? Reading by subgroup, math by subgroup, self-regulation by subgroup, because then again, we could do more targeted interventions if we know certain groups maybe are coming in with lower math skills or self-regulation skills.

[00:45:39] So I think that data, you know, maybe less for this discussion, but more for usefulness for our staff and teachers. And I really think we've got to make it more useful for Family Resource Center to partner with our families. so they can help support these needs at home, especially for our pre-K kiddos who we may not see until they get to kindergarten.

[00:45:58] That's the first point I wanted to make. You know I'm going to ask this question. What's the status of inclusion preschool, especially the PAC program and the community peers model? I know in particular I'm talking about the ones that are not co-located. Yeah, so if somebody could go to the slide that we have on the different models.

[00:46:18] I can't think of the slide number off the top of my head, but just to start out, to ground everybody, we have three models of inclusion that we're working on to really implement right now. The single teacher model, that's where a teacher is duly endorsed, has students in the classroom that are both general education and have IEPs.

[00:46:38] That one teacher in that age serves that group. That's a great model, but that's a unicorn teacher who has two endorsements, so we don't have too many of those classes. So we have to get a little bit more creative. The itinerant model, we think, is working really well. That's a model where there could be special education case manager and aid push into two classrooms and co-teach with a general education teacher who has both special education students with IEPs and general education students.

[00:47:08] The third model is the paired classroom model where we have a teacher who has special education preschool classroom, a teacher who has general education preschool classroom, and they interchange students throughout the day and flexibly through. So we've made a lot of growth in terms of the number of students.

[00:47:26] Two years ago, we were at about 300 students in one of these models. We're at about 700, a little bit over 700 right now. So we're making growth, but we obviously need to accelerate that and move faster.

[00:47:43] So we're working, obviously, with all of our schools to try to implement one, two, or three of these models in their school so that we can maximize inclusion. So we expect this number to continue to increase and grow. Our projected trend right now is that we're going to exceed the state target for preschool inclusion this school year.

[00:48:03] So that's good news because we've been way behind in the past. But even at that point, we'd still be below 30% of our students being included. Obviously, that tells you we've made growth because we've increased from about 16% to about 30%, but we have a long way to go.

[00:48:20] So one of the challenges, as Ms. Sizemore-Heyser pointed out, is when we don't have programs co-located, it's harder if you have a school that only has a special education school program. How do you get inclusion in a situation like that?

[00:48:36] Community Peers is a model where we've tried to offer free preschool to students without disabilities to come into the classroom and create a more inclusive learning environment. Two years ago, we had a very small number, a handful of students were at about 102 for this year, so they can grow, but again, we want to accelerate that growth, kind of just the current status.

[00:48:59] I appreciate that, and I do appreciate the growth, and I have noted that. A couple questions. Specifically, I had asked about the PAC classroom. I apologize. So PAC is an area that we have not made as much growth in.

[00:49:16] We've got a lot more work to do there. The easiest spot to start with our PAC students is our older students that are of the same age as students in the preschool classroom. So we're even harder with our twos because we've got students in the PAC program. So we are working with some consultants right now to re-envision our service delivery for PAC classrooms.

[00:49:39] And we're piloting two different elementary schools right now. Not made as much for the PAC as we have for PCCB. So when you say not as much growth, I would like to know how much growth? Off the top of my head, those numbers I don't have, so I'll have to get back to you on that. So I'm a little disappointed, Dr. Reed, that we don't have that information.

[00:49:58] When we're talking about inclusive preschool, we should have the information for all of our preschool classrooms. Even if there's not much growth, we should still be transparent about what has happened. Yes, ma'am. We'll have something before we present at the board meeting. Thank you. So let me dig a little more into this.

[00:50:15] So when you're looking at the non-COLEP located, and I appreciate the different models, How, in the paired model or the single teacher model that you're using, are any of these models being used for PAC? So I am going to phone a friend here.

[00:50:31] Ms. Pilsen is here with us today who probably has a better understanding of the data. She might even know the data that I don't know off the top of my head. So Lisa, if you could help us with that one. Sure. Good morning, afternoon, whatever time it is. Hi. So, yes, we do have, and I was actually specifically looking at your district.

[00:50:53] We have a school in your district that has the single-teacher inclusion model where they work with PAC students. So in the single-teacher inclusion model, it's 8-5.

[00:51:11] Eight students without an IEP, five students with an IEP. Those five students with IEPs are from the PAC classrooms in that particular school. And that's something that we're scaling based on students' needs. The decision of the IEP teams, as far as community peers are concerned, there are, we have 20 peers that are in PAC classrooms this year.

[00:51:42] Mike, correct me if I'm wrong. So that is something that, that is another area of growth. Whenever students are being, whenever a team is making the decision for inclusion for a child that is three or four years old, three turning four, because we find that the goal is for our students that have been in a self-contained program going into an inclusion classroom, we want to make sure that our students are having the best possible chance to have full success in a full-day kindergarten class.

[00:52:21] So in looking at the students, the team is looking for not what program, but what the level of needs are. So when I can't say to you that we don't have students with their level of services, autism, in inclusion classrooms, because we do.

[00:52:44] We do. We definitely do. We're not looking at it from a programmatic standpoint. We're looking at it based on what the student's needs are, what the knowledgeable committee has about the child.

[00:53:01] Of course, you have to take the student's needs into account. The entire purpose of inclusion is the environment first. And so I think we may want to balance those two considerations.

[00:53:18] So you're saying there's one in my district. How many are there entirely in the county? For the single teacher model, there's only 12 in the county. So for inclusive models of PAC, how many are there in the county? So, again, whenever we're developing inclusion models, we're not developing them based on PAC or ECCD.

[00:53:41] BASING THAT ON STUDENT NEED. HOW MANY MODELS OF INCLUSION HAVE NOT STUDENTS WITH AUTISM BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO BE VERY CAREFUL TO PRESUME THAT EVERY STUDENT WITH AUTISM IS IN THE PAC PROGRAM. THAT IS NOT ACTUALLY EITHER. SO HOW MANY PAC CLASSROOMS OR STUDENTS WHO QUALIFY FOR PAC ARE IN ONE OF THESE THREE INCLUSION MODELS?

[00:54:06] I WILL GET THAT INFORMATION TO YOU. But we have many. Between the paired classroom model and the inclusion, the single teacher itinerant models, we do have many of our students that are being included who are served through PAC.

[00:54:31] I apologize. I just don't have the numbers off the top of my head. And I couldn't have put Lisa on the spot to ask her if she had on the top of her head. I could pull them up. We'll get them for you. But I'll just reiterate my earlier point, just to be clear. We have not made the same level of growth and progress with our PAC program inclusion as we have with our ECCP program.

[00:54:54] I'll just go back to, oh, I have one comment if you didn't want to sit down. What we're going to do, Ms. Dixit will be the last person that's having their first turn because we're so late into this. We're going to take all go-backs at the end of the next presentation. As you said, we could spend the entire time just on this and we still have to go to multilingual.

[00:55:13] So keep your questions that you have for this, but then we're going to go into the next presentation or we won't get through that. - I'll keep my questions brief. Thank you for the presentation. It's a lot of effort which goes into this program, I can see, and we would like this to pre-offer to all our students, obviously coming to Fairfax County.

[00:55:37] But there's a gap, everybody mentioned that. And I was wondering how much of outreach we are doing to the families, especially the Hispanic families or economically disadvantaged families. Maybe some people don't know about there's a pre-K program. Do they, like I know 40% of the parents said they don't want to send their kids or they want to keep them home.

[00:55:59] Is it because they don't know about the options out there? Well, I will ask Lisa maybe to talk to us a little bit about the outreach that we do because that's in partnership with the county actually as well because the county program, or the county, I should say, offers certain early childhood programs, and then obviously in FCPS we have the pre-K program.

[00:56:20] So we do that in partnership. But I think there's always people that probably don't know. But I think when you look at that data that we tried to collect from the survey, we're trying to figure out if you knew about it, what factors prevented you from being interested in enrolling in the program.

[00:56:36] And there's just a lot of different ones, as we pointed out in the report. And I'll just say even anecdotally, like in my own house, my first child started preschool at age two. My second, my wife, did not want to start preschool until age four. So that was just a personal family choice for different reasons, and we're seeing some of that in the survey data.

[00:56:54] But we do do a lot of outreach and partnership with the county. Lisa? Yes. So great question. One of the things that we do as a division in March, we do March into registration, where we definitely are targeting our families who are not only registering for kindergarten because we want to ensure that families get the information and get students enrolled and registered as soon as possible, but also to register for pre-K as well if that is a, if the FCPS pre-K program is a program that's appropriate for the family.

[00:57:30] We do recruiting events at schools during the summer. Although we did not have the Bridge to Cave program this summer, schools that offered the summer meal programs, We had tables set up at those programs, any program that had summer school sites that offered any type of summer school for school-age students, whether it was in elementary school or not, or targeted at young children.

[00:57:57] There are families that have children that are younger. We've had staff go out for those events. We partner with the county on varying broad communication pieces, social media platforms, things of that nature.

[00:58:17] And we rely heavily on our principals to share information in their community newsletters, their marquees. We post yard signs, banners, things of that nature. Yeah, that's quite extensive. I would just like to add that maybe places of worship, so it gives, you know, churches, mosques, temples, you know, a lot of families go there, take their kids, and just to know, because awareness, like you said, is really important.

[00:58:45] I'll just ask one more question, and then we'll, I guess, go back to our next presentation. Our students, we can use technology, I guess, a lot in these days, and these kids are born smart now, like they can use iPad from like age two and do things, and they use technology much more than, you know, many generations before them.

[00:59:11] So my question was that I understand a lot of parents decide to keep their students home, but can they be given some at-home activities to do, reading or just doing something technology-based where they can spend 30 minutes a day, and maybe with some instructions, online instructions, I wouldn't say the word online instructions, that's not the right word, but something they can collaborate with the school system and they can do at home if they don't want to send their child to school.

[00:59:44] - Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. We do do some of that now. We create materials and resources that families can use. We really leaned a lot into those partnerships with our old Bridge to K program that we can't fund anymore because of the loss of ESSER dollars, and that was a program for students didn't do preschool. We gave them some additional summertime in school. The way that we kind of do it now is largely through the Family Resource Center through some of our programs, Family Literacy Programs, the HIPPI Program, the Home Instruction for Preschool Youth Program,

[01:00:22] but we could do more on that front for sure, so we'll take a look at how we could expand some of those supports. Thank you, and because I was not born technologically smart, I failed to at the beginning of this thank you for all of your work because i was having a technological glitch so thank you for your presentation and for all the work that you've done for this and i don't want an answer now but i would like an answer in the future the programs like hippie and family lit how many how many students are covered and families are covered and how are they funded and what is the threat to that funding because that's how we

[01:00:59] capture a large amount of kids and I think we don't give them enough kudos for the work that they do and I think it's important for us to number one know how many kids are covered and number one how they're funded and how precarious the funding is for those programs you could give that to me later because we want to go into the next presentation that we could spend another whole day on all right so the second area of our focus for goal one is on our multilingual learner progress towards English language proficiency and we know that

[01:01:38] multilingual learners that are able to make consistent progress towards English language proficiency are more likely to have the language skills needed to gain knowledge complete assignments and communicate their understandings including on assessments beyond academics communication is also core for our students developing friendships and feeling safe supported and empowered we continue to focus on annual progress for our students as we know the more language skills they acquire the more successful they will be research also points to a number of factors that affect whether multilingual learners will make the needed progress including instruction advising and student and

[01:02:14] family empowerment so to provide a little context first this slide presents our end of your membership data for last school year and based on this you can see that a little over one in five of our students was a current multilingual learner with about half of them being levels one or two or students who have minimal to some social and academic language skills.

[01:02:36] And an additional 60% of our students are former multilingual learners levels 6A through D who are still being monitored. So each year our multilingual learners' English language skills are assessed through the WIDA Access. And this assessment evaluates skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

[01:02:55] And the state sets expectations for multilingual learners to make regular progress towards English language proficiency each year. and the ultimate goal is for our students to successfully exit services. So overall, and across all of our student groups, the percent of multilingual learners making progress towards English language proficiency continues to increase over time.

[01:03:16] All student groups have improved 10 or more percentage points from the baseline, with economically disadvantaged students and Hispanic students showing the largest increases from the baseline, up 14 and 13 percentage points, respectively.

[01:03:31] This year's goal report also includes data on the percent of multilingual learners who successfully exited the program last year by gaining English language proficiency. So this isn't a data point where we would expect to see it close to 100% as we don't expect our students to exit when they're just beginning to acquire English language skills.

[01:03:50] At baseline, we had 10% of our multilingual learners exiting the program successfully. Last year, that rate increased to 14% and rates have been increasing steadily across almost all student groups as well. This slide shows both progress and rates of successful exit by English language proficiency, or ELP level, for last year.

[01:04:12] Some improvements from the baseline across the board for all ELP levels, and for both sets of data, we saw the largest increases from baseline for students at level four in their English proficiency. For our students categorized as ELP level four, 62% met the state standard progress, which was up 18 percentage points from the baseline.

[01:04:34] And in addition, over half of ELP level four students exited the program successfully, which was up 10 percentage points from the baseline. And because academic language proficiency takes on average from five to seven years to attain, we expect more students exiting as their ELP level increases, which is what we see in our data.

[01:04:54] So the successes we're observing in this data are as a result of an intentional focus on four strategies, each with an associated set of actions, and we're gonna provide some highlights of the work we're doing, and again, with more details in our full report. So our first strategy is focusing on direct, explicit instruction provided to students in English language development.

[01:05:14] Last year, we purchased K-12 basal resources for English language development for all schools and began piloting ELD resources at 15 secondary schools. The digital resources provide students with extra practice in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

[01:05:31] This year, we also have new requirements and resources for schools, including ELD common assessments that provide our teachers and schools with additional ways to progress, monitor, and support instruction, and new data tools and walkthrough guides to ensure multilingual learners receive appropriate services.

[01:05:49] Our second strategy focuses on enhancing English language acquisition in content area instruction. We continue to provide training in Project LADD and SIOP, which are two models of sheltered instruction that help content teachers serve multilingual learners their classrooms. This year teachers also have access to new data tools to see students assess strengths and growth areas on the WIDA to best support their instructional needs. And in addition we'll be launching a multilingual learner micro-credential this year to increase teacher skills in supporting our students and we continue to expand the percent of teachers with an ESAU

[01:06:25] endorsement. Our third strategy focuses on supporting students in schools who are not yet making expected progress. Last summer we offered programming to our long-term multilingual learners. A long-term multilingual learner is a student who's received ESO services for over five years and younger students who are at risk for becoming long-term multilingual learners were also included in summer programming. We're piloting a new AI tool, Reading Assistant with AMIRA, that supports literacy instruction for multilingual learners.

[01:06:58] And for schools with lower rates of students making growth on the WIDA, they continue to receive additional support and monitor through Project Momentum. And additionally, some schools have a required school improvement and innovation, or CIP, based on last year's WIDA progress.

[01:07:15] And finally, across all of our school reports, we see that multilingual learners with disabilities require additional support. This year, we're providing monthly professional development to ESAU teachers working with multilingual learners with disabilities. And in addition, the ESAU and special education offices will jointly provide professional development to enhance accessibility to core curriculum for all students.

[01:07:36] Our final strategy focuses on engaging families in their students' educational progress. To help families support their children's language growth, we provide family-friendly materials to explain ELD instruction and reinforce the importance of maintaining one's home language.

[01:07:51] In addition, we offer resources and programs to support students continuing their language skills at home, including our family literacy program and access to family license for students using the Summit K-12 program. And then for our public, this slide shows the school board's 2025 state and federal legislative program as it relates to our multilingual learners, and the continued advocacy for appropriate resources and the appropriate assessment of multilingual learners are clear themes from last year.

[01:08:21] In summary on this section, we've made large gains from the baseline and recognize that just under half of our multilingual learners still require additional support to make growth with WIDA. A higher percentage exited ESOS services last year, which is important as we prepare our multilingual learners for success both now and in the future and finally we saw some of our largest gains for our ELP level four students in both growth and exiting services so at this time that concludes our goal one presentation I'll turn it back to our meeting managers thank you based on our last section discussion we'll start with two minutes just to make sure that we have enough

[01:08:59] time to cover everything and go back to the go back so dr. Anderson I'm gonna go back to the go-backs but I'm gonna go back to my original point and just go down my line what I was hoping to have when I talked about the desegregating of data in terms of student performance because I want to be sure that especially with the pre-k experience I want to be sure that it has some impact because when I look at some of the data that's provided here students with disabilities 90 plus percent are participating in pre-k multi-race students from 88 to 92 504 students from 84 to 92 percent of those students participate in pre-k but

[01:09:38] yet 58 percent of them are performing well on these assessments so that's not the only factor it is a factor but I'd like to not have to do this on my own so if you can provide that that would be helpful and also I would love to hear some of your thoughts regarding the type of pre-k how are we evaluating you talk about the ratings etc how is that being evaluated do we have students who are in this kind of pre-k are performing those is there a case to be made here if there's some data to support that that I think would be super helpful with skip so we have not gone as far in our analysis of looking at if kids had a

[01:10:18] pre-k experience outside of FCPS was it a quality pre-k experience right now the data that we've been looking at has been based on the kindergarten entry form that families fill out that indicates did you have a child have a pre-k experience in what kind of setting and for how much time essentially is the information we're collecting I think you're asking a really important question because the research really ties to having that quality pre-k experience being a strong indicator of school readiness and that's certainly something that we can start to take a look at to help support the board's conversations thank you my second point on this area is regarding the goals that are being set I appreciate the year-over-year data in terms of where we

[01:10:57] want kids to be in the spring it just seems to me that it might be more impactful or even more accurate to set goals based on where they are in the fall if they are you know an X place in the fall we want them to be in place Y in the spring so having a one I'd like to have a side-by-side comparison with those students with spring and fall data rather than year over year because one they're different kids and two they're coming in without us being able to control what you know they are so it's not as helpful it's it's better to just be able to see the growth that we able to we are able to impact from fall to

[01:11:34] spring so if that's a possibility I would be very much interested in that data and it's eight seconds and I'll take a go go back this size more I wasn't sure there's a response to dr. Anderson oh oh I'm sorry I think you're raising a really important question which is the growth data and it's something that we certainly as we were putting together this goal report also had that reflection on recognizing that that fall data is not something that we have

[01:12:11] control over but really recognizing right the starting point for students and I think that that is absolutely something we can take a look at how do we bring more of those growth measures into not just this goal report but multiple goal reports thank you that's okay thank you just want to make sure Dr. Anderson could have a question answered so Dr. Reed and team when you bring back more information about the PAC, I would love to have more information about the reimagining and what your team's timeline and metrics are for that inclusion project

[01:12:48] to make sure it's going hand in hand with the rest of it. So that was my follow-up question on that. I do want to thank all of our kindergarten teachers who are working incredibly hard with such a wide range of students, so kudos to all of them. I did have a question. You mentioned earlier, you know, some students are entering kindergarten already reading. What programs What's the metrics to be having in place for those who are already leading or already exceeding the benchmarks when they enter?

[01:13:14] Because I want to make sure we're fostering their strengths, too, right? Like, closing the gaps is key and critical, and we need to do, and I appreciate the work, but I would love to hear on the goal report what's the work to foster those who come in with that ability to help them grow. I think, like, it's what I'm getting at, what's the growth metric for all students?

[01:13:34] Well, I think it's a great question. I mean, I think we're going to need to probably think about how we could support a little bit, But still look at where students are at in the growth that they're making, even if they're both benchmarked on these assessments that we have, right?

[01:13:52] So that helps us identify those strengths, which is important when we design our differentiated construction to be able to continue to push them, which we do, you know, we do definitely do that. But I think that's an area we probably need to think about how we would highlight and share what that work looks like a little bit.

[01:14:09] have been focused on whether or not you meet the benchmark or if you're below the benchmark. We haven't really talked about if you're above the benchmark, but that's a good experience. Yeah, and Dr. Reed, I would just encourage you. I mean, I think one thing when we were doing the strategic plan, right, as a team, we were really talking about fostering student strengths and helping all of them grow and achieve, but the goal reports have really been focused on more of the gap closing, which, again, is vital, but it's a piece of what we were doing with the strategic plan.

[01:14:40] It's not all of it. And so I think it's really important for our strategic plan to show that growth for all of our students because if we're reporting on it, then we're consistently doing it. And I know it's being done in our classrooms. I've seen it in my school visits. Absolutely, it's being done.

[01:14:56] But again, if it's in the report, it's consistent. And I know we're used to say every child by name and by need, but I think our strategic plan makes it clear to be every child by name and by strength. And so what are we reporting on on fostering those students' strengths?

[01:15:12] So we have growth metrics and measures for everybody. So I just would want to, for all the goal reports, leave you with that thought. Thank you. Dr. Anderson, first of all, we're a go-go-go-back.

[01:15:30] I have a lot of things here, so I'm going to try to go quickly. One of the things I also wanted to raise, as Dr. Reed mentioned, that Dr. Presidio, Dr. King, and Dr. Ponce, you're the closing the achievement gap team.

[01:15:47] I'd like to see that data a little bit more present, because right now I have to dig through it in the document. I think we have to be a little bit intentional about calling out where it is and what the impact is going to be in the future targets. Because some of the future targets actually make the achievement gap even worse.

[01:16:03] And so I think there has to be a little bit of intentionality there. And one thing that I wanted to raise to Dr. Presidio when you talked about the resources that are provided, often when I'm at the schools, I kind of experience a little bit of disconnect because the central office believes all the resources that are being provided are very helpful or are being used regularly.

[01:16:29] Well, there's a different application at the school site. How do we bridge the gap between we're saying do this, do that, what are the expectations, and what exactly is happening with what is being provided here? I'm just wondering who's kind of doing that monitoring. Yeah, so I think the first thing I would say is we want to provide resources that are shelf-ready to use for time, right?

[01:16:57] But we also know, and I'm reminded because my wife is a teacher in FCPS, that we have all kinds of things that we share with teachers that maybe at all times aren't always as reasonable to be able to do, right? So I think what the goal is is to provide as many resources as we can and make sure that we're providing that support.

[01:17:16] But it doesn't mean necessarily that every teacher is going to use every resource that we've created and provided. They need to use them with the students when they need them in a way that's going to be helpful and lead to. So the work that we've been trying to do is to build the capacity of instructional leaders in the building to understand how to support the teachers on the ground, because we're not in 198 schools every day in instructional services or DSS.

[01:17:40] So we work very diligently with our administrators and our instructional leaders in our building, depending on the content area we're talking about. We might meet as frequently as every two weeks or once a month to make sure that everybody's aware of the supports and materials that are available.

[01:17:57] Principals in the school, along with their instructional leadership team, is the first line of monitoring for fidelity of implementation. There's an expectation that something be used. For example, our new benchmark curriculum. We're very clear that that is an expectation that that must be used, must be taught with fidelity, and that is monitored at the school level through walkthroughs, led by them.

[01:18:18] The next thing that we're doing, again, and Dr. Ponce and Dr. King are key in this, is division-level walkthroughs so that we can gauge and see are the things that are required versus the things that might be nice to do actually happening consistently.

[01:18:37] We're continuing to try to deepen our work. I think you might have heard us talk about that previously. But we have very targeted walkthrough tools for literacy expectations. We're talking, obviously, in this report about our multilingual learners as well. What should instructional supports look like for multilingual learners, particularly English learners?

[01:18:57] which is critical that all students that are multilingual learners receive that. So we've got different walkthroughs for different expectations, and we monitor those first at the school level and then at the division. And then, you know, we're just here to support what schools might be spread.

[01:19:13] Thank you, Mr. Moon. Okay, I know that I only have two minutes, so I'm going to speak first. That I agree that it takes at least five to seven years to acquire academic languages for the second language learners.

[01:19:34] For many of the students, may even need longer than that. I'm not going to claim that what I experienced as a second language learner when I came to the U.S. as a teenager is the only best way to teach our second language learners.

[01:19:59] And the way that the opportunities I was given through our ESOL program back at ESL at the school that I attended, they were very open to providing flexible and creative opportunities for me to really learn the language that I needed.

[01:20:21] I did not have five to seven years before I went to college. I needed to learn much more quickly than that. And they let me, they let me go to regular classes from ESL and be able to return back to the ESL whenever I felt that I needed to return or wanted to try regular classes.

[01:20:41] That kind of flexibility, you know, giving students who wants to learn at his own pace or her pace he's on her knee i think we should give it a try uh you know that may require some you know training work on the part of not just the easel teachers but regular teachers who may be seeing this easel students coming in maybe once a week or twice a week but the students might want to give it a try to see whether uh you know that would be more helpful for the

[01:21:18] students' growth in acquiring English language before he or she gets to college. - Yes, sir, Mr. Moon, and I think, you know, we hear that from a number of our multilingual students that feel like they're ready for more accelerated coursework.

[01:21:37] There's a, as with all students, there's a continuum of expectation and readiness to accelerate learning for sure, so I appreciate you calling that out. Thank you.

[01:21:52] - That's it. - Thank you for this presentation. Again, this is a great program, north of new initiations. I have seen that in middle school when I visited that how multilingual learners are using different tools and differentiated learning in the classrooms.

[01:22:13] And their classroom sizes are smaller than the regular classroom sizes too. And one of the presentation I was attended was for a portrait of graduate from each student and giving their journey throughout the year and presenting different collaboration, what they did and communication.

[01:22:32] And the collaborative environment was very impressive in the classroom. It was more like everybody was helping each other, like, yeah, go for it, yeah, you can do it. So I feel like the multilingual learner, just like Mr. Moon said, they're very engaged and very smart kids And they want to excel, they want to be successful.

[01:22:55] Coming to the country as an immigrant myself, and I'll speak to a lot of us, we just have to work harder sometimes to just get to the point where everybody else is. So I feel like the right tools are given to them.

[01:23:10] It's gonna make a lot of impact. The only thing I wanted to ask, what is ELP level four on slide 36, which you have mentioned has a great improvement in proficiency.

[01:23:28] - So on slide 36, we're talking about ELP level four and proficiency is at the top of that. So it's showing that over our baseline, which was a 4% of our students who are labeled ELP level four, that's based on their WIDA assessment.

[01:23:49] So it's ranking how proficient you are in your English. So level four is the highest level that you achieve before you exit into monitoring status. So our baseline was 44% of our students achieving that target. And then last year, we had increased that to 62%.

[01:24:04] So that is a good increase. One thing that's not on this slide that I would point out in terms of the research, which continues to be reinforced in more recent studies, but this goes back several decades, of a five- to seven-year time span to develop English proficiency.

[01:24:23] Where we're at, which does not show on this slide, is that students that are with us for five years or less than five years, 67% of those students exit ESOL services after attaining proficiency. So the majority of our students are doing it at the low end of the research-based time frame that it takes for students to develop.

[01:24:45] And you don't see that on here because you only see the level four. Okay, one more question. On slide 38, you mentioned piloted Summit K-12 Connect to Literacy, a digital ELT resource. And I wanted to know if this is going to be also introduced to the elementary schools.

[01:25:04] Yeah, so we're still, in fact, maybe Rich Polio is here, our director of ESOL services. I could let Rich maybe talk a little bit about that because that's one of those resources that we piloted last year that we're trying to expand this year that provides that ability to reinforce learning outside of the regular school day.

[01:25:22] That's something that students can continue to use and practice at home. And it even has resources associated with it to help parents and family members. So Rich, do you wanna say a little bit more about Summit? - Sure, so Summit, the Summit K-12 program, the additional, it's a digital program that's supplemental to English language development.

[01:25:42] It's currently at 18 middle and high schools and it is, this year was introduced by the Title I office at 46 elementary schools. So we have it in both elementary, middle, and high this year. I'm going to take a quick turn before I go to some go-backs.

[01:26:07] I have a couple of questions. Well, I have one question in terms of when a newcomer comes in and you assess where they are in terms of content comprehension versus English language comprehension, like if you have that data, because we have some very high-functioning kids that come in that know the content but don't know the language.

[01:26:30] So that's my one question, if we capture that data. And my second question is that I would really appreciate an explanation of what proficiency is in terms of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. I understand this because I have had to explain it countless times to a lot of parents who say my kid no longer needs these services because they speak the language.

[01:26:54] So for our listening audience, if you would just explain what that, when we're measuring proficiency, can you explain what that looks like? Yes, I'll start and then just invite Rich to jump in with anything to add or correct anything that I might say. First on the proficiency, there's a real difference between what we might term kind of conversational or basic proficiency.

[01:27:18] So I might have some vocabulary that I can use to interact and have conversation with the community, But that doesn't mean that I'm proficient in academic English, right? So when we talk about proficiency, we mean at the same level of performance as a native speaker of the language, in this case English, would be at.

[01:27:38] So, for example, if you think about a high school class and you might be studying history, you need to be able to read complex text with vocabulary, make inferences, have strong comprehension skills, Be able to reason and analyze in that language in a way that is going to give you access to all the content learning that you need to do in that target language.

[01:27:58] And if you think about, sometimes I think about, if you were to drop me off in Germany, I might have some conversational skills and background with language, but I wouldn't be ready to learn about German history and German in a self-directed manner. And there's a real difference between that basic conversational proficiency and academic proficiency.

[01:28:17] So that's the first thing. And then, can you remind me of the second question that you had asked? Oh, about assessment, about assessment and newcomers, I apologize. So when we assess students that have a home language, when we do registration, we ask questions, and we're required to do this by state and federal law.

[01:28:33] If you speak a language other than English in the home, there's a home language survey. If you do, we're required by law to assess you to see if you need ESOL services. And when we have those students coming in, we also assess their literacy skills, their math skills in their native language to have a better understanding of their content knowledge versus their language proficiency.

[01:28:58] And similar to some of the questions Mr. Moon was asking, we don't restrict students in terms of their access to grade-level content. We enroll them directly in grade-level classes, ninth-grade English, for example, if you're a ninth grader, along with the English language development support that you need to increase your English language.

[01:29:18] But what ends up happening sometimes is students have a really rigorous academic course load and they might want to take other elective courses that they're not able to take because they're taking English language development course. So it does create some difficulties at times in the scheduling.

[01:29:35] Rich, do you want to add anything? I think you answered that very well, Dr. Persidio. I guess the only thing I would add is that we do notice the difference between our students students who are still receiving multilingual learner services and those who have exited those who have reached proficiency it does show up in our like for example SOL pass rates and so you'd see like one other definition might be that you know while many of our multilingual learners are able to pass SOL we know that our multilingual learners our former multilingual learners

[01:30:10] or students who have exited are able to pass state assessments at the same rate as our non-multi language so they're doing really fantastic when they thank you I appreciate that work and I also appreciate that we had asked before that you break down the information versus the levels and I appreciate that you listen to us and gave us that I will dr. Ricky thank you now I feel like I'm

[01:30:47] I'm now getting into the second half of the report. With multi-language learners, the progress as identified in the documents, it didn't meet the target of 59% from 56%, it made one-point growth.

[01:31:02] And I know we've been super intentional about having lots of resources to that population. So can we talk about the root cause analysis as to why we didn't get the growth that was intended? Well, I mean, I think again it's multifaceted.

[01:31:22] There's a lot of factors that go in there. There's a lot of factors that impact the learning rates. It's not just your language. There's a lot of other things going on there. So what we try to do when we're not hitting targets for individual students or schools, try to do some of that root cause analysis.

[01:31:42] At the school level, one of the things that we see is maybe the instruction wasn't as aligned as it needed to be to support student development on those targets. So the ESOL office works very closely, again, in partnership with Dr. King and Dr. Ponce, to work with schools that have not met those growth targets.

[01:32:03] Every one of those schools develops a school improvement plan after doing root cause analysis as part of their school improvement planning process. All schools that didn't meet their root of growth targets are required to have school improvement plan goals. Then we provide training and support to those schools to make sure to hopefully make greater growth in the following year.

[01:32:26] And then at an individual student level, the ESOL office will provide individual student consultations with the student, the family, and the staff at the school to do root cause analysis to understand why an individual student maybe is not making the expected growth and develop basically a support plan for them to try to get the instruction and supports.

[01:32:49] If you look at it at the school level with a certain targeted group of support level as well. Thank you. That's helpful. Dr. Reed, the reason why I wanted to just hone in on this is because we have just a few years left on this plan, and everyone's supposed to be at that 100% rate.

[01:33:09] So it's going to get real really quickly. And my wondering is if we're making single percentage points growth now when this is supposed to be kind of the easiest section, Are we going to be successful with the end of the plan in 2030?

[01:33:27] So thank you for the question, and we're at least moving in the right direction. Sometimes, like a flywheel, you have to engage in a practice over time that's predictable, and at some point it catches, and then we're able to accelerate progress.

[01:33:44] I also believe that for the first time, we've actually had multilingual literacy materials last year. One year is not gonna turn around data that's been a little anemic for a period of time, but I believe that the focus on this work will continue to garner an acceleration of achievement here.

[01:34:12] And our staff are working extraordinarily hard, our children are working extraordinarily hard, and our families are very supportive. So we believe we're moving in the right direction and we're gonna make the progress we need to make. - Sure, my last set of questions is regarding the SOL data.

[01:34:28] I know we didn't, may I just continue? I don't see any other, I know we didn't go over them, but they're in the back pages, 49, 51, et cetera, where we talk about the SOL data for third grade. We did not meet target in that category.

[01:34:44] The achievement gap also increased 53%. What are the expected changes so that we meet the target for these subgroups. Again, we're going in the wrong direction. We're not going in the direction that we wanna go into.

[01:34:59] And let me also just pull that in with the middle school data, the fifth to sixth grade. I am actually very concerned about that because the targets were not met for two years in a row and several groups went down.

[01:35:14] Similarly, with the sixth to seventh grade achievement data, That achievement gap is 69 points. Again, these are areas of great concern to me. The eighth grade SOL, again, we did not make that target except for 504, multiracial, and white students.

[01:35:34] That achievement gap is 71 points. These are great concern. And I won't even couple this yet with the new cut scores. So let's just talk about current state. We didn't talk about this and we needed to because the progress is not there.

[01:35:57] - So I think I will start by just saying, our focus on goal three is gonna be both on language arts and math and science. We are gonna have a broader conversation that's gonna be inclusive of those SOLs. So I think we'll be prepared to dive into a deeper dialogue in our goal three report.

[01:36:12] And we did that intentionally because we know, while the goal one has these measures included in it, the space that we've sort of made in this conversation has been to focus on school readiness. So I wanna make sure that everyone is aware that that is our plan where we're going to dive deeper into those data sets.

[01:36:29] - Okay, thank you. But just kind of overall, Dr. Reed, can you give us some sense of the new cut scores, how they will impact what these data show? - I don't know about this specific data set, but the new cut scores are certainly, we need to recognize the new cut scores are also coupled with a more rigorous assessment.

[01:36:49] The SOLs in math and reading recently, the tests themselves were redone, and by all accounts made more rigorous. So when you make the test harder and then make it harder to pass, you've got two concerns that are happening simultaneously for our children and our staff.

[01:37:08] So I know that our cut scores, there have been varying modeling that's been done and we're gonna be sharing some of that in an upcoming academic matters, but it could have an impact of upwards of 30% and perhaps larger in some areas of the county and that's significant.

[01:37:27] We're gonna have children one day that feel like they've met the SOLs or even highly achieving and the next day haven't even passed with the same performance and again on more rigorous tests. So I think that if I were contemplating raising the bar for excellence, My expectation and I think what I've talked with you as a board about is we need to take the rigor of the courses we're requiring such as requiring advanced math sooner actually does raise rigor There's nothing about changing scores

[01:38:05] that makes something more rigorous or there's Nothing about that strategy that supports excellence and education for children. So thank you for that I just wanted to make sure I took the opportunity to bring that into the conversation because I think it's going to be rude awakening for parents and students when those new those new cut scores are applied and we could not stress enough how detrimental it's going to be to our overall picture and I would anticipate a significant rejigging of our goals in

[01:38:37] our targets or not well I one of the things that we've worked on for about a year and we're going to share I believe for this coming meeting is our own Fairfax County public school criteria for success in other words our metric that we as a county and we as a community believe best describes excellence in education for this county and our children and we need to stabilize that metric and work with it over a period of time excellence doesn't

[01:39:14] happen overnight right it's a process of deliberate discipline behavior that occurs over time and in this case as we've made significant progress particularly in our mathematics it's something that as we move forward it's going to be critical that we think about what do we define as excellence because if we let someone else create that narrative and define us then I mean we just we simply can't allow that we need to carry our own narrative we need to be clear about what we believe excellence is and looks like, the world's changing

[01:39:52] right now. The 22nd century skills that are expected for our children to be successful are different than those skills were several decades ago and I think here in Fairfax County we've been a leader nationally and we need to continue to be by setting those metrics for ourselves and not allowing those metrics to become politicized. Oh I agree with you 100% I think my one concern is that the accountability to the external measures impact our accreditation which impacts how our schools view well how our community view our schools what I think it's always a good idea to share our narrative I think

[01:40:30] it's inescapable that we are going to be linked to the external factors and just balancing that is going to be a tightrope yes ma'am I will say that we have the number one students and staff in the country and just recently as recently as this week the 30 top elementary schools in the Commonwealth were published and 18 of those are Fairfax County Public School elementary schools which is more than half of 30 and we're only 14 percent of the students in the Commonwealth so we continue to demonstrate excellence across the board

[01:41:07] and I'm proud of the work our young people are doing and I absolutely last question because this is more of a process question. When we vote on this on Thursday, are we voting because we've seen the data, we've talked about the data and you know yes we accept it or that we are affirming that the growth is sufficient? I believe you're going to be voting it's an and that you've seen the data, that it's clear and we're making adequate progress. Thank you. I'd like to

[01:41:43] take a quick turn when we're talking about cut scores because we are talking about multilingual learners and I'd like for you to please explain the change that has occurred in terms of our multilingual learners and how they now are required to take SOLs that will count towards accreditation after. Just explain it, please. We have our resident accountability expert, to Ms. Huffman in the room, so maybe we should invite her up if she doesn't mind, because

[01:42:19] she attends all of the Board of Education meetings, works with the VDOE, and is one of our main advocates with respect to all of our accountability work. So there are a number of changes that are, I think, complex and confusing, and hopefully Bettris will probably do it.

[01:42:40] I know she'll do a better job than I will highlighting the most important factors, particularly as it pertains to multi-lingual learners i was trying to buy you time to find a microphone but very good um so the change in the accountability system that went into place it was approved by the state board of education last september and went into effect for this past school year with those changes our multi-lingual learners became accountable after one full academic year

[01:43:16] of public education in the united states so 12 months of public schools following that the students assessment scores would count within accountability and those results we believe will be released probably next week from the state to see that first kind of baseline of that impact in terms of the students impact the changes and cut scores additionally will have impacts on all of our students but the change from 11 semesters before the students were

[01:43:51] counting in the accountability system to now essentially three semesters is very significant and definitely worth noting and not best practice um so i think that that's important when we talk about and we had this conversation last year and we said we need to produce our own report card based on facts and reality uh mr frisch thank you i just wanted to clarify the board activity at the meeting regarding the goal report so our governance manual does not speak to

[01:44:30] approving based on adequate progress on goals it is an acceptance of the goal report being transmitted to the board and then the work that underpins that throughout the executive limitations which are all pointed at the goals is where we discuss engage debate say yay or nay to the adequacy of the progress that's where that work happens so i've always based and the governance

[01:45:02] manual speaks to accepting the report as being transmitted the evaluation of the work done is through the executive limitations so additionally the executive limitations are the only mechanism that we have at least in our current governance for course correction or asking for additional information other another mechanism would be a follow-on motion to accepting that we've received

[01:45:33] the report but we have a very specific approach to the board saying whether or not we believe the the work is adequate, and that's in our executive limitations conversations. So other than that, I appreciate the information that's been shared.

[01:45:53] I share some of the same concerns that colleagues have, particularly around how we get from, you know, point A to point B with the time left in the strategic plan. I will say that there have been reports that we've received previously that have showed surprising jumps in numbers.

[01:46:14] And so while something might look slow one year, other years it might show a bigger leap. I think just last year or the year before, we saw a 15% or 16% increase in proficiency, which was unexpected and surprising.

[01:46:31] Maybe it was 10%. So I look forward to further conversations. Thanks. Thank you for that, Mr. Frisch. Seeing no other placards, we can adjourn for lunch.

[01:46:51] take their seats we're going to get started in the next portion of our work session today which is our AI future in Fairfax County Public Schools and I'm going to turn it over to dr. Reed thank you thank you miss lady and I really am excited this afternoon I know the board's been very excited to to talk

[01:47:31] about artificial intelligence and all of the potential and I'm thrilled that this afternoon we're going to hear from one of our leaders in the field nationally and mr sethe will introduce him in a moment i really want to manage expectations for this afternoon i feel like sometimes do you know we start this conversation and it's a ginormous topic ai right it's you can't open a news release of any type without seeing some article good bad

[01:48:03] otherwise about it and so in managing expectations for today's conversation i'm really looking forward to this being a level setting for us as a team so that we all understand what we mean when we're talking about ai because i think that one of the things that babak said when mr sethe and i met with him earlier is often if we all had a bubble over our heads and we mention ai we all think we know we're talking about the same thing but in reality we're not and for us to chart a path forward i think it's important that we're all clear about definitions and what we really mean

[01:48:40] by AI and what we think about when we set a path forward. So it's a level setting today, and there is going to be opportunity for many more conversations moving forward. We're calling this topic area meeting the moment, and that came from that same conversation, which is the sense that we have to meet this moment as a school division, a community, and a country.

[01:49:04] And we're going to have our November 3rd evening meeting to invite our community into the conversation as we shape the future of Fairfax County Public Schools. So I will turn it over to Mr. Sethi and look forward to 90 minutes of robust conversation.

[01:49:24] Thank you Dr. Reed. I'm excited to have Dr. Babak Mostagami join us today. He started as a teacher in Michigan and he worked at opening up the first AI school in Gwinnett County Public Schools which which was slightly before Chad GPD era.

[01:49:41] So clearly he's been at it, doing it for a while. And now he advises institutions publicly, privately on the future of AI and education. So excited to have you here, Bob. - Thank you so much, Dr. Reed, Mr. Sethi, board members, it's great to be with you here today.

[01:49:58] What I'm gonna do is take you through a briefing. That's brief, it's gonna be short. It's not gonna have everything in it, but hopefully what it'll do is it'll give you bit of a sense of the sort of basics of AI and those sorts of things many of you are likely to be far more technical than I am and those sorts of things and that's great let's bring all that to the table but I look forward to engaging in this conversation and laying the landscape of what's going on right now around AI and education level setting around some of the AI capabilities that are out there and those sorts of things and then grounding it in potentially a set of things to consider as you all are moving forward in Fairfax just by

[01:50:37] way of reminder I so so I'm Bob back I'm an educator at heart as a fifth grade science and social studies teacher started off in a really rural place but I'm originally from Blacksburg Virginia and I've actually had multiple cousins who live in the Vienna Fairfax area and they've been through your schools they turned out all right so I appreciate that I hope they're watching this and seeing that you guys did a really great job so thank you they're they're all they're all younger than I am so I can sort of rib them on that but so it's I really appreciate you all and I do want to make sure that I say that while we're gonna be talking about AI today we're primarily gonna be talking about a world

[01:51:13] infused with AI and so it's gonna be about the technology but really about the world that our kids are going into and kind of going from there that make sense so let's start off so if you look at this picture right here a lot of people look at it and go oh that's a weird picture put up first and here's what's going on right here does anybody know what's going on right here am I allowed to ask that question? Well, they're not exactly jumping off. They're being pushed off the cliff, right? And so what happens oftentimes with penguins is that they get on these big ice shelves and in order to test the water for safety, they all sort of shove and push and pull until

[01:51:50] some fall in. Then they all look to see if something has eaten them or not. And if nothing has eaten them, then the rest jump in, right? And so, well, no, so here's the deal. So typically when you get in an AI conversation these days, typically when you're in an AI conversation these days you have people who come talk to you who are at the very back notice the ones who are like laying down in the back and like not doing anything and they're like oh yeah go jump like go do the thing um i am not that person okay so uh as mr sethe said uh i and my entire team when i was back in gwinnett county public schools we've been swimming in the water for quite a bit um and

[01:52:25] there's a lot that we can that we can learn from that experience and to help grow the entire sort of country on and so i just want to make sure you guys know that this isn't coming from a theoretical space but from a place where we've we've done a lot of what i'm talking about with kids for kids with families and communities and those sorts of things so let's dive right on in one of the biggest challenges that dr reed pointed out at the beginning is that we are typically having three separate conversations around ai at the same time which makes it really really difficult to have the full conversation conversation one is about future readiness of students for an ai infused world

[01:53:01] okay so this includes whether or not kids know and understand ai tools but also includes deeply human skills around do you know how to collaborate with other people do you know how to communicate with one another and those sorts of things and so ready future readiness of students is one of those conversations but often one that goes ignored the second one is a conversation around tools with ai in them and these are specifically tools that are used to support student learning so you might have a vendor or something saying oh we have this great ai tool that supports reading or math or whatever it is right but sometimes and oftentimes the child or the adult doesn't even know that there's ai in

[01:53:40] the tool but the conversation is around an ai tool for kids the third set of conversations is around ai tools to support adults right and so these are things that can support teachers directly so for example supporting lesson planning and building content and rubrics and those sorts of things but they can also be used by like research and evaluation folks to run big data sets all those sorts of things and to keep things going so before we get into any of these conversations though i think it's really important to ground ourselves in the purpose of public education and for me that purpose is to inspire and prepare young people for their future

[01:54:18] which i'm defining as flourishing in life career and democracy there are a lot of different ways you can sort of cut that across and those sorts of things, but fundamentally when we talk about the parts of a person's life in the future, I think a lot of it falls in these buckets. The challenge though is that we're leading in a rare moment where AI is fundamentally impacting life, career, and democracy in ways that were previously unimaginable. And so what that means for us is that means that we need to update and upgrade our systems, our classrooms, and our our lessons for this AI-infused world.

[01:54:52] Notice that I'm saying upgrade and update. I'm not saying throw away. I'm not saying reinvent the entire thing. What I'm talking about is making sure that we're meeting that purpose of education that we already believe in. Now, many people when confronted with this are like, oh yeah, okay, so like this a ways off, like it's far away.

[01:55:10] But the future is already in our hallways, right? Children beginning kindergarten this fall will graduate in 2038, right? So a question that comes to mind is, are we preparing them for today or for 2038? A child entering sixth grade will graduate from high school in 2032.

[01:55:26] A child that's born today will graduate from college in 2042, right? And so realistically, the question that literally keeps me up every single night is are we preparing children for their future? And by their future, we're at this point talking about the 2030s, 40s, 50s, and beyond, right?

[01:55:43] In some instances, people are already talking about the 22nd century. That scares me too much as a guy who has a 13-year-old and a nine-year-old. I'm like, hold on, let's finish out this century strong and then look forward, right? But the important thing to note is the big question of are we preparing young people, children, for that future that they're gonna have or are present?

[01:56:01] So to ground us really quickly and briefly on what is AI, 'cause AI is and isn't a lot of things to a lot of different people. AI is a technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity, and autonomy.

[01:56:17] I say that word simulate on purpose because it is not conscious, it is not human-like, it is simulating. And the form of AI that we're gonna primarily talk about today is called generative AI, which is a type of AI that builds new content using existing text, video, code, and images.

[01:56:37] But the thing that it's creating is fundamentally new in certain ways. If you look at the chart on the right, you see that there are all different types of AI out there. These are some of them, right? Everything from virtual companions to robotic personal assistance to machine learning and autonomous systems.

[01:56:53] There are a lot of different pieces at work. Today we're going to be primarily talking about generative AI. So the question of the day that I get from a lot of people is, are things really changing or is it hype, right? We always hear about the hype cycle, so let's jump into it.

[01:57:08] So piece number one, thinking about life, career, and democracy, right, AI is transforming life in real ways. On the left-hand side, you see some negative ways. You see some Gen Zers who would marry an AI in AI relationships, right? You see people having their closest relationships and companions with chatbots.

[01:57:27] You see the environmental aspects of AI and the environmental risks that come from a lot of the data processing and those sorts of things. At the same time, though, on the right side, you see some of the very positive things. You have organizations like CourseMojo and Amira Learning who have built really remarkable use cases in the education space for augmenting and supporting educators in what we want to do.

[01:57:51] Everything from supporting dyslexia screening to differentiating classroom environments in real human-based ways. At the same time, in medicine, you have AI proving they can outperform doctors in terms of medical diagnosis, which can be rather incredible. Imagine if you can detect lung cancer many months or years before a human eye could.

[01:58:10] That could really be beneficial to our system and our world. At the bottom, we have a really neat tractor. And what is there? Usually people go, oh, but there's someone driving the tractor. Yeah, I'm not talking about autonomous driving tractors. In this case, AI is being used to look and identify weeds in the soil.

[01:58:27] And those weeds are then zapped by a laser that destroys the weed without the use of pesticides or chemicals and those sorts of things. So think about the positive things that could happen if we didn't have to use those things in our food production processes. At the same time, AI is transforming careers, right?

[01:58:43] So you have Goldman Sachs saying that two thirds of current jobs are exposed to some sort of automation. McKinsey Global Institute is talking about 30% of activities and 60% of occupations that could be automated. Really really things are changing. Now for people who are like, I don't actually believe those statements, let's just look much more directly.

[01:59:03] These forecasts are no longer theoretical. In Accenture they've said employees who can't be retrained for AI will be exited. Shopify is talking about how AI proficiency is now baseline and built into performance reviews. Duolingo has specifically said no new hires unless teams prove that AI can't do the work.

[01:59:21] Walmart is talking about how AI is going to change literally every job and talking about how headcount will remain flat despite growth plans as roles are eliminated or transformed. So these challenges and positive opportunities with careers really are coming to fore and much faster than anticipated. At the same time, AI is transforming democracy. And so, on the left hand, you have the positive. So, there are really interesting use cases of AI to foster a more inclusive democracy, to make it so that they can find zones of agreement between people who seem

[01:59:58] very, very far apart and might not figure out those zones. Similarly, it can be used to improve citizens' quality of life by making it so that government can be more reactive and transparent to what the citizen needs are on the right side though you see some of the cases where ai can be really problematic for democracy and for community as a whole you'll see the la times article at the bottom that's where i highlighted roughly seven percent of americans use ai chatbots and interfaces for news each week that can be highly problematic if people aren't at a minimum looking at their own news sources themselves we have big shifts in election disinformation across the world happening

[02:00:36] as a result of AI-created disinformation. I have two images on here. The one on the left is, you'll see, I think that's Rachel Maddow, there are a couple other famous people helping flood victims in Texas. None of these pictures are real. They're all artificially generated, but they spread like wildfire on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and those sorts of things, and Twitter, because people thought they were real.

[02:01:02] Now those you might go, well obviously those are fake. But look at the picture on the right. The picture on the right was also shared from the Texas floods recently. And at first focus, you're like, oh yeah, that could be reasonable. Oh my gosh, look at all that damage. But when you look closely at that circled thing, that is a two-fronted truck, right?

[02:01:19] I have never seen a two-fronted truck that's been working, right? And you might go, well, that's innocuous. But the challenge is that when a person sees that, even when they're shown and told that it's fake, they go, yeah, that image might be fake. are probably a whole bunch of real ones that are similar to this and so it essentially is used to confirm people's existing biases now the bottom line to all this and i'm going to quote an old gwinnett good thing which is that ai and future readiness have to be for everyone and i really deeply believe that districts have to lead the way and so that readiness we would talk about in

[02:01:54] gwinnett as no one's allowed to drown in the future infused with ai that means everyone needs to swim most people need to be able to snorkel and a much larger and diverse set of people need to scuba dive in this world they need to be the creators of of ai in ways that meet the diverse needs of the community and not just the likes of a small group of people so let's get to some of the current capabilities of ai so that we can sort of level set on what things can currently do or what they're forecast to do so ai is able to do increasingly complex tasks so some of the headlines

[02:02:31] first is that ai deep research which is a relatively new development can conduct years of phd level levels of research in mere hours that mere hours is starting to become minutes like everything is becoming faster and more precise over time the second thing is that ai agents apologies for the numbering, AI agents are autonomously tackling tasks and collaborating with one another to accomplish the complex tasks. So think about it this way: there is a traditional form of AI where you can like ask it a question and it answers. Then there is generative AI, gen AI, that understands

[02:03:09] what's being thrown at it and answers accordingly. There's a new form of agentic AI which is more fully autonomous, meaning, for example, if I visit a website and have to make travel accommodations, it could actually do that for me soup to nuts based on parameters that i give it ahead of time so you're no longer necessarily talking about a chat interface you're talking about deep capabilities that can get really important and useful work done at the same time chat bots are being replaced with multimodal ai that listens speaks and sees so the chat interface is starting to go away and most new forms of ai are actually spoken to and they speak back

[02:03:46] they can see what's going on in a room they can make interpretations and inferences of about emotion and those sorts of things and these will these capabilities are starting to significantly shift how we interact with ai and what can come of it secondly or finally major advances are coming in the next 18 months right uh developers and anthropic and notice the dates on this by late 2025 and into 2027 these are what they believe will exist ai systems that will match intellectual capabilities of Nobel Prize winners across multiple domains. AI that can navigate all

[02:04:23] interfaces available to humans, meaning like websites, everything on your computer, Microsoft Word, Office, PowerPoint, all those sorts of things. AI that can reason through complex tasks over hours, days, and weeks, which means it can do far more complicated things than a quick sort of chat type now. And finally, AI that can interface with the physical world through robotics, meaning that the AI is no longer stuck behind the screen, but can actually interface with human beings through robotic capabilities now what does this mean for us that's a lot i can see your faces

[02:04:58] i agree right and anyone who sees this stuff and just jumps right in isn't being cautious enough and make sure that you hear everything i say not as a let's do everything all at once all of a sudden everything needs to be done with caution and with with student safety in mind but also with ensuring student readiness for the future what are some of these implications for for education there are lots of implications for education right but let's start off thing number one i would assert is that we need to engage in all three of these ai conversations so most of the time our ai conversations stop at the tool like oh are you using insert name of tool in your

[02:05:36] building if so then you're like doing ai if not you're not that's not that's not the case right we really have to center talking about the future readiness of young people which actually we do already in most of our buildings talking about the tools with ai in them and talking about the ai use cases and supports for adults a second piece is that our learning systems need to center the readiness skills young people need for an ai infused future it's really hard to read but if you look at this chart closely this is from the world economic forum and it's a chart that shows the sort of skills on the rise and skills on the on the decline from the world economic forum

[02:06:13] so if you look at the very very top which is small on our screen you'll notice that the top thing is not reading writing and math the top skill that they have listed give me a second to pull it up where i can read it is ai and big data thank you next followed by networks and cyber security you have things like creative thinking analytical thinking all that sort of stuff down towards the bottom of the list is reading writing and mathematics right now the reason i say that is not the "Oh my gosh, is he saying we don't need reading, writing, and math?" No, that's not the case.

[02:06:45] Content knowledge, however, so reading, writing, and math has to be tethered to these other human skills, the creative thinking, the critical thinking, those sorts of things, in order to prepare young people for their future. What can't happen is that those skills just get done in isolation or that we only teach content and don't prepare kids with the knowledge that they need.

[02:07:05] A third thing I would recommend is that I think every district ought to have a coherent AI readiness strategy and these are not big thick documents that never change but nimble strategies with clear guiding principles and community engagement that can embrace the clarity of direction but avoid the certainty of action meaning people should be very clear in direction but certainty around ai will prove you a fool because ai changes every moment literally as we're speaking new things have come out that will likely make some of our old ideas wrong including ones in this presentation and the second thing is making sure to engage the public in that ai

[02:07:44] conversation to ensure that the ai doesn't become one more thing but purposefully thinks about ai readiness and integration into the core sort of way of teaching and learning is imperative number four is that we need to increase the ai and future ready learning experiences inside and outside of the classroom that means active human connected learning it increases the importance of human skill development, teaching kids how to collaborate and partner together in learning that's connected for their lives. It means building knowledge and skills together in a tethered way. So modernize foundational knowledge with integrated skills, skills like adaptability, communication, critical

[02:08:23] thinking, creativity to ensure that they're ready for that future. Oftentimes these are in a portrait of a graduate or a portrait of a learner. And then finally is the integration of AI concepts and some tools learners do need exposure to ai and an understanding of how it works and doesn't work in the context of their learning and lives and not just in like a separate classroom and then finally i like to remind people of avoiding some common ai pitfalls right thing number one is do not please do not just put more kids on more computer programs like the the ai readiness skills required need kids to build human relationships and to see other people and

[02:09:01] work with them. So don't hear what I'm saying as buy a whole ton of AI learning apps and have that be the whole experience. Teachers actually do a really incredible job of building those human relationships that are critical. The second thing is I would urge everyone, kids and adults alike, to not give up their thinking to AI. So I've seen people literally on television, for example, get divorced because the AI told them to. And that doesn't make sense, right? Like we have to keep our own critical thinking and knowledge at the fore and we cannot allow our human thinking skills and judgment to be given across the ai which also means we have to train our young people

[02:09:37] to know how to embrace their own thinking and their own agency a third one is not to let tools lead instruction or program design so programs and what you want to do for kids comes first tools have to support that so not the other way around when we center the tools we forget about the kids and then finally and i put this as a final note not because it's the last and like least important thing but it's very critical is to be very cautious about data security people should not share personally identifiable information or sensitive information with an ai

[02:10:12] tool there are some exceptions where a tool has been walled gardened off but you should generally unless you know that for sure we should not be putting information about children's or ieps or or any of that sort of stuff in any sort of AI tool. So think about just whatever you would put out into the public is what you would want here as well.

[02:10:30] So with that, I'll close and I'll open it up for any questions and answers or comments that the board would like. - Thank you. Thank you for that presentation and for being here this morning. We'll get started with Ms. Mayor.

[02:10:48] - Good afternoon, this is really cool. Thank you. - Thank you. - I have a few kind of general themes I'd like to ask about and share and share with my colleagues and staff so I think it's very helpful to know the three different themes of how AI is being discussed in education I primarily hear about how do we keep students from cheating and plagiarizing and I'd like to aspire to something more for our students and we got to get through that and the wheel of all the different types makes me think about the definition of organic and natural right like you got to really know what's what's really there I find that it's tough for adults change I've really tried to focus on the students are very willing you know and

[02:11:26] interested and we ask them to change all the time but it's the adults that have a hard time learning the new way of things you know we've seen that a little bit we were rolling out the new literacy program a little bit with Schoology in terms of teachers doing it different ways but to their defense they have not all been trained in it so in thinking even just about Schoology and approaching that like so I have my seventh grader and last night we were looking at his stuff and one teacher lays it out all so well and everyone else is different and I just don't think we are there yet with the intentionality of how we lay things out for students to be like oh I get it now I can run with it

[02:12:04] like we're we're nowhere near that the same thing you know I think when we talk about transitioning through the schools at times so that's something and I do wonder you know dr. Reed like so what's the plan so how our instructional services and our technology office going to work together to like what is the plan does this infuse our strategic plan that we just had a report on this morning um so that is something i'm wondering i also um mr saturday if you remember i was asked to be a panelist on a forum that was done by middle schoolers and high schoolers on on ai two summers ago i think and they put the whole thing

[02:12:43] together at the capital one center and i was like gotham i gotta look i gotta look smart what are are we gonna do so that's when I really started like learning and trying and you know I wanted to do that but what I ended up talking about was the Commons because as someone in public policy how do we navigate this space that's always changing and talking about well who's gonna put up some guardrails and who's gonna make it safe knowing that it's always changing and I think like if we can think that way and teach our students like that more higher level level thinking of how are we thinking about the parameters of this not just how do we implement it then I could see we start it's just like with math that

[02:13:22] Dr. Reed says we're doing algebra in kindergarten right like how do we tease that out into everything so the kids are thinking that way so they know how to do a prompt when it comes to that but they also know how to read things and verify before trusting and to me really that gets on leading with integrity and so really we're talking about how to teach kids to be good people and be true to one another and I love that you have democracy in there because that's really crucial so those are initial thoughts and I'd love to hear dr. Reed if you have

[02:13:54] it all planned out yet I do think that I want to remind the board in our community that are watching that we started our lighthouse schools program several years ago and we're in we just launched the year three cohort and that initiation really was to find the penguins that weren't being pushed off but the penguins that were seeking to jump off early like dr. Riley here from our former McLean high school principal so those schools in year one got to

[02:14:29] pilot some new ideas concepts new relationships with technology is what I'll call it which are not as important as our relationships with one another But we're in year three now and AI is becoming a much more important part of that.

[02:14:48] In the handouts that got them handed out you'll see actually a handbook that our ISTE colleagues and Fairfax County Public School colleagues put together a handbook. We're looking at upgrading our SBITS training in terms of becoming ISTE certified to be stronger supports to our educational staff.

[02:15:12] But fundamentally we want to invite our community into this conversation November 3rd, the evening of November 3rd for our meeting the moment night to share much of what has been shared today as we frame that experience, Ms. Mayor.

[02:15:27] And I think we're going to have to be comfortable with a certain amount of fluidity because this content area and our 22nd century future for children is one that moves very differently than the past that we've traditionally planned for.

[02:15:47] But we're excited. Again, the Lighthouse Schools have launched this work and this is year three and it's time, right? It's time for us to be clear around our framework in this area. - Thank you, Dr. Anderson.

[02:16:05] - Thank you, this is definitely very exciting and trying to contain some of the things that I want to ask about. What I love about this conversation, It's not that we shan't talk about AI and have it be infused in our schools, infused in our tools, because we were certainly there like, oh, let's not do anything because kids will use it to cheat, and that's always been the conversation.

[02:16:30] So I'm very excited that we've moved away from we can't touch this to how do we get this into our spaces. I really appreciate, I think, section, well, they all say A up here, but they were different on what I had on my screen, but I moved away from it, where you talked about do not give up the thinking to AI, because there's a space to use a tool and apply your analytic skills.

[02:16:57] You're just doing the grunt work by using this tool. And I don't know if we are there yet. My husband, who is a nuclear engineer, came back and showed me at a conference that he attended. A dissertation was done in 45 minutes by AI, something that people take 10 years to do so the work it's happening and a lot faster in other fields than it is here but my wondering and i know you talked about the lighthouse schools dr reed my wondering is what is our basic expectation right now and if it's none just let me know it

[02:17:34] is none um i was actually asked of a from a constituent in terms of well do you have ai regulations and policies might I don't think so I know we talk about it quite a bit but we have not landed on anything that's on paper so if you could just touch upon all of those that would be appreciated yes ma'am I I think what we have right now is we have a lot of spontaneous outbreaks of AI use across the school division and there's not a systems approach to how we're approaching

[02:18:08] AI across the entire school division so when we think about the Google pilot pilot prove scale model that was part of what the lighthouse schools were you know initiated around like a pilot that's contained then we enlarge think autonomous driving cars right originally in a very small parking lot a larger parking lot that's more complex eventually in San Francisco and then bring it to scale across the country so think about AI in Fairfax County public schools we certainly have drafts of a framework drafts of activities drafts of

[02:18:45] thinking but it's pretty much been limited to a particular department or team and it it's guidance or optional or all those types of things that things are when they're new if that makes sense like the penguin has jumped in and most of the penguins are still actually alive right they haven't all been eaten so what we're talking about now in terms of meeting the moment is how do we take what we've learned from the work that those teams have done the lighthouse schools have done what other people around the country and world are doing and really build out our framework to develop a proof of concept that we can

[02:19:24] then bring to scale because that is part of our strategic plan you know we focus a lot on gaps and we also need to think about what are our strengths and what those aspirational characteristics that we want for our children and our community and this is one of those I would also add that we have a couple videos that time permitting we're able to share about how AI is being used in classrooms in Fairfax now and be happy to maybe show a one of those now that you think would be appropriate at this juncture if I could just finish my sure

[02:20:00] I would be appreciative to see those videos but that's also my wondering because you do have those spontaneous outbreaks, as you call it. So the disease does exist in certain places. And we know that teachers are utilizing some of the tools because I know that they can tell when students are using AI in their work because we've had parents come to us at the board meeting to talk about that.

[02:20:26] So the tool is already there. I guess what I'm looking is for the pivot. How do we start to teach kids to use it as an information gathering rather than a work-generating tool so that they can still have access to what everybody else has access to.

[02:20:45] Because you can't ask me anything without me putting in a chat GPT, trying to figure out what's happening. Every single day. I did it with Carl on the phone just last week. We were talking about the PLAs. Like, oh, what do they say about it? Well, chat GPT says there are pros and cons.

[02:21:01] it's automatic for me right now and I would imagine for the digital natives who are my children and those coming after him it's even more innate how do we teach them to use that for good kind of like now because they're in it well I think that's where we were talking earlier AI doesn't substitute for our own ability to think critically and we have to when we look rather we're looking at pictures that just kind of raise a question or we read arguments that make no sense or I mean know that AI hallucinates right it makes things up

[02:21:39] at times and nothing is going to substitute for critical thinking on the part of our young people but I'll defer to our AI experts across the way here I will also say though is chat GP to me is to English in some ways and thinking as calculators were to mathematics early on and we still see students calculate a a certain math problem that has the most outrageously wrong answer and they'll write it down without like wait a minute did you stop and think whether that makes sense right like because they maybe hit a wrong decimal point or

[02:22:16] whatever and so we still have to make sense even when we use a tool does that really you know pass the sniff test I guess for lack of a better way but mr. Sethi you were gonna say something yeah I was gonna say I think that's a good segue to the videos as examples but go ahead so just to quickly add to sort of what we have been doing and where we are headed, right?

[02:22:37] We have seen AI being used primarily as a consumption tool. We see that all of us, individually, collectively, we use it to consume something. It produces something for us, we demand something, and it produces an answer, we run with it. What we would love to bring, and actually we are bringing with the handout in your fly, you will see we have sparked a partnership with Amazon and PlayLab, and we are sparking a hackathon, which is essentially going to allow our students, high school students at this point, to be able to use tools to create.

[02:23:07] That moment where they can go from understanding this is just not consumption, but creation, to problem solve for something bigger, larger, that they're passionate about, I feel like it starts getting that opportunity for both our students and our adults to say, how do we use these technologies in the future?

[02:23:24] And it is still evolving. It is still moving fast. It still changes on a daily basis. I think Ms. Maren was asking about how do we put the guardrails? We have access to tons of tools. There's a vendor every day who shows up and says, "Hey, this tool is the best tool. "Why don't you use this tool? "Put it in front of your students."

[02:23:39] And we've been holding down the fort, right? We are not ready. It doesn't matter, even if your tool is safe, we don't know how this is gonna get used and what it will be used for. If our adults are not ready to use the tools in the classrooms, then we're not willing to open the gates and say, "Just enable the tool for students."

[02:23:55] We do want our adults in the system to learn everything about every tool that we can enable for them, which is why it's really focused on adult AI literacy so we can at least have a shared and common understanding across the division of that concept. But we have some good examples, and let us show the video if you can.

[02:24:16] The early clips from schools who had kind of used these tools that I've been using. - Our fifth and sixth grade students are being introduced to AI through a template lesson from Adobe Express.

[02:24:31] They are generating images of themselves using descriptive language to see how accurate a portrait they can create. Once students have finished their projects they share it to a classroom gallery where everybody can see each other's work. This creates a great visual of how accurate or in many cases inaccurate the AI imagery is. Seeing that these faces look similar to their classmates but aren't quite right generates a great discussion about how AI is a tool to help us with our work, not a replacement for doing the work ourselves. It's important that we edit,

[02:25:05] check references and make the work our own my name is megan keen and i am an ml teacher at holmes middle school i am part of the lighthouse schools initiative i created this storybook using google gemini after attending our lighthouse schools kickoff on september 22nd 2025. my sheltered english 6 class has been learning about john muir through the benchmark advanced curriculum i created this storybook to help my students see how the past connects to the future first i asked

[02:25:45] Gemini about storybooks, and it gave me questions to answer to start creating the book, and then I added the age range of my students. Gemini created a fun story about a girl named Sierra who was relatively the same age as my students. This was a great connection to the Sierra Club, which was founded by John Muir. These are some samples of the storybook that was created. When Mel Malek asked us about using AI in our classroom, I shared this storybook with her. She told me that she was able to translate it into French and so I ran with that idea and translated it into the languages of my

[02:26:24] students. The languages represented are Dari, Turkish, and Spanish. Each student will receive a book in their home language as well as one in English. At Langley High School, the Honors Biology team transformed research projects all thanks to google notebook lm and gemini notebook lm became our project's brain effortlessly organizing everything from research sources to student

[02:26:59] feedback its power to instantly create summaries and mind maps made it a breeze to bring new teachers up to speed but the real magic how it positively impacted student learning this wasn't just about biology it was about building vital research skills that students can carry into any subject. Gemini helped us brainstorm, craft clear instructions and even perfect our project rubric.

[02:27:25] We used it to survey students, analyze their feedback and continuously refine our approach. This meant better instructions, smarter timelines and lessons perfectly tailored to student needs. Integrating AI streamlined development, making projects richer and more engaging. Students gain valuable transferable skills, setting them up for success far beyond the science classroom.

[02:27:49] That's the power of AI in education. They've enabled for our staff to use their learning opportunities and being able to enable that to integrate into the classroom in the ways only they know and they can see.

[02:28:12] I don't think anyone from any central office team can say, use this to do X and that is the same X everywhere. That's sort of the power of this stuff. Once you plant the seed and let them use it, when they have their aha moment with it, we have seen this happen over and over again.

[02:28:28] You probably all have individually seen it too. when you have that aha moment like I get it and now I can use this to leverage and push forward in a certain direction which supports my work and helps build on it that's when it happens and this momentum is it's something that you get to by testing experimenting learning on your own I don't know if there's a PD that we can do collectively which everyone just suddenly gets it but that's that's the thinking that's the scaling strategy right now thank you miss Seismarizer I have to confess I'm actually very excited about this I'm super excited about this I've actually was developing an AI forum topic and then

[02:29:07] I heard that this was coming so I stopped developing the AI forum topic because it was here a couple things I will just sort of frame this I know a lot of people there's a lot of nervous nervousness around AI and and fear of it I think of this similar to when I started working at my law firm and my was a young graduate from law school and there were not very many people in my law school classes at a laptop I had a laptop I took my notes on the laptop showed up as a young lawyer and all of the partners had computers with docking stations and half the partners use your computer monitor to put post-its on and

[02:29:43] not that old so that wasn't that long ago so to think from that world where we're using computer monitors for post-its to what computing is in every workplace now is what I see the promise of AI and we still have jobs and we've made advances in technology and all sorts of advances that we probably have imagined as a young lawyer and so I don't think of this as much different than that moment when computing became infused in every workplace or the calculator became infused in every workplace I think what we are doing now is very smart which is setting our students up so that they're not the

[02:30:19] partners with post-its on a computer monitor but the associate who can type her own briefs and that's how my analogy for this I have been talking for a long time including do you know how much I pushed on our grading policy to make sure that we were assessing our portrait of a graduate skills because I have said for a long time that the most important skills that our students have is a core base of knowledge so when they put things into ai they know whether it's right or wrong or how to look it up or research it and check but also critical thinking analysis collaboration teamwork right those are the things that set us apart and this this is something you've heard me say.

[02:30:58] So I am thrilled of your presentation talking about that. What I'd like to know more about, and I'll just say on the side note, I'm a college professor, so we see this all the time. And I don't think it's, you take away cheating by changing your assessments, right?

[02:31:14] What I've done in my students' papers is I just say, okay, go use AI and then tell me what it got right and what it got wrong and where in the textbook is the source material for what it says and how you would change it. And I make it analyze what AI gives me. that's changing the assessment. So there's lots of opportunity here, but I guess the first question I have is, not just changing how we're teaching in our core academic subjects, but how do we emphasize getting more infusion of the subjects that where students are focusing more on the communication, collaboration, critical thinking skills into our teaching of core academics?

[02:31:49] And I'm thinking in particular of theater classes where I learned a lot of these skills, and I'll talk more about that 'cause my time is almost up, infusing that type of teaching methodology into our core academics so students learn those skills naturally and without it kind of being forced.

[02:32:04] So I'll stop there, I'll have like 17 go backs please, I'm excited. - So something, I was in New Hampshire giving a talk to 400 teachers the other day, and I asked a question of how many of you plan your lessons based on content that you need to get across to children?

[02:32:23] Every single hand went up. Great, wonderful, step one. Then I asked the question, how many of you teach skills like critical thinking, like perseverance and those sorts of things in your lessons as well? Every single hand went up, I'm like, wonderful.

[02:32:38] If I looked at your lesson, your lesson plan, could I see those skills being taught? Raise your hand if so, and no hands went up. And the reason I bring that up isn't because we don't have the intent or the willingness or the ability.

[02:32:54] And it's not, what I'm not asking or saying is that by just writing critical thinking on a lesson plan, suddenly it happens, right? But essentially the core design of a learning experience, which we call a lesson, right, can be shifted in ways that aren't really difficult, that actually get back to the core of what teachers love doing and what they came into the teaching profession for, and at the same time get across the content knowledge, which is required by standards and those sorts of things, and build those human skills.

[02:33:23] So I've seen it happen. I've seen it in classrooms across the country in different ways. I've seen it in Gwinnett with our AI work that we had been doing. And one other thing is that there's a student actually from our AI high school that I was chatting with yesterday.

[02:33:40] I'm gonna call her Morgan for our sake. But Morgan had been through three years of this AI high school and someone asked her the question, we were preparing for a panel, and someone asked her the question, what about cheating? Like, what about cheating? What about like losing capabilities with AI?

[02:33:55] And she kind of looked at the person like they had three heads and I'm like, Morgan, please explain what that look is for. She's like, that's a conversation from a long time ago. Like we have realized that if you're just using it to cheat, you're not really using it for what it's for.

[02:34:13] And so it doesn't even cross our mind as that being a primary use case. You're supposed to use AI for expanding your thinking, for pressure testing your thoughts and your logic flow, for testing your logic, those sorts of things. And so what gives me hope is that there's a generation of young people who are growing up who could potentially view it as a tool in that way to really expand their capabilities if we inspire them and let them do that.

[02:34:41] - Okay, Ms. Dixit, followed by Mr. McDaniel. - Thank you for the presentation. Obviously it is very welcoming and all the school board members, we really like learning and hopefully implementing more AI in our schools.

[02:35:01] When you mentioned about the AI high school, that might be direction in one of the schools, might take that route could you let me know a little bit as how does that work sure so in Gwinnett County Public Schools we did a sort of a we're a county that's growing in population and so we had the need for additional seats and so we were creating another neighborhood school so not a specialty school or a magnet school or anything like that and our question was essentially could we create a theme in this school that would enable it to be a test bed for the rest of the school

[02:35:37] system and in our case this testbed was around ai readiness and this was before chat gpt and those sorts of things so many people thought we were a little crazy back then but as the sort of world advanced and things moved along people became increasingly supportive and interested in okay what does that mean so what it what it meant for us and i'm going to be very very clear that i i personally believe that school designs should be held and owned by community members who are giving a lot of input by neighborhoods and families, in addition to teachers and other people.

[02:36:10] So it's not like we had one brilliant mind at the top that said, "Hey, this is a school and it worked for everybody." What we ended up creating was a framework for AI readiness, which was not just about the technology but around many of the skills. So things like creative problem solving, ethical thinking, and those things alongside data science, mathematical reasoning, applied experiences, robotics, those sorts of things.

[02:36:31] And we used that shell to essentially say, how would we create a school where kids are prepared to swim, snorkel, and scuba dive in the age of AI based on that framework? And what that meant in practice was that for the scuba divers, we were like, okay, we need a set of AI classes that they can take and dive deep into the sort of deep knowledge around AI.

[02:36:54] And so we built that. So we built a career and technical education sequence of courses for the state of Georgia that were used by our county, we're the first ones to use it in our state, that would do that for our scuba divers, right? At the same time, we realized if we do that and only that, we'll end up in the same place that like computer science ended up, which was like this one-off room to the side that most kids didn't have access to.

[02:37:16] And so we started looking at the swimmers and the snorkelers and we started looking at how do you upgrade every single lesson plan every day to start incorporating a lot of these AI concepts into it, right? And so that's when we got to the point where whether you're in a biology class or an English class or whatever, chemistry class, whatever class you're in, you're actually getting pieces of that core AI framework as part of your teaching and learning experience of that day.

[02:37:41] And then we didn't just do the high school, we actually worked it all the way back to K feeder pattern. And the big thing that was the sort of the trick that's the hard part is that because AI is changing all the time, you can't just do this once and then you're done. We actually created systems within our school to make sure that lessons and things like that could be constantly updated and upgraded as the technology progressed, as the kids knew more, et cetera, et cetera.

[02:38:06] And so, yeah, so I wanna say the school is in year four now and doing really, really well. It's a very popular school. The sort of local area has grown significantly in population and at the same time, it meets the needs of every type of learner that you could imagine.

[02:38:25] - Thank you for the information. Do you guys have AI labs within the school where students are taking problems and then trying to solve it, coming up with their own solutions? - So the interesting thing is, as we were building our school out originally, we thought we'd need these big footprint labs, similar to how you might need large computer labs and things like that.

[02:38:46] But as ChatGBT started coming out, and as we started realizing that the primary interface for AI, for especially kids of high school age, was gonna be any device, We realized it was actually better not to create pure AI labs because it would give the signal that you should only do AI when you're in that room, as opposed to AI is infused in part of how you think about everything across the curriculum.

[02:39:10] Now that said, we did build specialized spaces for like robotics and some of our advanced manufacturing things and those sorts of pieces, 'cause those require like very specific facilities. But in terms of the AI, like the AI specific piece, They would use those spaces and they just as much use the drama and art spaces for the AI work as well.

[02:39:31] Thank you. You know, before we used to say math is in everything, now we are saying AI is in everything, pretty much like right now. Every day we use AI in all the social media or our personal work. I have an example of Brazil, we recently used AI-powered robotics tree planters, which basically reforestation, doing reforestation for them.

[02:39:56] is the kind of critical thinking and thoughts provoking ideas we want to you know give it to our students that these are the problems I know there's a deforestation happening or there is some disease which is incurable still in this age and come up with a solution so for me AI is more of like solve the problems and that's the thought we want to give it to our students so how do we get this information and get those tools to kids to I don't know if chat GPT the right answer but yeah i think this is very timely we gave out a folder and we will also send

[02:40:32] it electronically with that competition we are running for our students sparks that basis of creativity right we call it seize the moment in alignment with meeting the moment where we are encouraging our students to create with ai as opposed to just consume so if you all have an opportunity to kind of push this out to the high schools and have them participate it is it has prizes associated with it so the coaches are getting compensated for it and it's a partnership with amazon and play lab which are two private entities but that's sort of the beginning of it and there's additional work that will happen in the back end when we learn from how do we run this how do we spur creativity how do we encourage the adults to support our students thinking

[02:41:11] and then how do we bring it forward so we can highlight to the world the great talent we have within our division and our system thank you so much katham i think lastly I would just say that piloting idea with one school and then taking it to all schools is what I think is the way to go because each and every student in our FCPS should have access to these tools and these opportunities that's the equity point we have to make sure that we absolutely give it to every student after we do the initial pilot so I'll stop there thank you for thank you

[02:41:45] again. Thank you. Mr. McDaniel, followed by Mr. Moon. Thank you. Good stuff. I will confess that I have forced my staff to be using AI on almost a daily basis now to help analyze different stuff that comes out. But the other day, my kindergartner came home and had a little update on her math progress so far. And she's struggling to tell the difference between squares and rectangles, which I guess is kind of understandable for a six-year-old, you know, they all kind of look the same-ish, but not really.

[02:42:23] So my first inclination was to go online and print off some worksheets and sit down and work with her. Then I said, wait a minute, I bet you there's something out there where I can develop an online quizzing system that I can sit with her and walk her through it, and sure enough, there's a tool to do that, and it tailors as you go, and it really drills into the weakness areas and helps her.

[02:42:43] So I say all that to say, this is focused right now on the classroom, but there's two other areas where we can be infusing AI that's one helping parents help their students and helping parents navigate the educational experience of their kids and the second area which we need to have the conversation around at some point is the actual administration of the school system and operations whether it's finance HR I know it was mentioned IEP 504s anything that we do that is very manual how are we going to infuse these types of tools

[02:43:17] into those processes in the long run because as we all know dollars are not where they used to be and we're going to have to continue to squeeze these budgets more and these types of tools are going to help us accomplish that so i would welcome any thoughts or feedback there i'm just going to double click into that moment where you use the tool first it's that aha moment that we were talking about because when you have it you know where to go and look for it we are actually starting building capacity on serving content to our parents in terms of giving them ideas of how to engage and work with them right we obviously have our family academy which works in hosting

[02:43:55] online sessions we are at the starting stages of building an online learning sort of module where parents can come in and take on lessons and i think it is critical for this we were discussing this a little bit earlier the social media thing ran out of our hands to the end where we as an institution even as a country had to shut down phones in the classrooms could we have prevented that if we started this conversation ten years ago trying to help parents understand and granted we as adults didn't know at this point how far this one can go so this time around I think we know better so we want to start the conversation with our parents and the one which we really really and

[02:44:32] I will say this here in this moment so everybody gets this the anthropomorphization of sort of AI tools where somebody starts believing it is a thing where it is a person, an individual, that they can relate to. And the relationship forming is probably going to be the biggest issue that we'll see rising in the future.

[02:44:50] And as educators, we can certainly support that. But I think we need our families in this together so they can make sure that they're able to monitor and support the students through that. They need to know it's a machine. It may know them better. I mean, we know AI tools will repeat back to you whatever you want it to say.

[02:45:06] The sycophony of it, as the term is used frequently, is very dangerous. and students need to know how to discern, or young kids, adults need to know how to discern that. So our role in helping our parents understand all of those facets early is probably gonna be much larger than the previous cycles we have with technology.

[02:45:27] - Thank you, Mr. Moon. - Well, thank you. I'm glad that we are having this discussion today. I think the first time I brought this to the attention of a superintendent was about a year and a half ago when I got so excited after returning from attending a conference up in New Year related to AI.

[02:45:51] With that said, it has taken, you know, to me or way too long to have this conversation. And I'm hoping that the next conversation, next hour on the conversation we'll have after this one is not gonna take another year and a half because for most of us our terms as a school board member is gonna end.

[02:46:10] Perhaps if it's gonna take another year and a half. So from a school board member's perspective, At least this one person's perspective, we make policy decisions, we make budgetary decisions.

[02:46:25] We're not gonna go into my new detail of how this should be run by superintendent or the school system. So we wanna know what decisions on what timeline superintendent or other senior staff envisioning for us to do.

[02:46:43] What kind of work do you expect the school board members to do? I am not an educator. I will not be able to claim that I know much about AI either. I hear a lot about the benefits of using AI, and I see some cases that how they are being used in the school system, and as well as Mr. McDaniel suggested how perhaps, I mean, one of the areas I have a keen interest in is how we can use AI to improve our operation as well, to perhaps generate more savings, cost savings, or provide more efficiency in our operations, et cetera.

[02:47:21] But again, going back to the role of a school board member, what decision do you expect the school board to make? - Well, today, no decision today. This is a presentation to level set so that we're all clear about the conversation that we're having when we talk about AI.

[02:47:41] It's also the first time as a board that a superintendent are having this conversation. So I think it's very important to be thoughtful about what are the possibilities, to think about the buckets that this work sits in, both in operations, in the classroom, and in staff usage.

[02:47:59] I think that down the road, the policy setting around AI is definitely something I would expect the board to determine because I think the policy determines what comes to scale across the school division and what's available then across every neighborhood in the county.

[02:48:22] So I think as we involve our community, November 3rd will be our first community conversation dedicated solely to AI. By the end of this year, it's our expectation that we have a framework and we have a good start at that already.

[02:48:41] And we need to have a framework that cuts across all departments that the board has conversation about so that we can bring to scale the use of AI across the three topic areas. I don't know about snorkeling, swimming, and scuba diving, but I can get there probably.

[02:49:00] But I think that we need to think about by policy, what's the minimum expectation everywhere? What are the guardrails the board's willing to live with to allow the system? essentially what is our sandbox, right?

[02:49:16] As a system to develop new ideas and new practices. So I see all of that coming at some point later this year. - I mean, that's exciting. Later this year, by the end of this year, is two months, three months from now.

[02:49:32] - I'm talking academic year. Nice try. - All done. - Thinking, by June. - My effort has just failed to push superintendents in a faster timeline, but that is better than a year and a half, another year and a half.

[02:49:51] However, next time when I see this, I would love to see some sort of recommendations from superintendents for the board to start making some decisions rather than keep putting this off.

[02:50:07] I'm sure that this is fast changing technology and there are a lot of things unknown out there. by the time superintendent comes back, by the end of the school year, school year, not calendar year, things might have already changed, and then they may be forced you to change your own recommendations to us.

[02:50:27] However, we gotta get some, we gotta start making decisions. I mean, that's how I see it, otherwise we'll never get there. So with that said, could you put me on go back? - Yeah, to Mr. Moon's point, I just want to clarify too, The important way in which to shape this topic area is going to be building in the maximum flexibility that we're comfortable with because of the nuanced, nimble agility we need to have to really maximize planning for our children's future and not our past.

[02:51:03] - Thank you, Ms. St. John Cunning. - Thank you. I know some board members were here a few years ago and I know I participated in an initiative that I think has since been shelved where we were gonna try to make all of our schools adopt the Making of the Mind footprint or framework, which really focuses on seven essential life skills that children need.

[02:51:28] And when I look at your slide 19, it really reflects those, which is not actually the tool, but the life skills that they need, which include focus and self-control, perspective taking, critical thinking.

[02:51:43] And I would like to see if we can consider revisiting that, 'cause as we start looking at it as a tool, we have to manage those life skills for those children and that's what helps put those guardrails there that so many of us sometimes worry about.

[02:52:00] So I would like to have the superintendent just think about that. - Thank you, Mr. Dunn. - I think this is an exciting conversation but I think it's a little amorphous and so I wanted to ask the superintendent, when will we see a proposal, a plan and when will we see a budget that goes with that because right now we don't necessarily have the federal funding to feed hungry kids or provide kids with special needs with all the support that they need.

[02:52:36] So I'm always excited to go off on adventures, but I wanna make sure we're doing it in a fiscally responsible way, given the funding shortfall that we are facing right now and the funding shortfall we're likely to face come this spring, given the additional needs that will be on the minds of county and state leaders given reductions in federal funding for everything from Medicaid to affordable housing.

[02:53:06] So I just wanna make sure that we get excited, but we also approach this from a maximally cost-effective perspective and also try to not get people so excited that they end up being disappointed what we roll out turns out to be more limited because we just don't have the dollars to do something grandiose yes sir i let me just clarify for all those folks listening we still are receiving money for our food and lunch program as we're in litigation around those federal dollars

[02:53:41] but we are still currently receiving those dollars i think you raise a really good point right it's reckless to think about uh planning an initiative that we don't have resources to support i will say that right now there's a significant interest nationally locally globally probably that's not in any great order but nationally and locally and also globally around the utilization of AI and the integration of AI into our work and into our education spaces so there's a significant amount of grant money

[02:54:16] that's out there right now for us to take advantage of if we're positioned well with a thoughtful plan as well as partnerships that we're one of the first k-12 school divisions to partner with the play lab partnership and maybe I'm not using the right word on that but not play land I knew there's one more but we're not announcing that oh we're not announcing okay we're not announcing one of those partnerships but I think what we want to try to do is make sure

[02:54:50] that our work in this area is funded because I agree with you it's a fool's errand to plan something we really can't support with resources having said that we believe we've identified a number of possible resource areas and what we want to make sure is that as we shape our direction we want to make sure we include our community which is the purpose of the November 3rd evening and also make sure that your thoughts feelings as a board that that evenings reflected we wanted it after this work session so we could take sort of what we

[02:55:29] heard and frame the conversation that night so I think it's good to have a cautionary tale and I appreciate that I just I know this is obvious to everyone but it doesn't get spoken about enough you know our kids aren't learning handwriting I've seen handwriting samples recently from high school kids who it looks like you know second grade kid chicken scratch and and that's that's not good a lot of our kids don't have access to physical textbooks and those are preferred by many kids nowadays I think they show they're more effective

[02:56:08] and I think being humans we learn best from other human beings from teachers and so I think there's there's a role for AI there's a role for technology but I think in our country we get so excited and obsessed with technology that sometimes we can lose sight of the fundamentals and we've we've been losing so the fundamentals for a couple decades now at least and and we're seeing the effects of that and the social isolation of our kids anxiety and other issues so we need to just be thoughtful as we get excited about yet another kind of technology that we also start to think about the fundamentals of human-to-human connection

[02:56:47] and teaching some of the basics of handwriting, you know, personal finance, et cetera, that require us to be successful in our human society. Thank you.

[02:57:03] Mr. McElwain. Thank you, and I appreciate being able to follow some of my colleagues. I really appreciate the presentation, I thought it was very good for level setting. I do think if this is what we present on November 3rd, there's going to be a lot of disappointment.

[02:57:22] I think I would have liked to see more than just a couple videos about what we're doing as a system on this, and I think others have laid this out, that I think we are doing a lot as a system that just wasn't reflected here today.

[02:57:38] So that's the only editorial comment I have, and hopefully we'll have a more robust presentation next time. Thank you. Ms. Anderson. Hi there. So I tend to be the penguin that's at the front. I don't mind being pushed into new technologies. I was in the classroom when Wikipedia firmly came out, so I had my kids using a wiki for our class, so that if they missed a day that they could go there to find the information, and that was their responsibility as part of the learning in the classroom.

[02:58:13] I wasn't afraid of it, and I did very much similar to my colleague. I made it part of the assignment so that they understood what was going on. I do think that to my colleague's point related to funding and things like that, I see this as a preparation for the time that we have the funding available to do everything we want to do.

[02:58:34] The board can start working on policy. We can start setting a framework within the division as to how we want to utilize these tools and start the conversation. I personally love the videos because it gave me an opportunity as a place to see where we've already started and the work that's already being done, so more of those I think are amazing touch points.

[02:58:55] Even an old-fashioned poster session at some of the events where you could walk through and see what the different projects are in real life I think is often helpful. I do think that we are at a moment where it would be beneficial for us to examine what tools we're currently paying for.

[02:59:12] And I thought that for a long time related to just the sheer volume of different apps and things like that. And what will happen is that we'll have one person or one school that is still heavily invested in something and we need to figure out how to phase those out.

[02:59:27] So that way we can open up dollars and funding to move forward. So I would very much like to see more robust discussion about the tools we're already paying for and what our usage is. that is something that I've never seen is what the usage of each of these individual tools are and so I think that that would be I also anecdotally know that regardless of whether or not we pay for anything related to AI our students are already using it our teachers are already using it and our staff are so I would very much like us to embrace it as to this the beginning we don't have to

[03:00:04] be the first penguin to get pushed off the ledge and we're certainly not but we could be in the middle of the pack so that we are making solid decisions after we figure out that there are no sharks in the water so I think that this is a good start to the conversation and I'm really looking forward to where we go next and I want to definitely say where we can help so what are the policies that we need to create I don't necessarily think that a specific AI policy is the way to go but a policy about innovation and then allowing regulation to come in makes a whole lot of sense to me and so creating a policy around embracing

[03:00:41] innovation within our division I think is essential to success so that's just my thought thank you thank you I'm gonna take a turn as well I want to commend Fairfax County Public Schools in and being ahead of the game in the sense that we already have an SBIT in every one of our schools I also want to talk about the fact that they're not all being used correctly and I know we've talked about this Mr. Sethi and I commend your office on the IT side and also the IS side for leaning into this reality but you know our school-based technology specialists you know they understand or they should that a tool

[03:01:20] doesn't teach teacher teaches but they can leverage technology to utilize UDL to differentiate instruction to make sex acts all students can access learning the inclusion model, the lighthouse schools, all of this is intertwined and I think we're doing fantastic work and I do appreciate the vignettes and I do agree with my colleague Mr. McElveen that there's a lot more fabulous work being done. I will just say as someone who attended ISTE I'm on a lot of communications from different vendors that I went to their booths and I just

[03:01:59] got an email recently from a vendor that has free tools for our for our teachers and 14,400 AI supported educational resources were just last week alone utilized for free I also still have teachers that lean on this teachers teach us or there's some website where they pay for other teachers who've created what's it called teachers pay teachers we got to get off that our teachers should not be paying for content but this is a Maserati and to my colleagues point about about costs yes we need to be careful but we've

[03:02:36] already made that investment in our ESPITs so what I would like to see happen is the relationship between ESPITs and principals which I do know is being a focus area that principals better understand what an ESPITs is there for especially in light of the staffing in elementary schools I'm hearing that some ESPITs are sort of being plugged in almost as monitors that were used, and they're far more skilled than that. The ISTE certification is an incredible undertaking, but it requires the artifacts that demonstrate the leveraging of the technology and not tapping into technology to

[03:03:13] teach. I also find it apropos that we're going to be talking about decision points. We're going to talk later about the Western High School so to that point I have a question for our guest related to Gwinnett County in the AI school it's four years in is that trickling now into the rest of the the schools within Gwinnett was that a jumping-off point because that very much excites me in terms of an opportunity we might have in front of us sure so yes yes it is trickling into the other parts of schools and here's how and we we had always and keeping in

[03:03:53] that I'm not with Gwinnett County Public Schools right now but I had had been and led the work there the theory of action for all our new schools was that you build an innovation within one place and then you actively figure out what pieces of that innovation go elsewhere right and so at this point in Gwinnett County Public Schools the AI pathway that I talked about that's the three course pathway for the deep divers has been expanded to two other schools already that are actually hubs for many other schools to access and we're looking at how that goes even further from there but more importantly than that there are core aspects of our framework around robotics around computer science where every every school including every elementary school for example

[03:04:32] has a robotics team and robotics conversations there's computer science at every single grade level in every single school so like the combination of the ai readiness part is both the explicit ai development work and the future readiness stuff and is being treated sort of as an imperative for everywhere without uh enforcing a cookie cutter now you're going to do the same thing that school did and you're going to it's like meeting the moment and the need of each of the communities thank you um and the last thing i'll say because i'm going to be out of time is in terms of espets you know having worked in a high school i felt like my espet spent so much time

[03:05:09] dealing with Schoology and CIS and not instruction and so I'm hoping the technologies that are within those tools are better and they don't need to be in the weeds on that with supporting teachers but they can start to support instruction which is why they're there so we're gonna do go backs and because we do not have a lot of time I'm gonna give people a minute and I'll start with Miss Marin okay well first I'd like to know how other school divisions are approaching this let's think about the governance and what informs our board we also need to be experiencing discussing this how do we help all kids snorkel that should be what we're talking about at least monthly right but

[03:05:47] the good news is that we can plan our own agendas so we can actually make that happen what I find so tough is this is juxtaposed against the incredible reality of public education so I have a little part of my brain like yeah innovation this is great and I've got wow we're just trying to get money and survive and like teach all kids and the needs are increasing and there's a teacher shortage and our facility funding but then also there's a little bit of but we're used to building things as we do it but then we're also FCPS and sometimes we don't roll out things all at the same time but we have experience rolling out things so this is about teaching adults right it's about teaching adults so they can teach kids and we teach a lot of adults all the

[03:06:26] time but we could do better I'd like to ask the board with the non-negotiable investments of money and time are we can direct the superintendent this Thursday with executive limitation on financial planning to come back with that list of all the apps we can do it through a budget question and last thing I'll say is we spend a lot of time and money getting rid of materials that were not up to our standards of quality when it comes to social studies and other things I am very uncomfortable with now teachers could just you know we got to still make sure they meet our quality level our level of cultural inclusivity of historical accuracy yeah that's I wish I had like two more minutes but

[03:07:03] - There we go, so for my colleagues to consider. - I'm gonna give Ms. Merritt another minute. And everyone has two minutes 'cause there's only three go-backs. - Okay, okay, to regroup, governance, okay. We all need to have presentations like this way more often, we need to understand what's happening.

[03:07:22] I would say, what's some low-hanging fruit? Can the board start using a tool very explicitly? Let's give ourselves an assignment, let's do that work. Again, hard to make the brain space to be creative when we're just trying to survive. The materials, we've gotta be thoughtful what's in front of students and also what's in front of parents and families because we know with benchmark advance parents don't always see those consumables right so now we're talking about teacher created materials in class that's one class another class how are parents supposed to keep up I can't even find my seventh and tenth graders materials online now we're gonna have creation of whole new things we got to think that through again the non non-negotiable investments so the board like we can make this decision you guys

[03:08:02] we can look at what we're paying for and like miss Anderson said stop paying for those things but we have to do that work so i'm happy to submit the budget question or i'm happy for us to do a follow-on this thursday for financial planning which is this thursday and see what we can do thank you thank you ms seismor heiser so i kind of sketched well before i get into my sketch i want to ask a couple questions one of the things that i've been talking about for the last few months is ai adjacent jobs which is just a phrase i made of it maybe it's a thing or not but you know when we talk about ai can do all these things well someone

[03:08:41] has to prompt it. And I know prompt engineer is already a job that exists, right? I think about AI compliance and ethicists. Companies are going to need to have compliance rules within their companies. And these are not necessarily technical jobs, but they're jobs for communicators, they're jobs for marketers, there's lots of other things, right? Have we thought about how to build skills for what I'm terming AI adjacent jobs and jobs in the workplace where AI is going to become a tool to augment that work? I can tell you from having young adult children that they I have children who are being measured now on their use of AI in their workplace so what's the thought on that first or the

[03:09:20] training for that so I like what you just said around every job is AI adjacent because that's the reality it's not even adjacent anymore the AI is part of the workflow across the board so that's really important so no matter what job someone wants or what area there are aspects of and impacts of AI and if we recall the pieces around life right there are big decisions being made by utilizing AI algorithms and things like that that our populace just needs to be aware of and able to make the right voting choices for example as a voter related to those things right and so that's really critical you are

[03:09:59] correct that there's a whole new infrastructure of jobs emerging that are directly AI adjacent that didn't exist previously because AI didn't exist before and and I like your your pieces around like publicists and things like that in the AI arena or or AI law ethicists sorry ethicists in the AI arena so there there are a lot of things like that to my knowledge I haven't run across anyone who is deeply built out what what like what all the and mapped out what all those jobs are because they're still emerging as such but I think that's a very important point okay so I kind of sketched out this plan

[03:10:36] as we're talking it's very very rough how do we get I mean the funding is an important piece right but I think we need to have the plan to know what we need to fund and then figure out what we maybe we can pull for other places like the million apps we have or whatever but how do you have AI education infused in course subjects in such a way that it becomes a tool that we know how to use it as opposed to a tool that's using us right how do we consume what is our core knowledge or content that everyone needs to know what are the skills in life I like life democracy and industry which includes what I call these AI adjacent jobs we're preparing our kids for and then what are the skills that were that are the portrait graduate skills are even more important now in an AI

[03:11:16] adjacent world what's the plan of building out what those pieces are right what we're preparing them for and the skills they need to have to get there and then how do we infuse that I love the idea of a pilot that we then expand upon a pilot AI high school but I to me it's like what's the core content the plan to teach critical thinking skills and looking at how will we teach them perspective taking collaboration self-regulation agency teamwork critical thinking our job is to prepare students for the future that they're gonna walk into not the past that we came from so what's the plan to do that and the grant and funding training and the PD for our teachers and our families to go along

[03:11:54] I'll stop there I'm saying I would love to see that someday I don't think you have that today I wouldn't expect you to have that today but that's what I I think we need to build towards. - I agree, and that's, we also, I think as Babak was saying, we need to involve our community in that conversation.

[03:12:12] And that's why I'm really looking forward to November 3rd to have our community join us as we shape the trajectory of this work. - Thank you. Dr. Anderson, followed by Ms. Anderson. - Yeah, just very briefly, the conversation here definitely has revealed that we have a lot of thoughts.

[03:12:31] We have a lot of ideas as a board in terms of, least as individual members in terms of where we want this to be this to me is the starting point of a draft of a policy because we don't have that yet I had whispered that to miss Marin on the side but I felt compelled to just share we have some things that we could start putting down on to paper it doesn't mean it's the last and final policy but that at least it is a start where it is that we want this to be how because our policy is not only our communication to the public but it's our direct it's our directive to the superintendent this is the opportunity for us to do that so I would hope that all of these thoughts are

[03:13:11] being gathered that are being articulated here to help bring this to governance in the very near term thank you miss Anderson we have spent at least all of this year so far working on the urgent and what I see this is working on the important and the important is the oxygen that keeps us going it's like the thing that gets us all excited and makes us want to do work that is so important for the division moving forward. I do think that we have an opportunity here to define what future ready

[03:13:47] actually means in a real way because the idea is we have some of the theoretical already, right? Pog does that. It could be that it needs an update related to new things that are happening, but then we have this like practical aspect of future ready that is very, when the kids walk out the door we want them to be able to do these things. And so I do think that maybe expanding the definition of what we mean by future ready is probably going to be extremely important as we move forward with the discussion. And this is where effectively surveying or talking to kids or, you know, we can get feedback from those people in industry. Like this is a place where

[03:14:27] we can gain partnerships. So I really think that this is the opportunity that will create something we need to be innovative here. It's not just that we're expecting the kids to be innovative. So they will always be innovative and the adults just need to follow their lead. So I'm very excited about to see where this is going. To some of my colleagues' points about like how this work is going to move forward, we're going to need to talk about that. We've been talking for a while about whether or not we needed another committee, another standing committee related to some sort of technology focus or innovation in education and that kind of thing and I think that this is leading towards that discussion because I'm not sure that it's

[03:15:06] fair to just put one more thing on governance in terms of trying to determine the full path forward here so all right and thank you again for being here IT and for you sir we appreciate your time and we're going to transition now to the presentation on the new Western High School after a five minute

[03:15:25] break which is the new Western High School I call on Dr. Reed and her team to present the information thank you madam chair and appreciate this afternoon it's been a great afternoon of thought-provoking conversation so this afternoon I want to talk a little bit about how we want to frame this

[03:16:04] conversation and I want to be really thoughtful about level setting again and just sort of managing expectations for the conversation so I'm going to jump up and use the thing you can do is talk a little bit about what we did before. We only had one other work session, right? Because we just bought the school and property on August 14th. So we really haven't

[03:16:43] owned it that long. But recall that at our last meeting, we talked about really, I'm going to call it a continuum of possibilities. And the continuum is anywhere from sort of a single topic all the way to sort of a more comprehensive approach for a school, right? And so I think it's important when we start brainstorming any new idea that we think about the vastness of possibility and not start with the very narrow idea, right? Because then it's really hard for everyone to connect to the conversation.

[03:17:18] So, and this is an important conversation to connect to because it's the first time we're having an opportunity to open a new high school in two decades. So I think having that broad conversation created a lot of discussion a lot of conversation among us as a team among our senior staff among our community we are planning a community conversation Saturday October 25th to have an open house at the new school we're inviting the community to come in to we're gonna have a presentation a

[03:17:50] little bit about possibilities and ideas around the high school and just kind of a get to see the building sort of a couple hour event but this continuum really led us to have some conversation around what was our thinking for a new western high school so this afternoon what i want to share is um at this point my recommendation in thinking about how we're beginning to think about this at this time and what i want us to think about is really kind of

[03:18:26] i'm going to draw a circle here for a shell if we can think of that of a school idea if that makes sense which is to say that within this comprehensive high school which is going to be i believe best situated as a neighborhood school a neighborhood high school we can still within that and we'll talk about that can still have what we talked about earlier today which is we could have 22nd century skill pathways that could sit within a comprehensive high school

[03:19:00] that i'm going to say will have its own discreet i love these kind of math things i hope you're panda mr mcdaniel it's squares and circles now not squares it's not a triangle but i believe that this neighborhood western high school should have its own boundary right we have made a commitment it for quite a number of years to reduce crowding on the Western of the Western high schools so if it has its own boundary and it has a comprehensive

[03:19:33] curriculum it can still have a 22nd century if you will halfway within it and a an opportunity for us to incubate or pilot new ideas as well much as our guests this afternoon talked about with high schools so because we also have classroom spaces that we're building out yet we haven't completely built out so I'm gonna be talking in the presentation and you're gonna hear others talk about

[03:20:09] all the possibilities that could be situated within a comprehensive neighborhood high school with a traditional boundary to reduce crowding the western high schools and still have opportunities for second 22nd century skill development within the school so we're trying to make sure that we can provide the opportunities to even try some sort of new curricular ideas potentially that can then be brought across the entire county and brought to

[03:20:43] scale which is why the boundary work what we're going to base the new boundaries on the western high school programming possibilities and then the expansion of our career and technical education which provides access across the division and our Academy work which provides access across the division that

[03:21:17] was a very important topic in our last conversation so let's start with the first slide please here are some basic facts again to level set the presentation today. We expect the capacity of the new Western High School eventually to be at 2,000 students or more. The site size is on the site. It will be our newest high school building as it was built eight years ago in 2016. It has a number of

[03:21:52] building amenities as well as site amenities. The campus space including the two buildings we're developing is 355,000 square feet with 407 parking spaces and a transportation

[03:22:08] loop that we've already reviewed for accessibility. So islands and minimize split feeders where

[03:23:48] possible. Enrollments last capacity looked at using current student enrollment projections to maximize efficient and effective use of our school facilities and help us make informed decisions. Looking at proximity, it was to limit transportation times and ensure efficient transportation routes and attendance areas. Per 8130, a superintendent can also look at seven additional criteria, and a couple of those criteria are relationship to school pyramids, minimize disruptions of students in instructional programs, minimize future

[03:24:24] capital and operational budgets, and minimize the use of temporary classrooms and modular units. So on this next slide, we'll just talk about some of the things Dr. Reed mentioned, but the Fairfax County Public School boundary review process for Western High School is designed to relieve overcrowding at Westfield, Chantilly, and Centerville High Schools with the goal of balancing student capacity across the Western High Schools. In addition, we will review to seek to eliminate attendance islands, reduce split feeder patterns wherever feasible, and per 8130 align this

[03:25:01] with phasing adjustments as described within 8130. That's a brief overview of how we're gonna look to incorporate the Western High School into the current boundary analysis. As you're aware, our consultant is working through those analysis right now, working through the analysis that we directed them to do, and we'll start a series of community engagements on the 13th of October, and that will go through the 30th of October as well, so.

[03:25:30] - Thank you, Mr. Gordon. So this afternoon, just I think the major takeaway from the boundary part of this agenda is that we're drawing a boundary unique for the Western High School. It is not completed yet.

[03:25:47] And that we will be bringing a draft boundary likely by the end of this month that would hopefully meet these needs. It's not ready today, but it is a boundary that is a discrete boundary being drawn at this time as a draft for this high school.

[03:26:06] So moving on to the next slide, and then the next one, looking at programming conversations, as I began on the chart, we're thinking at this time about a comprehensive high school with a traditional boundary.

[03:26:23] We also recognize that any time we open a new school, it's an opportunity to think about planning for our students' future, and what are those courses and possibilities that might enhance a student's experience as we think about a future.

[03:26:40] So even within a comprehensive high school, there are a number of types of programming, be they CTE classes, academies that are attached to the school, or even a school within a school model. There's some options on this slide.

[03:26:56] As we go to the next slide, just wanna remind our board and anyone watching or downloading the presentation that as we look at comprehensive academic offerings, neighborhood enrollment, and making sure our facilities meet what the expectations would be for a comprehensive high school.

[03:27:15] These are important and important in any comprehensive high school planning across the division. The next slide illustrates two current examples within Fairfax County Public Schools of schools within a school model.

[03:27:32] On the left is the Edison Global STEM Challenges Program. And even though Edison High School is a traditional comprehensive high school, that's a neighborhood school that has a defined boundary, there are 90 students within Edison High School that attend a four-year cohort program.

[03:27:52] In this case, it's a three-year for grades nine through 11. And that cohort of 90 students is focused on Global STEM Challenges. and that's a program that can exist within a comprehensive high school that has a traditional boundary.

[03:28:08] If there's room in the program, students outside that traditional boundary are allowed to apply for a transfer, and if they meet the transfer guidelines are accepted into the program. If there's not room, then it's filled by the neighborhood school in the traditional comprehensive school setting.

[03:28:28] Another example is the Lewis Leadership Program. The Lewis Leadership Program is currently situated at Lewis High School, and in this case, it's a four-year cohort program, but there are elements of the program that are inherent in all the courses at Lewis in terms of all the grade levels.

[03:28:48] In other words, all students can participate in some element of the program, but there are about 30 spaces that rising ninth graders can apply for to be part of a four-year cohort program. So these are examples in two of our comprehensive high schools that allow for what we consider a school within a school pathway that doesn't change the fact that there's a traditional boundary and it can be situated, as I mentioned, in a comprehensive high school.

[03:29:20] So as we think about this Western high school, when you think about about 2,000 students, it's reasonable to think that we could have anywhere from 30 to 60 to 90 students in one or two such pathways within a Western high school while maintaining the comprehensive nature of the school and a traditional boundary.

[03:29:45] The next couple slides are simply some ideas that different community members have shared or staff members have put forward. Let's look at the next slide, please. One of those, because of the proximity to Dulles and the incredible opportunities currently career-wise around aerospace careers.

[03:30:10] That is one possibility that could be one of these pathways of 30, 60, or 90 students within a comprehensive high school. There are all kinds of possibilities, and simply because we're visiting some of those on these slides does not imply they're the only possibilities.

[03:30:29] These are just some that have been suggested and that are current, if you will, after a review of the research. So this slide talks about some of those possibilities. Again, it's not a school-wide theme, but rather a pathway for 30 or 60 or 90 students potentially over four years.

[03:30:49] There are a number of these. They also have aligned credentials. If we go to the next slide, please. The aligned credentials and certifications, When we think about workforce learning and workforce development, one of the things that we're really thinking about at this time is what types of credentialing or certification can our students earn while they're still with us in Fairfax County Public Schools that become portable when they leave us.

[03:31:20] So this chart identifies a few of those and also lists a grade nine through 12 progression that would be a potential progression for these topic areas. Conversely, there's also, in the next slide, as we looked at, I met with several community groups already and several of them have been very interested in a humanities or a leadership and ethics possible pathway that would track through, again, 30 students perhaps, maybe at 60, that might go through a four-year program.

[03:31:56] Again, we're uniquely situated near the nation's capital. The opportunity for a leadership program or ethical civics and government strands or the humanities. This is also, these are just examples of what a ninth through 12th grade cohort could look like and also the aligned credentials and certifications that might connect to these.

[03:32:19] There are infinite possibilities and what this afternoon, the board's gonna be voting in early November on not necessarily the brand of the possible school within a school track, but this idea that it is a comprehensive high school with a defined traditional boundary, and some one, two, I don't know, possible pathways, because I think those will be developed with our planning principle and community input as we move forward over the course of this year as well.

[03:32:59] So at this point, I'd like to turn the CTE and Academy expansion topic over to Dr. Presidio for his comments on the career and tech ed expansion possibilities. Dr. Presidio.

[03:33:15] - Thank you, Dr. Reed, and good afternoon again. Happy to be back for this second work session that I think is a good continuation of some of the conversations we've been having all day, particularly from the AI work session. So as Dr. Reed mentioned, as we're thinking about innovative programming opportunities for this new Western High School, we know that we need to be thinking about innovative programming opportunities for all of our schools as well as equitable access to existing career and technical education offerings that we have around the county.

[03:33:43] So we wanted to provide a little bit of thinking today in terms of what our work in that area could look like. We did term this a plan, but I'm gonna just go ahead and front load and say, I don't have a plan with timelines, deliverables, milestones, and success measures today. Probably a framework or a concept model would be a little bit more apt.

[03:34:01] So on the next slide, we wanted to share with you just kind of our current state of how we talk about career and technical education in Fairfax County. We use the term pathways to talk about large areas of focus. So on this slide, you can see the current pathways, seven pathways that we offer.

[03:34:19] And in each of these pathways, we offer a lot of different coursework. So for example, I won't read everything on here, but for example, if you look at business and information technology, we offer a lot of coursework, and these are just a few examples on the slide, business management, business law, accounting, all types of business-associated courses as well as IT-associated courses, which it sometimes can overlap with some of the other pathway areas just in terms of our nomenclature.

[03:34:47] So another area I would point out on the slide would be STEAM and computer science, for example. A lot of the courses that we offer in computer science, programming, networking administration, advanced programming classes, cloud computing, cybersecurity, some of that has overlap with business in the IT sector.

[03:35:07] But we have these seven different pathways, all with multiple courses within each of the pathways. So that's kind of our current state of how we organize our work. And on the next slide, I wanted to share with you just a few highlights and celebrations for the work that we're doing and the programs that our staff are currently offering to students.

[03:35:27] So we have 150-plus CTE courses across FCPS, offered in base schools, offered in the online campus, offered at our six academy programs. In fact, we have over 65,000 students on an annual basis who are taking one or more CTE courses.

[03:35:45] On the right-hand side, you can see that's translating into a lot of success for our students, a lot of career-connected learning, work-based learning opportunities. We had over 8,500 students last year, these are all figures from last year, participate in work-based learning. Over 5,000 students completed a CTE sequence, that's a series of courses that leads towards a certificate in a particular CTE area.

[03:36:08] So we have a lot of offerings and we have a lot of access, but we also have equity gaps and access gaps with some of these programs across the county that we really need to try to shore up. So on the next slide, I just wanted to share a few recent enhancements that we've been working to try to make sure that our programming in CTE is industry relevant and relevant for today's economy.

[03:36:34] So a few recent examples of innovations in CTE programming. The first is that we've really tried to create more equitable access to courses at our base school level. So two years ago, we introduced advanced computer science. We already had introductory computer science, but advanced computer science courses as well as cybersecurity courses is standard course offerings in all of our base schools.

[03:36:58] So that was a big win for us is to try to start to standardize access to some of the high-tech courses that we were already offering. We've also introduced a new welding program as part of our academy. It's actually situated at Bryant High School and serves students from Bryant in one section and then students from around the county in the remaining sections throughout the day.

[03:37:18] We just opened that program last year, and that's associated with our West Potomac Academy. So it's kind of an annex site of the West Potomac Academy. We've done a lot of additional access to CTE courses through our online campus in the last several years.

[03:37:35] In touching on the work session from just a few minutes ago, this year we offered our first AI programming course, AI fundamentals programming course, through our online campus. So any student in Fairfax County can enroll in that. As part of our capital improvement work, partnering with our facilities department, the recent renovation at Falls Church High School, we really invested in the nursing lab, which serves students from around Fairfax County.

[03:38:01] Students can graduate high school with a licensed practical nursing degree by participating in that program. It's an amazing opportunity, and again, we'd love to have more programs like that around the county. But I offer that as an example of when we think about capital projects and programming together, we can do some pretty cool things.

[03:38:19] and then a lot of additional opportunities for internships and work-based learning, even within Fairfax County departments. So on the next slide, I just wanted to point out where we think some of our future CTE programming expansion work really needs to go.

[03:38:35] So we review with business and industry professionals on an annual basis all of those seven CTE pathways. We seek input from people in the industry in terms of the relevance of the coursework that we're providing to our students. And one of the things that we've heard over the last several years, and we've heard it several times in our conversations today, is that technology is evolving so rapidly, it's very, very difficult for us to keep up, and we're starting to fall behind in some really important sectors, like artificial intelligence, like machine learning, like quantum computing and quantum science, like data science.

[03:39:13] So based on the conversations that we're having, the research that we're doing, just even partnerships with George Mason University, the community college system, the county economic development authority. These are areas that we really need to build out new programming in.

[03:39:28] And our goal would be to build out this programming in a very thoughtful and intentional way so that we don't have access barriers to students based on their base schools around the county. So again, I don't have a complete plan about what this is gonna look like, but conceptually this is an area of new programming that we know that we need to focus on.

[03:39:46] On the next slide, I wanted to share with you just a little bit of what that might look like in terms of courses. Now as we develop new courses, particularly in high tech industries in areas like this, we want to work with business industry and higher education partners. We've got some good partnerships with George Mason, as I mentioned, in their computer science program.

[03:40:06] But here you can see, and I'm not going to read every single course on here, but in these three different pathway areas, AI, data science, and robotics, potential courses that could be offered leading to certifications in these areas. And the main thing I think that I would call out on this slide is that you can see if there's a course that has an asterisk next to it, that would be a new course.

[03:40:27] If it doesn't, that's a course that we currently offer somewhere in Fairfax County. So we already have a strong foundation in some of these areas, but we don't have fully articulated pathways, and we think that we could build on the strong foundation that we've already established, create greater access geographically to students around the county, and really provide some innovative career related learning opportunities to students across FCPS.

[03:40:52] On the next slide, I just wanted to share with you kind of the strategy that we have historically used and I think we can still build on this strategy, it's not the only strategy, but just how we've gone about thinking about access to courses for students.

[03:41:08] So base schools is the first place and probably the best place for students to get access to their coursework in their base neighborhood school. So we can expand access to areas by ensuring that we have standard course offerings, which means that a school would be required to advertise that course if there's sufficient student interest and teacher availability, then they would be able to staff that course.

[03:41:32] Now you could foresee that we might have a standard course offering, and we forecasted in one particular school only two students decide that they're signed up. We wouldn't be able to run that, it wouldn't be fiscally responsible. So we'd have to think about, well how could those students get access to a course if they couldn't get it at their base school?

[03:41:49] Well they might be able to get it at the online campus. So we've really tried to lean into getting more career and technical education courses at the online campus for students to have access if they can't get something at their base school. The other thing that we do is we utilize our high school academies.

[03:42:05] We have six academies as you know across the county. Students based on their base school are targeted to kind of two geographic academies. academies offer different programming and that was intentional by design to be as fiscally responsible as we could be and those are typically those programs of academies are typically reserved for programs that have highly specialized equipment so you can think about things like again the nursing program the welding program HVAC programs dental our dental lab program right things that are going to require a lot of highly specialized equipment that we may not be

[03:42:41] able to afford or have the facility space for in each of our base schools. And also they might have really highly specialized teacher licensure requirements. So students in our licensed practical nursing program, they have to have an instructor who is certified to teach in Virginia, but also who holds a professional nursing license to be able to provide that instruction. Same thing is true when we're talking about automotive programs, when we're talking about cosmetology programs. They have to have the appropriate professional certifications sometimes it's very difficult to find people like that in 26 different base schools so those

[03:43:16] programs tend to be specialized in our academies but we know that this isn't the perfect structure to create access so we want to lean into how can we enhance each of these access points in our future work on the next slide I won't go into this in detail but I just wanted to again share with you kind of how things sort out is our current state.

[03:43:39] So on this chart you can see the CTE program areas or pathways, those seven pathways that we talked about at the beginning. Then you can see in the columns if they're offered at the Bay School, the academy, or the online campus. So again, business courses, for example, are typically not offered at our academy because those are courses that are pretty easy to offer at Bay Schools and staff at Bay Schools.

[03:44:02] Additionally, they can be supplemented through online campus offerings. Health and medical, as I mentioned, you can see is not really offered at base schools because most of that requires a lot of technical equipment, just even hospital beds and things that need to be in the classroom.

[03:44:20] We have an ambulance simulator that's part of our program. Lots of different things that probably would be impractical to have at base schools. But we can offer that at academy, and some things could be offered through online campus like a medical terminology class, which would be easy to do.

[03:44:36] Similarly, trade and industrial. Sometimes we do offer those at our base schools. I think we have 10 or 11 automotive programs right now. We don't have 26, but we do have some of those programs at our base schools or typically at our academies, again, for facility space and technology needs.

[03:44:56] On the next slide, we want to talk just a little bit about how we would go about--you go to the next one as well, Eric, thanks--how we would go about making some progress on enhancing both the innovative programming that we offer as well as the accessibility of programming that we offer. So the first thing that we would like to do is really try to create more standard course offerings at base schools, particularly in this emerging technology area that we've talked about, AI, robotics, and data science. If we could offer

[03:45:35] standard courses students could get access to those courses at their base school we could also think about expanding online campus and getting some of those courses available online as well as what we're calling virtual or hybrid courses where a student might take a course virtually at their base school that's taught by a teacher at a different school who has students probably in the class if they can't fill the class at their base school combining two or three schools students from multiple schools with the same teacher using hybrid instruction we have the technology to do it it's not you

[03:46:15] know always the preferable model but in the right context with the right students the right instructor that can open up more equitable access eliminate transportation costs eliminate transportation time and lost time in student schedules the other thing that we would propose doing is really looking at all of our base schools and thinking about those specialized programs that they have that maybe we could open more seats in.

[03:46:41] So while we don't have automotive at every school, perhaps we might be able to open some seats in automotive programs that do have automotive programs to students that don't attend that school. We could allow students to transfer into a program for a particular specialized program like that and stay in that new school for four years, or we could allow them to attend part-time like we allow students to attend part-time academies now again another strategy which we think would have limited cost to expand access to students and specialized programs around the county and you can see there we've we've named some of the courses automotive culinary criminal justice

[03:47:20] JROTC the reason we named those courses those are those courses that have the biggest student wait list when students sign up those are courses they really really want to take we just don't have enough current seats facing okay so let's move forward a slide into the next slide and we're going to talk a little bit about how could we expand access through our academies creating more equitable learning opportunities through our academies so again as I mentioned I won't belabor the point but you can see even from the pictures on this slide our academies tend to be highly specialized programs unique facilities unique instructors so you can see students in our dental lab students in the automotive

[03:47:59] program students doing our electrical program as well as our culinary program that has you know a high-end kitchen on the next slide just to provide you kind of the current state of how these programs are currently situated across our academies you can see for example business and marketing we have very little of business and marketing in our academies because those are courses that typically are covered in our base schools we don't need to have them in our academies on the other hand if you look at trade and industrial we actually have a lot of trade and industrial programs in our academies because it

[03:48:38] requires a lot of specialized equipment so this is just the current state by program area pathway not by course if we were to do this by course this would be like a 12 page document we would be happy to do that for you if you were interested so on the next page how would we go about expanding access to academies. And where should we start? Really health and medical and trades are the biggest gap areas when you look at some of those charts that we were just flipping through pretty quickly.

[03:49:06] You can see we don't offer as many learning opportunities in health and medical and trades, and we have long wait lists in those programs. So we would propose starting with those two particular programs, trying to get more geographic access in some of our existing base schools, in some of our existing academies and also even thinking about, and Miss Lady I believe has talked about this before, extending the school day in terms of accessibility for students.

[03:49:36] So sometimes students can't get access to programs because they are taking so many AP classes, they're a full IB student, but they really want to explore this CTE program. If we could shift some of our availability starting earlier in the day with what we call a zero period before the first period of the day starts or after school, what we call a ninth period, we potentially could open up access to more students to participate in these programs.

[03:50:00] But I do want to point out that's cost neutral because we didn't add any staffing. We just shifted the availability of when the course was offered. We're not offering it to more students in the aggregate, we're offering it to more students that maybe would have been conflicted out of it previously.

[03:50:16] But again, we think that's a good access strategy. The second thing would be to look at creating additional career pathway programs similar to the Edison program and the Lewis Leadership program that Dr. Reed talked about in our base schools. And here, I think anything is fair game, right?

[03:50:33] As Dr. Reed mentioned, we haven't made any decisions about the new Western High School. We've got multiple ideas out there. We could bring new ideas to the table even if we were gonna start some additional schools within a school is what this model really is in our base schools across the school division.

[03:50:50] You could think about, again, some of the high interest areas that we have, like trades, technology, health sciences, but you can also think about things like the arts program or a humanities program as well. And then finally, like I mentioned, the partnership between facilities and instructional services with the renovation at Falls Church High School.

[03:51:11] If we can build in more opportunities like that when we have high school renovations to design built-in career and technical education spaces like we did at Falls Church with nursing, that would give us a lot of additional access as well. So as I said, this isn't a plan with timelines, deliverables, and everything right now.

[03:51:29] This is more of a concept. But we wanted to get your feedback if you think we're on the right track as we can then take this work and turn it into more of a plan with definitive timelines. I think that is it. So thank you, everyone. Thank you for the presentation.

[03:51:48] And Dr. Reid, thank you so much for the Western High School overview and presentation. I think we'll start with questions for the board members. The first was Mr. Trish. Thank you for all the work that went into the presentation and scoping everything out.

[03:52:06] My high school growing up had a science and aerospace magnet inside of it. I was not a part of the magnet, but many of my friends were. I will say it felt at the time, even then, that the technology was extremely outdated. We were in the shadow of Howard Hughes and his facilities.

[03:52:22] And I think after launch, they never kept up with things. So I think if we do go in that direction, I think it's important to have some kind of a long-term partnership somewhere that keeps the technology fresh in terms of what's been presented uh and in terms of like the questions the board will be grappling with i appreciate the leaning into a traditional approach to the school with a its own boundary you know for my part of the county the discussion around the western high school had always been that there would be a tertiary benefit to the

[03:52:59] Western High School because we would not be taking in a bunch of students from that part of the county at Oakton High School for example so I think capacity relief has various benefits downstream as well and I also have been since the first conversation started I've been keen on the idea of having something special baked into a traditional comprehensive high school so I'd be supportive of a path that takes us towards and probably more inclined to the pathways around the aerospace and science than I am around American

[03:53:39] democracy I think those seem very interesting maybe those can get baked into what we do at Lewis already I do have some questions about the pathways experience and obviously those are things that can be you know farmed out to other schools for students have experiences as well this is a pathway that every student in the school would end up following, or just select students?

[03:54:02] - When we're talking about pathways, we would only talk about students that would select themselves to participate, which the Lewis Leadership Academy actually has 30 students out of their 1,700. Only 30 of them are choosing the four-year path.

[03:54:19] The Edison Global STEM Academy, I believe 90 students choose the three-year path from ninth through 11th grade. out of over 2,000. So it's really, it's a fairly finite pathway that's included within the school. It's not school-wide, although, you know, I think that the Lewis Academy has certain characteristics that any student can participate in, but the specific pathway is a fairly small group of students that choose to participate.

[03:54:50] - So in order for the sample course selections for the different pathways by year to work, approximately how many students would be needed to make that work. I know that we'd probably be on-ramping the school over a number of years in terms of filling it up, but at its, I don't know what you would call it, when it's at the point where everything is fully functioning at every grade level, about how many students out of the 2,000 would be in the pathways in order for that kind of a framework to work.

[03:55:21] - Generally, what you look at, which is the case in both Lewis and Edison is about 30 students per course, per grade level. So if you had 30 students, that's a section.

[03:55:37] There were 30 students over four years at Lewis. So 30, 30, 30 all the way through. There are 90 over three years, which may mean there are three sections, perhaps at each grade level or 90. But you minimally would want 30 students involved because you wanna maintain class sizes for budget purposes.

[03:55:57] It shouldn't cost any more to have a pathway than straight traditional, because you're still providing staff for our students. - So it'd be 30 students-ish per grade level? - That's what we would be thinking about. And again, roughly 500 students per grade level times four is about 2,000 students.

[03:56:17] So we're looking at about 500 ninth graders, 10th, 11th, and 12th in the new school. - Well, I look forward to the further conversation, and I'm supportive of a comprehensive approach and something special being baked into the school. - Right, and any current sitting high school could bake a pathway into their programming if, and that's what Dr. Presidio was talking about, is this potential expansion of our CTE pathways, because as we look towards 22nd century skills, it's not enough just to take a course, although often middle school is that exploratory, to take a course, do I like this area, do I not,

[03:56:55] the wheel is often what they talk about in middle school, try a number of things. In high school, if we're looking at industry certification or some type of credentialing, they're gonna need to take a series of courses, which really is part of this pathway idea.

[03:57:11] - Thank you. - Thank you, Mr. Frishtag. Next is Mr. McDaniel. - Thank you. I think the school within a school model is fine. I would agree that, you know, it needs to be more technology focused as opposed to humanities.

[03:57:27] But I wanna, and I do have to leave early go pick up my daughter from the bus but speaking of busing on slide six it seems like we're limiting the review of this bound I don't want to get exact lines and things like that but it seems like we're limiting the review of the boundary to Westfield Chantilly and Centerville what I envision purchasing this building and the lines that would be drawn around it it was to relieve capacity in the western parts of the county well if you look geographically

[03:58:02] the western parts of the county there are two other high schools that feed into there that are not included in this scope and that's oakton and south lakes and i have kids at oakton to mr frisch's point that are two miles two and a half miles depending on how you drive it from carson which is where western high school is that are being put on buses 10 12 miles 45 minutes down to oakton you have people sitting even closer going into southlakes not as bad of a bus ride but nonetheless so my hope is that when we're looking at the actual geographical boundaries

[03:58:41] of this western high school we're looking at the western neighborhoods and not artificially limiting it to the lines of these three high schools because it's not the fault of the western neighborhoods that they're being bussed 45 minutes east to oakton or however long the bus ride is getting the south lake is not as bad as the oakton guys so when we're looking at those lines and when when you guys are looking at those numbers, some of the worst split fears of elementary schools in the county are sitting in those neighborhoods and they're getting overlooked for no other reason than they're in goofy lines that were drawn because this building did not exist.

[03:59:16] So that's my only comment here and hopefully staff can go back and expand the scope of this to include South Lakes and Oakton. - So Mr. McDaniel, we've looked already at a couple models that looked at South Lakes and Oakton. One of the downsides of South Lakes 'cause it currently is not over capacity as Chantilly and Westfield, Centerville, Oakton actually is a outlier high school with a significant enrollment increase this year.

[03:59:44] So we'll definitely be looking at both of those as well. But as we looked at the map and the furthest west, those were the biggest three, but for sure Oakton and Southlakes are a part of whatever modeling comes back. - Right, and on the capacity numbers, so I looked at the boundary tool online, compared it to the CIP documents, Westfield, Centerville, Chantilly right now are sitting at a 600-seat overcapacity total, give or take, with a couple seats.

[04:00:11] But if we're saying that the capacity here is going to be 2,000, where are the other 1,400 students going to come from? Well, that's why we're looking at more just those three. Those are the paramount. That's my point, is even in a worst-case scenario, there isn't enough of a capacity deficit, even in long-term projections, for those three high schools to fill the full utilization capacity of the western high school thank you thank you mr. McDaniel mr. Dunn I want to ask I know that you mentioned that the

[04:00:49] boundaries or draft boundaries are being prepared by the end of this month so dr. Reed do you expect the school board vote in January to vote to include not just the comprehensive school boundary review we've been doing but also the boundaries for the new western high school that's my hope I again when we started this boundary process we didn't even contemplate buying a high school right so this is another new variable that's kind of come in in the fourth quarter I guess for lack of a better way to put it and I do hope we can get

[04:01:25] there mr. done because I feel like that's important we're trying to figure out the best way to feather that into our work and I don't think there's a perfect solution for that right now but we're working on it and will there be a separate set of community meetings if because all the community means right now they're on the schedule will be done by October 31st I'm not sure yet okay I was this is a great presentation first of all so thank you to you and your team for bringing together a great presentation there wasn't any discussion of project-based learning but I believe that the physical construction of the

[04:02:04] building was really built around project-based learning is there any contemplation of that within the kind of curriculum being developed for the Western High School it could be I think one of the things we have to recognize is that the policy decision that we need to make by November is really this school shell I'm gonna call it right which is to say do we want a comprehensive high school that has a traditional boundary because that sends us in a really specific direction what types of courses that sit within it we

[04:02:41] have a standard course book for comprehensive high schools we also have a model for inserting school within a school sort of models which are we've given you probably eight or ten of those possibilities then there's also sort of the as our guests spoke about AI being infused into the courses you could infuse project-based learning in the number of courses in addition to that so we didn't go into detail about the types of infusion in that way here

[04:03:18] but within those schools within a school it's very likely there will be project based approaches to the work it's really a good approach across the board quite honestly but we're gonna once we make the decision on the shell our planning principal and our planning team Mr. Smith is leading that work with Dave Jagels Dr. Ponce Dr. King Dr. Presidio Mr. Gordon that committee will be inviting community members that are likely going to be attending that school to have deeper conversations around those topics but we're talking at this

[04:03:54] level about comprehensive high school traditional boundary that's the decision I'm going to ask you for in November it sounds like you're already going down the path of a traditional comprehensive high school though so I'm just trying to understand like what are the decisions you're at if any that you're asking for today I'm not asking for a decision today today is informational but very early in November you're going to need to make a programming decision about whether the school has a defined boundary in a comprehensive high school versus recall at the very beginning I talked about the continuum of

[04:04:30] possibilities right you could do a magnet for the division you could do a magnet for the Western only you could do a traditional with no schools within a school just total comprehensive very traditional curriculum you could do something in the middle right traditional boundary but comprehensive with a school within a school those have staffing implications that we need to have an answer to because then we need to set that committee and mr.

[04:04:58] Jagels off to begin planning once that decision's made in early November so no decision today simply informational and a chance to sort of chew on what a comprehensive high school with traditional a traditional boundary could look like including these possible a pathway or two within the school if possible and how do you how do you get from the infinite possibilities you know different combinations that you put on your slides to one recommendation or do you anticipate providing a recommendation for one of those pathways or school

[04:05:36] within a school etc or you know AI versus the aerospace versus you know humanities to the school board I don't purse well I mean how do I but it's not by November first of November right because there won't be a chance really to authentically engage with the community about that I think once we know if that's the way we're going to go then that gives the committee that's planning along with the planning principal an opportunity to meet with the community also potential students that will be attending and really create a process to think about what is that interest and that will be running

[04:06:10] parallel obviously to the naming process and it's parallel running to the boundary setting process and then at some point I'll be bringing a recommendation back to the board on what that programming might look like which Which was very similar to the Lewis Leadership Program conversation the board had or the Global STEM Challenge conversation the board had about Edison.

[04:06:37] That decision could come after I hear your decision on is it a comprehensive high school with a traditional boundary and some type of a program perhaps that's situated within that. You mentioned the committee. Who is on that committee?

[04:06:52] Well, there's a school opening committee which includes right now a very few people till we're clear on is it a traditional boundary comprehensive high school because that's when we'll know which community to draw community members from so it's a bit of an unusual process we're in so mr smith do you want to clarify who currently is working with you certainly and good afternoon everyone we have representation from all of our chiefs who are working on that committee uh we are we have paused all programming because we haven't gone down the road of programming at this time right now we're looking to ensure that we have the space and

[04:07:32] facility ready when the time would warrant us having meetings in the building and then preparing for a future opening but again we have representation from all of our departments on this operations committee and they're right now some of the topics mr. Dunn are like security are we wiring everything within the new school into our current security there are a number of those technical topics that need to happen right now and are happening security inventory and what we currently have in the building food nutrition services safety and security those are the pieces that we're looking at now clearly a facilities piece to ensure that we have our spaces up and

[04:08:12] running but it's very operational at this point and and does that include decisions on what to do with the swimming pool which would be the only one that we maintain and whether it needs we need to build a football stadium because it lacks that at this point those specific level decisions are not being made at this juncture right now we're looking at sort of that more global policy decision around the shell right comprehensive high school traditional boundary with a possible 9 through 12 pathway on one or two

[04:08:51] content areas at what point do you make a decision on AP versus IB curriculum or if you're looking to bring in something like Cambridge as an alternative I love Cambridge I'm glad you mentioned that but I that would be once we have the decision on comprehensive traditional boundary then mr. Jagels who's our planning principal along with mr. Smith will be reaching out to the community that will be situated within that boundary to have those conversations okay I do love the presentation that mr. Presidio presented

[04:09:26] on providing greater geographic equity and access so that all students have access these wonderful programs we have I'd love to see some component of that being expanding access because 30 students in a you know 2,000 student plus high school is not very many students and there's a lot more interest I think especially for some of these programs so and and making sure that I mean that's almost a separate conversation from Western High School, right? So I'd love to see that conversation keep moving forward so that you know we can have you know on a dual track perhaps in combination but I appreciate that's

[04:10:05] being raised because certainly if we're having a shiny new thing in Western Fairfax County all you know as far west you can go before you cross the border I want to make sure that people living in other parts of the county also are being considered and these long-standing problems that have existed and were thoroughly examined by some of my colleagues, I think, who led work sessions under the prior board to look at gaps in programming and availability, we start to move towards outcomes and not just further conversations.

[04:10:37] Thank you. Yes, sir. And the reason we paired the topics was because at the last work session we had board members concerned that we were creating something unique here without making sure we had access to programs and across the division.

[04:10:53] So wanna sort of benchmark where we are and I've asked Dr. Presidio and his team to put together a 2030 plan to provide that equitable access across the county. - That's wonderful, thank you. Do you know when that will be presented?

[04:11:10] - Well, Dr. Presidio, they have bits and pieces of this plan I think because the CTE Advisory Committee talked about it for a number of years, and we had a CTE review recently, so we'll get back to you on that, Mr. Dunn, but I'm expecting that this academic year. And I just wanted to say, I love that 12-page document you mentioned from slide, I think it was 27.

[04:11:30] Thank you, Mr. Dunn. Ms. Marin is out, so Ms. Lady. Thank you. I got a couple comments, and they kind of might seem all over the place. First of all, slide 18, I don't want us to be conflating job readiness with CTE.

[04:11:47] When I look at this slide, AI, data science, quantum science, computing, energy, which is wind, solar, or other sources, that is not career technical education. It is, but it's math and science. And I just, I have gotten a little frustrated throughout my tenure in Fairfax County Public Schools, just because there's so many pathways, but we seem to be just conflating this with career technical education, when if we're going to create these courses, they're not going to have CTE codes.

[04:12:16] They better have science and math codes. and so I just want to be clear about that and then slide 19 my question is with the asterisks proposed new courses not yet offered are these being piloted in Fairfax right now no as I was trying to mention this is more of a concept model in partnership with business and industry trying to think about what new courses would we need to have to actually build out the type of experiential sequence that students need so any or any of these video ease that or somewhere else, or we would be proposing them?

[04:12:48] I think there are a couple that might have VDOE course codes right now, but most of them would be new courses that we would need VDOE course codes for. Because I would like us to move on the VDOE ones now. I started asking for data science before I retired in the system, and I think we kind of have a data science course, but kind of we don't.

[04:13:07] We have not – I just looked at – and no disrespect to any discipline, but what is information systems what what is that course anymore like when we look at some of what we're doing I think that we've got a lot of an opportunity here to really really improve and revamp a lot of what we're teaching in every discipline that's much more more futuristic even when you look at the humanities in the American democracy idea which I love those those pathways but maybe some of those pathways should be you know course offerings in some of our of our you

[04:13:42] know schools we have now I feel strongly that this is a missed opportunity if we don't utilize this school for some sort of specialized pathway I was initially a proponent of making it some type of magnet or career Academy that would relieve the Western high schools but I understand I'm not going to get support for that idea I don't think I say that as someone who worked at Chantilly and dealt with the overcrowding you know it's funny when you have overcrowding and and all of a sudden we're gonna shrink that school by three or four hundred kids, people are gonna freak out because no teacher wants to leave there, okay?

[04:14:18] So you know, people are gonna get cut and kids are not gonna move, right? So even though it's overcrowding, we figure how to deal with it. But having said that, I understand the desire for a more comprehensive high school and I very much support that, but I would like to have a pathway.

[04:14:36] I don't think 30 kids in a cohort is enough. I would love to see 180, but I could live with 90 or 120. I think that's gonna take time, but I think as we put this out there and back to the conversation earlier, can we also infuse this as an AI high school based on the conversation we had earlier in terms of lesson design and the overlapping of how all that works?

[04:15:00] I think that's important. And then I had one last question and that is with early childhood. Are we gonna continue to keep that space or is that because that's nowhere in any of the slides? But I personally think that that's a pathway we eliminated from our kids that is a pathway that we need.

[04:15:18] So I'd like to see that stay in some capacity, even if it's as an academy course, or if we have enough interest within the school. So I'm just curious to know where we stand on early childhood right now. - We've made no decision on the early childhood space, although it is a special little space and the playground is pretty amazing too.

[04:15:37] So it certainly has a lot of possibility attached to it. - Thank you. thing I would say and again I don't know what is happening with some of our academy spaces but we desperately need HVAC and electricity and probably welding on the western side of the high school whether we can renovate something at the Chantilly Academy to create that space or do something with some of the spaces we have here it's definitely a void so thanks Thank You Miss Lady Miss Marin yeah so a few things so I see a tension with our

[04:16:12] boundary policy so 8130 directs that phasing is not phasing is not applicable in the situation regarding a new school so all the families and students that get boundaried into the school will not have a choice to say no okay so if we put a program in on a certain subject area i don't know how families would feel about that now if it's 30 kids i'll talk to that in a minute but that is different than every other school and we need to think about that um the second thing i'm glad you clarify Dr. Reed that the boundary will be based on geographic location and not

[04:16:47] a magnet from various places regardless of geography and will particularly consider overcrowding. I know that my constituents in that area will be relieved to hear this even though the outcome still remains unknown. The big picture is not being considered here. This is about programming at one school when we are long overdue to consider and make decisions about the offering of career and tech ed and career pathways in every high school. I'm trying to go with innovation and I want to go with that unknown arrival place to a point but I personally have been advocating and waiting for a thorough conversation on the board about CTE for years and here we are seeking to make a decision

[04:17:26] about one school in a silo rather than have a comprehensive thoughtful plan to expand access and equity I'm not interested in a niche program for 30 kids when some students don't have access to the breadth of programs we offer madam clerk could you please put up slide 23 so um i meant we have 60 000 high school students so i'm interested in what can scale when we talk about access to programs at all high schools well first of all there's two categories of information technology i don't know which ones those are off the top of my head what's the difference i'm thinking about our ai conversation

[04:18:05] which one of those two categories infotech cyber computer science and tech and engineering education Which one are those the ones that are going to focus on AI? And secondly, for technology and engineering education, Herndon High School is not in that category. It is the only high school in that region that doesn't have it.

[04:18:23] So I'm supposed to grant access to 22nd century learning for the students who are going to be boundaried into Western High when there's an existing high school that does not have the coursework that we just spent talking about is the now and the future.

[04:18:39] That is not equity. this very much is a concept it's not a plan and yet you're asking us to decide in a month or we are putting it on ourselves to decide in a month on a concept I've been asking about the early childhood space since I first went to the school on that day in August Dr. Reed I've asked you as recently as yesterday what is being done with the early childhood space are we ripping out that facility part or are we keeping it what is the cost of that why isn't there anything about the upkeep. If we do something in technology and AI, what's the ongoing budget to

[04:19:16] maintain it? And I just want to say the constituents locally, the Carson kids, they want to stick together as much as they can from that cohort from Flores. And I also sent you to the board questions from eighth grade students. We haven't even talked about what is the experience like for a rising ninth grader at this school? Do they have homecoming? Do they have sports? What about music? Do they have marching band? We're going to talk about that. Thank you, Ms. Maren. Next up, and Dr. Anderson thank you there's a lot here to digest and so I'm going to try to funnel down to the most urgent thing that you need from us right now as I

[04:19:56] said during the last conversation on this matter and I will repeat here we have to have this be a comprehensive high school because we must relieve the overcrowding and the spaces in the Western high schools that I've been hearing about since I've been on the board and we don't have any other options in sight so very much leaning into having a traditional boundary of a comprehensive high school so that's check for me you could put that down that's how I'll vote my second piece is I do think this is an opportunity to also do something differently at this site I don't want it to be something that only benefits 30 60 kids I'm actually kind of surprised to

[04:20:35] hear that the Edison and the Lewis programs only impact such a small number of kids so not only would I look for whatever it is that is the special thing that happens at the Western High School to impact more kids but furthermore I'd like for us to go to Edison and Lewis to see how we could expand that because all of these things come with some resources that we are investing is it the most bang for the buck and maybe it's just one class and it's one teacher I don't know feel free to tell me but it just seems as if we can do a little bit more there agree with a lot of things that have been said but one of the other

[04:21:14] things that I wanted to to speak to is the space I probably one of the few board members that has not been to that space so mr. Gordon can you speak can you kind of try to give me a picture of the layout there's a main building and two other buildings are we looking for all of these buildings to give us the space that we would require for a comprehensive high school or is it just the main building that's going to give us two thousand kids thank you great question so fundamentally we're looking at how do we take two grades ninth and tenth grade initially form a new school so ninth and tenth grade in this first

[04:21:53] phase would be the primarily the main building of the net main building roughly three hundred and twenty five thousand square feet we have two additional shell buildings for additional thirty thousand square feet fifteen thousand square feet each so again ninth and tenth grade would look to occupy the main building we think we need roughly three to five years to plan budget design construct a school that would support all four grades and so building out the two out buildings we've looked at some concepts that would include again 15,000 square

[04:22:33] feet when you look at traditional educational space needs somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of that space needs to be credited or allotted for circulation circulation meaning you know egress circulation bathroom storage mechanical space so if you look at roughly what that high end of that 40 percent we think we would be able to in the second phase of that support roughly five to six classrooms per floor roughly ten classrooms per building so additional 20 classrooms you know in those two outbuildings of a traditional

[04:23:07] concept and that would then then in that second phase and we would then look to repurpose spaces within the facility with the ultimate goal of having 500 you know students per class and getting us the 2,000 student 2,000 students quick follow-up question our other high schools how what's the typical size or the average size of our other high schools so you know I think our smallest high schools 220,000 220,000 220,000 eight square feet or something like that largest is roughly 410 maybe and that 220,000 square foot high school houses

[04:23:47] 2000 kids well at a base we obviously a smaller high school has temporary classrooms temporary facilities so that's really a base building concept so there's additional school additional square footage instructional space that supports that if you look if you were to ask hey what's a we want to build a new high school I think we would roughly look somewhere around 4:15 4:10 as a concept of what we were wanting if we had a perfect space perfect size you know acreage to do that are these two out buildings kind of far away or is this kind of a walkway situation so they're walking distance I had to guess I'd say

[04:24:26] they're within a hundred yards of the main main building thank you I definitely think there's some space for us to learn a little bit more about the facilities component and I would also be interested dr. Reed and knowing the impact the CIP the utilization impact of the surrounding schools if we were to move into this position where 500 students will need to populate the grade levels and I'm glad that Miss Marin brought this up we don't have to start with just the the first two grades but I think it's a good idea because in high

[04:25:01] schools you have to build momentum it's you can't be a senior in a new place because you haven't had your activities you haven't had all of the things that make your experience special so I am in full support of that but I want to make clear that they don't choose to go they all go because that's what happens with a brand-new school thank you dr. Anderson I'm a seismal Heiser thank you a couple things as I look through these slides and look this information first

[04:25:37] of all I'm really grateful we're including on just the high school right in terms of our pathways I wanted I'm hearing a lot about not humanities pathways not humanities pathways and I want to call attention I'm sorry I I wait thank you I want to call attention to the specific slide around humanities and the offerings on slide 13 these are not what these are the classes that are going to build those skills that we just heard about in their previous right journalism debate argument rhetoric digital literacy empathy ethical

[04:26:15] decision-making that's what makes us human and not AI how do we not have this pathway somewhere maybe not all of this but for good you know what you need to add to this is improv and I mean comedy I mean theater improv because there's nothing that teaches you perspective taking and listening skills better than improv I'm gonna tell you this right now you've got and how to get from point A to point B then improv because you're given a scenario and you've got to listen to somebody else you can understand the perspective to build on

[04:26:49] that to get to the end that should be infused in every lesson we do but I like So the first question I'm gonna ask is, is it a possibility to have this type of stuff infused everywhere? 'Cause if we're going to build those skills that are needed for our students, if not, is it possible to offer more than one pathway or pathways that are combined together?

[04:27:13] So it's not AI or humanities, but it's AI and AI adjacent, AI and AI adjacent skills. 'Cause I would recommend one pathway, or if you wanna go two different AI and data science, aviation and adjacent skills.

[04:27:33] You can't separate them. That's my big, this is great, but you're siloing skills and we do that in FCPS. We silo things. I would take this back. I would take this humanities part and infuse it in the other pathways and then come back.

[04:27:58] If you could please answer or comment on that. - No, I think what's exciting about where we are in education today is really anything is possible, right? I also know that once we can give the committee that's gonna work on this and the planning principle the green light to whether we're doing a comprehensive school and a traditional boundary with possible pathways, then really we want that group to go out and work with community students that might be attending to come up with some ideas that we would bring back to you as a board for consideration and I think the integration of the humanities skills, because you're right,

[04:28:38] the last session we just had, it's not so much the technology, but it's our ability to use the technology in an ethical, thoughtful way that's very important. So they're both important. All of it is important, and I think we've got to figure out also, not just for the Western High School, but really across our school division, how do all our young people benefit from what's been captured here in terms of a discussion.

[04:29:04] That would be my pitch, is I think integrated education, interdisciplinary education has been the trend at the college level of the recognition of the need for the skills alongside the technical knowledge.

[04:29:21] Lots of people are doing Gen AI. There are not very many people who know how to use it. And this is what we've done. We've had portrait graduate over here and content knowledge over here. If we're gonna really prepare our kids for the future, we've got to prepare them for both.

[04:29:41] So I don't have much more to add. I appreciate the hard work that's gone in here, but I would encourage you to come back with an integrated model for Pathways. - Yes, ma'am. - Thank you so much. Mr. Moon?

[04:29:58] - Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I've been enjoying the conversation between board members and staff and superintendent. With that said, I want to start with a couple of comments slash questions. As earlier, when you were making a presentation, you seemed to be making a distinction between comprehensive school and so-called 22nd century skills.

[04:30:22] I don't know whether we can really talk about 22nd century, which is 75 years from now, and with the technology and other things changing so fast enough, I can hard to keep up with the 21st century changes.

[04:30:38] So on top of that, on top of that, I don't know whether we should be saying to our community that comprehensive schools, education we are providing in our comprehensive schools is not gonna be future-oriented.

[04:31:03] They're ancient, archaic, backward versus 22nd century schools because I want all our schools to educate our students for the future. Am I asking too much?

[04:31:21] hopefully that's something a superintendent and staff to consider when you want to talk about different programs that we don't want to leave vast majority of our students in regular comprehensive schools to uh fall behind those who are will be studying 22nd century skills so with that said uh the preparing the duly acquired buildings for new students to come in

[04:31:54] to be educated are we thinking about a renovating retrofitting all three buildings at the same time or are we trying to do uh you know part at a time a little bit at a time or main buildings first or what are we thinking of hey sir thank you for the question just want to correct the record so uh our smallest high school without modular buildings is 285 000 square feet our largest is 459 000 square feet and then our average across the footprint is 383,000 so just want to

[04:32:33] level set that. So to answer your question so it would be a phased approach I think to do this it has to be done over a three to five year period so the initial piece is what can we have in place by August of next year and we're looking for a two grade set so roughly a thousand students. The main building or in three buildings? Just the main building okay with that set, with that perhaps perhaps I'm just an idea I'm just throwing out that I'm in general I

[04:33:07] would prefer large part of if not all part of the schools to be a part of a comprehensive high school program as opposed to magnet or specialized for the entire school so with with that in mind if you are still discussing or debating and not sure about what other programs on top of what we normally provide in comprehensive schools we should consider perhaps those programs could go into those two separate buildings over 15,000 each they may a perhaps could

[04:33:44] accommodate up to 400, 500 once they are fully renovated accounting for that up to 40% of what do you call that circulation we're eventually gonna need all three buildings to get to 2,000 kids the two outbuildings and the main building so And as we looked at the footprint of that, I think ideally we wanted the first two grades to start in the main building.

[04:34:15] But if we end up, when we look at the renovation in the main building, it may be a quicker task to renovate one of the outbuildings while we do the renovation on the main building. But I do agree with you that the two buildings that are on the property close, perhaps at least one of those, can hold an abeyance for until year two or so as we flesh out the pathway for um if we're still contemplating that but i we're gonna need the square footage from all three to get to the to

[04:34:49] the um 2000 enrollment thank you mr moon uh miss and john cunning thank you um i've enjoyed the conversation and thank you for the presentation um i think the problem with the presentation is that it was too comprehensive and there's 12 of us here and we all have very unique ideas you gave us so many to pick from and that's a problem but that's also a possibility um there was a lot of things that were brought up i want to first say that our comprehensive high

[04:35:26] schools that exist now are top-notch what we're trying to decide is this going to be comprehensive and what is it going to have i would like for you to provide the numbers for the rest of our board members to understand exactly how many students are serviced at academies or at these schools within a school because the numbers we're talking about about the 90 and 30 are pretty much even across the board that is not an unusual situation so when we're talking about that I think we have to calibrate ourselves realistically about what's happening now and what the capacity is although I'm very excited to hear that at the Montessori school there's 125

[04:36:06] students which is another school within a school so depending on what we decide to choose you know that's going to dictate the kind of numbers that we can have I think that we are so excited about this and we're so enthused about this and we all want to put in our two cents and that's not even counting the community I appreciate the presentation I think we need to defer to the community that where it sits and I think that we also need to defer to the magisterial school board member that represents that that has been listening to the voices I think the possibilities for what can happen at this school and

[04:36:45] why we have to make the decision now versus that long term that we would have if we had bought a property and we were building it we have to make the decision now not taking away from the fact that we know there are equity issues not taking away from the fact that why hasn't this been done in other places we have to make decisions now based on the fact that we are very fortunate just like incredibly fortunate that we have a building that is already there that needs some minor modifications and yes it's quick but oh my gosh look at all the time we didn't have to waste on building it so I think that's the

[04:37:22] frustration for all of us I think we have a lot of great ideas and I'm hoping that what we can do with this is use this as a blueprint to maybe look at our under populated schools like some in my district and maybe put some of those programmings there too so we have equity my daughter went to an Academy but it was a struggle because it was Fairfax High School which is not near Edison High School okay it's gonna be impossible to get people from my side of the county to there I mean it's gonna be not impossible but difficult but let's put some programming there but right now the decision is this because we have it and so thank you for this presentation that created a lot of possibilities and

[04:38:01] a lot of problems thank you so much for those comments I'm miss Anderson do you have any comments meeting manager okay I'm gonna just speak as the Surrey district representative and also the idea of comprehensive school actually was more of the community voice as well so we heard so loud and clear from the community they wanted this to be a school with a specific boundary and to

[04:38:35] alleviate some of the capacity issues and definitely it's going to help a lot not just central centrally but also with Centerville, Westfield, any other other high schools in the western side. I do want to add that the school within the school model seems to be a great idea right now as we just had an an AI presentation before, and that just gave me the idea of having an AI program amongst the other programs we're thinking about.

[04:39:07] Just the school which did this great program for three years. We are in the right time to go into innovation right now. We cannot wait for next five years and then start this. We have the opportunity to do it right now.

[04:39:23] We need to take that momentum and like all of our voices, I think very, very similarly, we are discussing about how we can use technology in advance of school. And lastly, I'll say CTE definitely has to be reaching more school population, so I really appreciate the idea of having it in the base school and using hybrid technology because so many courses on computer science, related AI, and cybersecurity can be done online.

[04:39:53] it's basically a win-win situation whoever has excess issues so I'll leave at that and I think we have some go backs miss lady thank you I realize often I speak quickly so I just want to make sure for those listening that I 100 percent support enrollment relief for the western side of the county a hundred percent do I just believe that we could do some innovative things and also provide that relief so having said that I think that listening to my colleagues where I landed just so people are clear was a school within the school model and

[04:40:31] again that focusing on relief within the western side of the county but there is great opportunity with this facility I also I love the humanities pathway and I'm gonna put this out there like leadership one leadership to leadership three and four we teach that now all of our schools but I don't believe we're doing empathy and ethical decision-making in leadership one and I don't believe we're doing justice power systems thinking leadership - I believe we're making posters and we are showing up at school events and we are getting credit for our behavior so I asked for years when we were teaching this to please have a program of studies that's a curriculum and it's not a gut course as

[04:41:11] we used to say in college I also would say that there are some other gut courses something in athletic leadership and sport not that that can't be a major or or dissertation, but I don't think that some of what's being taught, again, I'd like to see a healthy program of studies.

[04:41:29] So I also want people to understand that we teach World Civ in most of our schools. That is a lot of what this is happening with this humanities pathway. So as someone who went to the College of William & Mary, it's college day for those in the community too. That's why I'm wearing my shirt, not because I don't know how to dress for a work session.

[04:41:46] I obviously believe in liberal arts education, so I very much support that. But I just want to uplift those things. And the last thing I'll say, and this might require humor, might add levity too, but in terms of the IB AP, I believe the school's too close to Southlakes to make it an IB school, and Southlakes is under-enrolled.

[04:42:03] I would vote for AP, but I really would vote that all of our AP schools become Carnegie schools, because I think it might cost a lot less. But I could be naive, is it cheaper to do Carnegie? It is cheaper to do Carnegie, so I'm all in for, maybe if we're gonna go Carnegie units, Carnegie curriculum that we get rid of ap because it is a astronomical amount of work and a lot of money thank you mic drop thank you miss lady for the mic drop i have mr dunn next um can there be

[04:42:40] additional information provide mr gordon on this three to five year time frame you've discussed because my understanding is that one of the outbuildings um which is just across the street from the main building might be used for you know an academy program in aviation where you need like big open spaces or it could be HVAC or any number of things where you need that open space and since those buildings have not been constructed with you know inner walls and such that seems to offer great space for you know academies or similar programming so and i just want to say like cost estimates if we have any rough ballpark because when we paid 150 i didn't know there would be

[04:43:18] you know tens of millions on top of that i'm just trying to understand the impact on the cip so for sure we got a shell building you know depending on program selected that you know something minimalist could be depending on that type of program so for sure that's a possibility but we look at timelines you know if you're putting something in there you're probably eight to 12 months in design process and then you're also then have to go through the county for review so that's another 12 months so that's a lot of the time is eaten up with design and then

[04:43:54] and also with going through the proper review process within the county. - And, well, that might be a great pilot project for my colleagues who are on the Joint Facilities Board to work with on the county and to expedite that permitting process and the Planning Commission as well.

[04:44:12] But what's the rough ballpark kinda you have? If we're just doing straight, traditional, comprehensive high school, you mentioned, we gotta build out those two buildings to get to 2,000. I think the superintendent said, well, so what, when you say shell, I don't know, are there floors to the building that you're gonna have to construct, you know, level one, two, three, or is it just a big empty box, or?

[04:44:33] - They're both two-story buildings. - Okay, and so how much construction needs to be made? 'Cause I got a hammer, I can get some wood at Home Depot, like what needs to be done exactly? - Well, I appreciate that, Mr. Dunn. I think what probably would be most helpful is if we brought back a report to you that has some more detail and we can do that, I think not this Friday, but next Friday, in terms of what it would cost to do classrooms.

[04:45:01] And I think we have a ballpark on that, Mr. Gordon, ballpark for classrooms for each of those buildings. I'm not looking for detail, just ballpark. - So we're looking for CIP, we have what cost to build out shell buildings and we have cost to build out new square footage and we have cost to build out and renovate.

[04:45:22] So for a shale building, roughly looking at 15,000 square feet, so it's thereabouts about 4.2 million per building. And so my estimate is about, Bald Park figure, Rough Oregon Manitou, about 12 million to build out both buildings in the traditional sense, total.

[04:45:42] You said 4.2 million per building, there's two buildings, so where does the extra 4 million come from? You've got equipment, so if it's traditional, probably less. I'm just kind of, you know, protect myself, protect the kind of the organization here of what a rough organ magnitude would look like.

[04:46:00] So that doesn't include furnishings, equipment. So if there's something special going in there, then that would probably, you know, get it closer to that 12 million. So it would be, it could be less for sure. What about the main building? Because, I mean, it's nine years old, newest building in our portfolio. It's an award-winning architectural design.

[04:46:17] How much needs to be done in the main building, if anything? Again, a lot of that is kind of gets back to program setting. And so we're looking primarily at a traditional concept. I think, you know, you have two elementary school floors that are roughly about 25,000 square feet each.

[04:46:38] If you're looking at roughly about $320 per each to renovate those spaces, I think that could roughly be about $20 million. So I think all in to bring this thing in to a traditional school is roughly, rough order of magnitude somewhere between 30 to $50 million to support a three to five year program.

[04:46:58] - Before 11th and 12th grade can go there. - That would support the four year concept, yes. - I don't necessarily think it's before Mr. Dunn because we have, you know, Falls Church High School's a current example where we've got students in a building being renovated currently.

[04:47:19] So I believe that we're gonna have within two years of a nine, 10, as we add each grade each year, I believe our renovation can keep up with that. And I'll work with Mr. Gordon on that. - Okay, that would be great. And if we can just think about public private partnerships and all options, construction management at risk, design build, all these things just to do things faster, cheaper, as we learned in a work session last year before you were hired.

[04:47:47] Thanks. - Thank you, Mr. Dunn, next would be Dr. Anderson. - Okay, thank you, I think I'm still confused as to how we're able to have buildings with much less square footage and more students, and we're not able to have four grades in 325.

[04:48:05] But you don't have to get into the details right now because I think that's more information that should come to us at another point, as well as all of these costs of renovations, all of those things I think should be packaged for a comprehensive perspective. This is a significant investment and this is not a space where I think there should be a deference to the Magisterial District member because I don't think we've ever done that.

[04:48:29] Almost every decision from an AP center to a Korean center, the whole board weighs in. So I think that's what we're doing here. One of the things that I want to make sure that I share that I'm not in support of is making this an AI high school only because of the presentation that we just heard.

[04:48:47] Everybody needs access to this. So those are good things to bring to all of our comprehensive high schools. I also wanted to share that the CTE, very appreciative of what you've provided thus far.

[04:49:05] Clearly there's a yearn for more information that is a little clearer in terms of what we're going to put where and what is it going to look like? Are the content going to be the most rigorous and up to scale?

[04:49:21] Because we all know location, location, location matters. That's how kids get locked out of programming because they're not able to access it. So I'm looking forward to whenever that plan can be provided. And also Dr. Reed, if at some point where you could bring back to us kind of like the big picture, because there's been a little bit of conversation here and there about the timeline of this project, how it gets buried in, not buried, encompassed into the larger bandwidth conversation, the meetings for that community.

[04:49:50] All of this needs to kind of be laid out on paper for us to have a visual of how these things are going to dovetail into each other. Thank you.

[04:50:06] - We can certainly provide that. I believe there's a draft set of dates right now that's being worked on that we'll be providing you. - Ms. Anderson, first turn. - I just wanted to speak up for a second because as we determined in the previous, to Dr. Anderson's point, We absolutely want to make sure that all of our students have the ability to work within AI and, you know, have those experiences.

[04:50:30] I guess my point or my thinking is that if we actually have this be an AI high school, then within, in theory, we could turn it to be next year that we get started. And if we can do that, then that's the fastest turnaround we've ever been able to make related to curriculum implementation that I've ever seen.

[04:50:51] And this would give us the place to test things that could then be put out to the rest of the schools. So I kind of love the idea of having this be an innovation high school, or at least the school within a school model, I understand. But again, you guys have heard me say a million times, I do what I do for a living now because of a class I took in high school that taught me how to do computer graphics that we now call computers and art.

[04:51:17] And now that computers and art class is, from what I understand, in all schools because it's on a computer and it's easy to implement everywhere. And that was a million years ago when it wasn't easy to implement everywhere because it was expensive as anything to get all those computers in the classrooms.

[04:51:34] And the software was insane. So I understand that it is hard to start somewhere. But when we start somewhere, we get to where everybody has access. And so we have to begin. We can't stop the process moving forward simply because we're afraid that not everybody's going to have access as soon as we start.

[04:51:55] And so I just don't want us to be held back with the possibility. The other aspect with AI is we've already talked about the fact that it touches every industry. So it means that we can get the fine arts kids. It means that we can do all of those things because we are going to be able to open it up to everyone.

[04:52:12] So I just think it gives us an aspect to a possibility. that would be a strong pathway moving forward to get to the innovation that we want. - I just wanted to say, I concur.

[04:52:30] And next, it is Ms. Marin. - Thank you. So what I wanna try and think about is how to be innovative and creative, so visionary and realistic. And so I just, again, just like with the AI, I'm struggling to see the possibility knowing that the resource of time is limited.

[04:52:51] I don't think that we're really recognizing this. We are assuming that staff, among all the other things going on, have time to create this whole new course selection, plus all the building stuff, and time for the board to be appropriately informed.

[04:53:08] I don't think, colleagues, that we are being set up for success in making the decision about Western High School. We just heard back of the envelope estimates, nothing written down, no projected plan that could be subject to change.

[04:53:23] Where is that money coming from? Is it from FY26 operating funds? Is it from the capital funds? And this is, every board member needs to see this school 'cause then you'll see why the question about early childhood matters, because the bottom floor, a significant part of it, is set up for little ones.

[04:53:43] So are we ripping out cubbies and that area, or are we keeping them in? These are, again, I'm perplexed at why I can't have an answer to that question, Dr. Reed. Yes or no, you want us to vote in a month, is it gonna be there or not?

[04:54:00] I think this school within a school model, it's confusing language, it's a pathway. It's a career pathway, we have IB pathways. Let's use language people know because they're confused and it sends off alarms and people think that they're not getting a comprehensive high school. I have a really difficult time being in this strategic plan space of this morning and seeing progress over time each year and how planful work implemented pays off.

[04:54:26] And then we have information given to us incomplete and are expected to make decisions. And then there are some that we make in a silo that have implications across the school division. Carnegie schools, I would love to have a conversation about that.

[04:54:42] When do we do that? Because maybe the decision we make on Western High School can start that. It's so rushed. I just don't get it. I would love to hear each of you what you would vote on because this is when we're supposed to do the work, which is why it's so valuable to have our work sessions that are scheduled and noticed publicly.

[04:55:03] So could you please share what your thoughts are? Will you vote for comprehensive high school? Do you want a magnet? Do you need more? What's the work here to do to prepare us for that vote? - I'll put you in the go back as well if you want. - Mr. Dunn, are you, do you wanna speak?

[04:55:20] Okay, so it's Miss Lady. - Just real quick. Cambridge a Carnegie is a high school credit know that that's it I got my you know you're in when you're in education speak you you know you can you get confused but Cambridge is what I was talking about thank you mr. fish I think today I have heard a textbook example of what the next steps document is for next steps document although not always used this way is designed to solicit the information that one needs in order to make the desired decision so I have some

[04:55:57] questions that I'll be adding to the next steps document to see if colleagues are equally minded in terms of needing that additional information to make the decision but that's exactly what that document is for so it's already in the inbox is what I'm hearing in murmurs across the table so I'll be looking forward to seeing what folks put in there and I will likely be adding some items as well thank you I'm looking for speakers now okay okay Ms. Heizer, for second term.

[04:56:33] - Thank you, just briefly, I do agree, and I appreciate all the hard work to bring the plethora of options back to us. I think that's really helpful for us to see all the possibilities in this. And I think while it is difficult, I think, to think about what do we do with this new space that we have, and it's gonna cause ripple effects other ways, right, and it's gonna be positive in terms of relieving the overcapacity issues we've had on the Western side for a long time.

[04:56:58] But I would just encourage all of us to look at the possibilities of this, there's a lot of really good inherent possibilities and and i do think it's important to look at the possibilities of a pilot that can be expanded to some level to our other comprehensive high schools i think that to me is the best use of this now whether that pilot is humanities or ai or some infusion i think there's still more conversations and work to be done but if we are going to do what we need to do to make sure our students are set up with the content knowledge and the skills to be successful in this very seminal inflection point in education and in our society.

[04:57:38] Using this as an opportunity to create the pilot that can be then taken to our other comprehensive high schools I think is to me would be my advocacy for the path to go. It still means it's a comprehensive high school, it's a traditional high school that relieves it over capacity, but building within that those, it's similar to what we're doing with the lighthouse schools, right, or the inclusion pilots. We have models for these types of pilots within our comprehensive of schools all over the county but if we don't take this unique opportunity where we're starting a high school from scratch to be the leaders at Fairfax

[04:58:16] County is known to be to create the model for what the education for our students who are looking for us I can tell you having 20 some years old in the career world right now with AI is disrupting their career paths at an early career stage we owe it to our students to be the person who has the laptop and not the post-its. So let's make that happen. Thank you, Ms. Seismohyser.

[04:58:41] Ms. Mehran, do you need to go back? Okay. So just to confirm, we have our conversation today and the next time we talk about this is when we vote on it on November 13th. Actually, if I can interrupt, I gently spoke with the superintendent about the fact that I'm asking her to bring back a presentation when she puts this on for new business on the 23rd. So we will have a presentation of the path forward so we will have a a layout and i will work with her to ensure that we have what we're what we're looking for and we'll work with the next steps document as well thank you chair i'm just again perplexed dr reed i've known you to be very strategic and thoughtful

[04:59:20] and planful and yet here we are creating new dates at the last minute no budget i just do not understand how you how the superintendent could expect this board to make a decision with taxpayer money and not have the information in a timely manner and I do feel alone in this so I'm trying to figure out if I'm just really seeing things weird but again trying to make database decisions here and I don't want to make a decision about one per one school when again there is a need across

[04:59:57] other schools I've been hearing the same stat about Edison 30 kids for years what's the plan to do that what's the plan to expand it what's the plan to expand HVAC I don't have a single constituent in Hunter Mill going down to Springfield to participate in HVAC or anything down there and that has been the case for the six years I've been on this board and I have not heard a single implemented plan to change that but we're ready to go to do new coursework and new stuff for this school I want innovation but it's got to be the connected to the big plan and also not just one year what's the out year for

[05:00:35] budget we talk about this all the time we get money for building but not for maintenance we didn't talk about the pool now I will say that my constituents who are would be most closely affected those in the Flores elementary school pyramid of school that would go up they are five or six minutes from Western and currently the students spend at least 15 to 20 minutes going either way and so they are very passionate about look this is like a great opportunity for our kids not to have to trek to the other sides and what they said to me is knowing that geographic boundary at least would be a relief and figuring out the

[05:01:11] programming then we can work it out but again I just don't hear a plan to work with them about those questions about homecoming or whatever you know and I want to be sure that other stakeholders in the community like every board of supervisor like the county executive have all received a tour and not just on on that October 25th open house, but it's really important that people understand what this is and we are just rushing so fast, but I guess I'm alone unless I hear something different.

[05:01:42] - Thank you, Miss Marin. I think Mr. and Dr. Anderson is next. - Yes, just very, very quickly. I just wanna be sure that I didn't lose some information because this was a very robust conversation. Dr. Reed, the decision that you're asking us to make, rather than me saying it, can you just please re-articulate the decision you're asking us to make at current there is no decision today right be made on the whenever in the future November 13 mm-hmm we're going to need and it's been calendared it'll be new business on the 23rd the 13th we need a programming

[05:02:22] decision and the programming decision is are we going to have a comprehensive high school with a traditional boundary that's what I'm going to be recommending that's different than a magnet school it's different than it's different than a magnet school and all the other sort of continuum I will also be saying that I think it's important that evening that we have some kind of a 22nd century skill pathway school within the school is what we call it at Edison and Lewis we have a program within the school I think that's going to be important in a new

[05:02:59] high school and we have an opportunity to create it from the ground up it isn't a have to it's if kids choose to so the decision is comprehensive with a traditional boundary is really the decision because then I can turn that over to the planning team which will be actually building out a comprehensive high school master schedule which we have a standard course catalog already four so it's simply matching that comprehensive schedule and then there's been a lot of work done in a variety of arenas to think about what might that

[05:03:35] program within a school look like which might be over a four-year program and again would have to be self-selected just like any other course taking pattern but that's essentially the decision but the decision on the 13th it's only comprehensive high school with traditional boundary everything else is to come later yes ma'am thank you thank you dr. Reed I don't see anybody oh okay miss okay so that's helpful to clarify so what we're voting on on November what

[05:04:09] was the date 13th is the boundary well whether it's a traditional high school but again I just the vernacular really matters and as we know a lot of the there's been a lot of communications confusion at the start of this school year okay I'm hearing from staff they're verifying people don't really know school within a school you mentioned Edison I'm not familiar with Edison but you know it again it's confusing people think magnet they think lottery that's the vernacular people are used to here so can we call it a pathway because

[05:04:46] that's vernacular people are used to okay so if we say that November 13th what we are voting on is it for it to be a comprehensive high school with the local geographic boundary to be decided is that accurate okay when is the board then voting on the programming at the high school if and when the board already has in the sense that a comprehensive high school has a standard course catalog already every comprehensive high school the boards already approved the standard course catalog so that those are the courses those are the program that are

[05:05:24] gonna be at that school what about the pathway the pathway I will that is something we're gonna have to take back to the team because that's gonna require some community input before I bring that back to the board so the board does decide on whether there is a pathway I have to go back to policy and regulation about that I believe so because I recall in my early in my tenure the board approved the Lewis Academy at Lewis High School so that from memory again I would expect that the board would have a role in making a decision around that pathway and if we add other courses to the standard course catalog those always

[05:06:03] come to the board as part of your routine work I'm not sure Lewis would be the case study it was done in a untraditional way I would want to check other programs and look at the policy but again I continue to raise that the regulation for policy 8130 is not up to date the regulations supposed to be updated after the policy updated it was last updated in July I'm gonna have a hard time voting for things if they're based on outdated policies and one-off traditions okay thank you so much Miss Marin just for clarity because you asked

[05:06:43] and I'm just gonna say I'm supportive of traditional boundary school on this in this particular case and and programming in the school for the same population which attends a school not pulling from other schools that's the basically school within the school model or pathways so with that said I think I appreciate all this conversation the robust I said you know brainstorming today and with that said I think we will adjourn now at 4:30 to

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