Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 6h 25m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgY4W_grCM
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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[00:00:05] - Good morning everybody, good morning. Good morning, I believe we have a quorum, so we're gonna go ahead and get kicked off. As soon as the budget team is ready, we'll go ahead and get kicked off this morning. So welcome to our very long work session today.

[00:00:23] I'm excited to start with our budget committee of the whole. For those who are not aware, the budget committee is actually a committee of the entire board. So we're gonna start our work session this morning with a meeting of the budget committee with our budget fiscal forecast. So I would like to go ahead and turn it over to Dr. Reed to introduce the team and go from there.

[00:00:43] - Thank you, Ms. Seismorheiser. And we're thrilled to be able to launch our budget presentation. And I will turn it over at this point to Ms. Burden, our Chief Finance Officer.

[00:01:00] My comments prior to Ms. Burden introducing her team and beginning would just be to talk about how important budget is, right? The budget is a foundation of everything we're going to be able to do as a school division and well-resourced divisions are able to provide for their students and subsequently our community in ways that systems that are less resourced are not able to.

[00:01:27] So this budget conversation is one of our most important, honestly, conversations and one of the most important bodies of work we're gonna engage in this year. So I appreciate the care and the thoughtfulness that the board has in this, and appreciate our community's attention to this topic as well.

[00:01:46] So Ms. Burden, if you'll introduce the team and share our forecast documents, I look forward to a thoughtful conversation this morning. - Good morning. Again, I'm Lee Burden, CFO, and I have with me the budget director, Alice Wigington, and assistant budget director, Matthew Norton.

[00:02:06] And Lisa Hall is also here with us because at the end, I think we have a slide on the budget communications plan. So if you can go to the next slide. As you all know, you've done this before.

[00:02:23] This presentation provides a preliminary fiscal forecast for the school operating fund for the fiscal 27 budget. It includes early projections for key financial areas that drive our budget development.

[00:02:38] and it's prepared in conjunction with the county for the fiscal forecast discussion at the joint meeting on December 2nd. The potential expenditures, I say this every year, but it's important to say it again, should not be interpreted as a recommended budget change or what the superintendent's proposed budget might include.

[00:02:59] Of course, there are commonalities, but we're still a couple of months from delivering that budget. We'll get better information, better data along the way. so this is truly a very early preliminary forecast. And it's also worth mentioning, again, that the Virginia Code, section 22.1-92, mandates that the school board prepare a needs-based budget for school for the upcoming school year.

[00:03:27] Next slide. We thought it would be a good idea to just remind you all of what reductions that we had to take in the current year for fiscal 26, that those required difficult decisions and we reduced the budget by 121.3 million and that included renegotiating the collective bargaining salary proposal, delays in planned investments, adjustments to staffing formulas, including class size across all school levels.

[00:03:58] But we did allow schools to carry over a greater amount of funds to mitigate the impact of the staffing formula adjustments. Next slide. - You know, we still are in an environment of a great deal of uncertainty.

[00:04:17] You know, I'm hopeful about the federal government shutdown, but that ain't over yet, in my opinion. We also, of course, continue to have concerns regarding the future of federal grants and the impact, of course, on federal funding on the Commonwealth.

[00:04:34] Chronic state underfunding was evidenced by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission in 2023. those funding deficits still exist, hopefully many of the JLARC recommendations will be implemented given the new leadership in the governor's office.

[00:04:53] Next slide. So given the economic uncertainty, the forecast considers no new resources and departments were encouraged to repurpose existing funds for programmatic needs. The fiscal forecast is a base level budget that requires compensation adjustments, per the collective bargaining agreement, enrollment, student needs, benefit rate changes, pensions, healthcare, and then contractual rate increases.

[00:05:28] Next slide. We don't normally get a county transfer money until like December 1st, the day before December 2nd.

[00:05:45] And we don't try to project that for them. That's within their lane and not ours. And so we always have to be decided there. So we have assumed no increase. although increases over the past few years have ranged between 4.6% and 6.8%.

[00:06:04] State revenue, we're assuming a 17.3 million increase based on sales tax and a projected LCI change offset by projected enrollment decreases. And then federal revenue, we're just assuming that to be leveled, there wouldn't be any change.

[00:06:20] So the total projected revenue change at this point in time is 13.2 million. And again, typically at this stage, we have very little information about potential revenue. Next slide. So just going into a little more detail about the required expenditures for this very base budget.

[00:06:41] We have step increases, funding for step increases, which are merit increases based on qualifications and experience is included. The last one that was provided was in fiscal 24. Market scale adjustment of 3%. This provides a percentage increase applied to salary scales to keep pace with rising crosses and the market, and each 1% of MSA equates to 31.6 million.

[00:07:10] The FCFPSA, collective bargaining unit, those negotiations are incomplete at this point in time, so that is to be decided. We do have some benefit rate changes. This preliminary forecast assumes the impact of health and retirement rate changes for ERFC, BRS rates will not be known until December, and there are no rates changes currently for FCERS.

[00:07:37] Enrollment and student needs shows a savings. We received enrollment projections recently, and we are still running calculations for special populations. So this number represents classroom teachers and other general staffing. So this number, this decrease will, may go up, it may go down once we complete or refine our calculations for special education, ESL, and those kinds of things.

[00:08:04] And then contractual includes escalations that we already have in place in contracts, renewals, leases, and expenditure changes that were, that have recurring costs that were approved at quarterly reviews.

[00:08:23] So the total required expenditures are projected to be 193.8 million. And just, again, bears repeating that education is a very labor intensive enterprise with 89% of the budget funding salaries and benefits.

[00:08:38] So even if we try to do a very base level budget, the any labor intensive industry is going to require greater resources for salaries and benefits as a result of that.

[00:08:54] Next chart, this table reflects the salary increases by category staff have received historically. This chart is always in the approved budget. A step increase reflects movement on the pay scale based on merit, experience, and service.

[00:09:12] A market scale adjustment is a percentage increase applied to salary scales intended to maintain pace with rising costs. And a scale implementation is a targeted pay range for a subset of employees typically based on a market study.

[00:09:28] I think it's, you know, if you look at this chart, you know, it immediately jumps out that in fiscal '26, we gave five and 6%, 25, 4%, FY '24, we gave 7.22%, In FY23, we gave 6.68%, and those sound like large numbers, but you should be aware that over the last four years, the state initiated a total of 18% in salary increases.

[00:09:54] Now, for 23, it was 5%, 24, it was 5%, plus 2% on January 1, in 25, it was 3%, in 26, it was 3%, and if you add all that up, it's a total of 18%. But you all have heard me talk about before, the state only funds our salaries based on, you know, basically 20% and 80%.

[00:10:17] So for that 18% state salary increase, the state kicked in $108 million, and the local increase was $432 million. So once again, I don't believe the state is doing their share.

[00:10:35] Next chart. This shows the master salary comparison against seven peer divisions, and we are at 102.5% of the market average minimum, 97.1% at the market average mid, and 94.3% at the market average maximum.

[00:10:53] We rank 2nd of 8th at the market minimum, 5th of 8th at the market mid, and 7th of 8th at the market max salary level. But this ranking has improved so, so much over the last couple years because it was our intention to be able to compare well with our market.

[00:11:13] Because as you all know, we're all competing for brand new teachers coming out of college. And being able to say that we pay the most or we're near the top is very valuable to get those new teachers to come work for us. And so you should know that at the minimum level at MA Step 1, in fiscal 24, we ranked seventh of eight divisions in the rankings.

[00:11:37] In fiscal 25, due to what we put forward and was funded, we moved up to rank five of eight. And in fiscal 26, the current year, we rank 2 of 8 divisions. So in three years, we have gone from 7th of 8th in beginning salaries to 2 of 8th in beginning salaries.

[00:11:57] So we made great progress there. Next slide. This shows our gap. And, yes, the projected gap is $180.6 million. But the thing that jumps out to me is that last year, The gap at this point in time that we proposed at the fiscal forecast was $275.3 million.

[00:12:21] So we have reduced that number by just putting together a base budget at this point in time that's nearly $100 million less than what we requested last year. Next slide. You all have heard this statistic before.

[00:12:39] 85% of the fiscal 26 budget focuses on instructional programs, and that includes, you know, special ed, instructional support, adult ed, of course, elementary, middle, and high. Then we have support programs, which is defined as transportation, facilities management, general support, central office, and that accounts for the rest.

[00:12:58] Each 1% of the overall budget for instructional purposes is $33.3 million, and for support programs, 1% is $5.9 million. next slide you all know the community has grown to rely on programs and services that differentiate FCPS from other school divisions here are examples where we exceed the minimum state standards activities and athletics advanced academic resource teachers applied behavior analysis preschool

[00:13:33] autism enhanced staffing assistant principals and class size and then other programs are college and career specialists elementary art music and PE special ed lead teachers all of these areas are areas that we are going to have to look at in the event that we do not get funding because these are the areas where we fund positions and support in excess of what is required by the state next slide and just to give you a graphic of kind of what we're talking

[00:14:09] about this shows FCPS staffing beyond the SOQ and an average school at FCPS has plus six administrative and front office staff than is required by the SOQ, nine teachers more than is required by the SOQ, three and a half classroom instructional aides, and two specialists. So the average school has 20.5 positions that we fund that are over what the standards of quality require.

[00:14:40] And another reminder, J-Lock determined that all Commonwealth school divisions, all 132 of them collectively spent 6.6 billion more than the standards of quality and now I will turn it over to Miss Sizemore Heiser who's going to talk about school board member priorities etc thank you and thank you for this detailed presentation just to set the stage a little bit before we go into priorities this is our first fiscal forecast obviously a lot of information is not yet known and still being known but it's a way to set the stage it's our kickoff process based on the work session we had in the spring after our

[00:15:17] last budget the team has been working very hard on a budget communications plan talking points handouts and a website so Miss Youngblood Hall is here to answer questions about that as well but you've seen some information come out about that in the last few months so you're welcome to ask if Miss Youngblood Hall about in the communications as well and I have asked for talking points based on this slide for the board members to have going into our fiscal forecast and our joint meeting so just to go on to talk about school board priorities as you may know in the governance manual and this is the same process we used last year I've not changed anything but the governance manual requires that we work with the superintendent that the budget can

[00:15:57] budget chair and vice chair work with the superintendent and assistant superintendent to gather and consolidate school school member of budget priorities so in the process of that last year we sent out if you recall a Google form for you all to share your priorities we are asking because we're the entire division is aligning our work to the strategic plan we are asking but you're not required to align your priorities to the strategic plan and as you'll see in the form that we'll send out later this afternoon from the sticks that and I same as what was sent out last year there's a spot for you to list your priorities and how which goal goals it may align to and at the bottom there's a spot to list whatever you'd like to list all of that

[00:16:37] will be consolidated into an Excel spreadsheet and shared with dr. Reed we're asking for you to have those turned in by December 5th so after the board discussion today if you can go to the next slide please so as you can see this is the governance manual charge for the budget chair and vice chair to work with the superintendent assistant superintendent to gather and consolidate board member priorities so we'll be gathering those priorities so after the discussion today we'll send out the Google sheet all those results will be in one document we're not going to change anything you said we're just going to put them all in one Excel spreadsheet to consolidate them and share those with the superintendent as she develops her budget did you have a question miss lady

[00:17:14] I just was curious given slide six slide 12 with proposed cuts is it makes sense for us to perhaps also weigh in on those I mean last year I listed all my priorities right well with all due respect none of them came to fruition right I mean other than high academic standards right like but other things related to school counselors or other things that may be important to me so I'm just wondering because we're looking at probably a deficit should we be commenting on slide 12 so you get board input on potential things that are

[00:17:54] listed here I mean absolutely so in the form that were that was developed last year there's a section at the end for any other comments you want to list so you're welcome in that section to share your thoughts on that I'm happy to put a thing on the forum about what you feel is more important to save or to fund as well but we're really going off what the governance manual required which is to collect the priorities but so i always suggest that on that last part of the forum which is kind of any additional comments or priorities you're welcome to list on there please save these and even in the budget priorities you're welcome to say i don't want to add anything new but i want to make sure that we protect x y and z that could be a priority also and also if we're going to have

[00:18:32] to cut this would be my priority of where to cut yeah exactly here here and here yeah priority doesn't have to be what you want to add it can be anything that's a priority for you when it comes of the budget whether it's protecting a position or this is a position that I think we could cut however you want to phrase it it's really up to you in that documentation all we ask is that if you would like to align it to a strategic plan goal but yeah in this era of the budget it is hard to add additional priorities and I appreciate the staff you know talking about that but you're welcome the priorities are listed however you want whether you want to comment on slide 12 or comment on what you'd like to see focused on good

[00:19:10] question thank you for that question Miss lady so that will be sent out to you later today from look out for an email from this Dixon and I around that and then I'll turn it back over to the budget team to talk about the budget question process which also is has not changed from last year's process which I think worked pretty well we got some positive feedback on it so I'll turn it back over to the budget team yeah the budget question process it's it's the same as exact as last year that they'll be your budget questions can be submitted using a google form school board members and board of supervisors are allocated five priority one questions on a rolling basis and then priority two questions will be answered afterward access

[00:19:49] requires signing into a fcpsschools.net account and after this meeting this afternoon we you'll receive an email with a link for the fiscal 27 budget question google doc and you can submit any questions there and we'll get them answered as quickly as possible thank you and then the budget communications plan um thank you so um just briefly i think everyone received uh information on the

[00:20:28] budget communications plan the update on that um is that we will have uh the website go live after the work session uh toolkit links will be distributed following work session the talking points uh the slide decks and one pager uh and then content will be added regularly that includes videos uh and more one pages whatever is necessary um so that that is the update at this time and then the final slide is the calendar and so the upcoming dates december 2nd the joint meeting

[00:21:07] the governor will release their budget on december 17th the introduced budget superintendent releases on january 22nd in february are your work sessions and your public hearings and then the county executive will release his fiscal 27 advertised budget uh on february 17th great um so with that we'll go ahead and turn to questions again just as a framing this is our preliminary fiscal forecast we're just the kind of setting the groundwork for where we are in terms of our budget realities the budget this year things that um we fund you know some just background information about what we're

[00:21:46] looking to fund, what is the SOQs, what's above the SOQs, so I will then turn it over to questions, and we'll start with Ms. Marin followed by Dr. Anderson. Good morning. I had some questions about some of the slides, so if our clerk team could please help with pulling them up, as I asked. One of them is slide six about the transfer situation. So I just wanted to clarify something that was said. The first bullet talks about an increase that ranged between 4.6 and 6.8 percent.

[00:22:16] It seems like there's a mix of talking about dollars and percent change because we know there has not been an increase in the percent transfer. So can we please get really clear about what that's saying? The county transfer percent was not level last year.

[00:22:36] We're assuming the county transfer will be level, which is a poor assumption to make. need to learn from last year we cannot guarantee that it will be a level so can you clarify is it mixing the percent transfer in the actual amount because if I look at it that that statement is not correct from what I understand well the reason that we're we're not forecasting the county revenue is because we're assuming at this point in time as we always do at the fiscal forecast that the county transfer would be level meaning we would get exactly the same

[00:23:15] amount that we got in the current year because we don't have any data upon which to do projections for the county transfer and they probably would have a problem with that anyway. But if you look at the county transfer increase year to year, fiscal 26 county transfer compared to fiscal 25, fiscal 25 compared to fiscal 24, the final numbers, that county transfer has increased from 4.6% to Okay. I understand that, but it is complex. We're weaving the percent change of allotted

[00:23:51] money to allotted money, but we also talk a lot about the percent transfer. Do you see how it can be confusing? I have this sheet of all of the past transfers and the dollar amounts, and we can see that this is conflating two different things, and it needs to be clear.

[00:24:13] need to talk about apples to apples. Amount of transfer, percent of transfer. I'll leave it at that for that point. If we go to slide eight, please. Ms. Marin, if I could. I think what you're talking about is the percentage of county funds that are coming to FCPS. And you are correct that the percentage of funds has eroded over the last few years.

[00:24:38] Can you go back to slide six, please? Excuse me. So here's my concern, and I'm going to show it on slide 8 and slide 9. If a member of the public looks at this, it does not look like we are being underfunded and that's a problem. And the bigger point I want to make is the communications plan is right now. It's every single thing we put up in public and it's how we talk about the budget.

[00:25:02] It's not some talking points we're going to get after this meeting. This is a story and the story this is telling is that we've gotten more money. So it's really hard for me to advocate for more money when it's stated that way. I'd like to show on slide eight a similar thing. I'm so glad that it was stated that the state requires a match. That data is not anywhere on this slide. That's a problem.

[00:25:29] Please arm us with the information and make it more compelling. Just like that JLARC data that shows that big gap. Give us the visuals. Tell that story, please. On slide 9, same thing. Well, if you look at our minimum, we're doing well. But if you look at our maximum, we are very behind. So help us tell this story better to the public that says we are competitive. Just clearly the message is we are competitive at hiring new teachers. We are least

[00:26:03] competitive at retaining experienced teachers based on our salary. And I also would like to know where the mid number is on our FCPS I'm not sure why that's blank thank you I'll take a go back please any comment back before that a dr. Anderson we'll fix the chart that's yeah we'll fix it dr. Anderson yes thank you a comment that

[00:26:40] I want to make before I dive into my questions is I am appreciative of having this discussion so that we can be more prepared so that community can be more prepared for whatever we end up happening in May because we already had heard somewhat from the board at least from Bryan Hill back in September that there are no additional new dollars for us I mean there was a whole Fairfax story about it so minimally Dr. Reed I appreciate the opportunity to have a thoughtful planful conversation with this difficult budget year one of the

[00:27:15] things that I want to talk about this is slide 4 where we are hoping that there would be some additional funds coming from the from Richmond from the state being that we will have a new governor very soon one of the things that I want to make sure that is clear additional funding from the state will not be untethered correct it will always be twin we will always have to have a match or is there a pot of money which could potentially be untethered can you speak to that please now dr. Anderson you know that I resist speculating what a group

[00:27:54] of elected officials might do because nine times out of ten I would not maybe be wrong so I'm I cannot speculate what the General Assembly or the new governor might do but I can tell you that all of the literature that was put out by the Abigail Spanberger says that funding public education is the is her top priority right having said that what I'm trying to say if that were to happen our LCI will be applicable to any of those additional revenues yes or no assuming they do not change the formulas with which they allocate funding

[00:28:34] correct so if we receive various increases it will always be that we have to offer an 80 percent match to it that's what i'm trying to make sure we are clear about if they don't change any of the formulas in which they allocate funds then that would be correct and frankly i don't see any space for that to be changed this year because there hasn't been a lot of movement on that no matter how loudly the northern virginia region has screamed about it right well like one of the things is the fact that they use a weighted average for one of the jlark

[00:29:13] items was that they pushed down the salary assumptions that they make and that's one of the reasons why we get such a small amount on the compensation because their salaries are higher than you know a lot of people. And I raise this because I want to manage expectations because several years ago when Governor then Governor Northam brought forth 5% for staff we could not match it so we were not able to take advantage of the five percent because the monies that were available locally only allowed us to take advantage of two to three percent at

[00:29:49] that time I just want to be sure that that's part of the conversation right if they decide to throw out there how they calculate the salaries and use the actual average then we would absolutely receive more than the small amount that we receive currently at least for compensation thank you slide six on on slide six um you have the federal revenue transfer at zero can you speak a little bit to that the the only the only federal revenue that is in the school operating fund all of the other

[00:30:26] federal grants are in the grants fund so it's only idea and carl perkins that are in the operating fund and we have just assumed that that funding is going to remain level meaning the amount of our grant award in fiscal 26 is going to be exactly the same in 27 because with you know as it the the broad and sweeping edicts from the federal government still do not have enough detail for us to be able to predict what they might what the

[00:31:00] fate of those grants are for school divisions currently we're we're just receiving greater scrutiny in our reimbursement requests in the current year but the money is flowing it's flowing a little slower than normal because of this additional scrutiny that video is is placing on air grant reimbursements but we are receiving funds that we were promised when we were you know prior to all of the federal government stuff okay well no I'm glad to hear that one of the things that you talked about here as well under the

[00:31:36] state revenue was being offset by enrollment decreases you said that a bit too quickly can you give more detail yes air enrollment is reduced from the previous year and over the year that we're in currently what we've seen is the actual enrollment September 30 is is less than was projected and there will be an impact on state revenue because many of the state line items are funded based on ADM which is enrollment with except for pre-k it's k-12 and so we

[00:32:14] would expect to see a reduction in state revenue that's allocated on a per pupil basis due to the enrollment loss thank you and dr. Reed what is that September 30th enrollment look that up and get that to you I think we are my time I said it before and we've just kept on going you owe me about eight seconds please give - Dr. Anderson, eight seconds back.

[00:32:47] - I know we are down about 1.5 to 6%, somewhere in that area. And I think I'll get the exact numbers for you, but I think we're somewhere between 177 and 178, but we continue to grow over the course of the year.

[00:33:04] So we continue to add students. We're down a bit from last year, like I said, over 1%, somewhere between 1 and 2%. and we'll get you the exact same numbers. - Thank you, I would appreciate that.

[00:33:23] This is now slide seven. On slide seven, the expenditure categories that are articulated here for the step increase in MSA, these will be applicable to all employee groups for the purposes of this preliminary fiscal forecast.

[00:33:42] We did include all groups in those cost calculations, but you should know that the only group that is sitting out there is the PSA group, and that's about 1,400 people. So it's a very small piece of-- - PSA group.

[00:34:00] - Principles, supervisors, and administrators. - Thank you. - I didn't know we had a new acronym. - FCFPSA. - Thank you. And one more question regarding, this is on slide eight. I'm not sure how to calculate some of the things that you shared.

[00:34:17] You mentioned about a 6%. Did you add the step in the MSA in that presentation? I didn't follow where you were going with that. - Yes, I just added the step in the MSA together to see what kind of salary package we provided in '26, '25, '24, that's all.

[00:34:39] - Thank you, I'll take a go back please. - Thank you, Ms. Anderson, followed by Ms. Levy. - I just wanted to say again that last year we did have an increase related to some of the JLARC advocacy that was outside the LCI, correct?

[00:34:57] So the support cap related to special education was outside the support cap, or outside the LCI. So there are possibilities that would relate to funding that would actually be real dollars that would show up for us that I think that we all can spend some time to learn more about and advocate for.

[00:35:14] I also know we are currently in a re-benchmarking year, correct? - Yes, we are. - So in theory, the LCI is gonna shift just slightly that would provide benefit to the division? - That's correct. Going back to the discussion that we were talking about on slide six, I just wanna reiterate one more time that 100% we did not receive the county transfer that we requested last year, but we did receive an increase in the county transfer.

[00:35:41] And so I understand what this is trying to aim for is giving us an average over the last four years of what we have received related, but the request is always gonna be different what we've received. We also have to be mindful of the fact that as things like the bond increased, that is the debt service is part of the overall transfer rate. So as we're advocating for more bond transfer, things like that, that does impact the amount of real money that we have in the operating fund as well because it's all one pot of money. So I just want to make sure that we're kind of all level set that we did receive an increase last year over what we had received

[00:36:20] the year before and I think this is some of the frustration and the tension that's happening between us and the Board of Supervisors that I want to make sure that we're clear about moving forward is that yes we did not receive the full transfer that we requested but we did receive an increase over what we had received the year before and so we I think continuing at this moment Miss Burden we talked before this presentation about the fact that there's a possibility that if we saw some increases from Richmond this year that there's very real there's a very real chance that the number the scary number

[00:36:58] that is on the next couple slides it isn't quite as scary and so it's more doable when we're talking about the fact that we are going forward with a very simple needs-based budget based on exactly the needs that we have and if we can continue to advocate for the state to increase some of that funding as well then we're in a very real position where we could meet our obligations which is I think all of our intention related to the CBA and everything else so I just want to advocate again that I do not want us to continue down the path of being in direct conflict with our largest funder I think that it's

[00:37:34] extremely important for us to be working carefully and closely with the Board of Supervisors to get what we need and have them fully understand what we're trying to do here and so I there's no there's no new money in any of this and and we're just trying to meet our obligations.

[00:37:50] So I think that's an extremely important point for us to focus on. - Thank you, Ms. Lady. - Yeah, to piggyback on a little bit of that, I think on slide six, it'd be beneficial under the county transfer bullet, if we just included both, right?

[00:38:06] The percentage of the budget that we get from the state, I mean, I'm sorry, from the county, and if you're gonna do the past four years, then the percentage is listed for the past four years, because yes, while there has been an increase, the part of the pie that they're keeping on their side is increasing much higher than ours.

[00:38:29] And I understand, and I think the public understands everything costs more, right? Everything costs more. If we can go to slide eight for a second, and I think it's here when you were talking about the 18% increase in the state and the fact that they contributed 108 million to that and we had to come up with $432 million.

[00:38:54] Can we put that on here? Just like when the state quote says, we're gonna give everyone $1,000 bonus or whatever they called it last year. And I remember listening to one of my delegates at a public meeting state that the governor told him that would cover all of our employees and I had to pull him aside afterwards and correct him on that because of our SOQ.

[00:39:17] So when they say we're giving every teacher $1,000, It's not, 'cause that costs us money too. And then if we can go to slide nine, I just need to make the point here, 'cause people don't really understand that. While we're recruiting well, and while we are close to number one in starting salary, I am tired, I'm tired of watching our veterans walk out the door to another jurisdiction.

[00:39:41] I don't think our public fully comprehends that what it costs to train up new people, and how painful it is to watch your best, And forget your best. I mean, we are robust. We have great people.

[00:39:56] If they've been here 10, 15 years, they're fantastic. And because of the top of our scale, they're leaving us. And we can't emphasize that enough. So I don't know if we've got any data points on where people who are leaving us are not retiring, but I think that's an important point to be made is that that's why that number matters.

[00:40:16] And then finally, just because I have to, on slide 12, we gotta get college career center specialists off of that slide. I'm gonna tell you that when I was a director, there's a point in time, there were several points in time when I was without my college career center specialist.

[00:40:33] I mean, you gotta be resuscitated. I don't think that we understand, I don't think that people fully comprehend the volume of work that goes through that office, and the skill sets that those people possess. So I'm talking about 26 people in the county, It's not gonna be a big item, but I am very strongly emphasizing if we're gonna talk about college-going culture, if we're gonna talk about course-taking patterns, if we're gonna do all these things, we've gotta have that position filled, and quite frankly, at some of our largest schools, we need to.

[00:41:06] - Thank you, Ms. Lady. Mr. Moon, followed by Ms. St. John Cunning. - Thank you, Madam Madam Chair. Thanks for the presentation. I have a few questions to ask. I am gonna start with page 12.

[00:41:29] Did I understand you wrong that you would be looking at everything on this particular chart as we continue with our budget work in terms of coming up with a potential budget reductions, if we have to make reductions, is that?

[00:41:49] - This chart was included in the discussions about the approved budget last year when it was conveyed that we would need to cut our budget by $120 million. And this is just a list of where we exceed what the SOQ requires.

[00:42:09] So at this point, you know, certainly these are some areas that we are looking at to see, you know, how far are we over the SOQ, those kinds of things. But, you know, none of that analysis is ready for prime time, nor has any decision-making been had that would identify which one of these things or if any of these things would be reduced.

[00:42:33] - So when do you expect to start any work on looking at any of these items? Are you waiting until board gives you further directive to look at certain areas, or is the staff on our own start looking at these?

[00:42:49] - You know, we work very closely with the superintendent in putting together the proposal for the superintendent's proposed budget on January 22nd. But until we know what the actual revenue is, which, for the state, you know, Governor Yunkin will introduce his budget on December 17th.

[00:43:10] There may be a distinct difference in the budget that we end up with based on the General Assembly's work and Ms. Spanberger. So we probably won't know that until crossover as far as what they might.

[00:43:27] And so in order to decide whether we're going to have cuts and what we are going to cut, We first need to know what the revenue possibilities are. And at this point in time, we don't have any information on the revenue possibilities. And what is the crossover?

[00:43:43] I think you showed a timeline on page 19. Third week of February, Mr. Malloy. Third week of February. February. You know, what I'm trying to avoid is a repeatable last year, making significant budget changes at the last minute.

[00:44:06] And I was really hoping that we had more time. as a board member, one board member, or 12 of us as a collective body, given more thought to the ultimate decisions we made. So without, with my desire not to see what happened last year, happen again this year, I'm really hoping that superintendent and staff will start looking at whether share the information publicly or somehow just to keep it yourself

[00:44:42] the time being I gotta you know work has to start earlier than waiting until two weeks before the decision to be made uh with that said uh I am gonna go to a okay let me let me ask this question with uh slide number 12 along with the 11. Is any 11 is sort of pie chart uh is any of what I see on page 11 not reflected on page 12?

[00:45:14] Page 12 should be, looking at the items on page 12, they seem to be coming from everything on page 11, correct? - Yes, yes, I mean we, in all of the schools, we can see the SOQ in our instructional staff, our leadership, all of that is funded somewhat by the state and all of that is part of what we would be looking at.

[00:45:47] - So if you are looking at everything that is on page 12, you could tell public that we are looking at every program, every part of our budget. - Yes. - Okay. And with $190 million, I mean it's very early at this point in time, additional expenditures, our budget will grow to be about 4.2 billion next year?

[00:46:13] - Yes. - So what's the increase in the percentage-wise? - 5%. about 5%, around 5%, and $180 million of gap, if that is divided by property tax of $31 million per cent, correct?

[00:46:34] That is about six cents. I'm trying to anticipate the argument. - Yes, although, you know, typically when the county executive, you know, steps out with the fiscal forecast in December 2nd this year, The only thing that we see in the county transfer assumptions is the reassessment of property, not a real estate tax increase.

[00:47:04] We usually do see, though, what is essentially revenge marking of housing in Fairfax County. And I don't know where that's headed right now, but I can tell you that last year at this time, what they stepped out with was about $130 million increase due to reassessments, of which, you know, about half, 50%, about $65 million would come to us.

[00:47:34] And again, this was on December 2nd, you know, very, very early. The year before that, there was about 157 million increase due to reassessments, of which half was about 78 million. So historically, they have assumed reassessment increases that are revealed at the fiscal forecast that are outside any decision to increase real estate taxes.

[00:48:00] That's fair. Since I only have 14 seconds left, I'm going to ask one quick question, ask if I go back. looking at the, I forget the, I think it is on the expenditure reductions, adjustments, is any turnover or vacancy included any part, any of the items on page 7, or is the part of enrollment and student needs reduction of 41 or 42

[00:48:39] million dollars? It is not included at this point in time because our attrition has slowed over the last year. And we are not looking at increasing the laps and turnover numbers at this point in time. In fact, we may have to decrease them slightly from our assumptions. And as you know, those are negative numbers in the budget. So if we decrease it, that's an add. But we're still looking at that. But we have had very little attrition in this past year. And so that is impacting those numbers. And that's why you don't see

[00:49:18] it here. One other thing I wanted to mention that also recall that the county initiated a meals tax in this current year and their estimate of what that might bring in was 60 million dollars for in the first year but that was just for a half of year six months period. That 60 million is probably high in light of the environment that we're in currently a lot of federal workers in

[00:49:51] northern Virginia so the assumption as to what the county might receive in a half year this current year for meals tax is probably going to be less in the future that 60 million number is probably too high but even so there will be recognition of a full year's meals tax in the next year and so we should see some increased they should see some increased revenue there even though they made any they have not made any promise to share any part of that

[00:50:23] with us thank you could I have a go back and just as a reminder mr. moon you can share those priorities in that document setting in which Dr. Ede will have so that's one way to influence that list is to share the priorities so that the team is aware of what the board priorities are thank you I'm next with St. John Cunning followed by Mr. McDaniel okay so I'm going to slide 11 and I know you've got this all broken down what I don't see broken down here and I know it's probably baked into some of this

[00:50:58] are the services for our multilingual learners and students with behavior or social emotional required support because I know we have very robust services that we provide to those students and I don't know that we have the numbers Dr. Reed when we talk about maybe a slight decrease in enrollment but there's an increase in students that need special education services or other services that do require more specialist or more funding and I think if we could get those numbers

[00:51:32] it's important in the story that we tell because we do know that people move to Fairfax County specifically because of those services and I think we're missing a very important point when we tell that by not telling that story that we may have less students but we have more students that require these services and people specifically move to this county for that and then also showing the success we have had with supporting some of our multilingual learners that then go on to perform higher than our native speakers so when we're talking about this budget

[00:52:11] and the story it's not just about numbers it's about people and it's about the fact that we require those specialists that have that training and the investment that we've been making so I just wanted to put that point out there I'm glad to hear that attrition has slowed but I will tell you that because so I really so that is probably my request and my ask that we tell that story and get those numbers out there because we have set the bar so high in

[00:52:45] terms of SOQs we're already hearing from parents that you know why are there not more teachers even though we have been exceeding the SOQ requirements but we've set the bar so hard high that that's already an expectation and so that's something else that we have to keep in mind when we tell the story that we have made this investment we are in tough budget times and really that's kind of my only comment but I would like to see the differentiation between even though there's a decreased enrollment of students what is the increase of

[00:53:25] students that require special supports across the board in very many different areas thank you mr. McDaniel on slide five there's a comment in here on the second bullet saying that this forecast only reflects the base requirements so can I interpret that to mean that we're not adding any new programs in this proposed budget no in the proposed budget I don't know you know we don't want the fiscal forecast to usurp the super intense proposed let me rephrase

[00:54:04] - Does the fiscal forecast add any, is the forecast to add new programs or not? - No, it does not. It is the very basic, what we can get by with based on the CBA, what we know about enrollment. - Okay, all right. And then, by 12, where we're talking about SOQ and what we do kind of above and beyond, so to speak, and then the same thing into slide 13.

[00:54:32] It will be helpful to have some dollars attached to these various lists of items, so we can do calculations based on that. Not urgent, but having some of those numbers would be good. And just a general comment. I mean, and maybe I'm going to be a little wet blanket here.

[00:54:49] I don't subscribe to the notion that we're underfunded. I subscribe to the notion that the funding is imbalanced at the county level, and our county taxpayers are consistently being asked year over year to pick up the tab because our tax dollars that go to Richmond aren't coming back in a way that is not putting pressure on our local homeowners.

[00:55:11] So I want to put that out there, because if we go back and look, historically, the last time we had 177,000 students was 2011-2012 school year, and that budget was $2.2 billion, and this forecast is projecting a $4.2 billion budget.

[00:55:30] We have money. We have had increases of budget year over year over year, so I don't subscribe to this claim that we are underfunded. I do believe Richmond needs to do a better job. We've had that discussion. We've been beating that like a dead horse for months, if not years now.

[00:55:47] So I do agree with that. And then slide 13, when we're talking about what we're going to have to cut back, because there are going to have to be cuts and reductions. There's no way around it. 13 provides, in my opinion, the framework for where we start having that conversation because it's above and beyond what the state requires us to do.

[00:56:06] Not that the state requirements are all that in a bag of chips, but that's where we have options is on slide 13. I mean, 20 and a half positions per school, which is what that calculates up to, times 200 schools, that's 4,100 positions. I'm not suggesting cut 4,100 positions, but I'm saying what positions are going to be the least painful cuts that would impact the classroom?

[00:56:27] And that's what I'm gonna be looking at through this budget process. Thank you. - Thank you. Seeing no others, I'll have Ms. Dixon take a turn, then I'll take my turn, we'll go to go backs. - Thank you, Ms. Burden and budget team for this presentation.

[00:56:45] - I just want to pick from what Mr. McDaniel said about the cost of living has significantly increased from back then to now. I think everything is like 40, 50% more. Day to day expenses have gone up and as expectation from the staff.

[00:57:05] So I think that's just counting inflation and all. I think that numbers kind of matches. I do understand that there's a significant reduction in the ask. You mentioned from 275 to $180 million, $695 million.

[00:57:23] What does that kind of break down, where does savings come from, dollar-wise, if you have numbers? - Largely, it's compensation. Remember that we had a much larger compensation assumption.

[00:57:40] I think it was at 7% at the time we developed fiscal forecast last year and also think that at that point we did know about health care rates and they were going up significantly we didn't have many initiatives beyond the very basic enrollment was also expected to go up especially I think it was a special education population that required additional staffing so it was those kinds of things it's people it wasn't new programs or new initiatives, it was mostly compensation benefits.

[00:58:18] It's just, it was a higher cost then than it is this year. - Thank you for that. And I believe we are already going with the very basic budget, so that everything is at the basic minimum, the percent increase even for COLA.

[00:58:37] I actually wanted to just mention that on the list of, on the slide 12, there is obviously a lot of positions for principals and assistant principal teachers, but there are some things called with cybersecurity and safety and security, and that's on the, you know, list of over SOQs, I think, the services.

[00:58:56] These are very important things. I think just a few days ago, Manassas Park City Public School got, you know, ran some attack or they got, they had to shut down the school for a day. Imagine the inconvenience to our families and our students and the whole staff.

[00:59:12] everybody if it had to happen to FCPS. So I would just be very careful about that, that at no point we can put our guards down because the cyber attacks are happening to every government entity right now. And there are foreign entities and other people who are trying to get into our systems.

[00:59:32] Same thing with security. This is really important for our students to feel safe and I would not like any guards in that area. That would be one of my budget priorities, and I put my questions in. So lastly, I will say the central office.

[00:59:52] A lot of time we are being asked to reduce the size of our central office, reduce the cost. Could you give us an amount of like, what's the percentage of, I think it's there in a slide, maybe I'm missing it, but compared to other jurisdictions, how much, I think we used to have a slide of that if you could, how, I think if we have less staff budget for a central office as compared to other divisions.

[01:00:21] Yeah, we haven't completed that. We usually get that kind of information from the Wavy Guide, which is not completed yet for the current year. So that's something that we're looking at to see how we benchmark to other divisions, but we don't have any data yet. We've not completed the analysis. Okay, I will wait for that. Thank you so much for your everything. Thanks.

[01:00:41] thank you and i will just take a quick turn a couple things i wanted to mention first since this is such a sour budget year i did bring some sweet mokey donuts for everybody so there's some back there if anyone wants one um they're small so but they're mighty having said that you know i i appreciate the hard work i wanted to lift up again what we're talking about with this fiscal forecast what's listed here is really what we are required to spend between meeting our obligations to the collective bargaining agreement and just the change of cost of benefits right and and the change of cost of some of our contracts that we have to maintain, and obviously the change in enrollment, which is still coming in, some of those numbers,

[01:01:19] so this may change, but we really did hear our taxpayers and our board of supervisors in saying that, and the budget times have just gotten worse, that we are only doing what we're required to do. I think where some of the challenge comes in when I hear in the community is that people want Fairfax County to be Fairfax County public schools, they want everything listed on slide 12 and slide 13.

[01:01:42] And that's the challenge is that given our, you know, the pressure on taxpayers and our current economy at the county, given what JLARC has shown the underfunding from the state. And I know there's been some efforts around the support cap and things to address that. However, there is still a need based on the JLARC study to address funding, especially with the LCI formula.

[01:02:03] And I would say the SOQs, because that's one thing I wanted to talk about is that the reason our taxpayers here locally feel so much pressure and have to pay so much is because not just Fairfax County, but I believe every division, and correct me if I'm wrong, every division in Virginia spends more than what the state says it should be spending on education.

[01:02:24] This is the challenge. The state says the SOQs, the standards of quality, is what you should be spending to educate your students. And there is not a single division in Virginia who feels that they can educate their students even slightly okay with those standards of quality.

[01:02:40] I think across Virginia we spend, and correct me if I'm wrong, 6.6 billion, all public schools, 6.6 billion more than what the state funds based on its standards of quality. So if there's a point of advocacy here, in addition to addressing the LCI funding formula, which says that we get about 20% of, 23% or 23 cents on the dollar for what it costs, let's put it that way, 23 cents on the dollar for what a pay increase might cost.

[01:03:07] So when you hear Richmond say, "We funded 3% pay increase," well, we get 23 cents per every dollar of that cost. So that formula needs to be looked at, and I'm glad the re-benchmarking will be looking at that, and maybe that will help. But I would argue that our SOQ formula needs to be, because that's what's causing such pressure, because all those things on slide 12 that we listed, including very good points by my colleague, Ms. Dixon, those are all things we fund that the state says we don't need.

[01:03:35] I mean, that's the key. The state says our SOQs tell you that we don't need to have assistant principals or advanced academic resource teachers or college and career specialists or elementary art, music, PE teachers, all of these things. That's the point of advocacy, is that we need to relook from a state level what is a good public education and then we need to fund it.

[01:03:56] Having said that, let's go to some go-backs, unless the team or Dr. Reed wants to weigh on what I just said. All right. Thank you. We'll start with Ms. Marin. or just really quickly are we doing two or three minutes for go backs um it's 11 o'clock we can we can do two minutes for this we can do another we can always do another round let's hear what people have to say yeah i i wish we could do three um this is really important so i hear board members today asking to better understand the financial reality of this school division i hear desires for information and analysis and adjustments and how staff are articulating the situation so i'm ready to commit to a new approach for budget work however i've heard several times

[01:04:36] this morning phrases like as we always do or it's the same as last year nothing can be the same as last year we have to do things differently so here's information i am interested in seeing provided to the board an analysis of how funding for instruction is being maximized and miss lady talked to this about college and career where are the biggest returns and investment for our instructional dollars i go back to the world language discussion again we cannot keep avoiding analyzing where our best money is being spent when it comes to student success.

[01:05:09] Same with teaching Schoology. If we can teach Schoology and maximize that application that we are paying for, we will see those greater gains, but I have not seen a holistic change in that in four years since I've been advocating for that. We need to understand enrollment.

[01:05:26] I hear lots of questions today by the board. If our enrollment projections are going down, we need to know that because it impacts even the boundaries. residents asking well if we add more students to Marshall High School but we have lots of development in the Tyson's corridor they're exactly right but then now here I'm hearing well there's a decrease in enrollment so which one is it because I've trusted staff projections around enrollment when it comes to CIP but now I'm not sure we need to look at the whole picture of funding as was mentioned that includes the bond but also the operational funds that we're spending and also the in-kind sorts of funding that the Board

[01:06:03] supervisors does provide outside of the transfer. We need to look at all of the dollars that are being spent and know where our advocacy is needed. And then finally, we need to understand early the options that we may have to consider. There's got to be a revised acceptance, I'll just finish this point, that we will not know what's coming from us from the state directly. We won't know what's coming from the state to the supervisors directly. However, I am not ready to do another game of chicken and waiting for us to see what the supervisors do it's okay to be transparent about the needs we have and have a dialogue with funders we have

[01:06:41] nothing to hide so how do we do those things differently this year any comments I will say I think one way we've tried to do differently this year is having an earlier budget work session in September and significant work on comms that we've been doing this year to get the information out to folks including the website the whole comms plan that was shared with the board so there have been some efforts to try to do things differently and get this I think we tried to make it much more robust of a fiscal forecast so we can sort of forecast a

[01:07:19] little more what our challenges are and what the realities are so there's still obviously some room for changes but I think there was some some of that communication that we heard from the board in spring about the need for earlier and better communications and laying the found work is what I think we've tried to do in the budget this year well I'd love to be able to finish the point I was gonna make if we can have three minutes but we have an hour and 15 minutes left. That's fine, if you want to do three minutes. If you give Ms. Merritt a minute back and we'll just do three minutes. We appreciate that. Yeah, because, and I do, and I was just going through the calendar, and I'm so pleased to see that we're meeting with the supervisors on December

[01:07:54] 2nd, not Thanksgiving week, and we are meeting with them again on February 24th. What I'm wondering is what new information is going to come to us, because so far today it's been in the vein of what we usually receive. And I don't see where is the return on investment? Where are the analyses?

[01:08:13] Why would we cut college and career counseling instead of something else? Show me what is better than to fund than college and career specialists. There's no analysis. When are we going to get your suggestions, Dr. Reed, about, well, if we did have to cut, this is what it is and this is why.

[01:08:37] And this is also one I'll mention. We have the EL review on financial and administration on February 6th, and I did not find the superintendent in compliance on the financial and administration exactly for these points. I don't see analysis of returns on investment. Thank you.

[01:08:57] Dr. Anderson. I guess I'm going to pick up there as well, because what I wrote on the slide for slide 12 is where do we have the most bang for our buck? But I also think this is a list that is, I think, falsely alarming because it is not that we won't have a system principles it's that we have a different ratio than what is provided every single ap is not going to be removed so for me this list it's a good start but it's missing two things one very specific dollar amounts and two going back to

[01:09:33] the conversation we even had here when we were working on our legislative agenda what is the the potential impact to all of these pieces again we have time I don't think it needed to be in this conversation today but I think it needs to be in subsequent conversations if we reduce let's I'll pick up on what miss lady shared because that it's the only one that we've had extensive conversation about so far career and college specialist what could that mean what would be the impact because we will have to figure out where it is that we want to spend our dollars and I think overall what I'm looking for Dr. Reed as

[01:10:11] you are preparing your budget I know the conversation the narrative has always been the money is in class sizes that's where we have that's where we can get a lot a lot of dollars quickly that cannot continue to be our approach because we could save a penny here a penny here a penny here and it adds up eventually to a dollar I would like to see how the most strategic approach to this instead of we're going to have the this be applied across every single group across every single school what would it look like if we were a little

[01:10:50] bit more strategic how do we lean into the places where we have the highest needs how do we use a scalpel instead of a hatchet I'd like to see that level of strategy when the budget work here is provided also on page 12 what I did not see is transportation and that may not be above and beyond because I don't I'm not sure if there's an SOQ on that please correct me if I'm wrong miss burden is there an SOQ on transportation no but they would be included in central office oh okay so perhaps tease that out a little bit

[01:11:26] because I know we've had conversations regarding some of the transportation that we provide for special programming. I would like to see that be part of the conversation as we go into this difficult budget period. But I did have one more question.

[01:11:42] Well, let me actually ask you to respond to that, Dr. Reed. Could we be provided more impact details on these topics that you have listed here on page 12? - Absolutely, I mean, I think we're gonna provide you the cost that's above and beyond the SOQs for all of the above and beyond SOQs because as a board you need to obviously make recommendations and I think several of you made comments at the last board meeting that you wanted to have more involvement in determining which things are cut if necessary.

[01:12:18] So we're gonna provide those cost figures for sure. ROI is difficult. We haven't done an independent program review on every single topic area and likely won't be able to do that in two months. I think we all have a perspective on the importance of different topics, but it would be difficult to identify an ROI, for example, on the additional assistant principals or the different cybersecurity programs, right?

[01:12:49] It's just some of those ROIs to be really thoughtful require quite a bit of study and To review all of these areas in that way I think would be challenging, but we can certainly add costs to the above SOQ funding for the various topics for sure.

[01:13:10] This year is a very different budget year because we don't currently -- we're in year two of a collective bargaining agreement, we're not in year one, so we know what our fixed increases are which we didn't at this time last year fully and the one bargaining unit that's still in play we do have the financials at least tentatively to look at but absolutely we're starting the conversation earlier I think happy to provide all of the funding pieces I know miss burden can do that and I look forward to the continued conversation as you know my

[01:13:49] budget has to be what I think the the division needs to be successful as Miss st. John Cunning said we have students that do require more resources and if we're gonna maintain high expectations for each and every one of our students that's going to include high support so it'll be I think you know a great conversation moving forward but we will provide the data you're asking for I i appreciate that i have to say i'm surprised by some of the things you've just shared because two years ago when i was budget chair one of the board's directives was to provide roi on our

[01:14:29] programs which kicked off the baldridge work how is that not going to inform roi on all of these things isn't that what's been happening thus far that i'll be honest i still i'm so unclear about what the Baldrige work is resulting for us outside of awards. So the Baldrige work is going to provide efficiencies. When I think ROI, I think of research, independent research on all program areas, and there are a lot listed there, right? So we can provide our best estimate on ROI, and in some

[01:15:03] cases it will be more research than others. Having more elementary art, music, and PE teachers, for example that are on the instructional side we can certainly talk about the importance of art music and PE I think we all intuitively understand that the elementary special ed lead teachers again we'd have to find like cohorts and that's a position that's unique to us quite honestly so finding a benchmark research ROI position is going to be more challenging we can talk about why we believe it's important here. And quite honestly, Dr. Anderson, we're going to look

[01:15:41] at every single one of those areas and say they're all important. There's nothing up there that we're committing resources to that is not important and isn't good for kids in our county. The question is going to be, if we're not fully funded, and I'm not convinced yet that that's not going to happen, but if we're not, then we're going to have to make choices about, you know, which particular programs we're not going to be able to fund. And that's collaborative decision that we're gonna need to make so whatever data you need to be thoughtful about that we'll provide it I think that's my time I'll take a go back thank you mr. Frisch hasn't had a first turn yet so I'm gonna

[01:16:18] let him go and then we'll go back to the rest that go backs unless you want to wait I just wanted to address the the comment about ROI and Baldrige if memory serves it was part of one of the boards budget priorities and then that was solemnized in in our EL work to be achieved through the Baldrige work so there wasn't some esoteric directive on ROI there was a specific thing that the

[01:16:53] board adopted in the EL process to move forward with the Baldrige work so I just wanted to clarify that I did include a rather lengthy I want to say Marty was it a recent application which includes a review of a number of departments and I know many people have been out of town recently but it is in the Friday letter I think this Friday letter passed I'm sorry right last Friday I believe we put in about the Baldrige work which is again a benchmark but I think you know to be helpful in the budget work we can tease out by program that level of

[01:17:32] analysis because we've certainly done a lot of work in that in the last year Thank you. Mr. Moon, followed by Ms. Anderson. Thank you.

[01:17:47] Looking at my clock to have a full 30 minutes, even though I don't need all three minutes, this is a comment on slide number nine and follow-up request to provide additional information to be helpful to board members and public is, you know, I hate to see us ranked number seven out of number eight for the maximum salary level. However, I think by

[01:18:20] providing number of years it takes to get to the maximum level, it will be an important data point that the public will need to see. You know, for example, Prince William County, which seems to be way out there, $149,000, it takes 37 steps to get there our maximum is stem number 29 stem number 29 so there are differences and also our contract day is 195 days versus principal is 195 too but there are school districts

[01:18:57] which has 200 days number of school districts have 200 work days for the teachers 197 days so having those additional information probably gives more accurate and fuller information for for the public to see, thank you.

[01:19:16] - Thank you, Ms. Anderson? - There were just a few things that I wanted to go back to. First, as we're looking at what's happening across the county and across the state, when we're talking about re-benchmarking, Ms. Burden, are we, the reason that our LCI would be increasing is because the county is being identified as having a reduced ability to pay, is that correct?

[01:19:40] So if our LCI goes up, like if we're receiving more money from the state, it's because the insinuation is that the county doesn't have as much money to provide? - So the local composite index, if the community's calculation is that we have less, it's based on real estate prices, income, there's population components.

[01:20:12] If we are not as wealthy as we were in the previous biennium, our LCI would go down, which means that we would get more money from the state. - But that's what's happening, correct? - That is what, we do not have the new LCI numbers yet from this day. - But that's what we anticipate is gonna happen. - We're expecting to get them in the next, okay. - And so the idea here, and I'm probably looking at the reverse of the LCI, like the actual amount that we receive rather than, 'cause that percentage is thrown back and forth.

[01:20:39] But I guess the point is, is that as we are watching the decimation of our federal workforce from the federal government, and that is going to impact the county's ability to provide the additional funding we would need, and the state recognizes that in the LCI distribution, correct?

[01:20:58] The data's two years old. Although the state could decide to use more current data, they have long used data that was two years prior, so you wouldn't really see the impact of the federal government for a couple of bionniers.

[01:21:17] That's even scarier. Yeah. That's even scarier, so we're not even actually seeing the impact of what's actually going on although we are seeing it in terms of you know county collections and things like that that are happening at the within the tax basis here the other thing that I to mr. McDaniels point that I wanted to point out in 2011 2.2 billion is 3.16 billion today because I love to know what the conversion is always and so that is it's a significant amount of inflation that's happened since that time and at the same moment that our needs are increasing so we and we have a lot of work to do to ensure that when we're looking at salary comparison

[01:21:56] because anytime that we're talking about a percentage of money that we're trying to decrease anything those are people those it's people in our schools that are doing work with our students almost 100% of the time because the when we when we talk about cutting from central office according to last year's numbers I think it was about 9% I mean it's a very small proportion of considering that we are larger than 11 states I guarantee you our overhead is lower than the state level so the other thing that I want to say about slide 12 is for me

[01:22:31] slide 12 is just a list of things that we fund that are outside the SOQs and so yes I understand that we have things that we're going to need to look at and make decisions on and all of that but this is just a list of things where we these are things that are possible these are and I want us to be very careful when we're talking about ROI because we are talking about tiny humans we are talking about setting up kids to be successful for the rest of their lives and those children have been through a lot in the last five years related to everything that happened with the pandemic we hear that often we have a

[01:23:09] ton going on in terms of mental health and we're better than we were and so I am very concerned about us talking about ROI as if that doesn't matter and if it doesn't play play into our considerations so yes I want to understand where our eyes and where we have potential to cut things that are not going to be as harmful but the reason we've made decisions up to this point is because we thought that they were important above what the state is providing so I just want us to be careful when we're talking about ROI thank you miss Anderson miss Dixit ROI what an interesting word return of

[01:23:47] investment so I came I'm from the business world right so when I came to the board I was like yeah ROI matters right because you you spend money on things anyone and you get returned but when I walked to the schools and I have more than a year of experience now on the school board it's they're two different things we can't really say the same things apply we could talk about operational efficiency you know programs effectiveness and we can talk in that but not in dollar terms because when you go to classrooms you see there are

[01:24:23] multiple teachers working for what one group of students and there are you know they say like it's not one teacher per you know is educating you it's like a group they're special so it's very hard to like when I see the names on this list the every single of one of them is affecting some way our student education and providing a support system for them for their safety and security as well so and I understand why we said some words but in in I think public education we will have to probably think it in different differently just the business

[01:25:02] term doesn't really apply here and I did want to ask like if we get what we asked for we don't have to cut anything correct any of these other things so so So if we get like $200 million, we are good.

[01:25:22] - Assuming that the superintendent's proposed budget is similar to the fiscal forecast budget. - Actually it's 190. - I'm just keeping some buffer, Dr. Reed. So I just want to say community is watching and they are more involved than ever.

[01:25:40] When I talk to PTA presidents and leaders and community parents, they're all are saying that we are watching the budget cycle this year. They're aware that we were short funded last year and Fairfax County residents are very supportive of our school system.

[01:25:56] Our bond passed with 70% of the votes. So we would get the support from our community, our parents, general public. So we just have to make sure that now we get the money from the state.

[01:26:12] We are the one of the wealthiest county in the name the commonwealth and we don't get our due share that needs to change we cannot keep funding all the other counties and in virginia who are getting more money from state and federal so we should have more dollars back so i'll stop there thanks thank you and i appreciate the conversation as well and i did want to start with one of my colleagues talking about teacher salaries i am really thrilled that the board i was on previously and this board has been prioritizing teacher salaries because we cannot have an excellent education without good teachers.

[01:26:50] And I am similarly concerned that we don't lose our veteran teachers. So I think I'm glad that in the very little that we're asking for, which is focused on, you know, sort of, in my opinion, two main -- three main areas, one of which is abiding by our obligations under the collective bargaining agreement, which I think is very important between the step increase and the market scale adjustment.

[01:27:11] We need to pay our folks. We can keep them here. Benefit rate changes. can do about it everybody is dealing with the increase of benefit costs our enrollment student needs may actually bring that number down once we get final figures and we're abide we have to abide by our contractual agreements I wanted to mention that's all we're asking for but because 89% of our budget is for employee compensation because we are so employee heavy because that's what schools are right it's a people organization so it's different than other places where we can look to find maybe other efficiencies efficiencies here to the scale that we need a 1% salary increases about 30 million dollars

[01:27:49] so efficiencies here means people means class sizes it's hard to find the scales of that size and I know what we're looking and we're going to continue to look for efficiencies I also wanted to piggyback on the ROI where do you even look for is it how normally in the business world you look at shorter term longer term but is it how are kids doing when they graduate is it college I mean where is that ROI is it 20 years down the road when they have a job after college I think we have to be really clear on what it is we're benchmarking to figure out ROI having said that I do think it's important to look at programs for efficacy and for to make sure that they're still in line with best

[01:28:26] practices because we do know educational practices change so I think looking at that and our budget for efficiencies and effectiveness is important but I think we need to be careful not saying ROI because what are we looking at test scores mental health outcomes right what are we looking at here right so I think that's important i want to bring back the conversation a little bit to um the lci as well well i'm really excited about the benchmarking where i do think it may we may end up getting more money from the state is the lci basically looks at three different figures looks at the true value

[01:29:01] of real estate it looks at the adjusted gross income and it looks like taxable retail sales i imagine retail sales will be down and the adjustable gross income will be down I'll just put a plug in for the public listening that we need to look at that LCI formula because 40% of that formula is gross income. However, localities aren't allowed to tax gross income, so it's essentially a bucket of funds that the localities can't touch, but their localities are being held to be responsible for being able to pay based on a bucket of funds they can't touch.

[01:29:36] And I'm not advocating necessarily for an income, local income tax. I'm saying the formula falsely presumes an ability to pay by a bucket of funds that only the state and federal government can touch. So there's a lot of work to be done, I think, at the state level.

[01:29:51] We're gonna go to go-go backs. And since we still have an hour, I'll still continue to three minutes. We'll start with Ms. St. John Cunning. - So I actually just wanna piggyback and appreciate that my very business-oriented colleague pointed out that when we're looking at return of our investment, it's not always dollars and cents.

[01:30:13] And I do believe we have to look at that. I mean, it's important, but many of you know my story and know why I'm motivated and why I'm on this board, because Fairfax County Public Schools literally saved the life of my child.

[01:30:30] How can we ever put a measure of compensation and return for investment in that? So we are not a business. We are a service. And I think too much of the noise going on right now is business-oriented and dollars and cents versus services.

[01:30:50] so yes we are responsible for looking at the dollars and cents but all of us here are committed to doing this work here because we look at the little people and the young adults in our in our system as well as our teachers and recognize that we are providing a service and I cannot ever thank Fairfax County Public Schools enough for the fact that my daughter is extremely successful because of what happened here but more important she is alive and she is thriving thank you dr.

[01:31:29] Anderson thank you going to slide 9 miss burden can you share what potential steps could be taken to impact the maximum group moving that from 7 to a lower number what would that and what could that entail well we're we're working on it you may recall that the collective bargaining agreement requires

[01:32:03] that we add a step at the top of each salary schedule in fiscal 27 and fiscal 28 mr mr. moon is absolutely correct Prince William has like 37 steps compared to air 26 and so that's part of the the issue is that most of the other divisions around us have more steps than we have and so that's why we compare poorly when you look at the top.

[01:32:33] And like I said, we are whittling away at that every year by adding another step at the top. So, I mean, and our goal originally was to at least get to 30 because a VRS, unreduced retirement, requires 30 years and, you know, we would like teachers to make their home with us you know from the time they graduate from college till 30 years later but that's that's part of the issue is that we have shorter schedules than some of the other divisions and we're we're working on it but aside from doing you know something that's much more expensive um you know

[01:33:11] it's just going to take some time and what would be the financial impact of adding an additional step to each of the salary schedules i think it's about four million and that's included in the collective bonding agreement okay thank you can you also share where we are comparing our bachelors in terms of mid mid and max yeah at the bachelor's step one we rank two of eight and at the mid five of eight and the max five of eight so it's just slightly better at the mid and max levels

[01:33:50] Could there be a budget scenario in which we are resourcing a little bit better the areas that we are, let's say, five and above of eight and not necessarily focusing on the areas where we're one and two? If I might, Dr. Anderson, those would be topics that would be collectively bargained.

[01:34:15] We can't, we are at this point not able to intervene in salary. I think Mr. Smith could probably also comment on that, because the collective bargaining unit would have to say this is a priority for them. Recall we're in year two of the collective bargaining agreement, so I don't, you know, I think that's something we could think about two years from now, right, because we have year two and then year three but that's something that could be brought to the table as an interest but at this point it wouldn't be something we could play with for next year I see so does that mean the slide the chart on slide 7

[01:34:53] where it has a step increases and market rate adjustments both of these we don't have any wiggle room in these numbers at all because it's related to CBA or there is some so again and good afternoon good morning everyone so those numbers are built into the collective bargaining agreement for feu and we use that as the basis for building the budget that's the one of the values of having a collective bargaining agreement because you know how to plan your budgets for the term of the contract so we knew but i was told just a little

[01:35:28] bit earlier that these numbers reflected all employees not just FEU employees so these numbers do reflect all employees you have a TBD for our FCF PSA collective bargaining group some information will be coming to the board regarding those additional costs and then once those costs are known these numbers would be adjusted to reflect that no that's not what I meant because I think you did have that TBD for PSA which I didn't realize now had its own acronym so the

[01:36:00] 62.6 and the 84.8 that represents all employees not just FEU employees outside of the PSA's that's correct it no it's all employees so could I get the numbers for what that would be for just FEU employees again it's there's a everybody Everybody is in FEU except for PSA, and that's 1,400 people.

[01:36:32] But not everybody is in FEU. We have some groups that are not in FEU. Not all of our parent liaisons are in FEU, and I would imagine this includes them as well. Everybody that's eligible to be in FEU, I mean, if you're an hourly employee, everybody is eligible to be in FEU except for the PSA group, and that's about 1,400 people.

[01:37:01] But these step increases and market scale adjustments will be applicable to all of the employee groups that we have because we do have a couple that are not in FEU that we're not allowed to be represented. Well, that's confidential employees, and according to Virginia's collective bargaining rules, you can treat confidential employees as if they were part of the union that they would have belonged to if they weren't confidential.

[01:37:29] And we also have some of the employees you're talking about in terms of our family liaisons. Those who are FTEs and part of the operating budget, they are part of FEU. Those who are hourly are not covered by the collective bargaining agreement.

[01:37:45] But then we are including them in this as well. Yes, they are part of FEU. Those who are in the operating fund and are FTEs, they are part of The hourly are not, and remember, we're in a phased movement towards making all family liaisons a 1.0 position.

[01:38:09] We do have that last tranche of Title I family liaisons that, actually, they're not Title I. We already did those. It's the remainder, and it's about 40, 50 positions, but that's a multi-year investment.

[01:38:26] Oh, I know. That was my very strong advocacy. and so I'm glad we're heading there I just use it as an example because I think there's a disconnect that I may be able to explain a little bit offline here because I was not under the impression that every single employee group that would be impacted by this step and market scale adjustments are part of FEU so I'm looking for a more definitive number that is tying us to the collective bargaining agreement not just we're applying it because of some other rationale we can get a breakdown of all employees of all position titles

[01:39:04] that are in each of our collective bargaining units one thing that mr. Solomon and his team have done they have applied to all of our job descriptions when you go on to our website to apply for a job you'll know which bargaining unit that position is part of. And again, we have the instructional and operational for FEU, and then we have the administrative, which is FCFPSA. Those are the bargaining units we have, and all of our employees are then in those units, save for our leadership team members and our

[01:39:43] confidential employees. I think that list that I'm looking for is probably the shorter one, who is not under FEU, rather who is under FEU. But with my last 25 seconds, I'd like to ask regarding enrollment, and I do understand our kids don't come in these nice little neat packages.

[01:40:00] They never have and they never will. But being that we're about 4,000, and I got the numbers, Dr. Reed, so you don't need to look that up for me. Being that we're about 4,000 from where we were, did we see any savings with the decrease in enrollment?

[01:40:17] - We're actually not 4,000. What we wanna do and what we need to do is we look at year over year at the same moment in time. Not June, because as I mentioned earlier, we're gonna continue to grow through June.

[01:40:32] So we're gonna have a higher number in June than we do today. So I can do the math, but it's a little bit less than that. I think it's 177 from 180. So I think if somebody could do the math for me announced that it's less than 3,000 difference I believe but anyhow I don't believe we've seen savings on that because we've had some fewer staff positions but as you mentioned when students don't come in neat packages and we're over in some places and under and others you could it that's what this negative 41.8 million under enrollment represents is the reduction in the

[01:41:11] amount of staffing that we will need because we have an enrollment loss it's you're not saying the same thing I'm not sure I'm trying to answer a question about did we save significant money on that and I think we didn't feel certain teaching or we didn't feel certain positions for sure based on formula but we she's talking about current year I'm talking about fiscal 27 okay yes no but

[01:41:46] I think you were asking about current okay so what we've seen is there's some there has been some there were part of this is we've had less attrition and we've also needed to hire less we hired significantly fewer staff this year so that has enabled us to save some monies but in some cases we haven't been able to have fewer staff because we by October 1 we're now moving staff still to positions and making sure that we're able to you know still carry on

[01:42:24] activities so like just simple examples right when we take particular trips or have particular experiences for students whether there are ten fewer students at school or 30 fewer students we're still doing those experiences and with the same relative cost so I think we've seen some economies of savings but not to the degree that we might think and again as we continue to gain students your week over week and we're gaining at about the same rate it's a little it's a little slower rate than last year but we're still gaining I do think we'll see some continued savings and that we're not hiring as many people throughout the

[01:43:04] year but we're still staying fully staffed does somebody do the math for me from September to September we're down about 3,200 students September September to September and we are increasing from that September number thank you miss mayor I'm followed by mr. Frisch okay I'm wondering if maybe the better term than return on investment is economies of scale so here's the example that's fresh in my mind a few weeks ago I happened to attend with the superintendent

[01:43:43] here at Gatehouse a session with high school students who were environmental activists and they had wanted the opportunity to figure how they could do more they were from over a dozen high schools they came here after school so clearly like motivated students what I learned in that session is that this is what a student said is that they're only receiving two weeks of climate change education in their entire high school career it's included in IB environmental science I asked about the outdoor classrooms as you know has been a passion project of mine seven million dollars 36 high schools I learned in one high school four teachers are using it regularly for and that directive to

[01:44:20] build those classrooms was to roll out professional development and instructional changes that's what I mean by return on investment we spent a lot of money to make that happen how is it being used what might need to come off the table so that students so that we can that's what the board directed right So, I just sent around to the colleagues in this room, including our leadership team members and staff, some internal work documents that began in 2021, and this was referenced at some point, but at the time, Ms. Sizemore-Hyser and I brought to the board, and the board did a program review in an attempt to try and understand what was being offered, and

[01:44:58] this was part of the, then, the budget review we tried to do, I think it was the COVID year, month by month, looking at each office. And so what I did was I took PDFs and I put them in spreadsheets to show how often courses were being offered.

[01:45:14] And additionally, in 2022, I added information and in 2024. That 2024 piece is actually what is going to come to us this Thursday as a new business and that is the secondary course offerings. So last year I took the PDF and I put it in a spreadsheet and I said, I want to see where is American Sign Language offered? Where is, it was like a geology or geospatial, where is that being offered? Studio art, geosystems, data science, and I added up, so this is in a spreadsheet you can see, high school course selection responses, and you can see that it was added in some schools, not others. Why? We were not informed. We asked at the

[01:45:53] session, I pulled it off of consent, just like I did this week, it's new business this week but it'll be action on 12/4 why were some courses why was pharmacy technician offered in three high schools but not others now the kicker is is that this course catalog means that it's open for offer well we can have thousand it's like apps right there's thousands and millions of apps which ones are going to give us the biggest economy of scale because we can no longer afford to offer 20 different types of one subject we need to be really clear and going back

[01:46:28] to the AI discussion well is I hate to pick any of these but you know and any of these is cloud computing CTE is that what we need to do to get students ready for AI so I have yet to look at what the PDF that I'm gonna have to put in a spreadsheet for 12/4 why are these decisions being made I think we deserve we need to know I'll ask Dr. Presidio to respond as the instructional services department is the department that owns the absolutely no I appreciate it and I appreciate Miss Marin's work on this for a number of years and her advocacy on it

[01:47:07] I think one of the things that Miss Marin said is there's a difference between a standard course offering and an optional course offering in schools so So we work really hard with a committee, board-appointed community members, administrators from schools and central office every year to review our course offerings and try to make determinations about courses that maybe we have as optional course offerings that we think are so important that they should be standard course offerings.

[01:47:36] When you have a standard course offering, that means that every school needs to offer that course to students if there's sufficient enrollment in the course. so for example there could be a course that is a standard course offering but when we ask students that they're interested in taking it instead of getting 30 students which we would typically require to run a course we only get a couple students that are interested in it recently we ran a ballet class kind of similar to that we didn't have enough students to be able to run it then we have optional course offerings that we can offer at schools that might supplement some of the unique needs that their students are

[01:48:15] expressing interest in, or some of the unique talents that their faculty members have. Because remember, every course that we offer requires a licensed teacher to be able to offer it. So that is a, you know, that's always a consideration. Do you have staff available with the correct licensure to be able to offer these classes?

[01:48:34] And we do have a large number of courses that are optional course offerings that we could always consider to be standard course offerings, and we do that through the current process that we have established by board policy and FCPS regulation.

[01:48:52] - Thank you very much. Next we have Mr. Frisch, followed by Ms. Lady. - Wanted to clarify a few things. Back to the ROI question. One of the things that we talked about as a board when we were initially doing this and moving towards the Baldrige work was how you could have efficiency and sacrifice efficacy, you can have efficacy and sacrifice efficiency.

[01:49:27] And that what we're after is the nexus of the two, right? And so I think it's important that the Baldrige work is trying to create people within the division who are capable of doing that work internally so that we're not farming out the work to expensive consultants who would come back and maybe not have as firm a grasp on the lay of the land inside of FCPS so that we do end up accidentally sacrificing efficacy for efficiency's sake or vice versa.

[01:50:03] So I'll be keeping an eye out for those regular updates in the superintendent's Friday letter that tell us where we are in that process. And I also wanted to talk about or address the question of the Dr. Anderson was bringing up about who's covered and who's not covered.

[01:50:23] And so people at home may not understand what confidential employee means, like it's a secret agent or something. These are simply people in the school division from senior people to very, very junior people. Not that I'm describing anybody's job as junior, but in terms of where they might fit in the org chart, who, for lack of a better way of saying it, might have an impact on collective bargaining in some form, so they are not covered by one of the unions because they'd be bargaining for their own benefit.

[01:50:57] And so they're not included in that. So as for the others, my understanding is that everybody else is covered by the agreements, even if they're not dues-paying members of FEU, because that is the way that collective bargaining works in a post-court precedent world where compulsory membership is not required, unfortunately.

[01:51:28] People who are not dues-paying members get to take advantage of the benefits that labor works hard to bring about for them, whether or not they're paying dues. I happen to think they should be paying dues, but we'll have to wait for a Supreme Court that values working people.

[01:51:46] Additionally, hourly employees-- Specific hourly employees, non-full-time hourly employees are not covered by collective bargaining because they're not covered by much of the benefit work that we provide within our school system.

[01:52:03] So we're talking about a very small fraction of people in the school system, what was the number again, 1,400? Out of 41,000 people who are not covered in some form by the collective bargaining agreements or will soon be covered.

[01:52:19] - Wait, wait, okay. - 1,400 FTEs are in the PSA. - That's right, in the PSA, sorry. - But the 40,000 represents 26,000 FTEs. - Including the hourly part-time. - And then about 14,000 hourly part-time. - 14,000 hourly part-times, which are, so still about three to one in terms of who's covered by the agreement.

[01:52:43] Now, if the board wanted to move towards everybody being covered, we have a lot of money to come up with to ensure that everybody who's a part-time hourly employee now a full-time employee receiving the full breadth of benefits and support the school division offers other employees but I don't think that's a road we're on because it's not what's required for the jobs that we have in that matter we are moving some towards that and if there are others that need to be moved in that direction I think we should probably hear from people who think that so just wanted to clarify those things thank you thank you miss lady thank you I just

[01:53:21] wanted to add a little to the conversation around course offerings. I think what's really hard for outside folks to comprehend or understand is, well, I think that people understand their cultures at schools. But when it comes to the notion of standard course offerings, which there are often standard course offerings that don't go out of school because there's no interest. There are sometimes, I mean, if there's interest in a standard course offering and we don't have someone certified to teach it, but we have the kids who want to take it, we have to offer it and we will find the teacher.

[01:53:58] When it comes to optional course offerings, some of that's culture. And so just to remind folks that, you know, an instructional staff or a leadership council or whatever you want to call it, when I was at Chantilly to offer a new optional course, it was voted on by the instructional leadership.

[01:54:17] Because when you offer something new, you sometimes cannibalize something else that's there. And so just understand that there might be a culture at one high school of sports leadership, and there's no appetite for it somewhere else as a standard course offering.

[01:54:33] And I just want to share that. And then there's also courses like Pharmacy Tech, which are at academies. We don't have the lab space or the infrastructure to teach that in every single school. And I've shared this before. when I was a counselor at Marshall I literally told all my kids that theater was required because I felt that the theater teacher at that school was the best teacher in the entire school and when in life do you not have to stand and deliver a line and while some kids did not take it I had a lot of kids who did and then they took two and three and four years of it so I bring that up just because and also as a counselor we hate to hate to use this terminology but

[01:55:13] there's also places where there isn't the same strength instructionally. And so I want my kids to be in front of fantastic teachers who care about them as people. So the culture of the school is always gonna drive some of what's happening with the course offering.

[01:55:30] So as much as we don't wanna be a system of schools, there's a little bit of that that's gonna be hard to avoid just because some places, and back to Mr. Moon's point, yeah, the top of our scale might be at 29 years, but we've got people that are in their 45th year of teaching making the same darn thing because there's no step for them to go up.

[01:55:49] But their loyalty to brand, their loyalty to their school, their loyalty to those kids sustains that. An example of that would be the gentleman, I'm not gonna name names, but there's an econ teacher at Chantilly who's retiring this year. I fully expect that econ program to change because he is so incredibly good that people want to take his class.

[01:56:11] And sometimes that just changes with time. So I just want to talk about that a little bit because I just think it's hard for people to understand what happens from a course catalog to the building of a master schedule. I think if you want to really learn that, then maybe we want to look at course tally sheets from a couple different schools and help understand how that generates a master schedule for those kids based on what they asked.

[01:56:38] - The other part of that, and having worked in the high school for many, many years, is it could be on the tally sheets, but then when you look at the conflict matrix, I think is what we used to call it, often kids weren't able to fit it in their schedule because they had a required or something, maybe a continuation of a world language continuum or math or science that even though they wanted the course, it wasn't gonna fit in their schedule based on the course period it was gonna be offered.

[01:57:10] So it is a complex topic, but to the degree possible I think using that standard course catalog so everyone has a chance to opt for the course I think is important but I I did want to note the conflict matrix too because sometimes if you have limited sections of certain courses it limits enrollment thank you and thank you for this robust conversation we now have mistakes it and then we have got go go back so I did I just want to frame well I think this is a great conversation I'm glad we're having it we are focused a little bit on the budget fiscal forecast

[01:57:48] for today and the information around that and I know we'll have a chance to talk about course office as well board meeting because we are looking for an opportunity to see whether or not there's room at an upcoming work session that we can have a short but robust conversation wonderful I'll take a look at that for the agenda to course office all right mistakes it yes I'm going to just go back to the budget discussion and economy of scales it is basically

[01:58:22] where you gain advantage by production cost is low when your average cost is low per unit right so if we offer courses at every high school each course and then we have to hire those teachers and every is opposite of economy of scales because then your cost is going high by offering those those things but But where we can offer our economy of skills, and we should definitely look into this, is facilities maintenance.

[01:58:52] We have to look at how the federal government is doing their buildings' maintenance, issue contracts, look at that option as fixed firm, fixed price, or other contracting measures.

[01:59:08] That is the way, probably, to minimize some of our costs. And then we buy a ton of computer, laptop, I'm sure we are using that economy of skills there where we are negotiating the best deal. Another thing, Ms. Eisemheiser and I are in the joint IT task force with the county supervisor, and we're looking at different ways where we are buying services, we can negotiate a better pricing with counties and our combined collective purchasing power.

[01:59:40] So those are the things I would see we can see join some savings coming up and I think the staff at both sides are looking into that. But I'll say this, I think there are ways where we can save money but there are some ways we do have to save money and the population is shifting.

[01:59:57] I know the enrollment numbers are down a little bit but not in all schools. So we are seeing increase on some schools and the overcrowding and then obviously there schools and and when I go to schools I I find them really engaging the teachers are working so it doesn't look like there's somebody sitting like an idle body working just wandering around because everybody is busy and engaged with students when we go to the schools thank you thank you

[02:00:32] we're gonna go go go backs I've lost go go go backs but miss man we still have time so I'll go and give you three minutes thank you so much so you know two things I agree that it's hard for people to understand how the courses are offered it's hard for me to understand it as a board member and a parent and I should understand by now at least as a board member how the decisions are being made to fund courses and get staff especially you know when I think again about how the superintendent wants us to meet the moment for AI well what courses no longer serve that trajectory financially and to meet that goal I think this is really part of the strategic plan work just like we have

[02:01:11] invested in early literacy and elementary school literacy, other things came off the table and that has borne results. So what are those things now? I am not a fan of giving limitless options to students and saying, well, here's an option or your school could adopt it. It's dangling.

[02:01:27] I have kids who want to do American Sign Language. Well, if students really want to do it and there's a job market for it, how about we make that happen? You know, we used to talk about in the last board, like the Fairfax Promise. What are the non-negotiables that every student gets? We know it's the four core academics, right?

[02:01:44] But is woven in there now the AI work? We talked about weaving in the get to green work, right? This was the program audit. We have a global education program. We have a get to green program. We have all these things, but ideally they are woven in. So that it's not just dependent on school culture and that superstar teacher who we know when they leave things change.

[02:02:04] There's gotta be some basic agreement to how the things that kids need are being woven in and it's not left to chance of whether we could staff it. We could talk about dual enrollment. We have artists, that's part of the Fairfax promise, great. But maybe once they get to advance, they switch over to dual enrollment, or there's an academy.

[02:02:22] I have this data from 2021, I have not seen anything change. And I'm just not gonna let it go at this point. We are funding the same things. So we don't wanna increase class size. What course offerings are we gonna take off that no longer serve our students?

[02:02:40] I go back to world language. The data from 2021 show that we have 150-something elementary schools. Half had zero world language. Half, currently, to my knowledge, 'cause I haven't received an update since. And of that half, some are in FLES, which was made at the turn of the century for a different purpose than our very international community.

[02:03:02] Where is that analysis of how effective that is and if that's money well spent? The other students do immersion. Is that effective? I have asked this question four years in a row. This board must be looking at the course offerings and how much money it's costing and we have got to use the data.

[02:03:21] It's not effective, Dr. Reed, for the board to receive data and say, here you go, do what you want, tell me what you want me to do. What is your recommendation? What courses do you believe every student should have access to? What are the must-haves and how much does that cost?

[02:03:37] Thank you. - I just wanna make sure that for the FLESS world language programs you're asking plus and immersion if they're effective I just want to make sure that dr. Presidio has these notes because we're gonna need to come back with those I feel like it would take some more time for me to articulate that and it's the same articulation that's been made in prior years okay so is there do you think it is something that every student should have and if so what's the plan to make that happen I don't know miss chair Anderson if you would like to add the only thing that I want to add here is

[02:04:16] that we have a forum topic that we're trying to schedule right now related to world languages so I would like to pause some of this conversation because I think that the board needs to have the discussion first before we put the superintendent on the spot in terms of trying to make a determination related to this so I do we are working hard to figure out a time where all the members that put forward that work session or the forum topic are going to be able to be present and so that's what we're trying to get coordinated well I - Well, I appreciate that.

[02:04:42] I just wanna say it's already been a topic like-- - Start her time, please, because the time has been paused for a while, thank you. - I just wanna say, and this is a board governance thing. This was a topic that Rasha and I raised as a forum topic in 2021. It has not been resolved. So now there's a new topic, but we're talking about, of course, like-- - Ms. Mayor.

[02:05:00] - I just wanna say, since no one else has one person to please, at what point do we count this as done? Yes, Ms. Heismarheiser. I was responding to Chair Anderson's comment. - I appreciate that we've given lots of rounds and I want to bring us back to the budget, which is what we're talking about.

[02:05:16] I think what I'm hearing from Chair Anderson is that there's at least two future possibilities. One, a future work session that she is still scheduling with staff around course offerings, as well as a forum topic that we could potentially also discuss the program review forum topic to see where that stands.

[02:05:33] That was done, we had two work sessions on it with Dr. Presidio's office with Elaine Tolan when she was still here. and so we could see maybe bringing that work back, but I do want to just sort of focus us back on the fiscal forecast conversation. Having said that, it feels like there is a need for as we're going into years potentially of tough budgets to do some more work around our, and I've said this often on the special education side, but I think it merits, and this is something for Dr. Presidio and the Instructional Services Department to really do a deeper dive into what are we offering, what are we not offering, and what is the most valuable given the needs of our students.

[02:06:13] So I think just to frame that for that future conversation, I think that's important. I think there's a lot of questions that Ms. Marin, Ms. Hull and I and others have had around that conversation. But I don't see any other placards for the fiscal forecast.

[02:06:28] I'll give you one last one and then we're gonna, go ahead. - Yes, this is just what I need. One of the things that I'm concerned about, the list that you provided here, Dr. Reed, as we are working on our board priorities, I think each and every one of us can say these things should be untouched, should not be touched.

[02:06:45] These things are important because I'm feeling as if we need a little bit more in order to really cope with the situation that we're in. We cannot, this cannot be business as usual. We can't say, well, everything matters, so we can't change anything outside of getting $200 million to get us there.

[02:07:07] I think we're clear that we're going to have some gaps. we're hopeful that we're not going to have those gaps, but I think we are going to have some gaps. So how do we make decisions? So in your mind's eye, I don't wanna put you on the spot per se, 'cause I know we've had some conversations about how do we evaluate certain things.

[02:07:25] What would be, what are some of the considerations that we should be having as board members in order to determine, well, this is going to be better if there's going to be less harm if we are making reductions in these places.

[02:07:42] I quickly tried to scan the Baldrige report that was in the Friday letter of last week. That does not give me that information. Again, I was quickly scanning it. I'd like to be able to walk out of here with something that is going to guide my thinking because we know not every single thing we do is having the results that we want.

[02:08:03] Whether we want to call it efficiencies, ROI, whatever it is, we have to evaluate how we're spending our dollars and what is the best way to spend our dollars? Because we have had instances where we have stopped certain things in order to bring in new things that are more impactful, that are more effective.

[02:08:22] I'd like your guidance here and how do we evaluate this list since it may be part of our considerations for board priority work. - I think if we go back to slide 12, I believe it was slide 12 if I recall.

[02:08:39] these are the areas in, if you will, a macro look that are not currently funded by formula from the Commonwealth of Virginia. And so I think that in guiding your thinking, these would be the areas that we go above and beyond and we provide additional resources.

[02:09:04] I think we can count on the SOQ funding coming. So these are all the areas that as you think about priorities you have as a board member that we as a team, the budget team and the senior leadership team have looked at and said, just as we did last year, these are the areas if we're going to need to make cuts that they will likely come from some part or parts of these areas that are not SOQ funded.

[02:09:32] So how do we avoid canceling each other? There's 12 of us. Let's say each of us equally said, you know, these are the areas that are important and we should not touch. does that give you any feedback well i that's a great question that's why i think you have your next steps process and i think that my understanding is that ms size more heiser is going to be sending out a form similar to prior budget cycles where you're able to see what each other think about that i mean that's the purpose of the conversation really is to have

[02:10:08] a conversation to hear each other's thoughts on these topic areas i think several of you have shared your passion for different initiatives that are up there and at the end of the day what I would say is there isn't anything up there that's not important for this school division this community in the future of our country correct having said that if we're not going to be fully funded we're likely going to need to look at one of these areas for some type of budget work and at this point this is our first if you will public conversation around this

[02:10:44] work and I it's been helpful I think for both myself and our staff to hear some of your questions some of your requests for additional information and we'll get those out to you as soon as possible well I will wait until I have your feedback in turn because I made a request for more information I do agree yes well I do agree that all of these things are important I do know that they impact the student experience in different ways and they impact certain And groups in different ways, groups that we've been trying very hard to raise their performance.

[02:11:20] Thank you. That's it. Thank you. And I appreciate this robust discussion. So just as a summary after this meeting, I will be sending out to you the Google form for your budget priorities. You are welcome to put priorities of things you'd like to see, things that perhaps you think maybe we don't need to do as much.

[02:11:37] As a reminder, as Dr. Reed just said, this slide was merely to say these are the things that we provide above and beyond what the Commonwealth of Virginia thinks we need to provide to provide an education and as a reminder every single school division in Virginia provides more than what the Commonwealth of Virginia says they need to provide so it is not because and the last thing I'll leave with is that while I think this is a great start to this discussion I look forward to the discussion around the the course offerings as well as a reminder we're also going to have chance for the public to weigh in through our public hearings and other engagement I think that's a really another important voice

[02:12:13] to bring into this conversation as to what the public also prioritizes when we're in these tough budget years with an understanding that these are all the things that the locality helps us provide on top of what the state funds and so we're all entering to very tough and uncertain budget times and we need to have a conversation about what our priorities are including what we can continue and what we can't and so I appreciate the robust conversation take look at i know miss burton's team will send out the budget questions information and process as well and we'll have the same processes last year so if you have any questions or comments please talk to myself or miss dixit as budget vice chair and we'll look to continue this conversation and

[02:12:53] process thank you all very much and with that i'll give you 12 minutes of your life before lunchback 12 25 work session i guess this part of the work session is not called to order at 104 mr dunn has submitted written request to attend this this afternoon's meeting virtually due to a personal conflict he had a prior work commitment mr dunn is located in mount vernon virginia mr

[02:13:29] dunn please check your audio after we vote all in favor he's not on yet but all in favor and we have one two three four five six seven i believe okay all against all abstaining okay that motion carries mr dunn is able to join us we have majority with folks in the room and whenever he does arrive

[02:13:57] please let us know so we can go ahead and test his audio alloy dr reed did you want to share anything before I jumped into a quick review of what we hope to accomplish today no I'll just introduce mr. Molloy when it's time okay absolutely thank you well today's conversation I believe is going to be the last discussion we will have on this matter what we're hoping to accomplish today is to be able to one

[02:14:33] to finalize our priorities because those will need to be shared with our Northern Virginia delegation and I think there are some changes there that we will also discuss as we go into the presentation another piece of business that we hope to accomplish today is to review all board members submitted amendments to the program and hopefully come to consensus about those today in order to avoid sausage making at the table if we are able to have consensus today then we will just include them into the program rather than voting on

[02:15:11] each as we have typically done so it will definitely shorten the time that we will spend we're excited for the second piece I believe that we are ready to rock and roll miss Marin are you wanting to add anything else before we turn it over to dr. Reed no I think the changes that are forthcoming in Richmond have a a lot of opportunities and who knows what in front of us so continuing with our legislative program intact and working with our partners to see what they're doing is going to be a very timely time so dr. Anderson mr. Dunn

[02:15:48] has joined us okay mr. Dunn has joined us you've been voted into the meeting can you please test your microphone and audio I'm sorry your microphone and visual okay we will circle back with you can you hear me it is very low can you hear me better now. I think it's on our end. We'll go ahead and have Mr. Ho take care of that. While we do that, Ms. Dr. Reed, I'll turn it over to you for your

[02:16:23] introductions. Thank you, Dr. Anderson. So to follow on what Ms. Marin was saying, I think this is a point in time, maybe even a historic time in the Commonwealth of Virginia for the possibility of legislative action. So it makes this topic even more important, I think, this year.

[02:16:43] So I'd like to introduce Michael Malloy, who will kick us off. - Before we get started, Mr. Malloy, can we have one more check, Mr. Dunn? - Can you hear me? - Yes, we can. It's still a little low, but we are able to.

[02:16:59] Mr. Malloy, I apologize for the interruption. - No, that's totally fine. So good afternoon, everybody. It's a little loud. It's a little louder than anticipated. So, happy to be here, we definitely have had some changes since we last spoke in September.

[02:17:20] We've got a little bit more clarity at the state level about what the executive branch looks like, what the legislature's going to look like going forward, talk to you a little bit about that. As Dr. Anderson mentioned, one of the goals, or the goal for today's conversation is to finalize your language for your federal and state legislative program for your adoption.

[02:17:43] Coming up here in the next few weeks So the objectives I do do again want to set some of some state and some Kind of background information about what the political landscape and the policy landscape look like going forward As part of the agenda item you have drafts of all the legislative program documents at this point you have the The program document itself which you've actually seen a couple of different times in your September work sessions But you also have drafts of language for your state priorities, which are based on the kind

[02:18:20] of the broad categories that you had identified in your September meetings. Federal priorities, same way. And then we also have language for the potential joint position with the Board of Supervisors, that language that they're considering.

[02:18:36] And then finally, we want to turn to continued planning for your outreach with our delegation and preparation as we get closer and closer to the General Assembly session. So just as a reminder, you've seen this before, but engagement is a year-round thing.

[02:18:58] We don't only talk about legislative issues and policy issues during the General Assembly session. There's a lot of work that goes up until the legislative session, and there's a lot of work that happens after the legislative session.

[02:19:13] So November elections, obviously everybody has read the headlines, so you know that there There is now a new governor-elect, a new lieutenant governor-elect, and a new attorney general-elect in the executive branch.

[02:19:29] Those folks don't take office until actually, interestingly enough, three days after the General Assembly has started. The General Assembly starts on Wednesday, January 14th. Their inauguration is on Saturday, January 17th. So again, you still have the current administration who will be in place between now and January 17th. For the House and the Senate, the House of Delegates runs every two years. They were all up for re-election this year. The current configuration of the current partisan split

[02:20:04] in that chamber right now is 51 Democrats, 49 Republicans. After the 2026 election and once everybody is seated coming into the next General Assembly session, that split is going to be 64-36. And in terms of our delegation, so our 15 members, all of our incumbents were returned to office from the House. So the folks that we've worked with in the last several years will continue to be the same folks there. I did put the Senate on there, even though they weren't up for election, because there are a couple of things that have happened

[02:20:38] that will actually impact the senate. Their current partisan split is 2,119 because the lieutenant governor elect is a sitting senator she will have to resign her seat before taking her new position. That will open up that seat. It means that for a time the partisan composition in that chamber will be 20 to 19 because that seat will be open in terms of getting a new senator into that seat it really depends on when the lieutenant governor-elect resigns their seat

[02:21:17] because they can't start the process of a new special election until that happens so it's possible that we will begin the general assembly session with that 21 19 or by that 2019 split on the Senate side another thing that that's important is that Senator Hashmi is currently the chair of the Senate Education and Health Committee which means that's a position that will become vacant as well when we come to the new General Assembly so there will be a new chair we think we know who it is I don't think the name has been has been officially announced but it's a it's a

[02:21:55] sitting member on that committee will be elevated to to the chairmanship of that committee number of things happening between now and the opening of session in fact this Monday bill pre-filing officially opens that's the first date that somebody can actually press a button and say hey yes I want this bill to go forward members can request drafts for bills all the way through December 1st and they don't actually have to decide whether or not they're going to submit the bill for consideration during the session until literally the morning

[02:22:30] of the first day of the General Assembly, which is Wednesday, January 14th. We've started to see information about the biennial rebenchmark. I know you talked about that a little bit at your budget session. Next week, the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Finance Committee both have their retreats, so there should be some additional information from them on kind of initial projections on rebenchmarking.

[02:22:57] It probably won't be at the division-by-division level. won't come until the State Board of Education gets their presentation which we're told isn't happening until their December meeting so I think December 10th and 11th is the next the next State Board meeting and we'll see the more formal presentation on rebenchmarking and we'll also see the governor's budget you know coming out in December one other thing that's happening and something actually literally happened today because the State Board is meeting today is we're seeing some recommendations coming from some of those off-session committee

[02:23:36] things that we had talked about during our September meetings. So there's already kind of the beginnings of legislation being talked about as a result of those off-session work sessions. We've seen legislation on diabetes care.

[02:23:53] There's going to be some legislation coming out of the state board as part of their standards quality prescriptions dealing with universal screening for for gifted students and some additional our changes in how they're requesting us to do employee background checks and a couple of other things that are literally on the agenda today as we're speaking but we're starting to see those we're starting to get a little bit of a picture of what what legislation lies ahead once we get to session I just put this here you can you can look at this at your leisure but

[02:24:29] But this kind of fleshes out the ebb and flow of the General Assembly session. It's a long session, so it's a 60-day session. There was some discussion about when budget amendments might come out and when crossover was. It's typically kind of late February in a long session, so that's a point at which we'll see the House budget amendments, the Senate budget amendments, and we'll also know what bills have passed in at least one of the two chambers at that point.

[02:25:01] And then in terms of local, we'll talk about this a little bit more later, but you're in the middle of take your legislator to school month. I know many of you have had meetings and have meetings scheduled as well. The VSBA conference is next week. December, you have your joint budget meeting and work with the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.

[02:25:23] They have a reception on, I think it's December 16th, where they invite General Assembly members and I believe you all are invited to that as well. And then in January, the Saturday before session, so January 10th, there's a delegation work session that's held over at the Government Center, and typically we have a member from our board go over and give a few remarks to that committee.

[02:25:50] Okay, now moving on to the meat of what we're going to talk about here today, which is the legislative program and your legislative priorities. Just as a reminder, the legislative program is an annual document that you all review.

[02:26:10] It includes your statements on state and federal legislation, policy regulations, just anything that you can think of or anything that we can kind of dream up in terms of what might be issues that come before the General Assembly or the Board of Education or other policy-making bodies.

[02:26:28] The document is incredibly helpful for us, obviously, as staff, because it gives guidance in terms of where you all are with where you stand on policy issues. During the General Assembly session in particular, things move incredibly quickly and we're dealing with a huge volume of issues all at once.

[02:26:45] So to have kind of those guidelines in place for us is extremely helpful. And then just as a reminder, the program is in essence a perpetual document, so unless you affirmatively make changes to it, the language from the previous year carries forward to the language of the next year.

[02:27:04] Then in terms of the components of the program, you've got a joint position that you all hold with the Board of Supervisors. You have a position or you have a set of priorities for state issues, you have a set of priorities for federal issues, and then you have standing positions, so kind of the long portion of the document which focuses in on the kind of the soup to nuts issues that that we deal with so the first the first component is your joint legislative

[02:27:42] position with the Board of Supervisors this is language that shows up in both documents it's primarily focused on education funding the county board won't finalize their program until December 9th so we'll be close in terms of your adoption I think which is scheduled for December 4th and their adoption on December 9th as part of the agenda item there were hint or there were individual pages that were included as part of the as part of the whole work section package

[02:28:17] that includes the language the specific language for the joint position I don't know if you want to pull that up to look at it here or if it's sufficient that it's part of the the work session I'll leave that to you if it'd be the k-12 funding yeah it'd be that one just a reminder we did not have that at the last work session so it's actually largely this it's it's largely similar language to what your current joint position is one thing that I think the Board of Supervisors is doing this year is they're streamlining the language on

[02:28:55] all of their positions so this looks a little bit shorter than than it has in the past but it covers the same issues that it has in the past in terms of advocacy for JLARC recommendations, specifically calling out cost of living issues, specifically calling out some issues that are specific to FCPS in terms of numbers of students versus percentages of students in terms of how formulas deal with that and then also opposing particular things that may have a disproportionate effect on uh on northern virginia so that i mean that

[02:29:30] that just gives you an idea of what the language for that position and this position this specific language has already been presented to the board of supervisors as part of their ongoing legislative work um so if we flip back to the presentation itself this lady did you have a question yeah i'm Sorry, just because it's right now.

[02:29:57] Yeah, of course. I understand the LCI, but what advocacy has there been to change the SOQ to a lower number? Like, when have we ever challenged the SOQs outside of how the LCI is budgeted based on them?

[02:30:14] Does that make sense? Like, obviously, we are below the SOQs for the state in so many areas. I'll pick social workers. Do we ever challenge the state and say, as an advocacy point, it should be 1 to 250, not 1 to 1,000? I think the short answer to that is yes because the standard of quality is an accumulation of a whole bunch of different standards and there's staffing pieces and there's a bunch of other things that go into it each one of those individual components there has been legislation there's been legislation about school nurses about counselors about social workers psychologists so

[02:30:49] yeah those come up and part of your language in your program talks about increasing a number of those specific areas so the next and I'll put this up here for a minute and we can pull the actual language of the the priorities up in just a second but if you remember during your September meetings you identified kind of these in the bolded areas were kind of the seven areas that you had identified as your your priority priority areas going forward so you had state funding, accountability assessments,

[02:31:28] facilities, school meals, Freedom of Information Act changes, and then educational governance. So all of those were kind of the broad pieces. And then what the language here does is takes those broad points of advocacy and tries to narrow it down to some specific items that you can give a little bit more clarity to legislators or a little bit more clarity to the public of, well, what do you wanna see in terms of state funding?

[02:31:53] What do you wanna see in terms of changes to accountability? So, you know, this is a kind of a brief summary of what's there, but if we can pull up the state priorities document, and I apologize, there are a lot of words there, but, so a couple things that I want to highlight, one is in that preamble sentence, there is some adjustment in the language that specifically talks about unfunded mandates.

[02:32:26] um you have some oblique language and you do have some language in your in your governance position in your in the main body of the program but just wanted to highlight that talking about unfunded mandates from the state is is included in this language and then as you can see for each individual part so for state funding the advocacy would be to make sure that the biennial re-benchmark is fully funded. And then we call out several items within the JLARC report. Obviously the advocacy is for everything within JLARC, but this gives an idea of some specific things

[02:33:03] that the General Assembly could address, having to do with how its salary calculations are done and how much funding we get back for that, which is the issue about weighted averages. One of the biggest components of JLARC for FCPS had to do with the state doing a better job of recognizing cost of living differences between jurisdictions.

[02:33:25] That would go a huge, huge way. I think fully at least a third of all the funding that was recommended that could come back to FCPS in terms of the 2023 numbers that JLARC was using was actually attributed to the change in the cost of living adjustment.

[02:33:44] That was a huge, huge component of that report for FCPS. Same thing, I don't know if we want to go through these with a lot of granularity. I will highlight on assessment that we do have some language in there on some specific changes that we may want to see based on legislation that's occurred in the past and adjustments and clarifications that may need to be made there.

[02:34:13] Then I think the second to last one I will highlight as well, which is Freedom of Information Act. I know there's been some discussion, and we'll discuss it a little bit later as well. But this picks up not just the issue of disparity in board size in terms of how open meeting laws apply, but also I recall your discussion in September, you talked about the proliferation of records because of electronic communications and then also the expense of posting public notices.

[02:34:46] So again, this is intended to take those broad areas of advocacy and give some much more actionable steps of, hey, here are things that can be done to address these issues. So we can flip back to the main presentation.

[02:35:07] And then we actually don't need to go to the full federal priorities document because For the most part, what this says here is what the priorities have picked up, which really is just a continued discussion and a continued advocacy for not only at this point preservation of existing funding for education funding programs coming from the federal government, but enhancements to those programs.

[02:35:36] You've had standing positions for years and years on additional funding for Title I, additional funding for IDEA, particularly with the federal promise when IDEA was first adopted of the federal government picking up 40% of the cost of that.

[02:35:51] We're not even at 10% at this point. So there's a lot of room for potential improvement, but given the current climate, we do need to acknowledge that preservation of this funding is paramount.

[02:36:11] So the next, I think, three slides are actually mostly things you have seen at both your September work sessions. We haven't gone through them in incredible detail, but these are all of the proposed changes that are embedded in that strike-through document that's been available again at the September work sessions and also at this work session today. In terms of places where we've been able to eliminate positions because things have happened that have achieved the goals of the program positions themselves, new positions, new issues, new

[02:36:46] areas of emphasis you can see kind of them listed here the next two slides are all about accreditation and and state accountability because there's been so much that's happened at the state level you've got the new school performance framework coming out and a lot of a lot of discussion about that you've had discussions about aligning it IB diplomas with advanced studies diploma requirements. The one that I do want to highlight is at the very end of this slide, which is

[02:37:23] a new point of a new position that we've added. There has been some talk at the state level apparently about moving away from using SOLs as a way to verify credits, which would be an enormous change in Virginia. But apparently Virginia is one of only a few states that uses its standardized tests in that way, so there may be some movement in that, so we wanted to make sure that we had some language in there to acknowledge that if that conversation comes up that it's something that we can definitely jump into as part of your advocacy.

[02:37:59] That change alone would have, I mean it would have a ripple effect, it would affect a lot of the things that were talked about and some of the new changes in how SOLs are administered because it would change the nature of the SOLs, making it more of an accountability piece, not necessarily tied to individual students.

[02:38:17] So just wanted to highlight that as a new language that's been added above and beyond what we had in the September versions. Again, federal legislative program positions really haven't changed substantially.

[02:38:33] I think they haven't changed at all since the September work sessions. We did have one area where we could eliminate a position because the state has aligned state and federal accountability, and then several new positions mostly dealing with just support for funding in particular programs.

[02:39:01] I can't advance, thank you. So I did include a slide here because I know that Mr. Frisch had submitted, and it submitted even in September, language for some potential changes to the program, so some potential amendments that are above and beyond the current draft.

[02:39:30] just wanted to highlight those here they're also okay um so so uh i know that that was included as part of the agenda item uh mr fish's uh potential uh amendments to the to the program they're highlighted here i actually did put a placeholder in here because i saw that mr dunn had submitted something as well um about board open meeting requirements um if if we want to pull up uh the if we have those documents available.

[02:40:02] - Mr. Malloy, after you go through your presentation, we're going to go through all the board members submitted amendments, and then we'll take consensus on them and be able to move on. - Perfect, okay, so we can go back to the main presentation then, thank you. But this is just like broad highlights of what those proposals were about.

[02:40:26] So you as a board have talked specifically about being interested in actually initiating legislation, initiating budget amendments. So I wanted to try and highlight on this slide a few areas where either it's kind of a ripe area for us to initiate something or alternatively to share with you things that we have heard from other jurisdictions, other legislators, other advocates of legislation that we already know is coming forward.

[02:40:56] I know there's been a good deal of discussion about legislation around the changes in SOL timing and administration. so we've talked about that something for you all to consider would be some jlark recommendations as as individual budget amendments last year there was a budget amendment on the linear weighted average and that's something that would be easily picked up and and put back in by by a member that the thing about the the cost of living adjustments has a much higher price tag but it's definitely something that could be teed up just to let you know i believe and i i've not been

[02:41:33] been able to confirm, but I believe that that was being discussed at the Virginia Association of Counties annual legislative meeting. So when we get a little bit more clarity on that, we'll let you know. And then Sunshine Laws, a couple of areas that you talked about that could be turned into legislation for somebody to carry, both the FOIA study of electronic records and how they're handled and that sort of thing.

[02:42:04] And then also the issue of the meeting requirements and how it affects different boards differently. The next four are bills that we are aware that someone else, some other jurisdiction, some other legislator are actually putting in.

[02:42:20] We've talked about the Virginia Growth Assessment and how our waiver for not having to do it and using an alternative measurement is expiring after this year, and it's a substitution we'd like to see extended.

[02:42:37] So we know that's coming. We know legislation on native language assessment, legislation on addressing that international baccalaureate advanced studies issue, potentially legislation. We've had legislation for the last several years on school meals.

[02:42:55] A couple of things that didn't make this list that I can tell you about as well. One is, from a staff perspective, there's been some discussion about virtual driver's education again.

[02:43:11] You have a standing legislative position about that, but there have been some changes at the state level that have made it more difficult for us to access the state's curriculum. So there may be some interest in pursuing legislation on that issue.

[02:43:27] I am aware that there is likely to be clarifying language for the cell phone legislation coming forward. So just to be aware, which may be different than our current policy, but that's likely to come forward as well.

[02:43:45] That's what we know now. There are more things, as I said, because the work groups, the off-session work groups are putting out their legislative proposals. We'll start to see more and more pieces of legislation that we can respond to.

[02:44:07] And with that, we actually have a couple of slides beyond this if you want me to hit those too, and then we can circle back to this. I think this may be in not quite the right spot, but okay. So we'll just take a quick pause right now before we get to those next slides because have some specific actions with those where if board members at this point wanted to ask any clarifying questions of mr malloy or anything else related to the presentation please hold your comments regarding board member amendments because we'll go through that in just a little bit so we'll

[02:44:42] open up the floor for any questions or comments about what's been presented mr moon oh i'm so sorry i didn't realize who was first mr frisch was first followed by mr moon thank you uh for the presentation and for the work uh to get it here um you mentioned all the work that goes into this is the stuff that the public doesn't see right the work that goes into preparing for this um you know let's say from the day after the general assembly session ends to our work begins on the legislative program for the next general assembly session can you talk a

[02:45:21] a little bit more detail about the work that you all are doing in between to move the ball forward for the school system? So I think if we can go back the slide earlier in terms of kind of the year-round advocacy, I think is kind of the key to that, is just maintaining communications, I don't remember, it's like slide three or four, you know, maintaining communications, you know, not only with our, There we go, slide four.

[02:45:55] We try to maintain a presence as much as we possibly can at all of the off-session discussions that are happening. I'll give you an example. My specialist is upstairs watching the State Board of Education meeting right now. They meet monthly and their discussion is going to generate some potential legislative issues so we continue to monitor them and advocate with them.

[02:46:22] We try to maintain a presence at as many education-related or education policy-related off-session meetings as we can, meet with legislators, have discussions with them.

[02:46:38] Certainly at the end of a legislative session, we work in terms of helping the school system with implementation. And then as you implement laws from the previous year, you see that there may have been unintended consequences or changes that need to be addressed for the next session then that kind of folds into the the the staff recommendations that come in through the legislative program so i think that that gives you some examples of that that kind of ongoing work um are you meeting with legislative staffers in this off season too um yeah as as as we need to um you

[02:47:16] know we we try to we try to reach out and we try to have discussions where we can whether it's you know piggybacking on a meeting or initiating individual meetings with them um but yeah we do we do try to do that as much as we can in the off session and i also encourage my constituents to attend the town halls that my the delegation that serves providence district have do you all attend those the town halls that they all have before and after session we typically don't know about those to be perfectly blunt um we don't we we don't we don't get invitations to those are you on their email list we are in some cases yes but in most cases no um because i think they're

[02:47:53] mostly for constituents um we don't so we we don't we don't get the direct information um like we don't see the the weekly newsletters that they put out i would strongly suggest that you subscribe to those after this work session because extremely useful information to anybody who's looking to impact legislation is included in those including the way that they talk about their bills the way they talk about what's happening in richmond their public events the things they're going to the things they're bragging about i know that board members here have corrected uh newsletters in the

[02:48:30] past so we do i don't usually express shock but no that is flummoxing i i i i think i may have misspoke yes we do we do it's we do receive that information it's not as systematic as it should be and we will correct that but we do receive a lot of that information and there are 14 new members at least right i don't know how many new members of the minority there are but whose list we could be on you know in addition to our own delegation being on the list of all the other members would

[02:49:07] be good for finding people we are simpatico with right is there somebody in in uh hampton roads pushing something that we could partner with because then maybe they'll partner with there's There's all kinds of things that could be found there. Speaking of which, in anticipation of ESBA, I had a call and Nicole Cole, who is a Sposylvania member who was just elected to the House of Delegates, so she'll be joining the growing school board, former school board member caucus in Richmond.

[02:49:37] I know how busy they are preparing for all of this and I do appreciate the work that went into providing board members with materials and support for take your legislator to school month, I was able to go to Oakton Elementary School with David Bulova, and we had some really great discussions with staff and with Principal Kelly, and then Senator Salim and I, with Delegate Sebold, we went to Freedom Hill Elementary School and had some great conversations with Dr. Sapotka and several classes, and in both cases, we were led on tours and discussions by students,

[02:50:15] which was a new highlight. So I will hold the rest of my comments for, generally speaking, I'm fine with all of the other things that have been talked about in terms of updates to the program. They align with what we've been talking about the last few sessions. And I'll hold the rest of my comments until we pick up the amendment conversation.

[02:50:35] - Thank you, Mr. Frisch. Mr. Moon. - Thank you, Dr. Anderson. Just like Mr. Frisch, I'm generally supportive of our programs. As far as amendments are concerned, I'll wait, but my immediate attention and interest will be on meeting requirements and the board size, the couple of amendments that have surfaced.

[02:51:01] With that said, I might have missed your presentation on slide number 20 related to native language assessment and school mirrors. Could you just briefly explain those one more time? On the issue of native language assessment?

[02:51:17] Native language assessment and also school mirrors, which is at the bottom. so so uh there was there's been legislation introduced in the last couple of sessions and i think it will be reintroduced to introduce the concept of having uh subject matter assessments done in a native language as opposed to in english because right now a language learner they they take the same assessment as every other student in english they may be given a dictionary for translation but they they're they still are required to take the english language version Most states in the country have at least some allowances,

[02:51:55] like even Texas and Florida have subject matter assessments in Spanish and in other languages. This is just introducing that concept to Virginia. And that it's kind of part of a much broader conversation about a new assessment contract, that the contract of Pearson has expired, So we're moving forward with a new request for proposal from a bunch of different vendors and trying to embed that concept of having native language assessment variations included as an option.

[02:52:35] - That's us too, FCPS as well? - Yeah. - We are currently doing that? We are trying to do that? Is that, I'm trying to get-- - That would be at the state level. - With the state level. - Yeah, yeah. It would be embedded in the SOL system itself.

[02:52:50] - Okay, what about school meals at the bottom? - School meals, so there've been various proposals the last few years. One was for universal meals across the board, so lunches and breakfasts. Last year, there was legislation and a budget amendment to do just school breakfasts.

[02:53:06] We would anticipate that one version or the other of those are gonna come back, whether it be universal meals across or just universal breakfast. - Okay, thank you. This one has to do with, My next question has to do with composition of the Board of Education.

[02:53:25] The work of the Board of Education sometimes, or a lot of times, may be dictated by legislation, but they can also do their own work with all nine members, current members, being a Governor Youngkin's appointees.

[02:53:45] How likely will that to change with New Governor Cunningham? today normally wait until their terms expire, even though there's the governor who might have a completely different agenda? Yeah, the State Board of Education is actually a unique entity in Virginia in that it is actually the only executive branch board that's specifically named in the Constitution.

[02:54:12] So it has kind of a different status than any other board or any other commission that exists in Virginia. The normal process and the normal flow of how the Board of Education is populated is there's nine members and they're appointed to staggered terms.

[02:54:29] So every year a certain number of people come off the board and the new governor gets the chance to appoint members. What happened last year and the reason why the state board became majority new governor appointees faster than usual is Virginia also has a very strange system where the the positions themselves have to be approved by the General Assembly but the actual appointments are made six months prior to them being approved so you had a situation last year and you have a situation

[02:55:07] technically speaking again this year where there are at least two members on the Board of Education right now who are serving who are appointed as of july 1 who have not yet been confirmed by the general assembly they won't be confirmed until the general assembly comes back in january what happened a couple of years ago was that those those positions that were already sitting on the board for six months were not confirmed by the general assembly so they became vacant so that allowed the governor to make additional appointments above and beyond what he normally would have done that's how so normally the board is supposed to be staggered the concept is is that no one

[02:55:45] governor controls the majority of the board until the very very end of their term and then they continue forward to try and smooth out policy variations especially if you have your wild swings in in terms of partisanship or in terms of policy prescriptions so just just to clarify one point yes so a couple of members in the board of education have not been confirmed by general assembly and general assembly being in the hands of certain political party may not go along with the appointments of those two that means do they become

[02:56:20] automatically vacant after a certain point or so if if they're if their confirmation fails that's when their positions would occur there has to be confirmation vote yes they would they would have to be there their confirmation but would have to fail and then there could a possibility of that yes but then you governor appointing her own correct choices for those particular seats those

[02:56:46] two seats yeah thank you thank you mr moon mr dunn uh thank you uh i wanted to ask uh the legislative priorities and the legislative program is drafted in very broad and somewhat vague terms uh so and and i understand that might be necessary given you're not sure what bills will be proposed

[02:57:20] by legislators but i wanted to ask whether fcps perhaps on its own initiative or perhaps in combination with other school divisions ever drafts legislative language and shops it around to specific state legislate specific legislators to see if they can get a specific bill or amendment passed the short answer to that is yes both both in terms of fcps we have in the past both helped

[02:57:56] to draft legislative language and also budget amendments and then you know in terms of broad initiatives coming out of whether it's the superintendent's association or the school boards association or other school divisions they're they're also involved in helping to draft the specifics of the legislation not so not just the conceptual area or the issue area but the specific language that would go into the code so yes we've done both and how common is that or how frequently is it

[02:58:32] every year or once in a blue moon it honestly depends on the year it depends on kind of the board's initiative, it depends on staff initiative, if there's particular things that need to be specifically addressed, and it also depends on the willingness of individual legislators, right? Because at the end of the day, we can draft anything we want, but if a legislator isn't willing to pick it up and put it in, we can't get much further with that. So I would say it varies just from year to year and from issue

[02:59:07] the issue obviously this is your your day job but my my in my conversations with legislators and maybe the ones i deal with are different than others who are uh in richmond uh you know they they're asked since they have almost no staff uh is to me has been bring me you know a draft and an explanation of why you want to do something and they ask the same of their constituents. And, you know, there have been bills drafted by everyone from Boy Scouts to

[02:59:41] retirees. And, and that gives them, you know, something concrete to review. And, and, you know, in terms of our advocacy, if we bring them something specific that they can respond to, and, and perhaps iterate, that might get you where you want to go faster than simply reiterating policy points and i i say that as someone who dealt with the federal legislature congress for many years on behalf of federal agencies and the constant ask was we don't have enough staff

[03:00:16] similar to richmond although obviously congress has more staff than richmond does and but they will always wanted specific bill language that they could react to shop around other legislators to iterate if they were interested in the subject so just suggesting that as as a path forward thank you mr dunn thank you mr milloy for the presentation um i actually was you know during the last few months we've been talking about

[03:00:52] the new cut score for sols and which are going to impact is that been addressed in one of our uh recommendation from the staff recommendation i didn't see that exact uh term used that uh kind of resetting the SOS scores or reviewing them again, so I don't know if anybody wants to take that.

[03:01:16] - To be honest, off the top of my head, I don't think that actual language is used anywhere in terms of talking about the specific scores that are used to determine whether or not a student passes an assessment. That's something that we certainly could draft, but I don't think it's directly addressed by specific language on cut scores.

[03:01:43] - Dr. Reed. - Yes ma'am, I think it should be Michael, so perhaps we could draft something if it's a priority of the boards as well. - And the only reason is impact of the Commonwealth of Virginia, all districts. So I think this is one of the things which we work with the other divisions and kind of put that forward because half of our schools will pass, but their majority of school district will have failing schools.

[03:02:07] that measure and the other thing I know that the last few years a couple of years on the board that video he has been coming after you know us on in different ways and you know trying to take our money to like you know literally just one issue or the after other so am I is this situation going to change so what I I what I can say is is that you know obviously when you have a change in administration the

[03:02:46] governor has the ability to change personnel so the governor would have the ability to change it would have the appointment process over the superintendent of construction over the the secretary of education so if you put if you put individuals into those positions that have different priorities that will kind of flow down through the process that the one thing again to back to mr. moon's point about the State Board of Education education you've got the Department of Education who deals with a lot of the administrative pieces but you have the State Board of Education that deals with

[03:03:22] a lot of the broad policy pieces so there there may be some tension created there because you've got previous administration with new administration but I think I think it would be safe to it to anticipate there would be a change just based on campaign campaign literature and discussions that have happened out in the public that there may be different different approaches to particular education issues that come from the new governor coming in so thank you so much so we are talking more about the state legislation right now what about the federal and I see a slide 18 there's federal legislative program

[03:04:00] positions who are we going with these new positions and elimination so I mean these are really just adjustments in your existing positions your existing positions on federal legislation deal with a lot lot broader areas than than these these are some areas that were not not already addressed under the under the program so you have positions on special education you have positions on Title I, so dealing with at risk populations, Title III, a bunch of different things

[03:04:39] that are already covered, these are just the additions. Federal policy making, I think I could probably accurately describe it as incredibly tricky right now. Just it's much, much more difficult from a policy standpoint to follow what's happening at the federal level than it ever has been in the past.

[03:05:02] In terms of actual policy making, very little comes out of Congress anymore in terms of policy other than the budget. And even the budgets tend to be a continuing resolution from previous budgets. So it's an incredibly tricky time to deal with federal policy in general.

[03:05:24] - Okay, so yeah, kind of have to wait and see for some time. So, again, lastly, back to, you know, take your legislator to school once. I think we all are taking that, you know, action, and I'm taking like four legislators to different schools that had a very good visit to Poplar Tree Elementary with my delegate, Carrie Delaney, and she really enjoyed that school.

[03:05:52] Her kids have gone to that school before, and we are planning a few more trips, visits, I should say, with Senator Pekaski, Delegate Helmer, and Delegate Shen, and I think a couple of more.

[03:06:07] So we are taking this, like we want them to come to our schools, see our students in action, and they're all from Fairfax County, most of our representatives, so they have either had kids in schools or they have current students, so their familiarity is really good.

[03:06:24] Like I'm seeing them really interested our schools right now so definitely looks really good when we visit with them so thank you for everything yeah thank you before we move on I just want to chuckle back to the issue on cut scores I think one reason why the legislative program never has historically talked about cut scores is because cut scores historically has been kind of a largely administrative process I think it's a little bit different this year there was a change in how they were they were were done so I think that's that's at least one reason why it's never really

[03:06:58] been an issue for for discussion until until this year thank you dr. Anderson I wanted to add on to that that we did provide comment to the Board of Education and I believe I shared that with the board but I agree that if there's a way to legislatively lock that down for future planning I I think it's important.

[03:07:23] I do think that the Board of Education has listened and is contemplating a phasing program for the cut score shift, though I wonder about the need for it at all. - Thank you, Dr. Reed. Ms. Seismalheiser.

[03:07:41] - Thank you. And I may have missed a bit of the discussion about the phasing, but one thing I think, seeing how some of these rapid changes, not just in the cut scores, but the accountability standards and the metrics that are being implemented, even before some of these changes fully even flushed out by the Board of Education I remember the change in accountability where we asked what are the three C's and no one could explain them to us and you know changing it in the middle of the year where we couldn't change students schedules but we were being dinged on what classes students were taking so legislatively and I would love to see potentially if my colleagues agree on this but even potentially not just mentioning it but

[03:08:19] legislation but I wonder if legislatively we can ask our delegation to lead the charge in more guidance to the Board of Education in terms of, in general, phasing for major accountability or SOL changes.

[03:08:36] Because the challenge isn't necessarily for us saying, hey, we all agree we want to have good accountability standards, we want to make sure our schools are teaching our kiddos and they're learning what they need to learn, but when you do it in this gotcha way where you're changing standards in the middle of the year without even fully defining what those standards are it doesn't help that schools change their teaching methodology when they don't know what they're supposed to teach to because they haven't defined it for us so I think there's some room here in legislation especially with the opportunity we have to talk about a process that video we must follow for making major changes to accountability to mandate phasing to mandate community engagement to I mean I know some of

[03:09:16] that's already there so they're not throwing things on schools during the school year which seems to me less about actual accountability and more about showing schools are failing because it's really hard to meet a standard when the person putting the standard on you won't even define it so I think that would be something I would advocate for is some sort of legislation around creating norms and standards for how accountability and SOL cut scores and things like this are changed and the timing of that to give schools the best chance to be able to meet new accountability standards and support as well the other thing I just want to talk about separate from the package itself

[03:09:55] but just the timing and support provided I know last year I had one pager if I take my legislature to school visits and I don't see that this year I know we were surprised by the SOL bill last year that none of us knew about so I'm curious if there's been changes to processes and information so that way we're more informed in a timely manner of some of these major things and given more guidance. I remember you coming at the last minute of the morning of the state visits with like a little handout, a little sheet of paper. So I just wonder if there's some sort of process that we can put in place that for Michael Molloy from your office, you know,

[03:10:31] four days before we go down to legislative visits in February, we have X, Y, and Z documentation and a chance to talk to you about our questions in hand, right? We have, I know you send us the big Friday letter, but how can we better flag this one's really important? Like, I know how that sol bill got missed but i think there's some need to look at from your office i know you have more support now how to better help us engage so those are the two things i'd lift up yeah i mean i i can say in terms of a process obviously you know what what happened last year we are we are working on changing the communication in terms of how information gets to

[03:11:09] you because you're right it's it's a fire hose of information every week um i mean that's just just the nature that's the nature of the General Assembly session is you know you're dealing with with dozens if not hundreds of pieces of legislation but doing a better job of trying to prioritize and and lift up the very specific things that need to be on on your all's radar that's definitely something that we're building into our normal our normal process we've been doing some some behind-the-scene things so you'll see some some changes in how communication goes forward and also you know we we know in advance that that you

[03:11:46] all are interested in coming down to Richmond and meeting with legislators and that gives us a chance to be able to put together some of that documentation a little bit earlier to you know know that you're interested in doing that and that you're interested in coming to talk to folks so that you know that the the lead time is certainly helpful in terms of you know developing information but also making it presentable and everything else I'll take a go back thank you yes absolutely miss lady thank you and thank you to everyone for the hard work on this so a couple things just come flying in my brain as I'm sitting here one of

[03:12:26] them is the reality that when I was campaigning and meeting with my local delegates and senators that there is a huge gap in understanding the implementation of what they put forward in an actual school and I can't be specific about all the things we talked about it was certainly was something related to to discipline that seemed very logical from their lens and I don't recollect what it was but it is important another note I have written down here is is Perkins and CTE because of all that money and I remember I was working in the system I was like why is the CTE program growing and growing and

[03:13:03] growing when we have other people who have work interests outside of what I I would define that as. So to that point, I don't know that, and I'm gonna pick on Dr. Reed in a minute here, I don't know to what extent we're advocating for, I don't know if this is the right terminology, but double credentialing.

[03:13:22] For example, like a data science course, could that be a math credit, but could it also be a CTE credit, right? Because one of the things that frustrates our students is the number of required courses in the advanced studies track.

[03:13:39] If you don't take summer school, and if you take a world language every year, you literally are allowed to take six electives. That's it, okay? And people have an appetite for more. I was talking about double credentialing. I'm not sure if that's the right terminology where a course gets you a credit in science and perhaps also cross-crediting.

[03:14:01] I've never even heard us discussing that. So that would be another advocacy point for the Virginia Department of Education is that, I mean, this is all trickle down. the day we're a school system because of kids who want to go to school who want to learn and if i want to learn in this pathway but you're pigeonholing me in this pathway it's not fair so i just think that we need to be more robust in those conversations so um and then i'm going to go back to my my interruption earlier around uh standards of quality i i understand it's it's sort of it's I'll go with my colleague, Mr. Dunn,

[03:14:38] around writing specific bills, but I think that the world has changed, right? I mean, like when I started as a school counselor, you know, 40 years ago, I could do school counseling, I could do academic advising, I could do college advising.

[03:14:53] I wasn't triaging the number of kids who were cutting, the number of kids who were using, the number of kids who were coming from broken homes. Like, the world has changed. But when was the last time they changed the SOQs for certain mental health, but it's also the kids are bringing those same issues into the classroom, which is why our class sizes need to be smaller, right?

[03:15:13] So I just, I wanna be more deliberate around maybe advocating for change in ratios, which then in turn, because the LCI would bring us more money. - So I can see in terms of the standards of quality, one of the challenges of a conversation about the standards of quality is that when the state, if the state were to change a ratio, for instance, one to two more counselors or something, it has both a state impact, so it is a state fiscal impact, but because of the LCI and because of the split in terms of state and local shares, it has a local impact as well, and that's where the conversation tends to

[03:15:52] get more challenging, is imposing that additional local, because the SOQs are not fully funded by the state, we don't get 100% of the dollars for every position that the SOQs requires, always been a challenge in terms of those state ratios and I think we as a system have shied away from advocating for those specific ratios because it reduces our flexibility but it also places that additional local burden on us and as you talked about during your your budget conversation that burden is fairly substantial and it's you know seventy eighty percent of the total funding for those positions has to come from local sources as opposed to from

[03:16:31] state sources. Now if it's above if it's something that's above and beyond and I think this is an important important thing to kind of keep in mind if FCPS is doing something that's above and beyond where the SOQs are and the SOQs are changed to meet our standard or to come closer to where we are that then means that something that we were funding a hundred percent locally we now are getting some state funds from. That was one of the reasons why the the the support cap changes were so welcome was because we were funding well above and beyond where the support cap had us funding so by the state upping the support cap and

[03:17:11] providing additional state funding that was now state funding coming back for something that we previously were funding entirely locally so that's those are the areas that we try to focus in on our places where we're already going above and beyond and getting that additional kind of state subsidy for it as opposed to the areas where it would require us to go out and hire a bunch of new personnel.

[03:17:33] That's exactly what I'm talking about. Where we are doing it, and it's because it's the way it needs to be done for quality education, not to go below something we're not doing. We're the best, okay? And we're doing the best we can do, but with less and less money.

[03:17:49] But that's the point I'm making is exactly what you talked about. Thank you. Thank you so much. Ms. Anderson, and then I will take my turn, and Ms. Marin will as well. Mr. Malloy, we only have less than an hour left, so I'm asking for more concise responses to our questions. Thank you.

[03:18:06] Thank you. I don't think that this is a requested amendment, but I am going to just speak to my wheelhouse just a little bit in the fact that the format of this document is hard to follow. And I know that we've done an extensive amount of work over a period of time to get it to be more, but there are a few things that we could do that would make it a lot easier.

[03:18:29] I think that we need to have them broken into categories that supports and opposes under each one, if there is something that goes with each, because otherwise it's too hard to try to read through the bullets to get to the point. And the other aspect of it is it doesn't need to be lettered in terms of the entire document different because it insinuates that something is more important than something else.

[03:18:52] If at the top we just say these are provided in alphabetical order, we don't have to actually create it in a traditional outline format, which makes it harder to read overall and it insinuates something is more important than something else because it's lower on the list. So there are just some minor tweaks.

[03:19:08] The other thing is we have more in here under SOL, you know, state testing, than we have before. sub headers within there to break up pieces of information the same way we do have under state funding. So there's very, this is a resource for our legislators to be able to quickly go.

[03:19:27] And so if sometimes my perspective, and I don't think just our legislators are using it, I think probably when you have people around the state that are doing things with education, we are the big dog in the room, like they wanna know. And we spend a lot of time and effort to make sure, so we need to have this be as readable as humanly possible.

[03:19:46] And I just, I strongly think that there are some easy tweaks that we could make that would make it readable. I wanna make sure that the PDF that coordinates with it is all linkable within the document, so it becomes that Bible that everybody's going to.

[03:20:02] Because if there's pieces in here, it would just be, it would be really awesome to see this as something that's a very solid resource, so. I know it's alphabetical but it doesn't need to be lettered, like each thing doesn't need a letter.

[03:20:20] - Okay, thank you. I will take my turn seeing that there are no other speakers. Couple of things I wanted to follow up on. On page 20, you talked about how the last four bullets were already bills that were going to be carried. Did you have any additional information as to who would be those who are presenting these bills?

[03:20:41] - So my understanding is that The Virginia Growth Assessment Substitution Bill will be carried by Sam Razul and David Suterlein. They've carried versions of it in the past. It's been something that the Roanoke area has long advocated for.

[03:20:58] Native Language Assessment, I believe that Ms. Cohen may pick that up and she's had that in the past and so has Senator Favola. She had a Senate version of that. International Baccalaureate Advanced Studies.

[03:21:14] I believe that Senator Saleem may be carrying legislation. I know it's something that's been really championed by the Falls Church City School Board, so I believe they've been in discussions with him. And then on school meals, Senator Rome and Delegate Bennett Parker have carried legislation on school meals before.

[03:21:36] So they're the likely patrons of those. - Thank you. The reason why I ask is because this is another opportunity us to connect with those individuals to fortify their their their bills to provide information because we have relationships with most of those individuals and if there's anything that we can just ensure that they have I want to be able to make sure that we do that so that's one too I do agree that we need to have some specific language regarding the cut scores because in the same vein of what miss lady shared and having conversations with members it's illuminating what they may not be aware of I had this exact conversation with

[03:22:14] delegate hearing and she's like wow this is enlightening I shared a number of things with her which I will share with you all in just a little bit and it really I think it hit a mark because there's an assumption that they are much more knowledgeable about the things that we deal with on a regular basis than they are and I think taking the opportunity to offer some education would be helpful one of the things that I wonder is the cut scores while we are talking about phasing and the language I would also like for us to include in the phase and consistency of the cut scores I have yet to understand why it's different numbers for different grade levels and different subject not asking

[03:22:50] you I know you have the same question but it was always clear to every parent if your kid got a 400 they passed if they had a 500 they were proficient if they had a 600 was perfect score parents are not going to understand and remember all of these things or if they had a 375 to 399 they can retest having that consistency it's so very helpful so I would like for that to be part of the language that you're going to call for us not just to have a phasing or maybe not have it at all because that's not the way to increase rigor but the consistency of those scores across grade levels and across content areas is

[03:23:26] really important the other thing that I want to share I do agree with what Miss Anderson has shared we have some space here where our document could be more legible or more easily more easily accessed however I worry about removing the letters because I have found myself because I've had this where a member of the delegate texted me while we were in a meeting and I just said go to page five letter M I would hate for it to be bullets because it would be harder for me to say go to the fifth bullet maybe I miscounted or they miscounted but it I I don't want to say that one is more important

[03:24:04] than the other, but it has to be delineated in some way. So I worry about that. I just wanted to raise it because I actually had that as an instance. And I think those are my final, oh, thank you. I think those are my final statements.

[03:24:20] We have three board members for go backs, which we're going to do for two minutes, Janet, because we do need to get to some of the amendments work, some of the amendment work and some planning discussions for the briefing um so i believe i think i have the order mr frisch was first and that and then mr dunn and miss um sizemore heiser thank you um the the conversation around uh working on specific legislation reminded me of a call i recently had with a constituent um and we were talking about

[03:25:00] funding and how some school divisions have delegates or senators that carry legislation that directly funds project X or project Y and they cited Henrico as an example where legislators had carried a funding bill you know to fund this project in Henrico public schools and so this was in the context of a conversation around start times and bus costs and other things and I think we could probably come with a giant menu of things that one-off funding bills or whatever,

[03:25:37] obviously you're not gonna get them all in one year, but have we ever considered something like that where a one-time disparate funding need was addressed by a legislator carrying that as an option?

[03:25:55] - I think if, Dr. Reed, I don't know if you want to take that. - I don't know what our history on that topic is, Michael. I only have four years of history, and to my knowledge, we have not asked since I've been here.

[03:26:10] I don't know what historically we've done. I do think that some of the work we're currently doing, I think in terms of raising expectations for mathematics, I think the entire commonwealth ought to be focusing on that. And I know that there's some legislation afoot to talk about that, particularly adding some graduation requirements and bringing trig into Algebra II, for example.

[03:26:35] I know there's some legislation around that, but I do think it would be a wise and prudent financial investment also to financially support that work, not just here, but everywhere in terms of credentialing of staff, perhaps class sizes around mathematics, supports.

[03:26:55] I mean, I think there's some really important work. I think the whole AI world at this time, it's a whole other conversation, but I think there's a lot of work to do. As I've said before, I think it's our Sputnik moment as a nation, and we're on the sidelines at this time, I feel like, in our country on that topic.

[03:27:14] And I think if our Commonwealth has a commitment to leading education, that would be something also that could be funded. So, I mean, I think, to Mr. Frisch's point, I think it's a grand idea. I just don't know what our history here is in doing that.

[03:27:29] so we haven't specific i mean we've we've pursued budget amendments but we haven't pursued one as granular as what you're talking about which is uh example that i can come up with is loudon county asked for uh money for a recovery high school very specific in very well to that end and i get that like you immediately get into horse trading in the general assembly around that kind of stuff which i get which is why i think like having two buckets one that is like a commitment to long-term investment right like dr. Reed was just talking about those are not things that you would want and done be done in a year right but then there are other

[03:28:06] things that we could use that are an investment that is finite in a sense that it's not something that has to be renewed annually it'd be great if we had a menu of those things and then those were options for our delegates when they're having those budget conversations they know oh gosh there's five hundred thousand dollars I could probably get in this in this piece here here are the four things that I could try and get FCPS with that money right so I'm not saying this is gonna be easy given what people think of Fairfax County downstate but we you know we're in a bind just like every other public

[03:28:45] school system the last really quickly sentence and then I'm done we can talk about LCI until you know the cows come home and there's not a lot of cows in Fairfax County. It's not changing. It is as unfortunate as it is for Fairfax County. That's not changing. But J Lark is a solution, or at least a part way their solution. So I think it is behooves us to conduct advocacy around things that has a chance and heck of happening.

[03:29:18] Thank you. Mr. Dunn, two minutes. Thank you. My question is, how much are we doing to actually achieve a reduction in state testing requirements? Because when you talk to teachers in elementary schools in particular, there's the curriculum they have to teach during the year, but they have to step away from that curriculum in order to actually teach to the test, right? There's not just a test, but pre-tests.

[03:29:49] - Mr. Dunn, have you completed your thoughts?

[03:30:07] - I asked a question for Mr. Malloy. - Can you please ask that again? I think we missed it over the barking. - Sorry. My question is how much are we actually doing to reduce state testing requirements?

[03:30:24] Because when you speak to elementary school teachers, they spend, you know, their mission is to teach a certain curriculum, but they have to take time away two or three weeks at a time to not just teach to the test, prepare students to take this state test, but also we have various pre-tests to kind of prepare them for that state test later on.

[03:30:48] And every time we take students away from the core curriculum to teach to the pre-test or teach to the state test, that represents a departure really from benefiting students. Those state tests don't really benefit the students, benefit the school division and maybe whatever the state wants to measure but you know we we're not being student-centric in this approach with state testing and all the pre-testing that goes with it so what are we doing actively uh to actually achieve a reduction in those state testing requirements because it seems to me in reading this and looking at prior versions that there's

[03:31:26] a lot of copy and paste year to year as to state testing requirements and and i i just want to get at what are the active efforts we're making drafting legislation working with legislatures to actually to actually benefit um our teachers and our students there has been legislation in several years to reduce uh state testing to the federal minimums so reduce the number of uh of tests that are required at the state level um that that tends to be an annual discussion in the the General Assembly, and I think a lot of what you're also talking about is instructional

[03:32:05] practice, which isn't necessarily legislative in terms of the pretests and preparation. I mean, obviously, the importance of the test drives, because the test flows into accountability, because it flows into individual student achievement, that drives instructional practice, and I think that may be a little bit of what you're talking about, but there are annual discussions about reducing the number of tests.

[03:32:30] But what are we doing? That's the question. There's legislation by someone. Are we drafting legislation? Are we pushing? We're the largest school system in the state. We should have outsized influence. So what are we as FCPS doing? We have not drafted specific legislation on that issue. Okay, so we're letting other people carry the ball on that.

[03:32:50] Is that correct? We have not drafted legislation on that issue. Okay. Thank you. Ms. Sizemore-Heiser, and then Ms. Dixit, and then Ms. Neary.

[03:33:07] Thank you. - I just wanted to go back a little bit on some of the communications. And I appreciate the conversation about improving communications this year and the fire hose night. And I agree, it's a fire hose for you, right? That's just how our general assembly is set up with our very short 45 day or 60 day sessions.

[03:33:25] But I think, and we talked a little bit about this with the SOL bill, but what would be helpful is not just saying this one's really important or trying to flag which ones, 'cause I think in some ways they're all important, right? But giving us a little more guidance of this is a positive impact of this one, so you should advocate for it.

[03:33:43] This is the potential negative impacts of this one. And here are potential suggestions for fixes, because as much of it's a fire hose for us, it is also a fire hose for the state delegation, right? And the more we can make it easy for them to guide a bill in whatever direction we may wanna guide it, the more likely we're to be successful.

[03:34:01] So if we're just flagging problems, it leaves it up to us, whereas as a government relations, you have the expertise and the historical knowledge to provide a solution. And I think if you can help us provide that solution, we're more likely to be effective in our advocacy. And I know we do go down every year to Richmond, at least every year I've been on the board, other than the COVID years, we did go down to Richmond.

[03:34:23] So I don't know if there's some communication lapse as to when we go down, why it was maybe, I think you mentioned something about knowing in advance when we're going to Richmond. I do know we do that every year. So I don't know if there was a scheduling thing last year where you didn't know in advance, but we should definitely work with your office make sure you know in advance but i can tell you that we often go down every year so you could probably plan for a visit sometime in you know before crossover so as your office is planning to help us out i would imagine i don't want to speak for anybody else yeah so but you know in the past it's been in the vsb conference but i know a couple times on my previous term it was but

[03:34:59] just just for your planning purposes i can imagine you should know sometime in january we'll probably go down so thank you thank you mystic said i'll be real quick um i feel like in the document which uh miss anderson was talking about the formatting and things like that i feel like we need to have indexing just like we do on proposals right at least uh like hyperlinks so we can get to that section quickly also i just after talking about ai like i don't know from all of us and all this you know meeting the moment everything I think we just need to have

[03:35:37] an own bullet point here as AI and we need to take a charge on that and create policy and and proposed policy and how we can do better and more in the school system so that should be I think one of the priorities they should be like in the forefront it's there okay so I thought I was looking at AI as a okay sorry thank you miss Marin okay so I'll just say off the bat I agree with mr.

[03:36:10] Frisch's additions to the program and the spirit of mr. Dunn's it's something I have worked on as well with the sunshine law so I'll just put that there first you know what I'm hearing is is that we need an advocacy toolkit and I will say I try to put that together I was hard-pressed to do it in the last two weeks dr. Anderson has some great materials I just sent a link for that to the superintendent we could talk here we mentioned some of the things we'd like to have like the JLARC one pager that I wrote earlier this year and that's updated as of the summer I think the SOL changes the state accountability you

[03:36:49] know if you recall what we did last year when we went to the capital in January we had a one pager about JLARC and it had bills on that one pager that like up to the minute, "Hey, this is a legislation that's on your desk," and so we were, at that point it was very specific.

[03:37:08] We also could do the same thing for some of those other places. This is that nexus where the superintendent's staff need to come together because it's just a lot of work, and it's not possible to do the legislative research, the communications messaging, the design, and the specific magisterial or state-elected focused research.

[03:37:31] If we want this to be a big part of our portfolio, then the superintendent needs to help us carve that time out and provide resources for us to do that. I hear the interest, but even talking about the accountability in SOL, we could have a whole conversation just about that to make sure we all understand it and what we'd be seeking and actually develop legislation, but we need time to do that.

[03:37:58] I also would ask that we receive upcoming town hall dates, and I don't know what we're sending to our state delegation. It seems like it's very haphazard. We did talk about sending a regular update to our Board of Supervisors, and I'm not sure where that stands, so that's part of this as well, and getting savvy on that.

[03:38:16] The active efforts to draft legislation, I'm with you. One of the things I wanted to draft, actually, that I was working with a little bit, and I'll finish up, is with Senator Saleem, was legislation that looked at how our schools are being used as polling places given the impact of early voting.

[03:38:32] And maybe that's a JLARC study, I don't know, but I've reached out, I haven't gotten anything back, I don't know if I have to officially say, "Hey, can you draft this bill?" One last thing I'll just mention is, does this board want to make a statement or perhaps send a message to the incoming governor and send a letter with our priorities as the largest delegation, as the largest school division in the state?

[03:38:53] And also the reception on Monday. We had planned so hard for this legislative reception, however, our delegation has been called down to Richmond. All these meetings, we've moved it once, we've moved it twice, and we've got like three officials who are available on Monday, some of whom have already been on tours in our schools.

[03:39:11] So among the two, the chair and our other legislative rep, we're suggesting just canceling it at this point and then being really specific about how to follow up with everyone. Okay. - Okay, just picking up from that, I wanna be sure that there is no objection to the cancellation of the November 17th.

[03:39:32] Again, we'll have very few people available because they've been called down to Richmond for various things, seeing that there are no objections. One of the things that we'd like to do is to ensure that every single member of the Northern Virginia delegation is covered, whether it is a phone call from us or if you could embed that in your school visits if you have one that is coming.

[03:39:53] So at some point there will be a list that we send and we'll make sure that everybody signs up as to who they'll speak to because we will need to raise our federal, I'm sorry, our state priorities to those individuals. Regarding the federal representatives because we're not really funneled in that way as the federal liaison, I will take care of that with their staff.

[03:40:17] I've already had conversations with them at the meeting with Senator Saleem. So that will be coming to you hopefully by the end of today for you to sign up once we get there. The last thing, can we move the slide to the next page?

[03:40:33] So the next thing that I wanted to share because this came up in the conversation with Ms. Marin and Mr. Malloy, what do my visits look like with my legislators? And again, it's pretty labor intensive in terms of getting the data. We get these nice little folders that we put together. So them and their aid, they actually walk out with some information about the school, and it's very specific.

[03:40:54] And I also leave the same folder with the school principal. And it has a number of things, which will become available for you, minimally for you to look at, but you don't have to use it if you don't want to, but if you find it helpful, you could have your assistant take care of it, because Ms. Coffee takes care of putting all of this together.

[03:41:14] We first have a document that is FCPS at a glance, where it has much of the data that Dr. Reed has shared with us in multiple places. We just put it together. Then we have kind of a list of all of the Mason District schools. And I highlight the ones that are specific to that General Assembly member's district.

[03:41:36] So you'll see like yellow highlights throughout it and then a comparison with all of the Magisterial districts from number of special education students to population to ML students and Title I schools. And then I have a high school review, and it has a number of columns.

[03:41:56] Everything from renovation dates to number of students, to again, Title I status, all the demographics. Again, I highlight in this the schools that are germane to them. And I also provide them with another sheet, which I don't have here for some reason, that tells them the highest languages spoken outside of English in their schools.

[03:42:20] And I know that they've used that, because Congressman Beyer, he did use that to kind of change some of his communication after I shared this with him. And the high school page has all 25 high schools, as well as the middle school page. And then I have the middle school, the elementary school page, which has all of the schools and the regions that I have, which are regions two and six, because it's hard to fit 140 schools in one page.

[03:42:47] And then we have the priority list, and that has changed based on whatever it is, our priorities, accountability and the cut scores, the ones that Dr. Reed shared with us during the meeting, I had that as a one pager for them to see as well.

[03:43:02] But we also start the conversation with going through some of this folder in the principal's office before we go out into the schools, where I talk about what our concerns are, then I ask them what is it that they're doing, what are they carrying and then I say well, could you be able, would you be willing to move this forward?

[03:43:23] I think the next logical step for me in that is, here's the bill that you could actually carry rather than just having the conversation. Happy to talk about this more with you all if you like, if you find any of this helpful. But I have found that the individuals who come to this visit, they find this data to be very helpful to them and so did Ms. Marin and Mr. Malloy.

[03:43:45] So I will stop there, that's perfect timing. Now we are going to miss Janet, yes, if you could please put up the amendments. We are going to take some time to go through those, hopefully one at a time.

[03:44:03] If you don't have questions or high levels of concerns, please don't speak because we have only until, It's 2:35 now, where we only have until three o'clock. I feel like we're running against the clock at current.

[03:44:20] So very quickly, what I'm going to ask are the individuals who first brought them to just read it, give us a super brief overview, and then we'll take a consensus vote if there are no questions. Mr. Frisch, would you please start with page 16?

[03:44:37] - Yes, the first two here are additions to the federal legislative program. So they would be number 49 and 50 beginning on page 19. The first one is regarding SNAP benefits, which have been in the news a lot lately.

[03:44:57] It reads 49, the Fairfax County School Board opposes efforts to undermine Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program SNAP and supports returning these programs to their full authority in funding levels prior to congressional action in 2025. and then it gives the citation for the legislation, ensuring they can meet children's healthcare and nutritional needs.

[03:45:20] Relatedly, number 50 reads, the Fairfax County School Board opposes efforts to undermine the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which guarantees educational stability and support for students experiencing homelessness by ensuring their immediate enrollment in school, access to transportation and the services necessary to remove barriers to their academic success.

[03:45:42] This is on the chopping block in Washington currently. - Are there any objections? Seeing none, if there are no objections, I will consider that consensus for us to move forward with the language as provided.

[03:45:59] All right, please continue. - The next one is in the state legislative program and it would be in addition, under adding an AD section, other policy issues. And the first item being added under that new section page 16 would be the Fairfax County School Board supports efforts to ensure the Virginia Board of Education is committed to serving the interest of all students by strengthening its stability to help provide consistent and collaborative leadership for Virginia's public schools the one note on that is

[03:46:34] that there's talk among legislators in Richmond right now about making changes the way that members are appointed the timing of their terms etc so that we don't have dramatic swings like we've experienced in the last year the second yeah are there any objections all right relatedly this would be the second item under that new section the Fairfax County School Board supports efforts to ensure Virginia's public universities have stable student focused boards of visitors that safeguard institutional reputations and strengthen their

[03:47:12] ability to provide a premier education for all students similar to the previous one I think we all know what's happening at Mason and UVA and elsewhere are there any objections all right continue and then this is the last one this is a federal legislative priority and this is an amendment to a current priority previously the agenda indicated our support for something which has now been

[03:47:46] gutted. So this changes it. Page 19, number 36 would now read, the Fairfax County School Board supports restoring the Federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness PSLF program, and then adds these other pieces of FAFSA that have been gutted, income-based repayment IBR programs, and grad plus loans to the way they existed prior to congressional action in 2025 with the legislative citation these programs help students and educators pay for higher education in the case of pslf

[03:48:20] providing student loan forgiveness in exchange for public education related service time are there any objections thank you mr dunn you're up so can we please put mr dunn's um thank you um the uh and ryan mcaveen is the second for my amendment uh so the purpose of my amendment is to amend the Virginia FOIA Act to enable up to six members of our board to meet at a time but as applied to

[03:48:58] all school boards in the state instead of the current provision in our state legislative program which calls for all school boards and all other public bodies which is I don't know what's included in that number. This is limited to school boards and allows anything below a majority of a school board to meet in a formal meeting or in what the current legislation calls an informal assemblage. The idea is to and the objective is to enable especially informal conversations and

[03:49:33] further the effective governance of our school body which is currently impeded by the numerical limit and the current legislation which is anytime there's a formal meeting or informal assemblage of three or more members that is uh requires public notice thank you um can we actually make that a little bit larger what we have up there it's hard to see or maybe just take that color out of it and then well it was sent and i know janet had it but we'll go ahead and ask um

[03:50:10] for any questions that are of the group not sure which came up first but we'll start with miss anderson and this lady i think that my only i am obviously fully in support of ensuring that more of us can meet at a time my concern is i definitely um miss when mr dunn says six i think that that's too many just because i think that we we can't have a number i think what i've always advocated for is a percentage um and if we could go for 40 of our board or 30 of our board then i think that that still meets the needs for boards that are five to be at the less than the majority but for a board that's our size where it's just the

[03:50:48] sheer volume of people even if we could get to three people it would be a lot easier to get through some of our conversations so I think that for me I am I am I like the idea of replacing the fixed numerical threshold but I would advocate for it being a percentage of the board thank you mr. Dunn after you've heard all of the comments you'll have an opportunity to um give your feedback miss lady yeah i'm in the same place i was gonna ask for you know 40 but that might be bold um because that certainly

[03:51:25] would get us to 4.8 but not to 5 if you do the math um but four people is three meetings versus three people which is four meetings um and i just um yeah i i don't need i don't want a number but but a percentage 'cause then it's easily applied across all school boards throughout the state, regardless of the size of their board.

[03:51:46] - Thank you, Ms. St. John Cunning. That was exactly what I was gonna say. If you do percentages, it is an easier lift for the legislature to say this is what it is and it can be applied to all other school boards depending on their numbers. If you have a fixed number, I think that's, that's just a heavier lift and not as consistent.

[03:52:05] - Thank you. If you have a number, fixed number comment, Can we just stipulate that it's been assumed? Okay, Ms. Dixit. - I agree with my colleagues. The percentage makes sense, but also then we can remove the word majority.

[03:52:25] Okay. Thank you. Is that Mr. McDowell or Mr. Moon? Mr. Moon. - Mr. Dixit, I appreciate you bringing up this amendment. However, six seems to be a quite high, probably will alarm a lot of legislators to propose this.

[03:52:47] You know, for me, as a Fairfax County School Board member, I don't really care about other schools just which ability to meet or not be able to meet. But as far as my board is concerned, you know, having an opportunity to be able to have a conversation amongst at least four, if that can be allowed.

[03:53:09] I mean, that works with the 40%. If they can find a legislative proposal for just urban county executive style governments, a school board to have up to certain number or certain percentage is fine.

[03:53:26] I think four would help us quite a lot to be able to do a lot of work much more effectively. - Thank you, Mr. Frisch, four. - I'm not gonna talk about numbers, I agree, but I'm not gonna talk about numbers, I have two things.

[03:53:42] One, this is not formatted like an amendment, it doesn't tell me where it's going, It doesn't tell me if it's replacing anything. It doesn't tell me if it's adding to, so that needs to be fixed. If it's adding, then it's all underlined, not just in red. If it's striking, it's struck through.

[03:53:58] That's the format that, you know, I think we should probably make sure that board members have like a Google doc that shows what samples look like for these kinds of things, just generally speaking. Secondarily, I believe, and Ms. Marin can correct me if I'm wrong, Delegate Bennett Parker and some others have worked on this issue in the past.

[03:54:22] And perhaps with a larger majority among people who might be sympathetic, maybe we can get that done. I think the number comes into play with whether we can get that done. - Thank you. I'll take a quick turn and I won't talk about the number, but I will say what I'm glad to see that this, and I've known that this has been in the works at enrichment for quite a while, but that does not preclude us from having it in our agenda.

[03:54:50] So I will be supportive if we can make some of those changes to a percentage rather than a specific number because it makes it less applicable to other places. So Mr. Dunn, your turn for final word. Oh, so sorry, Ms. Osmoheiser.

[03:55:06] - Thank you. I agree in general, I think it should be 40% or the third, some sort of percentage. That's what I've been saying for years is that it should be a percentage of board size. So it's the same requirement, regardless of board size.

[03:55:21] So I agree with percentage. I do think if we're gonna advocate for this, I've had several conversations over the years with different delegates about the challenges, and I think there's some room for educating the delegates in all of the ways this impacts us. When I've had that conversation, they're shocked that we can't all jointly edit a Google Doc, even though it's FOIA-able anyway.

[03:55:41] So why we can't jointly edit something that's FOIA-able makes zero sense to me. in the same way of why we can't reply all, because that's also FOIA-able. So if something is FOIA-able, and I'd maybe ask if our legal team could take another look at that, because if it's subject to FOIA, why can't we reply all?

[03:55:58] And if it's not subject to FOIA, it's a closed session type of thing, which we also have those available in meetings, so I don't quite understand some of those challenges. But the thing that spoke greatest to the legislation when I've talked to them is the impact it has on their constituents being able to lift up issues to us.

[03:56:16] so i recently had a delegate who had a constituent who wanted to talk to the board about a specific issue and that delegate had to set up six meetings with that constituent so that constituent could talk to us about their issue we weren't taking any action we weren't making any promises per se we were just listening to the constituents concerns but because they didn't really want to do it in an open meeting the constituent has that right to not have everything they say in the public the constituent was not able to come speak to the whole board or 40 of the board just to say these are my concerns and this is what I'm looking for instead that constituent had to do six individual meetings two at a time just to be able to

[03:56:53] say to us this is what I'm looking for and that I think impedes constituent services significantly it impedes us ability to listen to the community impedes our delegation's ability to bring their constituent needs that are school related to school board members so I do think that talking and when I've talked about how we can't reply all we can't work on a Google Doc jointly at same time we can't well we can't reply to the each other's comments on a google doc we can they were shocked so i think in some of the way we talk about this we need to talk about the fact

[03:57:28] that this rule doesn't take into account the electronic way we do business that is foiable i can't say that's enough it is foiable so why can't we do it if it's still available to the public that seems to me meet the sunshine law but regardless i think educating our delegation is helpful because and in conjunction with that to say how much more the work of the school board has gotten to be even in the six years i've been on here the amount of constituent services the amount of requirements from the community i think that's important to lift up as well so efficiency

[03:58:02] and transparency is absolutely both important but i don't know if the rules have kept up with the changes in the way things work thank you that's very helpful uh mr dunn uh i i i would just like to echo everything that uh my colleague miss sizemore heiser said i think educating the state legislatures legislators about everything uh that all the negative impacts from the current legislation is very important especially to ensure effective governance um you know there's obviously

[03:58:37] a majority of people who favor 40 percent uh so i defer to the majority um i just want to point out however that um uh two things one uh i mentioned six but my email uh did not mention six um my my proposal um as to respond to mr fish's comment actually said this is what the state legislative program currently says and this is what i'm proposing to replace which is a wholesale replacement of the current language um so i i didn't paste this language into the document that's on the shared screen right now um but you can look at my email for for what the current um

[03:59:16] legislative program says uh 40 for the vast majority of school boards in the state would not enable more people to to meet together for example arlington has a five member school board i believe city fairfax does as well um if i'm correct in that uh 40 of five is two people so arlington would still be subject to only two people meeting at a time um that that's certainly you know i i represent fairfax not arlington so i'm fine with 40 um but it helps uh fairfax and

[03:59:53] anyone who has more than five school board members i just don't have an inventory of how many other school board members in the state have more than five i know the majority i believe is three especially in the rural parts of the of the state um and uh and and so i'm happy to to take that friendly amendment from you know whoever first proposed 40 uh instead of uh the the word majority but i appreciate uh the support of my colleagues otherwise thank you so given that we're not necessarily giving consensus to your amendment you will have to present this when this comes

[04:00:29] up for a vote and we'll talk about formatting to ensure uniformity. Folks we have two more things on which we need to give consensus so we're going to not necessarily take go backs on this issue at current. Can we please have the federal priorities be posted? Sure. While that happens you know as the conversation evolves we've talked about well Ms. Marin just talked about sending letter to the new state um leadership um can we have consensus as to whether or not the board

[04:01:06] would be amenable to doing so like do we want to do that at all and then of course we'll come together and determine what the content will be at some point in the future we have time um so all in favor of no we can't vote because otherwise it is it is uh i need a second are there any objections to the board sending a letter to the new governor just outlining some of our priorities and this letter will be shared with everyone before it is sent, obviously, okay?

[04:01:36] Seeing, we could send it to the whole world, but we'll certainly send it to the new governor. And I don't see any objections, so we will need to talk about as to working with Mr. Malloy to help draft such a letter, just really to couch very meaningfully, not just our positions, but the impacts, the rationale behind those positions, but in a way that does not create a 10 page document because that will be hard to absorb.

[04:02:05] Okay, now we have up there the federal priorities which have been listed. We will need to have consensus on this because this will be what is shared with legislators, well, I guess not on the 17th anymore, but on an individual basis with the legislators.

[04:02:26] Are there any objections to the federal priorities as listed? Seeing none, we will consider that we have consensus to move forward, Mr. Malloy, to clean it up.

[04:02:41] And so we have something that we can share very quickly. Can we also post the state priorities?

[04:03:03] Well, everyone has a state priorities on board docs and probably has had an opportunity to study them. Are there any objections to moving forward as they are listed?

[04:03:19] - Dr. Anderson, this would include the amendments that were done without objection, right? - The priorities do not necessarily include the amendments. The program includes the amendments. Priorities are the hot topic things.

[04:03:35] So two different conversations at current. So the state priorities as listed, are there any objections? Seeing none, Mr. Malloy, you can go ahead and wrap that up for us so that we can present that in our individual conversations.

[04:03:52] Just kind of next steps moving forward. We are not going to have the November 17th briefing. We are engaging in individual discussions with legislators. We are going to have a signup sheet to ensure that every legislator has a board member speaking to them.

[04:04:10] Could we have more than one? Sure, if you can get the audience, yay. But minimally, everyone needs to have one. And I don't have a timetable, but I would like to think hopefully we can do it around, maybe before VSBA, because we had intended on having this discussion with them on the 17th, but somewhere around there.

[04:04:31] So let's not wait until December in order to have that conversation, I think makes sense. We have our federal priorities, our state priorities, our joint priorities is yet to come, Mr. Malloy.

[04:04:47] - The joint priorities are included in this as part of the-- - Okay, do we need to take, give consensus on that at current I would suggest that you do okay so let's go ahead and put that up please oh it is up I can't barely see what's what are there any objections to the joint priorities seeing none we'll continue we'll consider those concurred by the board the last business that we have not really honed in on in terms of next steps is regarding the formulation of bills and budget

[04:05:24] amendments i know that there's some interest but we haven't really made a board decision regarding how to move forward on that so my once i find the sheet um going through i think it was on slide mr malloy which slide had the areas of interest by this board for potential

[04:05:49] bills and amendments slide 20. thank you so if we could put up slide 20. so the bottom four are being taken care of by other legislators as we've learned. So we have one, two, three. Mr. Malloy, I would love to hear your guidance regarding the first one, SOL timing and administration reforms. What information do you know that could

[04:06:25] serve us? Otherwise we'll be looking to perhaps offering some sort of amendment or a bill. Can you give some guidance as to where this may be with others? So I I think there have been some discussions already with delegation members about this topic.

[04:06:41] I know that some information was shared in a Friday letter in terms of some potential changes and some data around the impact that those changes had. So I think that those conversations are ongoing, but I haven't been directly involved in the conversations, but I know it's certainly something that VSBA or VAS has included in their legislative priorities, making some adjustments.

[04:07:07] Other organizations are doing the same. Other school divisions are doing the same. So, I mean, I think that there's ongoing work on that. - So, I guess I'm going to tackle it in a different way. Since we have these three items that I know we've talked about ad nauseum, are there any continued interests on the part of board members to submit, well, to have Mr. Malloy support us in writing bills to present to a state legislator?

[04:07:37] Besides Mohaizer? Oh, okay, I wasn't sure which one went off. - I mean, I would say very much yes. I think whether it's to present bills that are in the affirmative of things we want done, although I think more, I think presenting, I guess I'd be more interested in presenting changes or fixes to bills that are currently out there.

[04:07:55] One of the worries I have about presenting bills is, I think it takes a lot more conversation and stuff to present affirmative bills than it does to present fixes, but I think that's something that we can talk about and see how that would look a little bit more and see how that fits into the way their work style is to make sure we're not unintentionally presenting things that then fall into pitfalls or things like that.

[04:08:14] But I definitely think there's space to present fixes to bills or changes to bills to make them better. And I would highly, highly advocate for that because otherwise, and I've heard this from many of our delegation, this is great to have this list of things you want, but we don't give us ways that we can then take what you want and submit it, right?

[04:08:37] Even if it's not a full bill, if it's enough they can then submit it to their bill writers but i think we need to give them more than this and i'd be highly in favor of that thank you for that being that we only have one minute left to this session i don't think we'll be able to hash out the topics on which we want to submit fixes to present to any legislator or to make decisions about these three topics that are here so perhaps miss marron and i and mr malloy can reconvene in terms of the next step to move forward regarding the submission of bills and budget amendments miss marron yeah i just say you know vsba is coming

[04:09:17] up like next week and so for those going it would be good to have language ready or ideas ready to connect with others downstate um like i said you know i've been hard pressed to move this further in the last two weeks so it's going to take more than just myself and ricky if people want to develop bill language like please reach out perhaps start with a draft and send it to us ARTICULATE IT BECAUSE IT JUST -- IT'S A LOT GOING ON RIGHT NOW, SO THANKS.

[04:09:45] BARRING ANY ADDITIONAL COMMENTS, THIS PART OF THE WORK SESSION IS NOT CONCLUDED. PERHAPS WE CAN HAVE A FIVE MINUTE STRETCH BREAK SO WE CAN MOVE A LITTLE BIT. SO WE WILL COME BACK AT THREE -- DID YOU SAY -- MR. MCDANIEL, WOULD YOU LIKE TO SIT OVER HERE?

[04:10:04] ALL RIGHT, TEAM, LET'S GO AHEAD AND GET STARTED. IT IS ALMOST 3:15 AND WE'VE GOT OUR LAST TOPIC OF THE WORK SESSION, WHICH IS TO GO over the status and the information around the comprehensive school boundary review and so with that I will turn over to dr. Reed to introduce the topic and we'll go from there thank you miss Sizemore Heiser and whoo what a day so anyhow I will be happy to introduce our team they're going to present bits and pieces of this and I'll be sharing some of this work with them but we're going

[04:10:43] do an update of where we are on the division-wide boundary review process and we're going to talk just a little bit about the Western High School as well so I'm going to turn it over right now to mr. Eric Gordon our chief facilities officer so mr. Gordon actually mr. Gordon is joined by mr.

[04:11:03] muick dr. King miss young blood hall and mr. Smith in this because really there's a whole ginormous team effort dr. Ponce as well has been a lot of the meetings mr. Lambert's been a lot of the meetings it's been a lift really from a lot of folks at the senior leadership level and dr. King's part of the advisory committee as is mr. Gordon and this hall has been there mr. Smith so anyhow mr. Gordon why don't you kick us off on a couple of slides and we can phone a friend as we do this because it's been a team effort yes ma'am good

[04:11:42] afternoon all Eric Gordon chief of facilities today I'll be presenting an update on the ongoing comprehensive school boundary review so to recap how this process got started in July of 2024 the school board approved and updated policy 8130 on boundaries mandate mandating FCPS school boundaries be reviewed every five years previously we had not done a comprehensive review in the last 40 years so in July of 2025 so this this summer the school board adopted revised language which set phasing plan for boundary adjustments at

[04:12:16] school levels. This slide depicts the four primary criteria that's given to us from 8130. The school board identified these four criteria that should be prioritized by the superintendent and the boundary review so access to programming, proximity, enrollment/capacity, and transportation. 8130 contains seven additional criteria that states that each school community and unique location the superintendent may consider additional criteria and there's seven of those that are listed within 8130. A few points to keep us grounded is the importance of

[04:12:54] this work is some of the reminders that we have provided to the community during the process. First of all is adjusting school boundaries as a national best practice that is used in school systems across the country to manage resources. This is one tool that to manage resources and addresses changes that may arise. Secondary this is a budgetary adjustments that all boundary adjustments may occur as part of a boundary review are not intended to be quick fixes for all challenges across the division. Thirdly, the review cycles that were established in 8130 allow for regular reviews to address changes that may arise in the future, and as mentioned, this tool is not

[04:13:32] a one-stop problem solver. Additionally, as part of the review, normalizing the conversation around the boundaries has been a key part of this process. So the slide here you see is the timeline, so the phases that we've gone through um phase one was a boundary review process for the fall and spring fall 2024 and spring of 2025 held community meetings and community meetings and received input uh we're currently in phase two and we just completed uh community meetings of scenario four so we met 12 times in september and 12 times in october um as you're probably aware so looking

[04:14:08] ahead we're beginning work in the final scenario development which will continue through november ending early 2026 with the superintendent's recommendation to the school board for action which uh this slide here depicts the uh the process that we've been through so basically kind of a just a different look from the previous slide on a timeline um these are really uh significant effort touch points with the community the first meetings were in fall of 2024 were to explain the process and collect insights and feedback from the community this data was used

[04:14:45] by the consultant to develop three scenarios for consideration by the superintendent's boundary advisory committee and the community these scenarios focused on high impact areas as a review scenario one looked at neighborhood connectivity scenario two focused on cohort continuity and scenario three looked at a comprehensive comprehensive balance which was a combination of scenarios one and two these scenarios were cumulative meaning uh the changes from one were included in two and three included all scenarios all changes in three were part of include input from one and two in spring of 2025 these scenarios were released to the public

[04:15:24] to gather input from the community and public meetings feedback was collected through the boundary explorer tool tool and this uh this feedback was then reviewed by the consultant and the superintendent's advisory committee members of the committee reviewed the feedback and policy criteria, formed priorities and were then shared with the consultant to be used in development of Scenario 4. Utilizing the feedback and priorities from the committee members, Scenario 4 was then released and presented to the public. Scenario 4 is the only scenario under consideration and we're still receiving comments on that until on about the 14th of November, so this week is when

[04:15:59] the windows will close for boundary explore to comment period. Looking at the next slide, so just Just some quick data from the community meetings that we held, there were a total of 24 meetings held, had roughly 2,500 people in attendance.

[04:16:16] You'll see a breakdown of persons attended in person versus attended virtually. Looking at community feedback, community feedback is currently being accepted as I mentioned through the Boundary Explorer tool through November 14th.

[04:16:36] Data was pulled as of November 2nd, 2025 in preparing for this presentation, the Boundary tool has received roughly 8 300 comments and that was as of november november 2nd and we see received more than 2 000 less talks and messages the superintendent's boundary review advisory committee consists of 95 members this includes two parents caregivers from each of the high school pyramids of the 24 high school pyramids and school-based division level administrators teachers operational staff representatives from the county and local organizations and associations and other community

[04:17:13] members the committee helps to ensure the community feedback is considered in developmental and development of potential boundary scenarios and provides recommendations to the superintendent looking at a recap of the advisory committee uh work today um the committee has held 13 meetings since december of 2024. during the summer uh the community uh committee received community feedback on draft scenarios shared with the community in the spring of 2025 and developed a list of key priorities. In September, the community provided boundary change priorities and reviewed academic

[04:17:49] programming and initial transportation proximity analysis from the consultant. Input from the committee members plays an important role in shaping and guiding the consultant work in this process. In the upcoming November meetings, the advisory committee will review community feedback and will continue to provide input to further revise scenario four and provide additional recommendations or information to the superintendent but we'll see here is what's next so we have advisory committee meeting tonight and you want to

[04:18:22] provide more update on that ma'am you want me to keep going so new kind of a slight adjustment so the adjustment is through does not have their analysis completed from the October meetings so we're going to facilitate the meeting this evening and talk about what people what committee members have heard give them an opportunity to look at the maps again with feedback because many of the advisory committee members attended the community meetings and we've got a first

[04:19:00] draft or a first round of comments that folks will be able to look at that were received prior to October 28th and so they'll have they're getting the first tranche of boundary tool comments this evening actually this afternoon and we'll be reviewing that first tranche this evening so then we're gonna have our meeting on the 24th and we're adding a meeting I believe likely December 2nd they're firming that up so the 11th and 12th that you see up there will move to

[04:19:34] the 24th and December 2nd whereas tonight's meeting will have a slightly different con content because we won't have all the feedback reviewed because it's still open through the 14th and today's only the 12th among other things so thank you I think that slides done Eric yes ma'am thank you and so that still leads us into keeps us keeps on track in time for a December timeframe where dr. Reed superintendent will look through to make her recommendation and then will lead us to into January timeframe for where recommendations is presented to the school board, have a public hearing

[04:20:13] and then the school board will make a decision on the path forward. And that's what we have for a boundary update. Then we have a few slides for the Western high school update.

[04:20:29] So on this timeline, you will see kind of just lays out key points and I'll just run across from left to right. November 13th timeframe, new Western high school programming vote, December 18th. - I'm sorry to interrupt.

[04:20:45] I was thinking, I apologize that we could split the two topics and take comments on the boundary part first and then go to the western high school part so I apologize so if you don't mind we'll pause and just take comments on the boundary process and then we'll go to this part so it's 3:30 almost we have about two hours so we'll take questions for maybe the next hour and then we can split to the second part of the presentation so we'll start with Carl's not here so we'll go with dr.

[04:21:13] Anderson if you can move the slides back to the previous ones that'd be great thank you I guess one of my questions is you shared with me the resolution to perhaps Glassdoor and Parklawn I've made no bones about those two things not being part of the initial scenarios of being great concern to me how do I treat this information at current like where does that show up it's I'm not sure how to deposit it in terms of scenarios that were already developed so my

[04:21:52] understanding is the team that through did come through on this topic finally and did provide, I believe you directly, Dr. Anderson, vis-a-vis Eric, in the last couple days, I don't recall which day, the Park Lawn-Glasgow adjustments for your review.

[04:22:10] It'll be included in the Friday letter. It will be integrated into these conversations, and in some ways, having the meetings moved into December, our last meeting, December 2nd, will give us a little more time as the Boundary Advisory Committee to review those very specific Park Lawn and Glasgow adjustments, because those should be rolled into this division-wide work, no question.

[04:22:31] - And so this evening that you're having tonight, this will not be part of that conversation. - It can be. It's whether or not you want to give your feedback before it becomes part of the conversation or after. So if you're fine with us putting it in front of your Mason district folks tonight, happy to do that.

[04:22:49] I think we were trying to give you the courtesy to look at it first. - I would love to give you my feedback first. - Okay, all right. - Okay, thank you. And I'll try to do that so you have it as soon as possible. Thank you, that was my main question. So the other question that I had, because I think this is really for the community, because that has come up several times, there seems to be some misunderstanding regarding the scenarios.

[04:23:14] Scenarios supersede each other, they're not different pieces to be pulled from each. So scenario one is done and gone, scenario two is done and gone, scenario three is done, and scenario four is the only one that we're having discussions about.

[04:23:30] Can you confirm? - Yes, ma'am, that is correct. - Okay, thank you. Also reading this timeline regarding recommendations that the superintendent is going to be providing to us. Well, BRAC is giving you recommendations, then you're going to provide your recommendations.

[04:23:47] The BRAC is not a decision-making body. They're just giving you their best thinking. Is there a scenario, oh, I hate to use that word, but is there a circumstance under which the recommendations that are being provided to you by the BRAC are not what you bring forward to us, or perhaps you might pull back into a previous scenario and bring that to, or parts of a previous scenario to bring that to the board for our decision making in December, January?

[04:24:20] - I think you were correct that scenario four is the only scenario at play at the moment. The BRAC will provide their feedback and will construct a scenario five, for lack of a better nomenclature here. I will look at that. I would expect to make very little revision to that, but it's very possible I will make some adjustment to that and make a scenario six that I bring to you.

[04:24:46] I can't, and that'll likely be as a result of some feedback or some anomaly I look at with transportation or trailer placement or something maybe. I mean, I can't envision what the something is, but it's possible that I still will make some adjustment after BRAC gives it to me.

[04:25:06] - Thank you. This will be our last conversation about this until we get those recommendations from you, correct? - I believe it's the last scheduled work session, but I don't know. There still may be spaces on work sessions, so there may be other opportunities to have that conversation.

[04:25:24] - So here are my questions regarding what to expect from you. Will it be inclusive of transportation? Will it be inclusive of your goal to include grade six at middle schools? Would it also include whether or not the entire scenario will be implemented all at the same time, or it will be implemented in phases?

[04:25:48] Can you give a little bit of an insight as to what we could look toward having from you outside of these other changes? - Well, the board is gonna make the transportation decision around phasing. You will have a date set for that already in terms of whether you're gonna provide that for the motion that you previously passed.

[04:26:08] So that's a board decision that's already calendared, I believe for December 18th. So I won't be bringing a separate recommendation from that. With regard to sixth grade, I don't believe we have found that that's going to be a likely, I mean, I'll certainly speak to it, but I don't think we've been able to make movement on that topic at this time.

[04:26:31] - I thought you had one site that seemed feasible. - We thought we might, but I have not gotten the numbers back yet on whether that's actually possible. And then the, to be honest, the request to come back in March with an AAP center stay at every middle school may impact all those numbers.

[04:26:52] So I need to kind of deal with one variable at a time, I think, with that topic. So there might be one, but it's unlikely that I'm gonna speak to the sixth grade in the middle school beyond one school, and I'm not sure we'll be able to there. What was, I'm sorry, what was the other question?

[04:27:10] - It was implementation. Will it be wholesale? We're doing every area throughout the division, or? - Yes, I will be able to provide feedback on that. Yes, ma'am. - Thank you. that's it for me right now thank you very much um next i'm sorry i can actually say today more specifically we absolutely are going to be providing we're absolutely going to be providing some stepping into this in the western high school pyramids um for sure right like i can already say

[04:27:44] that because we're um very likely depending on how the conversation goes today going to be extending that conversation to be thoughtful around that work so yes i'll be speaking to that thank you is today the last meeting of the brac no ma'am they're not tonight is one of the last three there'll be a meeting tonight the 24th and december early december thank you thank you miss marin followed by mr dunn okay i'd first like to share a few thoughts with my colleagues

[04:28:20] this is difficult work i remain very proud that this board is facing it full on and engaging in the conversations in our community and i am interested in getting to yes to obtain a unified decision of the board on some boundary changes i am open to receiving input from each member especially each magisterial member about how proposed changes will turn out in reality including the cost and benefit of those changes so to speak i'm trying to understand all the proposed changes and i'll be sending out a list of times that i'm available in hopes that one of those times will work for each of you to please connect so we can um learn from each other

[04:28:58] i want to let you know that i am reliable for making decisions based on data about capacity and also the street data about how changes play out in reality what seems to make sense on a map may not actually make sense in a neighborhood depending on where the foot traffic and actual traffic goes i also ask my colleagues to consider any motions i may bring to adjust scenarios in the in the 100 mill district with the same goal of getting to yes and trusting me as I advocate for my community and I will in turn do the same.

[04:29:30] So I have two focuses of comments and questions. Dr. Reed, I'm not clear what I do with information I have from the community. Such as when we talked about foot traffic, I just mentioned in traffic, right? On the map right now, there are some suggestions or proposals in scenario four that split a community and basically cut it off from the only entry of its you know if you could consider a cul-de-sac but bigger right that it looks like on a map they could be with school community B but really the geography and the the driving make them it makes sense to be in B where do I advocate for that

[04:30:09] are you going to take that input from school board members because there has not been an official Avenue for that it's become from the boundary review advisory committee and I do continue to wonder about you know if the boundary committee advisory committee is getting the same comments again and again and again well how is that being weighted if it's the same exact thing so how do i advocate for my residents is that going form scenario five or is that something that has to come up as a motion on the day of the vote i

[04:30:45] mean i think it could be both right i think if you forward any feedback that you have other board members have forwarded feedback to me to share with staff i'm happy to receive that feedback and share it also with the advisory committee i think that after the advisory committee makes their scenario five we're going to post that and before we certainly can connect before i bring scenario six and if you still don't see those um your feedback reflected in that then absolutely that's something the board has the final say on so you can certainly modify whatever recommendation

[04:31:22] comes to you in January when can we expect scenario 5 following the early December meeting the last advisory committee meeting which we had to schedule in December what's that date about it's probably the first week in December hopefully but again we're hoping that after that feedback it takes through a couple days to get there you know stuff uploaded so we've had you know it'll probably be end of first week maybe second week early okay what I'm hearing you say is that there is no formal process for school board members to provide input I thought there was a hard line between us being involved and

[04:32:01] now you've mentioned you've gotten feedback from members I haven't given you any feedback it's starting to really in terms of specific boundaries and changes I will say a large community meeting I held last week with about a hundred people a member of the BRAC stood up and said I don't really know much more than you do so that has been sort of the pallor of the conversation so I want to feel like I have more of a voice than just kind of the average person but in and I want to give you this feedback as soon as possible because I don't want to leave my community hanging until the last minute well then I would email it to

[04:32:39] me if you have this is new information I'm glad to know that that's the process us thank you i sure will next we have mr dunn followed by mr anderson thank you uh can you hear me okay okay i'm assuming you guys can hear me um yes so okay great uh thank you uh so i just

[04:33:10] wanted to start um this process has been uh a work in progress i think uh there's a lot of lessons that need to be learned and captured in an after action report and i hope that that is part of the plan is that part of the plan dr reed it absolutely is anytime we take on division-wide work the team absolutely does after action planning and i think in this case since it's been 40 years and no playbook it would be most appropriate to have an after action plan thank you um i i think uh perhaps

[04:33:47] the greatest mistake during this process was the the consultant that we hired um uh yeah i know that was recommended by FCPS leadership, but ultimately I believe the consultant proved incapable of performing the most basic tasks. At no point, including the most recent round of community meetings, have I ever felt that the consultant actually understands the schools, the neighborhoods

[04:34:21] in in our county in my part of the county at least um and uh and i continue to have you know new issues that arise as a result of um some of the changes that are contained in in the uh in scenario four but i also just want to express uh extreme disappointment that um trailers and modulars really were not um not just prioritized but were really not addressed um at all in any significant way there are schools with that are at 153 percent without modulars and and so that

[04:34:59] situation is now going to continue for another five years unless school board members affirmatively step up to advocate for those communities where principals are fully expecting they're overcrowding to be addressed. And I don't think that was the process as it was envisioned, but it is the process as it is. And the students who are most affected by these trailers and modulars are low-income students. So I feel that it is completely unfair and quite possibly

[04:35:34] discriminatory to allow this situation, which has already persisted for decades and in many cases, to continue indefinitely into the future without any remediation or any reduction in trailers and modulars because I believe strongly for student safety for environmental health for many reasons that students should be learning in school buildings not in trailers and modulars regardless whether there's plumbing in the trailers or not and you know that will be my advocacy going forward for my district and I encourage all of my all of my colleagues to

[04:36:13] look at trailers and modulars and in your districts as well if that's of interest. I just wanted to provide those comments on the school boundary process but I also just wanted to say I hope going forward that as part of the after action that we look at community meetings and making sure that we engage the community in a meaningful way. I believe that the community meetings in September were not meaningful or effective and it does create a certain cynicism among the public when they believe that the results are kind of pre-cooked thank you thank

[04:36:49] you mr dunn that was your time thank you do you want to go back mr dunn uh no thank you okay thank you mr anderson so i want to start off by saying that i appreciate everybody's work here um i appreciate the braq members that have been thoughtful in their in their analysis of what's been going on i appreciate all the people that have emailed us i appreciate the lion's share of the work that's been taken on on our staff watching you guys orchestrate the meetings and all of the event work that was done i am deeply impressed with what we were able to pull off

[04:37:26] in a very short period of time and i fully understand that this is the board's request okay um i can't i love the fact that we acknowledge it's one of the first places that i've actually seen it written down this is not supposed to fix every problem that we've got we dug this hole for 40 years and we we did this over time and this intention this was intended to set us on the path that we can dig out of the hole that we're in it is not necessarily going to fix everything the first go-around that was not the intention if I understand correctly we're at what roughly 2% of kids is that

[04:38:02] correct right around there so we're about 2% of student population that were our adjustments which is which means that what we've been saying all along most of our kids go to the right schools this is fixing small issues that are around the edges in order to fix fix the capacity that we've got across the county I am well I understand that all of us know our districts the best and I don't know exactly how that's going to look in terms of how this is all going to shake out at the end but what I can say is that I am concerned about last minute advocacy here because only hearing from the loudest voices a

[04:38:41] Again, we had 2,500 people show up at the meetings, many of them were the same people from meeting to meeting to meeting, and we have 100, let's just call it 180,000 students. Not every household has two parents or two guardians, but many do, and so it is not representative of the way that everyone across the division, and I also understand that the folks that show up at our meetings are sometimes the folks that have the time and space to be able to show up at our meetings okay not to diminish the importance of hearing their voices too

[04:39:16] we have certain schools that i mean i will use west springfield as an example it is the tightest boundary of any high school that we have it's exactly what we want a boundary to look like and we have too many kids that go to that school and there's not much that we're going to be able to do that's going to fix the problem and if i am a board member that's going to advocate for something it's going to impact other people's schools at the same time and we have to think about that as we're moving forward so I just want to make sure that we trust the process moving through this is new in the process in terms of this is a new adventure for the division the way that we're doing it and I do believe that

[04:39:55] we've worked hard to get here and I want us to see it through to get to the result so that we can start looking towards the next step towards digging out of the hole so that was very well timed miss Anderson miss st. John Cunning and then Miss Lady first of all I will echo what Miss Anderson just said interestingly enough I had an interview yesterday with a Boy Scout who called me to talk about boundaries and I wanted to explain the process to him and I want to make very clear that this board specifically said we are directing the

[04:40:34] superintendent to take this work on we said that because we understand that each of us have different needs in our magisterial districts and if we were gonna do this work it would become well if you do that in your district it impacts this district and we said this has got to be a holistic fair approach and the committee was appointed the BRAC committee who has been very thoughtful I want to thank everyone that has done this work this is yeoman's work and I really want to people that aren't here that have been at every community meeting I want to shout out to Grace Angie and Raheel that have been at every single

[04:41:10] meeting at night and have spent 90 hours out of their week being there to support our community the opportunities have been there I agree that yes there are specific things that we know in our districts but we specifically and very intentionally made this decision and that's what I explained to this Boy Scout and I like I told him you know I understand how this must look like to you and he came away from this interview very appreciative because he didn't know that it had not been 40 years he also understood why we delegated this to the superintendent so that it would be holistic and we wouldn't be having turf

[04:41:48] fights and I appreciate the work that has gone on and that has been done I don't appreciate some of the work that some of our school board members have done where they have gone specifically to people and said if can I offer you a deal when we've never even had that authority to do that and that to me has muddied the waters and i'm really disappointed that some of the people on this board have done that because it has directly impacted a lot of us um and i think we've got to own up to that and people have got to be accountable for them going to specific communities saying i can make a deal

[04:42:23] with you that was not supposed to happen anytime i got any information i directly emailed it to this to the superintendent from any community member because that's what we agreed on and now we're going back and saying we didn't know what our rule was we were very intentional about this work this is hard work it's not that it's not easy there's there's going to be people that aren't going to be happy but at the end of the day we have to do what's right for the entire division not just what's right for Franconia not just what's right for Springfield not just what's

[04:42:56] right for Hunter Mill it has to be the best work for the entire division thank you mr. John Cunningham I appreciate it any comments before I go to Miss Lady miss lady then mr. moon I'm gonna echo some of my colleagues and thanking staff it in especially grace Angie and Rahel I mean it's amazing and and all of you the time you haven't seen your families I think since school started because all the nights out so I see you and I appreciate that and I'll also the BRAC

[04:43:33] members I know I'm blessed with some fantastic BRAC members who are crunching data and doing things via you know algorithms that I don't comprehend or understand but have been informative to me to better understand this process but I also want to talk about the fact that you know this should come as no surprise friends we can't please everybody and I could tell you in my tenure working in public school the leaders who bothered me the most were the ones who wouldn't make a decision because they were afraid of the people they wouldn't be pleasing so they became sort of like you know they just didn't make decisions

[04:44:12] okay we've got a decision to make and we're not going to throw the baby out the bathwater and I do not want to sit there and make sausage tofu whatever you want to call it at the table and try to amend and amend and amend whatever the superintendent brings forward to us there have been several scenarios there's been lots of feedback I will say this to echo some of what's been sent I can't even really call these I have never talked to the consultants that was never my way of working around this it was to forward things to the superintendent into my BRAC committee members and that's what I've been doing and so anything that I have that needs to be shared I've been sharing it and encouraging my my

[04:44:52] constituents to put it in into the tool so you know at the end of the day you know I I am very proud of the work that's been done in a short amount of time and and realize that you know we started out with a priority from all the parents from our community members of split feeders let's deal with split feeders let's deal with capacity well as soon as we dealt with split feeders in capacity guess what oh but not what it means my child or my nostalgic love affair with you know my neighborhood school or the fact that I'm fifth generation that's gonna go to this high school all of our schools are good we

[04:45:28] can clearly look at maps and see where there are issues but when we fix them a lot of people came out of the woodwork and so they really don't want to resolve split feeders I mean my point in this is that as soon as there's a pain point for anybody they're gonna respond to it but you can't do work with fidelity if there aren't pain points and the last thing I'm going to say is if you really are going to exercise your fiduciary responsibility and I might be going you know a little too far here but I'm gonna just put it out there when it comes to

[04:46:03] phasing and busing when it comes to doing this work you can't believe in healthy start times if you're going to bus all the phasing it's my opinion you can't believe in being fiscally responsible if you're going to bus all the phasing because of what it's going to cost and because it's also going to impact what's happening with the populations i'm seeing it at kent gardens with the change and and phasing in rising second through sixth graders i i love my predecessor the previous board i think that was a that was not that was not an appropriate

[04:46:36] amount of phasing but and maybe i'll take a go back thanks thank you mr mr moon then mr frish oh thank you um i was just surprised to hear a comment from a colleague that some board members were making deals with the communities and that surprised me if that were the case uh truly the case then i'm disappointed but at the same time i'm hoping that if and if any of the board members were making and having conversation with the community members they were trying to hear get

[04:47:14] feedback their comments their concerns uh that's where my hope is so with that with with that with that comment being shared with you i have a couple of questions for staff or superintendent did i hear correctly that phasing the transportation decisions is a schedule to be made in december

[04:47:45] 18th, December 18th, and we don't actually vote on the final boundary until January sometime because we do not get the recommendations from superintendent until after our decision to be made on transportation.

[04:48:12] I have all along assumed that our decision, our vote on the transportations will come down upon budgetary implications whether it's going to cost money and if so how much that's going to cost that has been my assumption and without knowing what the boundaries will be like i don't know how i can i can make the determination as to whether it's appropriate level of additional

[04:48:45] resources we have to put in we need to put in to provide the transportation so that's for superintendent yes sir so as you know i'll be writing the superintendent's budget in december and often i have that data and have a draft of it written with staff just prior to winter break then i'll take it i'll work it through winter break and make sure i'm at peace with it so if we're not if you're going to choose to fund transportation in alignment with the motion

[04:49:24] that was most recently made which said fifth and sixth grade any elementary school middle school for all middle schools and high school for all high schools we're talking about funding transportation at 200 schools and whether or not that's gonna be something I would need to include in the budget is a pretty important piece for me to include as I prepare the superintendent's budget so I think we felt like it was important to have that vote prior to me presenting a budget because traditionally we've provided transportation for phasing when we've

[04:50:04] adjusted boundaries at one two maybe three schools at a time i don't think we've ever contemplated transportation at 200 schools at the same time so i think the it's a question i think we could give you a range before that vote of the likely costs and i don't love speculating but based on by the 18th we'll have a scenario five right so we would be able to say all of x number of schools would be impacted and if children in those schools we could give a range i think of

[04:50:42] a possible budget implication and i think then the board's determination is do we see that as a priority to fund in a budget year such as this i think is the question i appreciate the fact that that you're gonna have to work on your budget proposer to be submitted to the school board and you will wanna know where the board stands on this important piece that has budgetary implication, but at the same time, at the same time, that's, I mean, at least as one board member,

[04:51:18] that is an important piece of information before, and I'm also, at the same time, I'm also hearing that, even though this is comprehensive, 200 schools, et cetera, it sounds as if that, as of this point, it may only affect 2% of the students.

[04:51:38] - It might be 3%, 2 to 3, but it could affect, potentially, two kids at 160 schools, or 16 kids at two schools, like I don't know. - Doctor, I just want you to know, at this point, without at least you letting us know what the range of a budgetary implication that may be, it will be really difficult for me to cast my vote on any motion.

[04:52:12] - Thank you, Mr. Moon. Mr. Frisch. - Thanks, so just some top line thoughts here. The process, I think I was clear on from the beginning about the survey work, the community conversations driving around scenarios and collecting feedback.

[04:52:44] And as we kind of went through the different scenarios and we would get the wave of people responding to the scenarios in the week or so after, every time there was like a big uptick in community feedback, I was collecting all of the feedback, categorizing it by how it aligned with our policy and then putting it in like a parking lot section, the things that didn't quite make a clean cut on the policy.

[04:53:08] And then providing that to the superintendent and the BRAC because A, that type of communication on the subject, this important, was FOIABLE, and B, I wanted to ensure that everybody who was reaching out to me was also making, that their voice was getting to the people who were making these scenario adjustments.

[04:53:28] And so over that iterative process, by the time we got to scenario four, I noticed that some elements of that community feedback had been taken, some had not. Some of that feedback had ended up in ramifications that sparked other changes that hadn't been part of previous scenarios, all to be expected.

[04:53:48] I also think that the community's reaction to this is all to be expected because we've not been doing it for years, for decades, for generations. And so, I think this is what is required and the growing pains that happen from trying to build a culture of gradual, iterative improvement.

[04:54:12] It's not gonna be better for everybody in the first year. It won't be better for everybody in the next go around and so on every five years. But over time, the swings will become less severe, the changes will become less noticeable, and we will be doing a better job of stewarding those resources.

[04:54:31] I would say the second piece that I think is important that perhaps would be a, I don't even, I think it's probably going to happen, but it could be a follow on when we actually vote, is an after action look at our work in this process to elevate what worked best, to refine what needed additional support or additional work so that as this goes forward future iterations it also improves just as the boundaries are improving I do very much appreciate staff the superintendent and everybody who's played

[04:55:06] a part in this because I know it has not been easy and it will get easier if we stay committed to the work thank you thank you miss Dixit and then I'll take a quick turn and we've got quite a few go backs and because of the essence of time we'll limit the go backs to two minutes so first of all I'd like to thank you everyone involved in this process this was a lot of work like my colleague said I did want to say that we heard a lot from a community and as board members too right so we would get like email you know sometime from the same community

[04:55:42] over and over again the same type of email from the so I hear you Flint Hill elementary you're happy with scenario four okay so and we are also responding them if they're inviting us for the PTA meeting if they're inviting us to talk to them we are hearing things I in fact want to just take the information back and pass it on to dr. Reed's team and and and Eric and you know whoever is involved and I don't get involved into the discussions like back and forth discussion we're here to understand but I'll say this much some people have very

[04:56:20] valid point some are just saying it because they want to stay in that neighborhood because the grandfather when you know and some you know is like a lineage they want to don't want to move the kid out of the school so all kind of things we're hearing so but 100% of the people are not going to be happy it'll be probably we'll touch to 90% and I think that's a that's fair I mean some we wish we could you know make everyone happy but then it's going to be a challenge to address everyone I did have one point about the high schools some

[04:57:00] because of the Western side and I'm going to point more we'll discuss more in detail later but some school are some students and families are concerned there's school their schools are changing twice high schools and because of the Western they're right now so they're in Chantilly they're said you're going to go to Westfield or South Lakes but then also Western so that's the kind of some difficulty they are facing and we'll have to figure that out that's my only concern right now is to not have students change boundary twice in the

[04:57:34] small amount of time so I'll stop there thank you I would share that concern which is why we want to extend that conversation so that doesn't happen thank you and I'll take a brief turn I just want to say that when we entered this process and starting to do the boundary review the policy review back when I was governance chair we all knew that you know I appreciate that this many new board members ran because they recognized that this was a need that was both costing us money and students time both in transportation and overcrowded and under crowded schools and it was something that hadn't been done

[04:58:12] holistically across the county in decades so what I appreciated is that we recognize the need for a thoughtful very heavily community engaged process and process that would be turned over to the superintendent to implement so that way we didn't have what I believe has happened in the past with board members sort of fighting against each other and advocating against each other and incremental changes that may have fixed one issue but created a ripple effect of other issues down the road which is kind of how we got here with the number of split feeders and attendance islands and students who end up going past a

[04:58:50] closer school to a farther school. Fixing this problem that's been let linger over 40 years is not going to be fixed in one go around. I think what we are doing with this thoughtful process is making a lot of dents in a lot of areas and setting up a process that can be used to continue to address this. Because at the end of the day we want to make sure that all of our kids are in schools that have the best amount of capacity. They're not over capacity and they're not under capacity because under capacity also has negative impacts in terms of having programming, robust programming available because there's not enough students for that programming.

[04:59:25] We wanna make sure the students are staying in their neighborhoods and their neighborhoods are contiguous so we can build those connections and all sorts of things. I think this is a good step. I really would strongly urge us as a board after we're finished with this process to do maybe a few months of debrief and lessons learned so that way the next time that we perhaps are looking at this and hopefully there'll be smaller iterations because we've sort of done a bigger change here that we can look the process because I think there's always room for continued improvement especially when you do something for the first time in 40 years I think given that I actually think it's a really good idea that we set it up in a way that operationally dr. Reed and her team look at it and I've actually appreciated

[05:00:04] very much the work of the BRAC members who've been on the committee from the Braddock district they've both been very thoughtful when I've reached out to them with questions of explaining the thinking of the committee and the decisions that were made so I think this is for what we have done here a great process I appreciate the OCCR team Angela and the other teams who are on thank you I mind blank for a second because I know how hard they've worked how hard you've worked to make sure we have that robust community engagement this is never going to be perfect because something this big and this monumental and this new by definition can't be perfect but I'm glad that we're not letting perfectly the enemy of the good here so I appreciate all your hard

[05:00:41] work I'm looking for to bring this home and I hope we as board members can stick with what we agreed to when we started this work which was to finish this in a thoughtful way that's what's best for the county as a whole thank you we'll go to two-minute go backs we'll start with dr. Anderson then miss lady thank you I'm not sure if you talked about this earlier dr. Reed through consulting and that part of this conversation today is there a reason for that they weren't ready I didn't personally speak to them but they were not ready for the

[05:01:15] data tonight okay I see that that seems to be the recurring theme of not being ready and I want to raise this here because there is no reason why the Park Lawn and Glasgow situations both of which were school board votes and mandates that were provided to them at the very start it's now we're getting that that's those are one of the three sections where there were actually school board mandates to include coats so I couldn't be more disappointed that

[05:01:50] that never happened I also wanted to ask the postmortem that is going to happen do you anticipate including school board members I think that likely there'll be a staff I don't know that I would call it a postmortem but I will call it an after-action meeting review and report because we do that honestly with big projects big incidents that's a I think it's a best practice so I know staff will certainly have that conversation I think it would be great obviously for me to be able to share that with you as a board and also to hear board feedback so I think there'll be what I would call stages of the after-action report but I

[05:02:29] think it's important that we leave some institutional knowledge about everything we learned I also am going to strongly recommend we keep a small group committee continuing as this advisory to the superintendent on this just as we have of the strategic plan we have quarterly meetings with a core group of people to make sure that what we said we would implement we are and I think that's important and then it gives us an on-ramp a group to seed from as an on ramp for the next review sure thank you for that and I understand kind of some of the rationale regarding the board's role but I think we could have been

[05:03:07] better leveraged and I will give you an example the initial and miss lady talked about how spit feeders were the primary driver this is what parents said that is not what the parents of Mason said and that's not even what the initial scenarios showed the initial scenarios for the Mason district centered on focused on Bailey's upper which is already a magnet school on route 7 it is a school that sits outside of its boundary that was the work that through consulting did for the Mason District. That was the only work they did for the

[05:03:46] Mason District schools because they said doing that prevented them from touching Glasgow and Park Lawn. I think a quick conversation with someone who knows the community like we all do as magisterials, I would have said this is not the problem to be resolved in the Mason District because it is already a magnet school it sits outside of the boundary for many many many kids it is a magnet school but yet that's how they spent their time they missed the mark one that

[05:04:19] a quick conversation would have helped to refocus thank you next to miss lady let's get that to miss Marin okay so I have questions about phasing number one dr. Reed it was just said that the board made transportation around phasing a decision about that I can't find the record of that anywhere in our policy decision in July nor in it's not listed I just thought we were talking about how

[05:04:56] students are coming in so I would like to have the verification of where it was determined that the board or people something was said just now about transportation would not be provided or what but I have other questions about phasing you know I think it's a lot of the conversation continues to be very theoretical to me and so like what if we could talk in like in such specific terms and and I want to say that I'm I was not aware other colleagues were sharing information or making deals or whatever but at some point the board does have a role and I'll say in fairness I have a community where nothing changed for them in scenarios one two and three and now in four it's

[05:05:34] changed or I have communities where it was changed in one and three and changed in two and four and those people have questions and so I think it is fair to bring to you all and say hey this is what I'm hearing and I'd like to hear what others of you are hearing when there are these areas of confusion again that's why I'd like to meet with I'll put that offer out there my community I'm also super proud of them I had two meetings of a hundred people each in the last week respectful calm and pathetic so I'm really proud of my community the way that they're turning up now when it comes to phasing I I'm most anxious about this and I really would appreciate if the superintendent made a a recommendation or at least told us what you're thinking about so I would

[05:06:14] like to aim for minimal upheaval of students learning experiences possible why there's not much time between the board vote in the next school year we vote in January we know our students are already selecting classes and it's it's only six months away it's August unemployment in our community is higher than ever and people need stability and I think we could vote on the changes in January for implementation in the following school years you know 18 months later as was said by our chair the students have been through a lot with the pandemic and these tiny humans we need to not lose sight of that I have a lot more questions about phasing and so I'd appreciate a go back because they're

[05:06:50] really important thank you let's we'll see the amount of time that we have left like if we have enough time left we'll go back we can do that or you can add it to your comments on the next section of course we'll go on to miss Anderson and then mr. Dunn so I want to say a few things first of all we are not acknowledging that leaving things exactly the way they are is not it is not in favor with a hundred percent of the community either so even if we are making changes that some people are unhappy with

[05:07:24] like leaving things the way they are is not is not necessarily tenable either um the other thing is we have 45 000 bus stops and 1600 buses we cannot duplicate that because for me it was not lip service that I hope that we can get to a point where we do healthy start times and if we are going to do busing for phasing I I can't support that because I want to make sure that people that we are actually working towards that goal and the only way that we can do that in my opinion is getting kids to go to schools closer to where they live and reducing the number of kids that we're busing

[05:08:01] particularly for things when it's your choice as to what school you go to so I I am going to advocate that we utilize this current student transfer process as a way to understand which kids are going to be going to which school.

[05:08:17] I am going to advocate that we waive the fee related to the phasing, but it would allow us to utilize the current system. And currently, when students transfer from one school to another based on a decision that their parents have made with them, they provide the transportation. And so I think that this easily can work into that process and it makes perfect sense for us to utilize that to actually understand what our staffing is gonna be.

[05:08:43] We can create a window that will open it up for those types of moves. We can utilize the systems that we already have in place so it's not one more thing that people have to learn how to do. So that would be my advocacy, but no, I am not in favor of us trying to figure out how to bust all the kids that potentially could get moved.

[05:09:03] - Thank you, Ms. Anderson. - Mr. Dunn, follow Ms. St. Chong Cunning. - Yes, I wanted to speak to the strategic governance manual, section B1, board roles and responsibilities. Number two, our duty is to represent and serve the interests of the citizens of Fairfax County, to engage with the community, to report regularly to the community, to exercise stewardship of resources and ensure that FCPS responds respectfully and in a timely manner to issues raised by members of the community.

[05:09:35] And that is certainly what all of us, I believe, have done in different ways. I believe Miss Lady was the first to hold a community meeting. - You can't hear us. Mr. Dunn, can you hear us? - I can, but I was speaking, can you hear me?

[05:09:52] - We couldn't hear the first part of what you said, so I wanted to stop and see if you could start again. We'll start your time again, I apologize, but we took this, we had some technical issues here, so we can hear you now. So if you wanna go ahead and start from the beginning, I apologize. - Sure, thank you. So I would like to refer to the Strategic Governance Manual, Section B1, Board Rule and Responsibilities.

[05:10:13] As school board members, that document states that it is our job to represent and serve the interests of the citizens of Fairfax County, to engage with the community, to report regularly to the community, to exercise stewardship of resources and ensure that FCPS responds respectfully and in a timely manner to issues raised by members of the community.

[05:10:35] I think if you examine the strategic governance manual closely, you'll see that those of us who have chosen to engage with community about school boundaries have done so consistent with the strategic governance manual. I believe Ms. Lady was the first to engage with the community very early in the process and others have continued to engage throughout.

[05:10:58] I know that I have held over 30 meetings about school boundaries alone. And so I was so saddened, so saddened to hear one of our colleagues today cast aspersions and make allegations unfounded without any evidence of people making deals.

[05:11:16] And so I will be considering a motion for censure to hold that colleague accountable for unfounded and spurious allegations, abhorrent conduct and despicable, despicable conduct, not just in this meeting today, but in other fora.

[05:11:34] so i'm putting that member on notice uh that she is accountable for her actions for her words and and it is completely contradictory uh to her obligations and they're under the strategic governance manual and that's all i'll say on that for now thank you mr dunn miss st john cunning so i remember when we all first met to talk about boundaries and as one of our school board members said they were very happy that there were new school board members that were going to take this

[05:12:12] I also remember how important it was to everyone and I had a specific situation where I worked at a school that was renovated that had renovated brand new school capacity for six to seven hundred students and at the time boundary changes were not done because it was considered too political at that time we all made a commitment that we weren't in this position for political reasons we were here to do the right work for the rest of our division so I will

[05:12:48] hope that all those people that emphatically said this is what we want will have the courage of their convictions and i will leave it at that thank you miss st john khani wait i just had one thing i wanted to paraphrase what we all have heard very famously alluded to here is you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you cannot please all of the people all of the time we all understand that we understand it's hard we understand people love their schools but at the end of the day we are whole we are being responsible to the entire

[05:13:25] division thank you miss lady yeah i just wanted to um piggyback on um madam chair anderson's comments related to the student transfer process when it comes to the kids who are going to want to choose to perhaps stay at their school based on the phasing voting that we voted on earlier in the year i've already shared that for the same reason healthy start times and also just how convoluted it can be i don't know how we can predict cost of transportation when we don't have you know how many kids are going to stay or

[05:13:59] go um it's you're you're it's going to cost us money it's going to cost us more than what we're doing so if anything's going to cost us more i'm going to vote against it um but the student transfer process i think also we need to communicate is going to have to have a hard deadline you know um and i guarantee you this could happen but i'm not going to get my schedule at you know high school x and then recognize that you know whoa maybe i could do better at high school y which is where i was supposed to maybe have phase two um that late in the game right like in order to build master schedules we have to know where kids are going and that

[05:14:37] has to be tight um and there would have to be a deadline and and this is part of what happened with with us doing phasing at kent gardens is that the numbers kept vacillating the closer we got to the opening of school you know some parents kept thinking well i'm going to be able to phase all my kids and then when they wouldn't couldn't it was easier just to move them all to the new new location versus having them split right some people don't come to that conclusion in a timely fashion to help address staffing needs so because this is system-wide i'm worried about staffing the only other thing i want to say is that having worked in at chantilly as much as i did um and

[05:15:14] having that place covered in trailers um i i well i i also have coats um there definitely are schools that have underrepresented populations economically that have trailers but there are also schools of privilege that have trailers and so i just wanted to make that since uh you know i'm not i'm not sure i'm not keeping score here but but you know the trailers and the modules impact all of our kids across all parts of our county economically and and otherwise thanks thank you miss lady miss tixit i'm just going to make a quick comment about the phasing as well the the busing or

[05:15:52] transportation on that um and if you're doing it for one two three schools like dr reed said and And my colleagues said it may be possible for not for 50, 40 schools if you have to provide transportation, both, you know, picking and then after school activity, late buses and all that.

[05:16:11] There are already a lot of people based school. I placed my own child in IB and we drove them to Robinson every day for two years, three years almost until we started driving. So, I think parents do take that responsibility and take it with ownership if they really want their child to attend a particular, so I've got a lot of constraints saying that they will provide transportation for their child.

[05:16:37] So I think community understands that, that is something they could, you know, they can do. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Dixit. We do have a few more minutes before I want to get to the next section.

[05:16:52] So I know, Ms. Marin, you wanted a go-go back, so I can give you two minutes for a go-go back. And I'll do my quintessential talking really fast. Okay, I would like to know when we're going to have the motion for that 1218 boundary phasing motion because I'm still unclear about exactly what we've talked about buses.

[05:17:11] We've talked about things. I think that also as a board, by January, we should articulate what the goal is for the boundary vote. Is it to reduce capacity inefficient by a certain percent? How much is enough? Is it to address the most egregious split feeders?

[05:17:27] Is doing any changes at all enough after so long without any? Like, and can we count as success the record community engagement? I will be satisfied if the boundary work changes the most egregious split feeders, but I wonder a few options. What if we could pass the boundary change in January and implement the changes simultaneously together in fall of 2027?

[05:17:47] Okay, families have plenty of time. Another option is that allow the freshman class entering high school this fall, the choice to go to their currently boundaried school or remain at their school. Allow families with currently the students that are in the secondary grades.

[05:18:03] So it's an up to two year phasing basically, right? You have a seventh grader, you can allow them to stay at their school for that eighth grade year. And then, well, not even two years, right? Like let's think about what the next two years look like for the set of people that are gonna go through these changes. And then at the end of the current school year, Once the boundary for Western is identified in the spring, I would like to see us conclude the boundary work by articulating what's the next round of work.

[05:18:30] I mean, this seems to be, it's gonna be something just like the budget and the CIP, or I guess it's part of the CIP. But I really do think we need to be thoughtful about the rising ninth graders because families have invested money even in getting their kids aligned with the pyramid.

[05:18:45] But also, as we said, it's a big change and they have six months. And they're just starting to get their course selections January when we make the vote and I think it's the same logic that the superintendent is applying to Western High School it's like let's get it together let's get it in place give people plenty of time and then we'll do it with a lot less angst thank you thank you seeing no their placards up I think we've had a very robust conversation today I appreciate the team's time and effort and so we will move on to the next part of the presentation on the Western High School and as we discussed there's a vote on phasing on December 18th so we'll move on I'll turn it back over to dr. Reed for the team yeah thank

[05:19:25] you miss Sizemore heiser so we're gonna go ahead and move to the Western high school and I I think how many slides do we have on this part five okay so the proposed activities here given we have about an hour they're posted and you can see they're color-coded between staffing boundaries enrollment and so forth we can go on to the next slide Eric this is something that I'm actually draw out for you I think what I found I got a lot of feedback from the board

[05:20:03] about the memo I sent you that it maybe wasn't as clear as it could have been and I think that sometimes there's a limitation in what I can provide you in writing and I'm gonna draw it out for you let me actually just start with that right now dr. Reed I believe if we don't have a mic people online can't hear so when we should have a mic up here okay thank you so what I'm going to do is just draw the phasing as we and the staff group if you can move Lisa please

[05:20:42] thanks this way a little bit and I what I want to say and I haven't clearly been able to explain this is that it's not going to be any more expensive it's just more how do I say it's more transparent about a run-up to a brand new school that isn't going to have all its features in place at the beginning and just trying to use best practice from around the country and how you open a school particularly that there's not a ton of best practice out there so I had to rely on phone calls and explanations because it's infrequent that you buy a school

[05:21:18] more often than not when you're opening a new school you buy property you have a lot of design conversations you guys know how to do that we've done that so here let me explain the thinking right now so I'm going to start just with these years 26 27 27 28 and 28 29 because really that how we're talking about phasing in is more so the confusion so 26 and 27 our thoughts are to begin with 9th and 10th grade because number one those are the amount of classrooms we're going to have that we don't need to deeply touch to run a 9th and 10th grade

[05:21:57] class. We know that running a 9th and 10th grade class is, you know, that's going to be about 1,000 students right up front to start with about 500 in a class because when the building's completed and you see the construction timeline, the building will hold about 2,000 children in four grades which is about 500 students a grade so in 26 27 we were thinking 9th and 10th grade in 27 28 we add a new 9 right and the former 9th and 10th grade

[05:22:34] become 10 and 11 so what we have now is we have 1,500 students in the fall of 27 with a new 9th grade rolling up in the 10 11 so then in the fall of 28 29 we add another new 9 we have the 9 has become 10 and we have our 11 and 12 so now we have a full school in 28 29 what we're proposing to roll this in thoughtfully is to say that for the 26 27 year

[05:23:10] I'm going to be proposing a comprehensive high school with a specialized instructional pathway We don't know which pathway yet, but likely a specialized instructional pathway that will have a traditional boundary.

[05:23:26] Comprehensive high school, traditional boundary with a specialized instructional pathway. What we're saying in 26-27 is because we're not going to have a lot of facilities, we're not going to have kids for varsity teams or championship marching bands or full, you know, senior level in forensics or theater or FBLA.

[05:23:51] And in fact, Tom Horn is recommending we are not opening it as a VHSL school, which enables the students who attend to continue to participate at their base schools in any of those sports after school, which means we would for just, bless you, for just the western high school pyramids just those five that we've talked about we would run the after-school bus for those students who want to do that but we would start with this ninth and tenth grade group they would opt in only from those western high schools for that year one

[05:24:31] because primarily as you recall it's chantilly centerville and westfield whose enrollment we need to bring down we know there may be some impact at oakton or south lakes at some point or not with the boundary but we're going to allow students from those five pyramids to opt-in in that first year. What I'm going to say though is that when the boundary is drawn sometime in June likely, May or June, there'll be a boundary that'll be drawn around the school. I guess we don't have smoke coming out of school.

[05:25:07] Getting out of school that, yeah, I forgot I drew that. Once that boundary is drawn, anyone that opted in within the boundary will bus because we're going to bus them anyhow eventually. But anyone that we, that opts in from outside the boundary, and they'll be told that, we'll have to get transportation either to a bus stop or to the school.

[05:25:30] So, but our 11th and 12th graders who are still going to their base school, we're obviously going to continue to bust like we always have just because you know the juniors and seniors have to go to their school so you don't have to opt in because you can still catch the bus with your other high school friends right it's no more expensive it's more andy and i had a hard time with this it's a little it's going to be more expensive to open a new high school and have a new set of routes but we know that because we have a new school that's natural but it's not going to cost any more to allow them to opt in for year one because we're only going to bust to the boundary

[05:26:05] we determine. Year two, when we add this new ninth grade group, the decision will have to be made at some point, here, do you become a VHSL school? I suspect the answer is more likely yes, but more, there will others say no, right? That's a decision the school is going to have to come to at that point. But at this point, because, and I'll tell you why, as a board, if you pick one sport to be VHSL, every sport has to be. So you can't, it's not one, or you can't cherry pick the, you know, the things, you have to go all or none. So anyhow, in year two, we're saying it's no longer opt-in,

[05:26:44] it's opt-out, right? Because your 10-11s continue and your nines are going to be fully, or not fully, but your nines will be boundaried in the fall of 28. So if you're in the boundary, you're gone because that's what we're busing. You can choose to opt-out for one more year because we won't have a full set of academic courses because we can't offer like multivariant calculus or some of the courses at the capstone end if we're just in with juniors here and there are other courses that aren't as likely but by 28 29 when we start the last group of ninth graders it's a hard boundary

[05:27:21] there's no more opt out there's no more opt in we're done unless kids use the transfer policy just like they could anywhere and if there was room they could like edison high school has the global stem academy or lewis has the leadership academy if there's room they can opt in but if there's no transfer. So we're proposing this. It's no more cost. It allows Dave, if we go down this road of opt-in only, Dave to start going to schools by December to begin talking about the school and

[05:27:57] recruiting a ninth and tenth grade class that can be registered in January and February based on our courses, our course selection process, and we move on. So that's, in a nutshell, what I was trying to and what we were trying to create in all these pictures, but I think it was kind of confusing.

[05:28:17] So to recap, our plan was to have 9-10 in the coming fall, opt-in, but only from those five pyramids, and we will only bus to the boundary once it's drawn, and that will be part of the understanding. Parents can get kids to a bus stop or to the school, and a bus stop should be close for almost anybody within those five pyramids.

[05:28:41] By 27, 28, the boundary's drawn. Everybody's bused within boundary, but you could still opt out because if you've started at your base school, we've said you could stay. And in 28, 29, we're done. So it gives people a two-year run-up.

[05:29:00] And to Ms. Marron's point, I actually hadn't thought about that for all schools, but I think it makes some sense. And I think that when we think about a run-up for planning purposes, I think it creates, I think, a way of coming to terms with the issue.

[05:29:18] So if we extend the boundary conversation, because really needing to get it done by January was a false need for us, because I think we've got more than enough kids that want to be there, period. And I don't see a purpose in, like, I think the boundaries we would want to give a run-up.

[05:29:37] And I think we would want kids who absolutely want to be there to have that opportunity in year one, then year two, and three, the boundary's tight. And then there are a lot of other things around VHSL that you saw, staffing. But all those things are on a timeline already.

[05:29:55] And Dave has opened a school before at Westfield, was part of the leadership team when Westfield opened. so i'm happy to take any questions or have staff take any questions but that was our thank you i think there's still one more slide or a couple more slides the next slides eric oh here we go why don't you talk to this because speak to this this is more of a technical building design yes ma'am so this is the slide depicts a tentative construction so you'll see it's color coded across

[05:30:29] xy or across the xy axis there uh blue looks at rfp process the green is looking at the design process or timeline going out for permit would be yellow construction orange I'm sorry construction would be the bid I'm sorry bid would be orange and construction is a purple or magenta color there three major activities here are looking at shell buildings athletic fields and the main building of course and just kind of a timeline how we think we would you know meet this requirement as dr. Reed depicted on the on the whiteboard there there is one

[05:31:07] more slide the last slide just covers some highlights community engagement dates we've got a naming process started in October we held an open house in October as well we're talking about we did share some potential boundaries as well we held a community meeting on November 1st and next steps we do have an OXIV permit that was given to us on the end of September the 2232 for change use application was submitted and has been received fully received from the county as of today

[05:31:43] and then we're fully working on the programming that will occur on the 13th and then we have a naming process as well part of the reason part of the reason that we're also going 9 10 and then 9 10 11 and 9 10 11 12 when you look at this construction schedule and we were able to begin this in earnest once we had some of the construction schedule we realized that like those shell buildings as what for lack of a better term we're not going to get to those for a couple years so we

[05:32:18] really also have to be cognizant of what we want to try to do in terms of the space we have because it would cost more money to move portables in which is one of the conversations we've talked about or trailers and i guess they're called trailers here but moving those in if we can stay with a construction timeline we should be able to save some costs to be able to have room for a thousand only in year one and then move to fifteen hundred and then two thousand we can better match up with the um the design and construction too so it wasn't like arbitrarily or separately discussed

[05:32:51] i just wanted to link those for you thank you dr reed i think with that we'll go ahead and start with the questions so first miss marron followed by dr anderson okay so um number one uh money so there's a tentative construction schedule i did ask some questions and i appreciate our council getting back to us. You know, what is the process? Who makes decisions that change the CIP renovation queue? So my understanding is that for the purchase of Western High School, it was not a renovation,

[05:33:25] so we didn't change the queue. However, this is a renovation. So it seems like it could be done when we do the CIP, but that is something in the memo from our lawyer says the queue is based on on a 2008 evaluation and has not been changed since.

[05:33:43] And it's very explicit that we are not to change it. Now, I know we are gonna have some information in the months ahead about reordering the renovation queue, but we are here with this decision now. And there's currently no estimate that the superintendent has provided even with how much money this is going to be.

[05:34:00] So again, I'm hard pressed to vote on this, not knowing how we're gonna fund it and where it actually fits in the renovation queue. I want to share that I really appreciate, Dr. Reed, you're looking at, and if you could, clerk slide 16, please, the phased enrollment plan.

[05:34:21] And what I'm thinking is if it's good enough for Western high school students, it should be good enough for all students. I'm even looking at the transportation. Why is transportation provided to these students, but not other students who are, you know, make a choice to be boundaried? And the nice chart that you have here, two-year phase in again it's very planful we know I mean people start signing up for summer camps in December in Fairfax sometimes you know so I just think that having a measure I think it will pay dividends in our community yes we might not be able to fix all of the most egregious problems right away but

[05:34:58] we're not going to solve a 40-year problem in one year what's the what happens if we don't do all the changes or we if we allow this phased approach then what is your proposal to look like for next year what what's like the further plan so I will stop there so I will answer as best I can at least one part of that which is why we would bus here potentially and not pay to bus in the other 199 schools or 200 schools and that's because we won't have a junior and senior class here and it's not possible we won't have a facility space

[05:35:36] or the ability to open that quickly we just we won't so it the juniors and seniors I mean we have to provide them school so we would need to bus them the off the kids that don't opt-in it doesn't cost any more to bus the kids that don't opt-in because we're already running the buses to their schools for their junior and senior classmates okay well then I have the question if we do a more phased approach over time for the rest of the school division with the boundary changes why not allow that option the option for those students to go to that central bus stop I mean that's what happens to go to TJ right

[05:36:14] or kit or to go to the AAP Center or a transfer I think as well well so my one question is can't we use the same approach currently used to transport children to level four AAP centers I know my wolf trap kids they go or they go to wolf trap to go to Louise Archer they get a bus or the TJ students right so that's one question the second question is I did not see in the memo where I asked about transfers anything about a fee and that was mentioned is there a fee for students to transfer and it's not in this memo there's just a lot of information coming out today that I feel like like I would love a 101 to this like let's have the 101 of all the things that are involved so I know how

[05:36:53] to make a decision on it like how much is the fee and so the AAP Center just want to clarify that for the board and the community the AAP Center receiving AAP services is a it's a legal right right it's like an IEP in many states consider gifted and talented students to have IEPs just as students who need special supports or have special needs so this the busting to AAP centers is in a kind of a separate category it's not a parent choice it's where we put the

[05:37:27] situate the program having said that TJ is a magnet school too so that's you has its own issue I think it's something we certainly can take a look at and I know Andy and just thinking of how to you know add a new school to our whole transportation system that's a that's a whole nother cost basis but that's part of why we're saying we're only gonna bust to the actual boundary you choose for the Western High School even as early as this fall we're not gonna bus outside of that well we're trying to replicate our current practice but so

[05:38:07] yes I mean that was certainly the intent because we don't I also heard from several board members the concern that doing this would cost more money and it actually it would not yeah we well I mean when you look at it I'm trying to we're only gonna bust the boundary so it won't cost to let kids opt in or out isn't gonna change the cost because we're only gonna bust to the boundary I have seen no data to confirm that there isn't any data yet because we don't how many kids are going in or out but what we're saying is we're only gonna bust to boundary like we're not gonna pay to bus anybody from outside the boundary so if

[05:38:45] we had a hundred kids or 2,000 it won't matter because we're not gonna bus kids from outside the boundary I don't know how else to maybe I'm not saying it clearly enough okay because we have to provide busing for the school within the boundary but we're not gonna bus outside of it in this plan but thank you miss dr. Anderson then mr. moon thank you the scenario that you've shared in terms of opening up with grades 9 and 10 that was always what you've shared since the very beginning that's not that's not a result of the 2232 i i'm a little confused there no i think the way we're trying to

[05:39:24] do it one grade at a time is the 2232 because we're not going to be able to start any kind of renovation until spring and so i think there was a sliver of hope that we could have gone 9 10 9 10 11 12 but we can't it's 9 10 9 10 11 and 9 10 11 12 is the only the main difference is in the two out years where we're just adding one grade level at a time rather than two and then two.

[05:39:45] That's correct. Okay, thank you for that. So during the first year are we looking at a minimum and maximum? How many kids are we targeting to enter during the 26, 27 year? No more than a thousand. Right. Because 500 and 500 and I think if we only took 400 and 400 that would be fine.

[05:40:11] we've had a lot more interest i think than we're going to have spots so until people realize that my neighbor's not coming with me so maybe i need to stay with my best friend so those are the pain points that will change your scenario is there a number that you have in mind that is too few in order to make this realistic i don't have that number in mind there are schools all over the commonwealth that are very small and very large we tend to have very large schools here we're the 6a division and you know we may open with a smaller school i don't think that's going

[05:40:45] to happen but we'd have to look at what we could staff i i think we need to be kept whenever this starts to move i think we need to be kept very current on the number of people who are opting in because if we end up opening up a school that has 300 kids because again when we get into the specific situation well my best friend wants to stay at this school because they play lacrosse there's going to be no lacrosse there all of those things will whittle away at that goal of a thousand maximum i do think we need to have a minimum for this to make sense um one of my other

[05:41:21] questions is i i think i i'm not seeing how this cannot add a cost because in my mind's eye let's say marcia and i are neighbors just like we are now we go to the same school right now we're in the same grade i decide to go into the new school because it's in boundary for all of us she decides to stay where we are currently let's say we're 10th graders now you're busting me as a 10th grader someplace new you're busting her to the same place how does this and we're neighbors

[05:41:54] how is this not an additional cost so let me be clear this is andy are you feeling vindicated because you were just as confused as i as i am right now it's not confused it's not i know i'm confused so well so let me clarify well you were right now let me clarify i'm confused let me clarify there is an extra cost to opening a new high school and routing transportation to it there is when you open a high school you're going to add bus routes to that school there is an additional

[05:42:33] cost but we're saying is there's no additional additional cost to open it this way because we're gonna have to we would have to run routes to the boundary of a new school period and that's an additional cost to what we're currently doing today sure and I agree with you perfect good we're good there's no no but there's no additional cost on top of that because if you're out of boundary you got to get to a stop or the school on your own we're not bussing out of boundary kids to that new school yeah my question was not for the outer boundary again let's say again we are neighbors we're both in boundary how do

[05:43:13] you bring me to one new school again that's the additional cost right and bring her to the school where she if she went to the new school that would be the first additional cost but to bring her to the existing school that's the additional additional cost but that's the old cost that's already embedded because you're already running your juniors and seniors still to their old school so she would just go to the same bus stop with the juniors and seniors because we run one high school route for those schools so if you were a 10th grader that didn't opt in you would just jump on the bus with your 11th and 12th graders because we're still taking them to their home schools for two years

[05:43:53] except for the ones that are again not packaged in that nice way so that will be an additional cost they have to get there on their own hmm okay well I'm I'm gonna need to wrap my mind around that a little bit.

[05:44:08] Can you speak a little bit regarding the Centerville renovation? Are we completely paused on that? - So I can speak to that. We're actually holding a public meeting next week, I believe on the 18th, George? 18th, the evening of the 18th.

[05:44:23] Miss Dixit, I know, has asked that we come out and visit with the PTA. So Eric, our facilities team, our engagement folks, we're gonna be at Centerville High School to talk about the renovation progress, I believe the permitting where it stands at this time.

[05:44:42] And I'm not sure, I haven't had time to check in with the team. - Are we paused or do we have a date? Or you can't tell me here because that's gonna unfold what you're going to tell the community on the 18th. - We're still waiting on the permitting. So we're gonna be providing the community an update. But with the new, I think we're ready to move forward in some capacity with at least a phase of the beginning.

[05:45:06] But again, I'll defer that to Eric or we can get back to you in more detail. But didn't we use the Centerville funds in order to purchase this Weston High School? We did some, some of Centerville's funds, but not exclusively Centerville funds. There were funds from other projects that have not yet been begun. I would be very curious to see how all of this is presented in the CIP work this year because it seems to be a lot of moving parts.

[05:45:29] We've undone certain things and now they're starting again. Where's all the money coming from? I'd like to go back, please. - So we did send a breakdown of where the funds came from, I believe last summer prior to committing the funds. - I have it embedded in my head. - Good, and there were a number of projects, and so we will provide that again.

[05:45:51] - Thank you very much. Mr. Moon, followed by Mr. Dunn. - Dr. Reed, for clarification purposes that I'm gonna have to ask you a couple of questions regarding the proposed phasing in. I think Mr. Smith is blocking my view, sorry.

[05:46:10] 26, 27, nine, and 10, I'm gonna just use a freshman, rising freshman ninth grader who wants to be a footballer on the football team at Westfield High School. So instead of a new high school, wants to opt out to go to stay, go to a Westfield right there, and then plays football.

[05:46:38] 27, 28, first scenario, the new school becomes VHSL school, member school, so there's a football team. So if he stays at Westfield, he will be unable to play football because he is within the boundary of a new school.

[05:46:59] I'm asking for clarification. If he doesn't go to the school within the boundary and that it is a VHSL member school now, he cannot play football at Westfield.

[05:47:17] - So Tom, I should have asked Tom to be here, but I don't believe that's accurate. there is a carve-out in VHSL which I sent to all of you about participation when the division sets boundaries. - Yes.

[05:47:33] - And it would be when there are firm boundaries. But I could, Giovanni, would you text and see if Tom's available to come down and answer that question? - Okay, you can send it to me, right? That's the first question. Second question is, you talk about form boundary. Let's talk about form boundary, which is 2829.

[05:47:51] So that student stays at Westfield, 26, 27, play football, and also play 27 and 28, play football at Westfield. 28, 29, it's a form boundary, as you said, with no opt-out.

[05:48:09] If he stays at the Westfield, he's not gonna be able to play football. - I, okay. - I'm asking. - We have an answer. I know, I'm just, I don't wanna give you the wrong answer. - This is Tom's email. - Okay, Tom's email went to, okay.

[05:48:30] Should the division consider allowing new ninth grade shoes to be, I feel like I need to send this to you, otherwise I'm just going to read a bunch of. Okay, send it to me, because I need to, sure, okay, thank you, that's the question, those are the questions that I have for clarification, so that I can tell them to respond to anyone asking me what that means, and I need to understand them better.

[05:48:56] I do, well I do too, and I think what I need to do is make it, a lot of this information is at the theory level, I should say, right? And we wanna make sure, and that's one of the things Dave Jiggles is doing is sort of translating that into simply to understand chunks.

[05:49:13] Because in your example, a student could also choose to go to the new Western High School as a ninth grader and play at Westfield, right? If they were interested in being part of the new high school. So I think those are some of those questions. And I think what Tom wants to do is make sure we start with a clear understanding about that.

[05:49:35] - The last thing I wanna do as a board member is not be able to answer questions after casting my vote on something. - Yes, sir. - Thank you. - I think Ms. Lady's forwarding you the email that we sent on the 30th. - Thank you, Mr. Moon.

[05:49:50] Mr. Dunn followed by Ms. St. John Cunning. - Thank you. I wanted to just opine briefly that-- - I apologize, I need to give the clerk's team just a minute to turn your volume up. So if you just pause, I'll let you know the volume as soon as they signal me that the volume's up high enough i'll tell you to start my apologies mr dunn if the clerk could just let us know when you're ready i'll let him know thank you all right mr dunn um your time is starting at three minutes so go ahead and start we can hear you now thank you for your patience thank you um i i i wanted to just offer a quick

[05:50:27] thought that i don't think the quote-unquote renovation of the western high school is a renovation that would necessarily amend the renovation queue I think it's more in the nature of a capacity enhancement and it's definitely the case that there have been many schools where capacity enhancements have been performed without renovating the existing school just adding on new and and those have been added over time over the past 20 years without making any change

[05:51:04] to the renovation queue and i can offer several examples but i wanted to offer that as as a framework for maybe understanding how to think about this but i wanted to ask mr gordon how what is the process for determining the scope of that capacity enhancement or renovation for example it's not just the shell buildings and converting you know pre-k classrooms to you know high school there's also missing athletic fields like there's no football stadium right so what is the process for coming up with the full scope of work that i presume will be brought back

[05:51:42] to the board at some point and and that's the second question will that be brought back to the board at some point yes sir it will be so i think it's a combined staff effort so there's an athletic component to it there's a programming piece to it and there's a facility piece so all three of us will come together to develop that timeline and estimate and then come back to the board and and - And as part of that, will there be a recommendation whether to keep the swimming pool or not?

[05:52:08] Because that will be the only swimming pool in any high school, in any school building in the county. - The recommendation, yes, of course it would be. And I would strongly recommend we keep it. - Okay. I wanted to understand if we are from outside the boundaries, gets in through opt-in, will they be able to bring their siblings with them just to keep families together?

[05:52:40] or is that under discussion at all? - I think it's under discussion to be determined. I think if it is from just one of those five pyramids, we would have to look at on a space available basis, but I think it's certainly up for discussion, Mr. Dunn.

[05:52:59] - The shell buildings, those are completely empty. That shouldn't have to go through a 2232 process 'cause you're just putting up interior walls in there to subdivide into classrooms. So can't that be broken out and put at the front of the renovation process? - Well, Mr. Dunn, that was my exact question.

[05:53:15] You were a fly on the wall. In fact, the team all is probably rolling their eyes at me because I asked that I think four different times with an increasing volume. But I'll let Mr. Gordon answer as he did for me. - Sir, we are front loading the shell buildings on the front end of this process.

[05:53:35] But when you take, it's all one site analysis. So we can't go to the county and split them apart. just one site analysis, looking at the shell buildings, looking at the fields, looking at what we're gonna be the main building as well. So it's a whole complete process.

[05:53:51] - Okay. And I wanted to ask, I mean, new high schools open across the country all the time. I mean, Prince William, Loudon, Montgomery County, I think is building one. Why aren't there, Dr. Reed said, you said there's no best practices out there, but there must be best practices.

[05:54:08] We've been opening new high schools for decades. Why can't we just follow the best practice rather than create a new process from whole cloth? - So there are best practices for opening new high schools. I opened one in the division before I left to come here. What I was referring to is those are generally high schools that have been planned from the ground up, which means we've bought the property, we've designed the school, we've laid out the fields.

[05:54:35] We're opening the school with most of those things intact. here we bought the school and it was a school that had a lower enrollment than what we planned to have at the end of our three year design and construction adjustments and it doesn't have a lot of the pieces that a traditional comprehensive high school would have and that makes it unique so that moves it into sort of what I would characterize as a more unique campus style and that's where there are many practices and it just pinging a variety of colleagues around the country this is where we landed with 9 10 then

[05:55:14] 9 10 11 and then 9 10 11 12 just because if this is unusual this is not the norm to just buy a school has there been analysis done of which high schools in the area have overcrowding and which have the greatest overcrowding because I thought the most significant overcrowding was at Centerville but we're just opening it up randomly to anyone it seems like we're not really taking advantage of buying this property at reduced cost to address the overcrowding at at Centerville which is necessitating a capacity enhancement if we could take

[05:55:52] those students and bring them to to Western High School not knowing the geography very well then we could perhaps eliminate the capacity enhancement at Centerville and save those dollars actually mr. and I believe the most the smallest footprint most overcrowded high school of that group or Chantilly is the Chantilly high school Centerville also is and I know mr.

[05:56:16] McDaniels talked about the number of trailers just in the western high school pyramids would be I think 1,700 students alone in trailers so really Chantilly is probably the most than Centerville than Westfield but there's more growth planned and more permitting in that part of the county for further growth and really anywhere else in the county right now so we're trying to look not just at today but sort of what we're gonna be looking at down the road so we're not moving kids multiple times but you're correct Centerville also needs some remediation for sure thank you I just want to thank

[05:56:54] and plans and the explanation you provided it's very informative and very helpful. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Dunn. A lot of it was due to the questions you asked, so I appreciate you being really straightforward about those. I do have Dr. Ponce with Mr. Horn on the phone. So if you wouldn't mind, Mr. Moon, re-asking your question, we'll have Mr. Horn answer.

[05:57:17] Go ahead, Mr. Moon. Tom, are you there? I am. Okay, and you guys can hear Tom? All right. Okay, can you hear? He can hear you. Can you see the screen? Well, he can hear you. Okay. He knows the plan. Do you want me to paraphrase? At 26-27, that's 26-27, a freshman choose to opt out from new high school to play football for Westfield. And the following year, 27-28, new high school

[05:57:54] becomes, in the first scenario, a VHSL member school. Can that freshman, now sophomore in 27-28, stay at Westfield and continue playing football at Westfield?

[05:58:17] So in other words, Tom, a ninth grader didn't -- Yeah, I haven't. Okay. Yeah, so thank you for the question. And there are two elements to this. The first to know is that once a student establishes eligibility at a VHSL member school, they can remain eligible as long as they remain continuously enrolled.

[05:58:37] So if FCPS allows a freshman to go to Westfield and participate as a freshman, and we also allow that student to stay at Westfield as a sophomore, their eligibility will persist. Okay, thank you. In the following year, the last 28-29, new high school becomes VHSL member school, and also boundary becomes form, meaning there is no opt-out for any grade.

[05:59:10] this particular student is now a junior, and he cannot opt out from his boundary, can he play, can he still play football at Westfield? - So his choice to remain at Westfield and be eligible would be a school board decision by VHSL policy.

[05:59:34] When we adopt a boundary and we tell kids you must go to this school, then they must participate at the school we tell them to go to. If throughout the boundary process, we allow kids to opt into a different school, they can be eligible there.

[05:59:53] So in other words, throughout this timeline, FCPS will control the eligibility of the kids in which schools they are eligible, but kids are never eligible at two schools. So when we convert to the new school being a VHSL member school, and we make boundaries not optional, all kids who live in that boundary will be eligible at the new school, kids that live outside of that boundary, kids that live inside that boundary that attend school outside of the boundary would only be eligible if they were continuously enrolled in the previous school.

[06:00:31] So to your example, when the new school becomes a VHSL member school, students will have the option to remain where they are and remain eligible or to be eligible based on the new boundary plan at the new school. - It seems fair for her.

[06:00:48] - So even in the third year, 28, 29, even with a form boundary, and as a VHSL member schooler, a student who will be a freshman in 26, 27, opting out to play football at Westfield, 27 and 28 still plays football at Westfield, and 28, 29 can still play football at Westfield.

[06:01:19] - Mr. Moon, I'm sorry, I was giving you a little extra time to answer, so. - Can you give the last answer? - Yeah, I'm happy to put you on a go back, but I wanna make sure we get to our other colleagues as well. - Tom, can you answer that last question, and then. - Yes, yes, Mr. Moon, if FCPS allows that student to continue to attend Westfield through our Regulation 2230 or any other process, then they would remain eligible at Westfield, even in '28 when the new school was a VHSL school.

[06:01:45] - But if the student, once a boundary was firm, chose to go to the new school because now that is their boundary at the new school not old school they could choose either one they could stay at Westfield and be continuously enrolled or become a new student I think we're gonna move if we don't mind I just want to make sure we get time for the college right could I just have that inviting please yes it's already forwarded to you mr. moon so you should have it in your email I think miss lady forwarded to you and so our next and I just try to keep going I'll go in the st. John Cunning okay so I'm

[06:02:25] gonna actually be very quick I know we're pressed for time I know we are considering a school within the school or a path and as we start moving on this project we my expectation but just let me know dr. Reed will we know what that path or the school within the school is going to be so when kids are signing in on in 26 27 they're taking that into consideration I believe so that's all I wanted to know that was quick we do have time I just want to make sure we get to everybody so next we have miss Anderson first I want to say that I support this

[06:03:02] timeline I think it makes a lot of sense when we decide to build a building it we have many years that tell the community that it's that it's coming which I think is why we had the language in the 8130 policy that said that if it was a new building that you would be required to go without phasing however because this is a unique circumstance I would I would be willing to have the board provide an exception to the policy for this particular school so for exactly the type of circumstance that mr. moon was talking about where if I have a student that wanted to go to wanted to phase in and stay at Westfield that's fine and

[06:03:41] they would continue to be able to play sports because that would be the phasing that would allow them to do that so I have no problem with that at all I think that that on-ramp for this school makes perfect sense i also agree with mr dunn that i think that this is covered that the purchase of this building all included the minor renovations that it's going to need in order for it to actually be utilized in in the way that it is and this is i'm going to continue to harp on the fact that this is a huge cost savings for the entire community Out in Gainesville, outside the county,

[06:04:16] Maryfield Garden Center just sold a 38-acre piece of land for $160 million with no building on it. This is a fully functional school that we are gonna be able to make work for us on 33 acres in county.

[06:04:32] This is unheard of in terms of the deal that we have. And I just don't want us to forget that as we move forward. And I am eager to come up with a path that will work for Centerville High School. and the rest of the schools. No one is trying to jump anything on the queue, but let's not forget that the Western High School location has been on the CIP for 10 years.

[06:04:54] So we are working towards what we have continued to tell the community that we're working towards within the bond price process that we have already had set up. So I am very comfortable with this process and I am eager to see where we land next on the next portions of determining programming and everything else.

[06:05:14] - Thank you, Ms. Anderson, Ms. Dixit, and then I'll take a turn. I apologize, Ms. Lady and then Ms. Dixit. We just didn't have you on our list, we missed it. - Okay, I'm easy to miss.

[06:05:32] So I also support this timeline because it is a unique situation that's been reiterated. I do wanna talk for a brief second about the student transfer process and the idea of close by school bus stops. That might be practice in other places, but as someone who worked at a school that was over capacity, but also always had people wanting to come to it and being the recipient of reading what was in that transfer portal, those folks are not provided transportation.

[06:06:04] And while I philosophically can understand the notion that if I can get to a bus stop, that I could ride on that bus, but only if that bus is under capacity as allocated for the neighborhood to begin with. Like, my point is there's bad numbers, right?

[06:06:21] I mean, I don't have many seats that are on a bus. Let's say, hypothetically, they're 28. If I'm the 29th kid, I'm not getting another bus because I can reach that bus stop, okay? We need the community to fully understand. We do things within reason. If I have 17 kids on that bus and there's three kids who can get to it, well, that's reasonable, perhaps, that they could then ride on it, unless the boundary people, all of a sudden, three families moved in with five children that needed that bus, then they might be removed from that bus and have to go back to their own transportation.

[06:06:51] I just want that understood. And there's a lot of reference to sibling, and I'm gonna just be pretty blunt here. I really want the regulation for student transfers looked at. I personally believe that changing high schools because of a world language should be removed because it's being used for other purposes.

[06:07:13] We're fronting that that's the reason. I also struggle, and I don't think people fully understand that most of the sibling transfers are at the elementary level, and most of our over-capacity schools are our AAP centers. And the second that, you know, hypothetically, my oldest brother, who's AAP, gets transferred, and mommy says, "May Robin come along as well, "even though I'm not AAP," then that makes it tough, right?

[06:07:41] And that's a big transportation piece. I think we tease out the numbers. So sibling one I struggle with because quite frankly, I am nothing like my two brothers other than we have the same parents, okay? And what I gravitated towards athletically or academically or theatrically or musically was very different from them.

[06:08:02] And so at the end of the day, we can all chart a path and I've seen it done when we have reboundary situations. I lived through a reboundering at Chantilly. And it was the people from Oakton didn't wanna come, the people from Oakton now don't want to leave, right? I mean, everyone loves their school, so to go back to a quote earlier, we can't please everybody, but, and I also do want to say that, yeah, the queue is not, well, the current queue, I think, is based on the age of the school, but Centerville definitely needs some love, and nobody's undermining that.

[06:08:34] I think that we need to also, and I need to say this, and I won't need to go back, I personally think we're missing an opportunity with how this school is designed. It's designed as a magnet school. I don't think we've given enough conversation to that, but if it's gonna be comprehensive, I need to understand what percentage is pathway, what percentage is comprehensive, as we look to enroll 1,000 in the first year.

[06:08:59] - Thank you, Ms. Lady. We'll now go to Ms. Dixit. - I don't know, Dr. Ms. Lady. Again, I said doctor, I know. - I know, you got that stuck in your head too. - So anyway, I don't know if you know the answer for how many students will be in the pathway right now, no?

[06:09:16] So I have a couple of thoughts. Centerville High School is very far from Weston High School. We can't just move students from Centerville High School to Weston. It's 25 minutes just in a car. Forget about the bus.

[06:09:32] And so the students who live close proximity probably are the ones going to be slated to go to Weston High School and that site. And a lot of students are coming from Westfield, from Herndon to Westfield.

[06:09:48] they're sitting in the buses for 30, 40 minutes. That makes sense, but I think some of my community members did not like that they were moved from Centerville to Westfield or Weston in of those scenario, map scenarios we had.

[06:10:05] That's not going to work. Second, I wanted to ask about the course selection. I know the students can pick their courses from ninth graders or 10th graders early as I believe March or April something like that but how about the pathways like you asked when do we know the students are enrolling on those pathway and what type of pathways will be available to them house how early how soon can we get that I think I think that I think one of the ideas you know

[06:10:43] I'd rather it was Lewis or Edison when they added those pathways they added after the school was open in this case because sometimes those pathways cost extra money right whereas comprehensive schools are comprehensive schools the one pathway where we have a possible funding partner is the aerospace pathway so if we can move forward with the aerospace pathway and have a funder that's likely what we're going to propose given our budget situation right

[06:11:17] now so I I know that Dave Jiggles and dr. Ponce we're certainly you know debating and discussing that right now and mr. Smith who's convening the group that works on it but I want to make sure that you know that we have a funding source for any kind of pathway and aerospace certainly is one near Dulles that would make sense there may be others another pathway some schools around the country have more than one right so it's just but that's where we

[06:11:53] would start and we may have a different pathway for example at Westfield when it's all said and done or a different pathway at Centerville following a renovation so our hope would be to have some kind of a pathway accessible for students really in all parts of the county in the FAA grant we're pursuing right now that we will be completing in January actually is a three-year grant we're applying for for eventually six high schools and my intent is to do two schools a year for three years one in each region but we would start with the Western High School being one of the first because it's obviously got a

[06:12:31] palette that we can place it in right from the get-go the one of the other pathways which will not cost a lot of money at least from the infrastructure way other than the servers and stuff like that is AI I think corporate partnership is the way to go there on I know some of the companies corporates are speaking with FCPS at the moment just to maybe figure out the curriculum together and what is industry needed I know it's it's something we've been talking about like AI pathway in the school so this is something I think you

[06:13:09] If you want students to come in, opt into the school, and I kind of agree with Ms. Lady here, like we do provide, need to provide them some exciting courses too also. Like it is, you know, we want the school to be successful as all our other schools are.

[06:13:28] And we have been talking to the community about all these pathways. So we just wanna deliver on that. I think that's what I'm saying. - Thank you, Ms. Dixit, and I will take a quick turn then we can go to go back so we've got about 12 more minutes for today's work session so first I want to say that I think this is a very exciting opportunity but I wanted just to kind of put back out there that this is a very unique situation on one hand we've had a need that it has been part of the CIP for over ten years around a Western high school and while I heard in the

[06:14:05] community enrollments dropping why do you need this new school enrollment is is not even across the county, right? So there is increased enrollment needs on that side and potential projected enrollment needs with the housing development and overcrowded schools more on the western side, putting my old at-large hat back on.

[06:14:22] So I think it, one, fulfills a longstanding need. Two, was a once in a lifetime opportunity. So I think what we used to do or traditionally do or do in other situations is always, we can of course look to that as a starting point, but it's hard to take what we traditionally do to a once-in-a-lifetime unique opportunity.

[06:14:41] We have to be creative and flexible and be willing to be open-minded of maybe doing things a little bit differently with keeping students at the center. I appreciate this thoughtful phasing because I think it keeps students at the center, especially on activities for students, which is so important in high school along with the academics.

[06:15:00] So just the first thing I wanted to say is, I think as we move forward, if we can continue this sort of thoughtful situation and ensure we continue to have robust community engagement and communication as we work through the phasing in of grades, I think that's important.

[06:15:15] And I'm just gonna put out that this building and this school is so unique and so beautiful that I think students will be excited for this unique opportunity and the potential for these pathways. Dr. Reed, as you're exploring these pathways, I think aviation makes a lot of sense. I would just really encourage you to find a way to focus on these skills.

[06:15:33] And I talk about ad nauseum, that's gonna set our kids apart in the future AI during future or a future with jobs that we don't know what they are. When you talk to industry consistently across industries, what they say they need is people who can think creatively, critically think, analyze, work in teams, collaborate and communicate.

[06:15:53] Across industries you hear that. And so having some sort of focus on providing opportunities and authentic ways to do that, speech and debate, as a hint, I think is gonna be critical alongside aviation or some of these AI or some of these very industry-specific pathways.

[06:16:12] So I would just really encourage you to consider that. And I'm just gonna leave it with a little bit of a personal story. I know change is hard and we wanna make sure we're thoughtful, but what we are doing here and what we're doing with the boundary work is what we've asked special education parents to do every day.

[06:16:27] Go to a different school, be bused twice as far away from your school. Oh, now we're opening a new program in this other school. now you have to go to this other school now or this school can't meet your needs now you have to go over here oh siblings we don't take that into account we've had i mean i can tell you my son went from preschool in his base school and starting kindergarten five out of the six preschool kids were based there and were told they don't belong there because there's no space and had to go to a elementary school not just outside of their pyramid because they wasn't on their pyramid but outside of their high school pyramid where they would know nobody this we do this all the

[06:17:02] time so I understand it's hard I have lived it my kids were never in the same school until they got to Lake Braddock so it's hard but this is a unique opportunity and I think if we continue to be thoughtful about it we can bring people along we'll go to go back I can't read that I'm sorry oh Ricky Dr.

[06:17:25] Anderson sorry no thank you just with my final comments one of the things that I want to reiterate dr. Reed is I really want us to be sure that we're being kept abreast of how many kids are enrolling for whatever the reason because I do think there is a number that is not going to be a reasonable number yes excitement yes but when we when the rubber hits the road who knows what decisions will kids will make and their families will make I also want to lean into what I think Miss Marion shared earlier regarding the consistency of practice if we're able to find some way to have this happen where we have some

[06:18:04] flexibility with students who are opting out or opting in I'd like to see if that's feasible with the rest of our schools in the boundary process instead of just saying hey you're on your own if we have a stop that they can go to that's great and I'm glad that miss lady reiterated because I wasn't clear that we would not add buses at the stop it would be if there's room so I think that that needs to be continued part of the conversation.

[06:18:35] Also, I'd like to see these costs. I'd like to see these numbers. I know we're not there yet because we don't know who the kids are and where they are, but as soon as that's feasible, that's important to know because I think it's great that you say it may not, but I'd like to see it on paper because our job is to verify what's being shared with us.

[06:18:54] Can you also speak to, I know in this process, we're looking to reduce the number, the overcapacity at the schools. And I got four of the schools rather than five, Chantilly, Westfield, Oakton, Centerville.

[06:19:10] - South Lakes may have an impact, but in the final boundary might not, right? Oakton and South Lakes are question marks. - Okay. - We do know that Westfield, Centerville, and Chantilly were the three pyramids that we most want to impact.

[06:19:26] Right. So how will we most impact them with this opt-out, I'm sorry, opt-in situation? How are we going to be able to track that intentionally? Right. We, I think we likely are going to have less of a most impact in the first year and then gradually by a year or two and then year three, it will be fully impacted.

[06:19:50] But to start, because we don't know exactly yet where the boundaries will carve, Because they're a variety if you look at it geographically it looks different than if you look at it by capacity We're just not sure. So that's why we want to extend that conversation and be very thoughtful about that I don't think I Think that I think it's we're not going to know everything and it's not going to be perfect till we begin to We roll into it. So we won't know the boundary before students are opting in correct that's why we're gonna David is gonna mr.

[06:20:27] jagels gonna be telling families if you want to opt in just like people who opt in at Edison for a specialized program provide their own transportation you know that yes there'll be a space of the school for your student but we can't guarantee busing till we know what the boundary is and then when we have the boundary first year only but after the first year that because the boundary will be drawn even the 27 28 everybody will know the boundary for a year so they'll you know be able to opt out there's no opting in at that point because we're again only gonna bust to the boundary and the only opt-in in year two would be if there's room by using the student transfer process so the only families

[06:21:07] that could potentially be caught up in this are families that have incoming ninth graders this year and potentially kids the following year they might be in in limbo because they won't be in limbo but the first year will but okay my times up I'll ask you after okay thank you miss Marin yeah just quickly I did put a bunch of next steps into our document colleagues I appreciate you taking a look at them I'm just tripped up on this transportation thing so we're saying if you're able to get yourself to school if you have the privilege of a

[06:21:44] car or someone who could take you you can go to this school but if you don't you can't wow that that's a tough one that's this well that's what it sounds like if you for some other places I thought I heard that but this is let's let miss Marin finish and doctor we can address your question okay I'll put that aside for a moment sorry for any confusion the question is gosh this boundary policy includes four aspects I've only really heard a capacity addressed in any public meeting. I have not heard discussion about access to

[06:22:24] programming increasing and this very discussion about are we going to continue to bus kids to AAP and IB and AP and all these places that's part of the reason why we have transportation issues. Now I haven't also heard from the board of the superintendent a commitment to explore those aspects in the next iteration of boundaries so it's just feels like it's the last minute here and all of a sudden we're talking about access to programming. Where was this conversation in any of the community meetings because all of the materials that were handed out were about capacity and percent capacity there was no data provided about how we're gonna change academies for capacity and this gets to

[06:23:02] the question from this morning about what decisions are we making to increase access for all of these programs so I just would like to be clear on again what are the goals of this is it to better right-size the capacity of our buildings? Is it to take care of some really egregious split feeders? What person is enough this time around? And how much is it all going to cost? Thank you. Dr. Reed, do you want to add? On the, I was trying to, on our current transfer policy, which has been reviewed, and I've asked the team to go back, staff to

[06:23:39] review it again to see, because there have been some questions raised about it, and they are, I think it's almost complete at this point. Parents have to provide transportation now for any transfer anywhere in the school division and because our schools are all excellent schools we believe from an equity standpoint that any school student is assigned to is a great school if a parent has it or a student has a particular penchant for another school and there is room we've allowed it across the county I think since time began as long as families provided transportation and that wouldn't be new

[06:24:18] here with the Western High School it's following that practice okay but it doesn't make it right we've already done it we've always done it that way that limits accessibility for kids again my kids have never had meaningful world language because it's either a magnet school or it's provided I don't want to perpetuate or at least let's acknowledge that it's something that we want to address let's face it we're actually out of time we've got one minute left so unless it's something that's a burning urgent issue missing John Cunning we're gonna say just say thank you to the staff for all your hard work and I know

[06:24:58] it's been a lot and having the Western High School which is a great opportunity of a throw in the middle of the boundary work has been challenging so thank you for your hard work thank you to my colleagues for thoughtful questions there was a next steps document so please make sure to take a look at the next steps and thank you dr. Reed with that this meeting is adjourned

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