Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, February 10, 2026

Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 4h 20m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6iJ1BaPBpQ
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 2026-10-28. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:00] a presentation on policy 8542 environmental stewardship thank you mr. McElveen and it's my pleasure this morning to have mr. Gordon share an update on this policy as it's a continues to be an important topic for

[00:00:15] us as a school division so mr. Gordon excuse me mr. Gordon turn the mic on

[00:01:03] thank you let me go back and start okay um provide a few of the certification programs of the process undertaken by Philippians and capital programs to background adoption of 8540 occurred in November 6th of May and was reviewed in September 26th of 2013 this is the school board for this policy a regular county school board is dedicating a sustainable by minimizing our environment

[00:01:40] the school board reducing energy emissions and fostering responsible management this work adopted a joint environmental task task with anyone two components to the conversation We're going to talk about waste management, four or five slides on that.

[00:02:06] Some of our net zero, how we're changing from net zero to globes. So first up, waste management, some of our contracts. First, we have P, a request for proposal, a Division I organics contract.

[00:02:27] This is a joint effort, and we expect this awarded, this contract to be held first, 2026 from now. The second is waste management, electronic waste, and we have a contract by the FCPS, operations contract with the Fairfax when we look at waste management and initiatives that up on slide there are kind of look at four areas of interest

[00:03:04] is you know cost new cost neutral act with two areas or two places it looks at our constructs and in our cities where can we recycle the best efforts that we can well we look at things or potential savings identify savings to this that's it you know could be done it could looking you know side printing products

[00:03:35] to move down look at additional activity share so that's initiative and then using trash recycling in schools and offices there are some on the next slide that potentially happen but to do that and you know those are composting at a division-wide effort and sustainable procurement practices and also

[00:04:10] transitioning to re-zoom reusable food services and cafeterias those are plates plates and forks and knives. We're currently not set up to do that, and if we were to go that route, there'd be a cost to support that. Also, there could be potential revenue generation to offset costs. We aren't doing this right now, but we could partner with companies to give our recycling materials. We also could have a contract for thrift books, for discarded texts and library books. The county currently does this, and this is something we could do as well. Next this slide the purpose of this slide is show a comparison of

[00:04:50] possible waste management initiatives and the impact verse effort. So as I mentioned before we're not doing all these currently we're doing shared tables and we're doing composting in the limited fashion. Currently have five schools that have a pilot program initiative doing composting that's Marshall Road Elementary School, Carson Middle School, Madison has some limited composting efforts in Lemon Road and Chester Brook. And there is a follow-on RFP that the county has let out that we are going to piggyback off of for composting as well. So of these items,

[00:05:27] again, we're only doing shared tables and some limited composting. Again, in this slide, the purpose of showing how sometimes you might have a low implantation effort and you might have of a high reduction impact. So we'll move on to the next slide.

[00:05:45] So again, kind of just bringing full circle what our waste management processes is. Our path forward is we will continue to partner with the county when and where possible with the goal to reduce waste management or reduce waste as being sent to landfills and recycle more materials as much as possible through our construction renovation efforts and our school-based activities.

[00:06:08] So the next couple of slides, we'll talk about alignment with net zero goals. So just a brief history. So we previously supported the state initiative of CHIPS, which was a collaborative for high performance schools. And then recently the state of Virginia has done away with that.

[00:06:26] And I'll talk more about that in a slide or two. And we now are transitioning to an effort called Green Globes. Green Globes is a rating system for certification that only keeps us in compliance with the Virginia High Performance Buildings Act. It also is consistent with our commitments to the jet for net zero energy initiatives, such as Green Globes criteria.

[00:06:50] Additionally, Green Globes criteria have a strong focus on energy usage and overall energy efficiency and getting our projects as close as possible to being energy neutral. So we were asked to show some projects that are currently designed for net zero and projects that we had designed for net zero and have backed out of that.

[00:07:09] And this is what that chart is depicting. So again, the slide shows the cost impact of net zero over the historical CIP timeline. The approval of the FY2529 CIP included a framework in which future projects starting in FY26 and beyond include CIP funding for major energy reduction measures to gain possible onsite net zero ready energy such as photovoltaic arrays and ground source heat thermal pumps.

[00:07:40] As such, project estimates starting with this CIP included the incorporation of net zero cost premiums and associated inflationary impacts on projects shifted based on both funding limits. So on this slide, there are currently three projects that are designed to net zero ready or some portion of net zero ready.

[00:08:01] So Centerville and Centerville High School and Dunloring have a net zero design and actually Centerville is a kind of a partial net zero ready 'cause the site conditions would not allow for a ground source heat pump And then we have Willow Springs.

[00:08:17] Willow Springs is in permitting as well, and it has a net zero design. So from a chief of facilities perspective, I think we've gone too far forward for Centerville and Dunloring to actually backtrack and do a redesign on those.

[00:08:32] This is where they're sitting in the permitting process. However, for Willow Springs, Willow Springs is something that we could potentially back out if the board gives us a direction to do so. And in that backing out, it would add, you know, taking from net zero and going to Green Globes compliance, we would see possibly a 14 to 20 weeks addition to a schedule timeline and potential cost savings of about $4.2 million.

[00:09:01] So what you'll see on this slide, you look at the first column under FY24 through 28, you'll see what the initial cost was for the project. And then you'll see an FY, the next column to the right, you'll see an FY 25 to 29 CIP estimate, includes a cost increase to bring, go from what the design was in 24 to 28 to bring it to net zero ready design.

[00:09:27] So you see a significant increase. Then the column from 26, that covers 26 to 30, covers this typical cost inflation increases. And then when you get into the next column For 27 to 31, it talks about, or shows, where we are going back towards a Green Globes initiative.

[00:09:48] And so you generally do see some cost reductions in that for projects that we have taken out the cost estimate to get us to the net zero standard. And then the final column, you'll see potential cost savings by switching back from net zero to Green Globes.

[00:10:12] This slide looks at generally a schedule, how the schedule will be affected, looking at net zero versus green globes. Again, same storyline, the first column for 24 through 28, there is no net zero design within that column.

[00:10:28] Then the next two columns for 25 through 29 and 26 through 30 do show what impacts to the schedule, adding net zero into the program. You'll see as you go down from top to bottom how the projects were cascading out to the right in the time of our construction process.

[00:10:46] And then the last column under 27 and 31, you'll see where we stabilize under green globes. And then the final column is see where additional time that was added to the schedule for projects that were initially planned or were planned to move to net zero design.

[00:11:09] Next, we'll talk about green globe certification. So in 2021, the Virginia State Legislature passed House Bill 2001, the Virginia High Performance Performance Act, which was an update to HB 2001. So an update to HB 2001 in July of '24 required greater efficiency and resilience in Virginia public buildings.

[00:11:31] This update also added language clarifying the word locality to also be inclusive to school systems. As such, this legislation is now a major driver of how FCPS designs constructs and verifies school sustainability design and energy performance.

[00:11:48] The pass available to track and verify this performance and achieve certification of our projects limited to two rating systems, Green Globes and LEED. Green Globes is overseen by the Green Building Initiative and LEED is overseen by United States Green Building Council.

[00:12:03] Under this legislation, CHIPS, which was the collaborative for high-performance schools, is no longer recognized and accepted certification pathway. We believe Green Globes will give our system the most flexibility in the achievement of certifications as the path is not prescriptive and the development of the pathway is collaboratively done with GBI staff throughout both design, construction phases.

[00:12:28] The final phase entails a walkthrough of the completed project with a GBI representative to discuss the project and move towards final Green Globes certifications. By adopting Green Globes, FCPS ensures that all future projects will continue to be more sustainable, environmentally responsible for the county.

[00:12:49] Last three slides of the presentation, we'll talk about the Willow Springs, Dunloring and Centerville. So for Willow Springs, the Willow Springs Elementary School renovation initiated as a standard CHIPS design with the fiscal year 25 through 29 CIP.

[00:13:06] It was approved for an update to the net zero rate design. This increased the project estimate from 56 million to 78 million. This slide provides context and explains additional costs incurred to date based on the change from net zero rate design, Construction increases to the A&E, architectural engineering services are approximately 356,000.

[00:13:29] If the design were to be reverted to net zero ready to green globes, the estimated fee to the architectural engineer would be approximately 130,000. This is based on a proposal received in January of 2026. This would lead a total of 486,000 incurred costs for sustainability design and requirement changes if we reverted back from a net zero design.

[00:13:53] So next we'll take a look at Dunloring. The Dunloring Elementary School new construction project was changed in FY25 to 29 CIP to reflect a net zero ready design. As seen on the slide, approximately 382,000 and additional A&E fees were incurred to bring this design into net zero ready concept.

[00:14:21] And the last slide, we'll talk about Centerville High School. The Centerville High School renovation project is also updated in FY25 to 29 CIP to reflect a net zero ready design. As seen here, approximately $922,000 in additional A&E services were incurred to bring this project into net zero design.

[00:14:40] So those are the slides I have to discuss for the first part of this brief, and I guess we'll open for questions, comments. Thank you so much. That was a wealth of information, and I'd love to see it, so thank you for that.

[00:14:58] I see we have two folks, three folks, we'll begin with Carl, followed by Sandy. you very much for your work here on this and for the work of all the staff that are here and folks that predate people. I was one of the board's representatives on the Joint Environmental Task Force for my tenure on the last board, and I just want to re-up what our commitments are in that conversation. So the goals as adopted by our board and the the Board of Supervisors were to achieve 50% emissions

[00:15:34] reductions by 2030 as compared to 2019 as a baseline. Produced 25% of the county energy use from a in-county renewable energy generation by 2030, 50% by 2040 using 2019 as a baseline.

[00:15:50] Decreased total energy usage from all county facilities by 25% by 2030 and 50% by 2040 as compared to 2019 as a baseline and that all new buildings major renovation projects beginning planning and design in 2021 and after must achieve net zero energy performance as defined later in the document unless county staff advised the board prior to the 30% design phase why the project cannot meet the NZE standard and so when this new board constituted in 2024

[00:16:26] there was concern that the steps toward net zero had not been taken yet for any of the school's projects and we had the option of stomping on the brakes and stopping everything or in favor of making all of those projects currently underway net zero or doing the opposite and saying we're not going to do that anymore or maybe something in between and so the something in between route is what the board adopted in that CIP that first February of this new board February/March of this new board in fact up to that point there had been

[00:17:04] indignation by many board members about the fact that so little progress had quote-unquote been made on the JET goals obviously especially when it comes to like transportation there are financial factors at play with sources of money drawing up from Washington etc but the route that the board took in that first CIP was to not touch the projects that were too far along to adjust the projects that were ripe for adjusting and to make that effort going forward.

[00:17:36] And so I guess my first question is, taking that into consideration, if the ultimate goal is carbon neutrality by 2040, which is ostentatious in itself, do the Green Globes approach to facilities planning enable us to get to that goal in any kind of reasonable way?

[00:18:02] I've got six seconds left, thank you. - So I think that, as you mentioned, sir, the 2040 carbon neutral goal is pretty aggressive. I don't know if we would have reached it under the previous net zero plan.

[00:18:21] And I don't think that we would get there on a Green Globes. I think there's still goodness to what Green Globes offers to the organization. You know, the big difference are the ground source heat pumps and then the photo fatigue rays across the roof. So if, you know, not doing those two initiatives, I don't know that we'd get there, but we still would do other good, you know, sensible sustainability activities.

[00:18:42] - Can Green Globe facilities be designed so that they don't hinder eventual net zero readiness? In other words, when you build a roof in a Green Globe school, can it be built in a way that does not preclude it from eventually being used in a net zero fashion?

[00:18:59] - The answer is yes. I think it's compatible with the net zero initiative. - And to finish the point, because we have had renovations conducted where we later learned that it was not something that could support, you know, solar panels or other things that would be needed to make it net zero.

[00:19:17] So the board could by policy indicate that at a minimum, these Green Globe schools must be made in such a way that they can eventually be upgraded to net zero. - The one issue is that I don't think you would build a building and then retrofit a ground source heat pump in.

[00:19:33] That probably is not doable, but for sure, design wise, we could ensure the design for the roofs could handle a net photovoltaic array. have a go back okay miss Anderson followed by mr. moon so I was one of the board members that was interested in bringing this to the work session to discuss because there are some things in the policy that stand out to me that have me a lot a little bit concerned I've always been fully supportive of the JET goals and I recognize how ostentatious they are and so those two things have always kind of been in conflict for me in my past life I got to teach engineering students and they used to write me really big reports about all

[00:20:13] kinds of green things that were going on in the world and so I have a weird sense of how this all works what I will say is in the federal government we create documents that our policy that survived changes and one of the things that I see as a potential downfall of this particular policy is that anything that we put into it potentially can very quickly become out of date you're gonna see the same kind of thread when we get to our next topic when we're talking about AI for me, what I'm wondering is, is there any way that we could create a mechanism that would allow us to create a policy

[00:20:52] that talks about what our philosophy related to environmental stewardship is, and then have some sort of renewable document that we do every year as a resolution, or every two years, however we wanna do it, that would give us the ability to make those nuanced changes.

[00:21:08] So that way we're not necessarily naming, because net zero is a buzzword, green globes is a buzzword. We're not naming the thing that it is gonna be the way that we get there. In that way, we also can real time adjust our goals to meet what is actually feasible in real life.

[00:21:26] Because at some point we're gonna hit 2030 and no one's gonna talk about the fact that this was all decided on before COVID happened. I mean, the 2019 jet goals happened before the pandemic hit and the world has changed significantly since then. and there's been no appetite that I've seen to at least adjust our discussion to see what's possible moving forward.

[00:21:48] And so, I mean, I'm a very practical person and when I'm looking at the list of things that we're trying to accomplish, including when we're talking about electric buses, and I know that Mr. Mewick's not here this morning, so I'm not gonna get into specifics about it, but I know that there are a significant number of our buses that are not parked on our facilities as a way just for storage overnight, in which case we would not be able to get to an electric system because they don't have a place to charge.

[00:22:16] And so there are all kinds of things that are happening in relationship to each of these that I am concerned about. In addition to the fact that when we're talking about delaying schools that have already waited 45 years, in some cases, to be renovated, I do not want to undo the good work that we've done up to this point for some illusion of cost savings when we're seeing the escalation in price happening so quickly over time.

[00:22:44] And so I would advocate moving forward that we can make whatever changes that we need to make, but I would not undo, particularly stuff that's gone through zoning, I would not undo anything in order to meet the illusion like of the change that's going on.

[00:22:59] So that's just my two cents. - Okay, Mr. Min. - Thank you for the presentation. A couple of questions that came to my mind, I, you know, seeing PowerPoint slides include from going to Net Zero to Green Globes, there are a number of projects, quite a few projects with a delay in completion of the projects.

[00:23:28] And I like cost savings, however, nobody will like project delays and I will need to be able to explain why a project that's going to save us money, usually doing something different where something less is going to take longer to be completed, while there are a couple of projects which is going to actually complete it earlier than initially projected on CIP.

[00:23:59] Second question is whether these, because we'll be acting on CIP, the board will vote on the CIP, is this, because I need to look at the CIP more closely, whether this is in the CIP right now?

[00:24:16] That final column, yes, sir. Final Cut-Up, one far right-hand side, is what's in the CIP? So what's in the CIP is we adopted taking net zero out of projects, except for the Will Springs, Dunloring, and Silver Line.

[00:24:34] Okay. And also, I know there are a couple of things you mentioned about going from net zero to green globes are not going to include. If you go with the green globes, there are a couple of things that's not going to be included when we do school construction or renovations and besides those for each one of these projects which will be delayed, project to be delayed, anything else that's going to be built differently from that general ready design or construction?

[00:25:12] So sir, let me just restate my last question or answer. So it's in the proposed, so the reflection that was not in the current CIP that was active, the proposed CIP that the board will vote on here shortly will reflect that we have this three projects that are net zero design that's Dunn-Loring, Centerville, and then Willow Springs, and the rest of them that's been taken out.

[00:25:34] So you'd ask the question about why do we see some projects cascade to the right? So as we were going through the net zero design, project costs were increasing, and then that would show that there's limited bond funding available in any given year, so there's limited bond funding as projects increase and projects will shift to the right.

[00:25:52] So that was the reason where projects were shifted. - If you're gonna save money by going to a Green Globes, shouldn't that expedite the completion rather than delaying it? Or did I get this, did I understand this all wrong? - So you're not incorrect.

[00:26:07] But I mean, there are other activities that we're looking at as well, whether it's the purchase of the Western High School-- - I would like to know. I would like to know because people would ask, these communities would ask, if the board is gonna go with the Green Globes, whether to save money first, And then that is why it is going to be all delayed while we see something like, you know, silver line and the downloading, they will actually be accelerated.

[00:26:39] So I gotta be able to answer those questions. - Yes, sir, so I would just, the one piece that I would add is, you know, not only, so if we didn't, if there wasn't a purchase of the Western High School, then some of these projects probably could come back to back on the timeline.

[00:26:55] but because we purchased Western High School and some other initiatives, there's limited, there's less bond funding available to do the project. So then projects will naturally shift out. So projects shifted out due to lack of bond funding available and do what we're looking at. - So going from a natural to green gloves, mostly does not have anything to do with project being laid by what I see on, I guess this is page 11 of the PowerPoint.

[00:27:24] it's mostly because of change of funding available due to our purchase of Western High School. Could I have that in writing, please? - Okay. - Thank you.

[00:27:39] - You asked another piece, sir, of your question was about what things aren't gonna get done, so specifically going from net zero to Green Globes-- - What's not gonna be included, how what is going to be different from other than those two things you mentioned? - Yep, generally most things can be done, but those are the two biggest-- - So I would like to have all those in writing so that, you know, when an inquiry comes in, you know, I can use what I get from you.

[00:28:05] - Okay, I'm gonna take a quick turn, then we'll go to Ms. Mirren. So, thank you again for this presentation. I think it's a very helpful conversation, I think a conversation I'm pleased that we're having. I also want to compliment, and I'm glad he just walked into the room, Mr. Muick on his work on rolling out the share tables to every school this year.

[00:28:25] So thank you, Dr. Reed, for your support of that. It's a zero cost initiative that can reap important rewards. I appreciate the discussion of all the waste management initiatives. Some other things on there that I want more clarity on are on composting.

[00:28:45] My understanding is that Get2Green is working on initiative, but you also mentioned that we're gonna be writing a county RFP. Can you talk in more detail about what that entails? - Yes, and I just will reiterate, we currently are doing composting at five schools right now.

[00:29:03] And so the, I think I'll offer help over here on the side, just to give details of the RFP.

[00:29:21] - I would just, while we're waiting, I will note that five schools is not okay, right? I'm glad we have something there, but we've had it at five schools for decades. So we need to get to having composting at all schools. - So the basic of the RFP would be, you know, how are you storing the materials and how are you transporting it off?

[00:29:40] So that would be the base components of the RFP that we're working with the county. - I'd be grateful for more details and I think the board would as well. - Okay. - So on recycling, I will tell you one of the top complaints I get from students when it comes to sustainability is that we have recycling cans throughout our schools that are then dumped into trash cans when the custodians come around.

[00:30:06] I would like for us to have a countywide initiative recycling such that we are using our recycling bins as they should be used and I'm not sure if it's a training issue for our custodians or what but the students see it and it's very disheartening so I don't know if you have any thoughts on that sir I would concur I you know custodians work for the principals but we do at my level have field custodians that provide training so it could be something just more education you know through chief of schools and through the field custodians as well that's that's helpful I'd love to see that

[00:30:43] implemented and I'd also love to see just equitable distribution of recycling cans throughout the county I think some schools have many others others do not or the students aren't seeing them and then just another point of clarification on the waste management piece is that you said we are moving to reusable items and cafeterias, right? So I know one thing that wasn't stated is that we've gone to recyclable bamboo wood utensils, right? And that was a major initiative.

[00:31:24] Is that not correct? That is correct. And Mr. Muick is here. We did work to have compostable utensils for sure to get rid of some of the plastics and particularly the single-use plastics correct right right and so that this beginning this single use plastic elimination began with the plastic straws back in 2019 right and we've slowly expanded it to utensils so I think we're doing good work here I don't know if it's been amplified as much as we can just to know that for the

[00:31:59] community to realize that but I'd also be eager to hear more about you know What else is being researched in cafeterias to make less waste? Hey, sir, I just want to clarify. So the slide showed seven potential initiatives that we're looking at.

[00:32:19] So of those, we're only currently doing shared tables, and we're doing composting on a limited basis. The other ones are, so there would be, if we went to reusable food services, that would require additional costs to be able to clean plates and have, you know, forks and stuff.

[00:32:38] So we're not currently doing that. That's just a potential initiative that would have a call startup to do that. I just want to clarify. So beyond the shared tables, and then I'm not knowing anything else that we're doing besides at the schools.

[00:32:54] I would take that as a do-out and coordinate with my Get the Green friends and let me know if there's anything else that we're doing. Great. I appreciate all the work. And, you know, I think one thing that has been challenging for the system has been the coordination between get to green food nutrition services all the all the players in the cafeterias and the schools that are working on these initiatives so I know there's work being done to break down those silos but I think we can always do more so with that I will hand it over to Miss Marin

[00:33:28] thank you so a few points the Governance Committee had worked on this it hadn't been reviewed in quite a while and so we were pleased to have be able to give something more synthesized and updated to the board so I'm very happy to talk further about this policy I want to mention you know mr. Dunn had submitted a request or he had requested that we review this and the reason was he had asked for a cost-benefit analysis because I took down what members had said about the certain policies we were reviewing at that meeting so required a

[00:34:05] cost-benefit analysis from the superintendent to address writing this policy and understand what our course of action would be so I don't know if it's exact cost-benefit analysis but there's certainly an analysis of how much it will cost and so is that roughly mr. Gordon a 20% increase on the price of all of those projects listed if what I was calculating there on that slide to go from the second column of 24/28 it's basic would you say generally that to incorporate net zero already it's basically a 20 percent increase of each

[00:34:41] project yes ma'am I would say generally this big picture piece for every two projects we do net zero we could have built a third project yeah so we don't have the money to do this the CIP our CIP work in which was only one meeting didn't discuss anything about how we're actually going to address the backlog that we have so a few things one of them is the cost savings you know 4.2 million five million we know what it costs to say remedy that remedy potential mold in a building or to fix HVAC and I don't think it's that much of a

[00:35:19] difference right so to do emergency repairs on buildings is going to yield about the same cost savings just roughly I mean that's really what I would have hoped for like a cost-benefit analysis like what are the trade-offs we could update X number of HVACs save all that money in emergency repairs continue to reap the benefits of, you know, better air quality and lower energy costs as compared to increasing it by a third of the cost and getting, for instance, four to 11 million.

[00:35:47] That's the kind of data I would need to be able to say what we could actually do. But I also want to say that net zero is really a retired concept. And we talked about this several times that this is a term that we are sunsetting because green globes is what it is and perhaps the two brand new schools at the bottom could be net zero but the rest of them cannot because to do net zero you could be net zero ready but we've just had this conversation several times until

[00:36:22] we're presented or we work on a plan to actually fund anything more this is just a lot it's an exercise to me so and I feel like it's an exercise based on one person's requests this policy and the comment about compost we should put that in here mr. McElvain you're absolutely right recycling I will just say I was at a high school last night there were big blue trash receptacles with big open space set top for trash and zero I took my recycling home with me so I've had this conversation for seven years I don't know what it's gonna take to fix

[00:37:00] it but it's not gonna be increasing the cost of every school and delaying by a third. Okay next Ms. Dixit followed by Ms. St. John Cunning. Thank you Eric for the presentation.

[00:37:19] So before the recycling I saw some of the things we on page slide number seven for reducing and I really wanted to discuss more on that high impact ones. Are those are in effect right now all of these are there i heard about the composting is going on for few schools and but reusable food services what is the i know it says the implementation effort is high what are

[00:37:55] we talking about in terms of high so for reusable food services again that's instead of having a recyclable type uh plate forks and knives you'd have maybe stainless steel and to do that we would we'd have to upgrade kitchens to support, you know, storage of those plates and forks and knives and also how we'd clean and wash those in a professional kitchen standard model.

[00:38:23] So why would that be high? Is that that would be waste that you're diverting from a trash or from being recycled. So that's not something that you're purchasing and reusing and then recycling is something that you're purchasing and reusing continuously. And again, just want to just reiterate, you know, we're not doing that now and we're not set up to do that, to support that.

[00:38:40] But that's something in the future we could if that's the path we wanted to go. - So in reality, recycling is, you know, in US only 20% of the recyclable items are actually getting recycled. That's the story after story and it's information we hear.

[00:38:59] So when we see all these recycling containers in different schools, things are going in it, but they're really not really getting recycled. They go to this entire, they all go to this landfill or very less of that material is getting recycled.

[00:39:15] So the reducing is the main item, reusing and reducing should be our focus, I guess, as our school district. And I would like to find more ways to reduce and reuse. And this is what I was talking about, that's food services, is that we could definitely reduce a lot of that trash and recycling going, which doesn't help.

[00:39:43] And also, the cost saving. I think in the long term, it's gonna really benefit the cost of buying the disposable over and over again. But the single-use tape plates or stainless steel, what you said, could go for years.

[00:39:59] I mean, in my country, we use stainless steel for everyday home use. And I have plates, Dr. Riesh, from 40 years ago. They don't go bad. So that's how stainless steel is good to use in cutleries or the plates and things like that.

[00:40:19] So I think if you could go to the next slide, if you don't mind, one slide up backwards, maybe six.

[00:40:36] I think I lost which slide, what that information was there. But I definitely don't like that we are going to delay any schools. And I saw some of the schools were in my district and for any reason other than we don't have the money.

[00:40:55] So if we could figure out a way to, and especially with Central High School, it doesn't make any sense for that cost saving of being negative of $30 million. I mean, something has to get fixed there, but I'll talk later about that, thanks.

[00:41:15] - Miss St. John Cunning, followed by Miss Lady. - So first of all, I wanna thank you and your team for all the work that you have done. know this is a lot of work I think that my questions come more into place in terms of going back to slide seven and this has kind of been alluded to by other board members is like when we look at the objective of cutting energy by 25 to 50 percent in terms of influencing daily temperature and lighting can all this isn't slide seven controls in individual classrooms I go back to the

[00:41:50] operational like operationalization of how this is done how you know if when this work and these suggestions are being done if you're speaking with principals if you're speaking with building supervisors I know from my experience of working in schools things will automatically shut off at a certain time and if you're having an evening event or if people are staying there a little bit later there are only certain people that know how to override those codes so that you're either not freezing or either too hot when you have

[00:42:24] automatic shutoffs of certain things then that can contribute to some of the issues that happened with a hayfield mole situation so I guess it's how do we get out of these silos and how do we make sure that's that that there's accurate training for building supervisors principles and more people that would know how to override some of those systems when there are certain specific events going on yes ma'am so how do we get there so i use hayfield as an example so um

[00:42:59] correct i think you know we we as an organization can do better in the type of how we manage day-to-day activities within the school whether that's you know making sure there isn't you know proliferation of dust on services that sits there and and then we have a high heat high summer high moisture that you know not there so i think there's a better effort that can be done through at my level pushing training out to the school-based leadership to how we're checking on school classrooms kind of throughout a long period of shutdown and I think specifically at Hayfield you know we're inputting in some data loggers to check relative humidity and airflow then we're

[00:43:35] also looking to how do we how do we properly balance airflow and water within the HVAC units that we have there that you know they're roughly you know 20 years 24 years old so how do we use what we have for the best efficiency that we do so I think school-based helping out the school-based staff with proper cleaning you know checking on facilities but for me it's also going down to kind of ownership yeah you see different levels of schools are clean to different the different standards about ownership of the school and so how do we help again how did my staff help school-based staff do that and I'll say that in all the schools I've ever worked with our custodial staff at least if for my experience they've been off the

[00:44:15] charts but but I do think there's a disconnect sometimes with some of the information that gets funneled down to them now at it's like 72 when we're talking about again the operationalization of the zero waste when you talk about the the food stations the shared tables like how that impacts how that truly impacts and even the composting the daily activities of teachers and also the food and nutrition service workers because I think sometimes we are at a very high level of what we want to see happen but we're not

[00:44:54] in the day-to-day level of how much time it takes to run certain things and what is that going to actually translate if we're going to be effective so I just want all of us as a board to take that into consideration because I've seen how that happens sometimes when some a man not a mandate but something comes down and at the school level the staff that are responsible either don't know about it there have not it hasn't been clearly defined how they're supposed to handle it and the other aspect is is there really the manpower or the time to do

[00:45:31] it so that's just what that's just my ask okay we have two more comments then we're gonna pause for lunch so miss lady and then mr. Frisch for a go back Thank you. Thank you, staff, for all the work you put into the presentation.

[00:45:47] So, you know, I think that at the end of the day, when it comes to a lot of things with waste, it's just whether or not people who work for us and our students understand environmental stewardship. I mean, you know, we have had recycling bins in schools for years, and they are not used with fidelity.

[00:46:09] So one of my questions, knowing how much I hated as an employee doing all my PDE at the beginning of the year, Do we have a required training on environmental stewardship of all faculty and staff to understand that you have a recycling bin? Use it appropriately. Like let's just start with the basics because my main concern is cost, right?

[00:46:27] Because and we also have get to green. So we're teaching our students environmental stewardship, but we need to model it. So if I'm a teacher and I walk down the hallway and there's a camp a place for me to put a You know plastic bottle and I don't use the right receptacle. I'm not being a good role model. Okay. We'll start there Secondly, I just want to share that this has been shared with me from elementary and that the share tables, that there are some children who literally go through the lunch line and take more food than they want because they want to be able to walk over and put it on the share table.

[00:46:59] I mean, really, we can't think of these things, but it happens. That's not good practice, okay? Now, you can't tell a child not to take some food, but we can certainly start to educate them on that's actually not helping the problem. I also want to make sure people understand they can only put on the share table food they took from the line.

[00:47:18] I can't put on the share table food I brought in my own lunch, okay, because we can't guarantee how, you know, safe that food is. In terms of trays, I think that's an easy one. I remember as a kid at Madison, you paid an extra 10 cents for your tray.

[00:47:37] And when you dumped your tray and handed your tray back to a custodian, she was sitting there with a bunch of dimes and you got a dime. I don't know what today that would look like but it's funny but there were also kids that would sit there and take your dime right I mean some kids may have made a hundred bucks taking everybody's dime I don't know but I think that's important and when it comes to composting we need to compost but it's an expense folks okay the bottom line is there has to be a place to put it it has to be a place for it to go and we also with share tables have to partner with local like ice our social workers in my opinion need to be involved in this because we need to find a place to take the food we create go bags all that's important essential for

[00:48:15] you know food insecurity but we have to partner to come get it where it's functioning at its highest is where there's a partnership with people who come and pick up the food um so i just think that and the last thing i'll say is yes i mean i would love to have more reusable um but i don't know what it would cost us to have to do washing of dishes and at this point airplanes don't give you knives and forks i don't believe we can give true knives and forks to children from a safety perspective um i'm sad that that's the situation we're in but that's a concern so certainly um not the one use plastics which you've gotten rid of so just to just to uplift some things but um we've

[00:48:54] got a lot of teaching to do um and helping kids understand don't just take all the food items you can take so you can walk them over to the share table would be one thanks okay mr frisch to bring us home yeah just a couple things I've appreciated the conversation particularly around composting and waste I think mr. McElbeen's right like when we've done so much in this school division that finding opportunities for big steps is often hard right because we've already reduced energy consumption by like 60% over the last 10 years or something huge like that so this is a space where there's a giant opportunity to take a very big step forward and I

[00:49:32] hope we'll take advantage of that. On the subject of Green Globes, I just want to correct the record, as it were. Net zero is not an obsolete term, nor is it a term that was specifically something that was a design style. CHIPS is the form that is now obsolete by state standards, and hence we're now on Green Globes, which is what the state expects. Both of those things can embrace net zero.

[00:50:05] It's a question of whether or not we want to embrace net zero. We were advancing our net zero priorities before moving to Green Globes and as Mr. Gordon has indicated, we can continue doing that if the board's prerogative isn't that way. The other thing I would note is that it's not just a expense on the front end to build a school that is net zero.

[00:50:28] We are missing out on a long-term opportunity to save money by not building net zero. Now, that doesn't mean that we are in a position right now to do it. I think that's for further board conversation. But just take these things into consideration.

[00:50:43] And I believe some of this is in the report that was given to the board in 2021 when this question first came up about the efficacy. There's a long-term energy savings on any school that's net zero, a significant. So for example, a school that might spend $100,000 on energy might only spend $15,000 to $30,000 on energy.

[00:51:04] There is a huge maintenance savings because the equipment is simpler and more reliable and easier to use. Some people estimate conservatively a 20% savings on maintenance costs.

[00:51:23] There is risk avoidance in being net zero. It doesn't make us as susceptible to wild fluctuations in energy costs. and with the uncertain international environment, I think that is always something to be concerned about.

[00:51:39] And there are also savings, well there are also things that students benefit from, including better indoor air quality. Schools can serve as shelters during emergencies where power is no longer available.

[00:51:55] So there's lots of things to take into consideration when we're thinking about net zero. And that's one of the reasons why I asked Mr. Gordon, if we don't go there, can we ensure that these Green Globes designed buildings are not precluding us from taking that step at a later date?

[00:52:16] - Mr. Gordon, any concluding remarks? - No, sir. Thank you for the input, and I think I have a couple of due-outs from this, and we'll work to answer those to Dr. Lee. - Okay, great. Yes, did you have something?

[00:52:32] - I'll ask this question. So now we've discussed this, what do we do if we have comments and bring this back to the board? Is it coming back to governance? - Well, I think we'd have a next steps document, right, Ms. Setlow? - We do have the next steps document. I haven't sent it out yet 'cause I wanna talk with the Chair and Dr. Reed really quickly just on deadlines for things, but I will be sending that out after lunch.

[00:52:56] - But Ms. Marin, as Chair of Governance, would you like to see this go to governance? - I mean, I know I have changes I'd like to make. I mean, how do we usually do that? I'd like to not have to post it and then bring it off and make motions. so I'm up to whatever makes the most sense and is most expeditious.

[00:53:13] - I'll discuss this with Ms. Marin and we'll figure out a path forward and let the rest of the board know what our path is gonna be. - Okay, thank you. We are adjourned for lunch. We will return at 1:15. Thank you.

[00:53:27] - We're recessed.

[01:27:53] - Artificial intelligence. I call in Dr. Reed for presentation. - All right, thank you, Ms. Lady. This afternoon we're gonna be presenting an update on artificial intelligence and Mr. Sethi is not able to be with us.

[01:28:09] he's been a key part of the team that's presenting this, but we do have Dr. King and Dr. Presidio and Dr. Riley here, and I don't know, I can't see if there's somebody else sitting, oh, Ms. Van Heusen is also here to present a set of slides.

[01:28:25] One of the things that I wanted to share before we start the presentation is, I think that we've had a lot of conversation about sort of the evolution of this really dynamic and fast-moving technology, and I thought it might be instructive or helpful the board to have a chance to look at one of the most current robotic features at the moment that's being rolled out globally because this marks a real transition in robotics and the capacity of ai so i'm going to ask the deputy clerk to go ahead and run this video just for the board it's about

[01:29:04] three minutes just to give a sense of how quickly this technology is moving at this time in china

[01:29:20] A humanoid robot did something humans trained for years to master and no humanoid had ever pulled it off before.

[01:29:51] In the US, another humanoid casually handed out Christmas swag and talked back. A robot dog sold out in under an hour, like a new smartphone. Factories started replacing skilled workers with humanoids at scale. And one of the most famous robots in the world is about to step onto a global stage next month.

[01:30:09] It all starts with a robot in China doing something that looks simple until you realize it's one of the hardest things a machine has ever been asked to do. On December 22, TARS Robotics showed a humanoid robot on stage at a live event, and this robot didn't lift boxes, didn't stack crates, didn't walk around waving at people.

[01:30:27] It sat down and did hand embroidery, real embroidery. It threaded a needle, used both hands, and stitched a logo live in front of an audience. Now, if you've never stitched anything in your life, that might not sound impressive. But the moment you think about what's actually happening there, it gets kind of wild.

[01:30:45] You're dealing with thread that stretches and twists, fabric that moves and deforms constantly, and movements that need sub-millimeter precision over a long sequence of steps. One tiny mistake and the thread snaps, the stitch misses, or the whole thing falls apart.

[01:31:01] This kind of task has been a nightmare for robotics for decades. robots are amazing at rigid repeatable jobs pick this metal part place it there do it again a thousand times but soft materials break everything they change shape they resist unpredictably and they require constant force adjustment in real time that's why until now long delicate two-handed work like this was seen as basically off limits for automation and that's what made this demo so important. The robot moved through the whole process smoothly, staying stable the entire time with no signs of hesitation or struggle. Both hands

[01:31:40] working together, adjusting force, tracking the needle and thread visually, and staying stable the whole time. That's not just motion control, that's embodied intelligence working as a system. People inside robotics immediately clocked what this meant, because once you can do this, you're suddenly not just talking about embroidery, you're talking about wire harness assembly, precision electronics, find mechanical assembly all the stuff factories still rely on skilled human hands for so thank you Janet I do want to comment as we go ahead and begin that

[01:32:14] this topic we have to continue to approach with a measured and thoughtful strategy we have to make sure we safeguard our student and staff privacy and I don't think we can look away this is technology that's here today and technology that's being used around the globe and we want to make sure that we here in Fairfax County Public Schools have an opportunity to shape its future use or we risk I think being shaped by its future use so at this point I'm happy to turn it over to dr. Presidio and the team to share a short slide deck

[01:32:53] and have a conversation with our board all right well thank you so much dr. Reed for that setup and good afternoon everyone I'm just to start out here we're We're definitely excited to have this opportunity to have a conversation about AI and FCPS and to continue our discussions.

[01:33:08] Just let me briefly introduce everybody for folks that might be watching at home and might not know. I think everyone probably knows Nardis King, our chief equity officer, but folks might not know Ellen Riley. She's our relatively new assistant superintendent for instructional services, formerly principal of McLean High School, one of our lighthouse schools, which was one of the initiatives of technology leadership in schools.

[01:33:30] so we appreciate having her perspective here. And then Monica Van Heusen, who is our Senior Manager for Educational Technology. She leads a lot of the work with staff like our ESPITs around professional learning to support technology integration in schools. So to get started here, and Ellen's gonna help with the slides.

[01:33:48] You know, in our previous discussions and presentations on artificial intelligence, we've really focused a lot on what we're doing to keep our school systems rollout of artificial intelligence really intentional, safe and secure when we think about AI technologies, but today's conversation's gonna be a little bit different.

[01:34:06] Today we're sharing work that's really the foundational work that we're doing to build a strong foundation for AI so that if and when student-facing tools are introduced in our classrooms, our implementation is gonna be purposeful and instructionally sound. And at the outset, we just really wanna be very clear about a few things with our current state of access, student access to AI tools.

[01:34:28] First, no generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini are currently provided to FCPS students. Also, no generative AI tools are required to be used by our students currently. And no decisions at this point have been made regarding future student access to generative AI tools.

[01:34:46] But we know, we can see from the video that we just looked at, the future isn't coming. The future is here, and we need to prepare to embrace that future. So instead of focusing on AI tools, though, the work that we've been doing about how to approach AI in the classroom has really prioritized AI literacy, instructional design, and human-centered control as those foundational understandings that we have to establish before we could consider AI tool adoption for students at scale.

[01:35:15] So our goal today is really to share the work we've been doing in these areas, and we hope that this is going to be helpful information for the board as you're continuing your AI policy work. So I think when we consider the role of AI in education, the essential question for us really is how can we leverage AI to increase instructional effectiveness and efficiency?

[01:35:37] And that question obviously very intentionally centers our focus on instruction rather than on AI tools. And a focus on instruction is supported by the recent research, which suggests that AI in education doesn't necessarily lead to one particular or inevitable outcome.

[01:35:55] the impact of AI is going to depend on the intentional choices that schools make about how AI is implemented and adopted. And you may have seen the recent report from the Brookings Institute that points to two different possibilities as AI becomes integrated into teaching and learning.

[01:36:12] And the first is that AI can result in diminished student learning when tools are used to replace student thinking rather than support it. And we acknowledge that there are significant risks with AI tools when not used appropriately to diminish learning.

[01:36:29] However, this Brookings report that just recently came out also points to another possibility that AI can result in improved learning when the implementation is intentional and instructionally aligned with clear guardrails to promote academic integrity, center human judgment, and student thinking in the process.

[01:36:49] And just one kind of fun fact as an aside, Rita Karim, a very recent school board member, is a co-author on this report so we're certainly very proud of her and excited about that. But the bottom line of the research really is that the difference between AI-enriched and AI-diminished learning is not the technology, it's how we design those learning experiences that use the technology.

[01:37:12] So today in our presentation we're going to talk a little bit about the work we've been doing to ensure that AI adoption in Fairfax is enhancing student learning experiences. And we really believe that the recommendations from the Brookings report are very important to ensure that we are adopting AI in FCPS in ways that are going to promote teaching and learning.

[01:37:34] And these recommendations really fall into three categories, prosper, prepare, and protect. And we've been utilizing these recommendations really to inform our thinking about the instructional use of AI. So, for example, in the prosper category, it's recommended to use AI tools that teach, not tell.

[01:37:53] And we believe that it's critical to prioritize student tools that support thinking and skill development rather than just giving students answers. So, for example, when you think about commercial products like Gemini or ChatGPT, they'll basically answer whatever question you enter into that chat.

[01:38:09] However, there are other AI tools that can be used in learning environments that are designed really to prompt student thinking and support student thinking and help ensure that students are reflecting on their learning and not just provide answers, but help students understand how to come to the answer themselves.

[01:38:31] And that's a critical distinction. In the prepare category, the recommendations really center around making sure that schools are providing a clear vision for the ethical use of AI that's centered on human agency and teachers' professional judgment. And our vision in FCPS, of course, is to support the ethical use of AI.

[01:38:51] And that's actually reflected in our guiding principles that we've developed and we're gonna share those with you in just a minute here in this presentation. Additionally, the recommendations point to ensuring that prior to any AI tool adoption, schools must focus on preparing teachers to use AI effectively.

[01:39:09] And that's something that we've been doing in FCPS. We've been focused on our work with our educators, not focused as much on work with students. And again, students at this point have not been provided access to generative AI tools. And then finally, in the protect category, it's recommended that schools use, that schools procure technology that protects students' privacy, safety, and security.

[01:39:31] And I think Gotham has talked to you quite a bit about the work we're doing in that area. But remember, we have a centralized tool adoption process to make sure that at the division level, we're taking into consideration that the vendors that we might do business with are entering into legal agreements with us to make sure that they can protect the privacy, the security of our data and not use data to train any generative AI models.

[01:39:57] And then the final recommendation is that schools need to support families in managing their children's use of AI outside of school. And this is really critical due to the ubiquitous availability of AI tools outside of school. Anybody who has a phone has access to generative AI tools.

[01:40:13] So we've got to do more to support our families in understanding what they can do to make sure that their children are only using AI in ways that are gonna support their learning and protect their wellbeing. So again, one of those core recommendations from the Brookings Report is to ensure that we're providing a clear vision and policy for the ethical use of AI before considering tool adoption.

[01:40:35] And I think it's important just to point out when ChatGPT rolled out in November of 2022, it was November of 2022 that we started getting questions from our schools asking us for guidance around student use of AI. So in order to really be responsive and to support that need, we did engage with school-based staff and central staff to develop the guiding principles that you see on the screen here about the appropriate uses of AI.

[01:41:01] And you can tell that these principles obviously center AI use and human judgment, and they're intended to ensure that our professional educators remain responsible for all the instructional decisions in the classroom. So just to kind of summarize what you see here, the principles that we've developed really emphasize that educators remain responsible.

[01:41:21] AI does not replace professional decision-making. The ethical use, privacy, and equity are non-negotiables, not afterthoughts. And that we commit to intentionally evaluating emerging technologies to ensure that we're providing tools that are safe and secure within our digital ecosystem.

[01:41:40] So as AI tools become more prevalent, these guiding principles are gonna continue to really focus our decision-making. Now, another central recommendation from the Brookings Report is that schools should focus on promoting AI literacy before integrating tools into instruction.

[01:41:57] And AI literacy is defined here as the technical knowledge, the durable skills, and the future-ready dispositions that are going to be required to thrive in a world that's influenced by AI, just as we saw in the video a few minutes ago. So we do want to emphasize that AI literacy is not just knowing how tools work, but it's really knowing when and why to use them and when and why not to use them and being able to distinguish between the difference. So on this slide, you can just see a few examples of the different AI literacies that we've been focusing on in FCPS. For example, we want our educators

[01:42:33] to be able to model the selective purposeful use of AI tools that are aligned to specific learning goals. Additionally, we want to make sure that our students are able to develop the skills to be able to question and evaluate AI-generated content.

[01:42:48] We want our students to really understand that AI is not infallible, and it will often reflect bias, because we believe that when students know how AI works, they'll understand that AI is really a tool that requires their critical judgment. And perhaps most importantly, we want our students to understand that AI is not human, And we're very concerned about the ways in which recent studies are telling us that students anthropomorphize AI and use AI in their personal lives, really treating it as a friend or using it for social interactions.

[01:43:21] And we want to ensure that students and parents understand the risks associated with interacting with AI in those ways. So ultimately we're developing our AI literacies in FCPS to emphasize selective and appropriate AI use, not frequent use.

[01:43:38] Another recommendation from Brookings is that AI should only be used in education when it can be integrated into the existing evidence-based instructional practices in a school system. Of course, in FCPS, our existing learning model, which has been around for quite some time, articulates those evidence-based practices that we privilege and that we want to see in all of our classrooms.

[01:44:02] Our learning model really provides a solid framework for us to guide the use of AI tools as instructional supports, not replacements for human-centered instruction. So for example, when you look at the learning model, one of the domains is a universally designed curriculum, and we believe that AI tools offer a lot of potential for helping teachers in this area as they differentiate their curriculum to meet the variety of learner needs that they have in their classrooms.

[01:44:29] So you can envision, for example, that AI tools can be used to support teachers in differentiating instruction by providing multiple representations of content, translated text, visuals, or even adjusting the reading levels of text to meet the variety of learner needs in the classroom.

[01:44:47] Additionally, AI tools are being developed that can be integrated into an existing curriculum, which is very important because you really can kind of narrow the scope of the AI use. So when they're developed into the existing curriculum, some of these tools are actually providing intelligent tutoring supports that will allow students to interact with the curriculum in a personalized way.

[01:45:09] So they can ask questions about content that they don't understand. They can ask for additional support preparing for presentations or for tests and quizzes that they might have coming up. So there's a lot of rapid AI tool development that we're keeping our eye on.

[01:45:26] And while we see the promise of AI to support teaching and learning in these ways, we also want to approach the use of AI with caution and a healthy skepticism, because we want to ensure that any AI tools that we do adopt would only be used in classrooms when it can be shown to strengthen teaching and learning in those practices that we uphold in our learning model.

[01:45:48] And of course, at the center of that learning model are our portrait of a graduate skills, which we developed over a decade ago and which we believe really reflect what matters most for students to thrive in an increasingly complex world. In fact, we believe that the rise of AI really makes our portrait of our graduate skills like collaboration, communication, critical and creative thinking really more important than ever because as AI tools become increasingly effective at routine tasks, it's going to be those uniquely human skills and dispositions that are going to differentiate our graduates in FCPS.

[01:46:21] So our goal is not for students to become reliant on AI. Instead we want our students to understand how to use it responsibly and strategically is a tool that can support their learning goals and their portrait of a graduate skill development. And this slide just provides a few examples about our current thinking about how AI tools can be embedded to support portrait of a graduate outcomes.

[01:46:45] So how are we building our adult and student capacity to use AI tools effectively? Well, we have chosen to start with our educators, again, not start with our students. Starting with our educators, strengthening their knowledge, their confidence, and developing their ai literacy so that they can later guide students in using ai safely productively and responsibly so we've chosen intention over speed and we're working very hard to center ai and shared language and common anchors like our learning model our portrait of a graduate and the guiding principles that we reference so on this slide you can kind of see our framework for

[01:47:23] the road map that we're using that has three stages of thinking about the progression of ai work and education. And the one thing that we want to highlight is that this is really a capacity building framework or model. It is not a tool rollout plan. So our exploration of AI, as I mentioned, really began as soon as ChatGPT was introduced into the universe over three years ago.

[01:47:48] And from this next slide, as we move on in the slide deck, you'll see that we've really prioritized our work around AI literacy before tool implementation, instructional coherence building is a strong foundation, and risk reduction in an environment where we know that students have access to these tools outside of school and are often using them in unsafe and irresponsible ways.

[01:48:11] So a few important things to note here includes our focus on the development of those clear guidelines for teacher and student use that I referenced earlier, and we've actually iterated those over several years and published them in a staff handbook, in a student handbook, so it's very clear what's allowable and what's not allowable, and set those expectations for academic integrity.

[01:48:33] And then, of course, we've also needed to learn more about this work, so we've engaged innovators and early adopters that were interested in working with us to learn more, try things, and to pilot things through very limited and controlled environments.

[01:48:48] Now on the next slide, you can see the continuation of our roadmap shows that, you know, we're engaging more deeply and it really kind of previews where we're considering evolving our work in the future as a school system. So for example this year we've expanded our work on those student AI literacies, building their understanding about how AI works, emphasizing safe and ethical use, and providing those researched informed ways that it can deepen and extend learning. So we've been piloting AI literacy lessons in a number of schools.

[01:49:18] And again I want to emphasize that the development of these literacies has not required student use of any generative ai tools like chat gpt now looking forward we do plan to continue to deepen our literacy ai literacy and we're going to begin to really kind of develop out those use cases and best practices for using ai and again we really want to emphasize that we know that we need to engage our families more deeply because this is a critically important topic that we need their partnership and collaboration in on this slide we've just provided a few examples we were hoping to produce a video but we didn't have a lot of time to do

[01:49:55] that for today so we just gave you a few examples of teachers working with students teaching some of the AI literacy lessons so you can see librarians STEAM teachers our espots across three different schools here providing instruction to students about some of the risks associated with AI and really trying to understand how it works so again all these examples you see here they're not requiring students to use AI tools it's just really developing their literacies and educating them about what AI is.

[01:50:23] So, in closing, our journey this far has really been one of intentional capacity building. We're not racing to adopt tools. We're working to build the foundation for thoughtful, effective, and ethical AI use. We know there's a lot of questions in the field of education about the role of AI.

[01:50:40] And we've tried to capture a few of those here on this slide that we think are some of the most important ones for us to continue to struggle with as a school division. And we look forward to engaging in questions like these and others with you as you continue the important board work of developing AI policy for our school division.

[01:50:58] So we thank you for your time, and we look forward to your questions and discussion. Thank you, Dr. Presidio. Excellent presentation and appreciate utilizing the Brookings report, as there are a lot of important things to have been gleaned from that research.

[01:51:17] I just want to sort of frame the discussion. I think as a lot of people are aware, our chair of governance and the governance committee are working on developing an AI policy. I see this conversation as a lot of how we're going to inform perhaps the direction of that policy.

[01:51:36] I also want to share, I think that some of my colleagues have also indicated like a policy on innovation because as we saw in the video, this is an ever evolving world. And so I don't know if it's AI in a vacuum or if it's an innovative policy, and we'll certainly work in tandem together to do that work.

[01:51:57] So I really appreciate this great presentation, and I think the first placard I see is Dr. Anderson. Thank you. This is very, very helpful, so much appreciated. I just have a few clarifying questions.

[01:52:13] One of the things that you mentioned and you shared multiple times that there are no generative AI tools being rolled out. What are the non-generative AI tools? Kind of highlight that for us please. Yeah, no, I think that's a great clarifying question. So I think people hear AI and they immediately think of things like ChatGPT, things like Gemini where students, well any user, can just interact without any guardrails with the technology. We do not have tools like that in our school system. Now, there are AI components built into certain educational

[01:52:52] technologies right so ST math which is part of a supplemental part of our math curriculum does have a tutoring feature that will respond to students basically will respond to students interacting with math problems right and it's built on the students response in terms of the types of questions and problems that a student would get next right that is built off of an AI infused platform but But it does not allow students to interact just innocuously with any sort of chatbot.

[01:53:26] Is ST Math the only example of that? Well, another thing that we've been piloting is PowerBuddy, which is more general. So we've tried to start to look at that this year with a few early adopter schools and a pretty limited rollout.

[01:53:42] I think we've got... Oh, what's PowerBuddy? Oh, yeah. So let me try to explain that. So again, it's an intelligent tutor that I was kind of mentioning. It's kind of an umbrella term for this technology where, again, based on the curriculum that students are studying, they can interact with that curriculum and get help and support.

[01:54:00] So they might ask the technology to provide additional practice problems for them or explain why an answer that they provided was wrong on a formative assessment, for example. But it's all tied to existing curriculum and the interaction is limited to that curricular universe, so it doesn't allow them to ask broad, generalized questions.

[01:54:21] And keep in mind, some of the questions I'm going to ask may be very basic because I'm here to build understanding. No, they're not basic at all. I'm here to build understanding. I'd like to better comprehend the differences between intelligent, I think you said, tutor rather than generative.

[01:54:39] How should I think about these two terms? Yeah, so again, I think what the distinction I'm trying to make is that the resources that we have that has any sort of AI technology infused into them are limited within a curricular universe, if you will, right? So the ST Math example that I gave you, the interaction for a student is only with the math content that we have purchased, vetted, and can ensure that is protected, right? So limited in terms of its scope. Go ahead. And I'm in this space because I've been speaking with a lot of parents who are very concerned about access for their students.

[01:55:15] So I just want to minimally, if we're able to, put that to bed in this conversation that they can watch themselves. When their students are in these intelligent components of the programs that we have, then they are able to ask questions like you're saying that the tutor can explain or can provide more examples.

[01:55:39] And how is that a little bit more controlled and finite than generative? Because it's limited to the curriculum that we've already adopted in the school division. So if it were to be asked some question, let's say ST Math, if it were to be asked a question about Latin, you would get nothing back.

[01:55:58] It has to be related to math. Thank you. That is very helpful. The other piece that I want to better understand is what are our teachers doing right now? because i know we have teachers who are piloting lighthouse schools i think that's year three dr reed is that correct so we have those folks then we have others piloting something else and others who are not piloting anything but are delivering those lessons help me understand the different buckets of teacher access yeah so i think the first bucket is teacher productivity

[01:56:38] right how can teachers use ai in a way that is going to save them time and result in better teaching and learning experiences for students so like one of the examples that i tried to give in the slides was obviously you all know that a major priority for our school system is inclusion and making sure that we have an inclusive educational delivery model where students whether or not they're multilingual learners students have disabilities are educated in the general classroom and have access to grade-level content taught by a general education teacher and supported by educational specialists.

[01:57:14] Well, you can imagine when you have a classroom with a wide variety of learning needs, advanced academic learning needs all the way to multilingual learners, you have to differentiate your curriculum. So teachers are using AI to take the curriculum content that we've developed, the units and the lessons, and be able to get differentiated resources that they can use to meet the variety of learning needs in the classroom.

[01:57:37] So again, examples are if you have an anchor text that you might be assigning to your students to read and you have this wide variety of reading ability levels, AI can be used to change the readability and the grade level content of that text to be differentiated to different levels for different students in the classroom without losing the key concepts, skills, and ideas that need to be presented.

[01:58:01] They can also create different ways for students to access the content. Oftentimes one of the things that our students have difficulty with is really understanding, particularly multilingual learners, understanding vocabulary terms, right, because you're learning a new language and you're learning academic content. Teachers can provide lots of different graphic organizers and visuals to help students understand what that academic vocabulary really means in the context of the lesson, again, the concepts and the skills that they're studying.

[01:58:33] Otherwise, teachers would have to create a lot of these things on their own, right? But using AI will allow teachers to be able to do that much more quickly. Additionally, one of the things that AI tools can support students with, right? So there's like that teacher efficiency productivity bucket, but something that AI tools can support students with in the sense where we actually have access to those tools like Power Buddy is providing opportunities for translation services, right?

[01:59:02] so we can translate material for students if they're a second language learner, for example. Now, you had asked the question about not just how teachers are using this for productivity and to work with students, but what are the things we've been rolling out and piloting. Really, the work that we've done kind of, I think, fits into two buckets.

[01:59:19] The first bucket was those AI literacies and really working with teachers to try to understand what do they need to know about AI, how it works so that they can use it effectively, and they can be prepared to guide students to use it responsibly. because again, students can access it outside of school, so we want to develop student literacy in AI as well.

[01:59:38] So there's kind of that component. And then the piloting work that we've done, 'cause I know we've received questions on this, has been really, really limited. The only pilot work that we've done with any tools is in 18 schools with the limited PowerBuddy pilot that we started to roll out this year.

[01:59:56] So that's really just a few teachers across the school division. It's less than 50 teachers across the school division and probably several hundred students that have been working with us on that. - Is that different from the Lighthouse schools? - So the Lighthouse schools really kind of initiated before, I mean it kind of initiated pretty similar to the timeline that CHET GPT rolled out.

[02:00:17] So some Lighthouse schools have been involved in some of the work around AI literacy. Some of the Lighthouse schools kind of overlap with the Power Buddy Pilot. But other Lighthouse schools have been working on different instructional technology goals, not focused on AI at all. So it's kind of like a Venn diagram. There's some overlap and then there's some distinction with the Lighthouse schools and the AI work. Thank you. Now, given where the different teachers are, because some are piloting, some are Lighthouse schools, and some are just your regular teachers who may have opted into some thing, and so we also have a bucket of teachers

[02:00:55] who've opted into nothing. Can you give me a kind of quick summary of how many AI tools are across the different groups of teachers that we have? It's really just PowerBuddy, because like I said, like when, you know, the example that I gave you with MathSpace, that's part of a curriculum that we adopted as our math curriculum.

[02:01:17] So there's no co-pilot, there's no Gemini, there's no Spark, it's just PowerBuddy? In terms of anything that we've done with students and tools, yeah. - No, I mean, with the teachers, like what are teachers accessing to increase their productivity? - So within division adopted tools, teachers have access to Gemini and chat GPT.

[02:01:38] They obviously could have access to other things outside of school, but those are the only things that we've engaged with at the division level. Yeah, and jump, anybody jump in if you wanna. - People are probably using outside of, But what we've co-sponsored are those two.

[02:01:55] Okay. You talked a little bit in, I think, slide 10 about the staff handbook and the student handbook regarding this. Where does that student handbook live, and how do parents access that? Well, that's a good question.

[02:02:12] It should be available on all the school websites. We have a central site with tools and resources on our website as well. but it should be available on all of the school websites as well. And the teacher handbook, that's not public-facing, that's just internal?

[02:02:30] Yeah, that's internal on our atlas, kind of our intranet site. I'll take go back, please. Thank you. Mr. Moon. Thank you for the presentation. I am generally a patient person, at least I want to say that.

[02:02:49] I want to be able to say that. But when it comes to AI, I feel very impatient because from my perspective, Our school system has been too patient in making progress in this particular area.

[02:03:05] So let me ask you a few questions from the presentations. Your timeline, roadmap, 2526, foundational AI literacy training for all instructional staff. So with the foundational training all done by the end of this year, what could those instructional staff be able to do?

[02:03:28] will they do will everybody be able to do something will everybody actually do something but we're not requiring anybody to use ai right now right i just i want to be clear about that we don't want to get ahead and have not wanted to get ahead of board policy so we've not had a board policy or any internal regulations on the use of ai we've provided guidance about what we believe is permissible but that's by choice it's it's not by requirement so if the board and obviously the the board is working on their policy right now,

[02:04:06] allows us to move forward, or requires us to move forward more rapidly. We believe we've built the foundational capacity for teachers to be able to understand how to use AI responsibly and safely themselves, and how to educate students to use it responsibly and safely.

[02:04:24] But we have not required the use of AI for teachers or students at this point. - I think I understand board built your responsibility to come up with a policy, obviously, and probably staff can make a certain recommendation as for what the board should consider as a part of the policy.

[02:04:47] AI tools, as we all know, are being utilized by many families outside the school, and we're not engaging those families on how to best use those policies because we're not ready, we're not quite ready to get there yet. Meanwhile, this is this one board member's view As more and more families outside the school cities get to use AI tools to help their children, it's learning.

[02:05:13] And there are families who do not have the same access. Gap is gonna grow. Let me give you an example of this one particular goal master. I am a goal lover. It's a board game.

[02:05:29] Decade ago, there was a famous five match series between a Google Steam Mines Alpha goal versus world's best and most respected professional goal player, human ended up losing to AI by 4-2-1.

[02:05:46] 10 years later, he interviewed the same goal master. And the very first thing he said was, with AI tool being right there, with the goal professionals using the AI tool to improve their skills, between those who know how to use, how the best to use, And those who are not as good in using AITL, there's a growing gap.

[02:06:11] I'm worried that this is happening and this will continue to happen. - Well, I think you're 100% right. We're concerned about a growing gap as well. I mean, that's a major equity issue, right? It's one of the reasons that, you know, our chief equity officer has been so involved in this work.

[02:06:28] And, you know, just as an aside, I would say one thing I've shared with some of my colleagues around this work about how the professional world is changing in the need to be able to use AI effectively to keep pace. My son is a freshman, my oldest son is a freshman at college this year.

[02:06:44] And before he started college, one of the things that he was required to do was to take a course about how to use AI effectively at the university level. Because the university felt very strongly that students who don't know how to use it are gonna be at a significant disadvantage.

[02:07:00] They also obviously wanna make sure students are using it responsibly, promoting academic integrity and everything else. But that was a requirement before they ever set foot on campus. And he's working in the business school and they have integrated AI into every one of their foundational courses, right?

[02:07:17] Now I don't know what they've done in their advanced courses but every foundational course he's in, finance, economics, management courses, they have integrated AI into every single one of those courses because they believe strongly that in the professional world you need to know how to use the tools. So that is where we need to be, is educating all of our students on how to use it well effectively but we have to do so in a way that mitigates risk and that's why we've been taking a more deliberate and measured approach at this time but I certainly understand your position to make sure that we're getting this right and doing it doing it well and maybe moving a little bit more quickly thank

[02:07:52] you very much more quickly then okay I sit up 17 seconds so let me ask you something that's not covered here is this is more mostly about teaching and learning, what about operational aspect of the school systems using EI Tours?

[02:08:12] Yeah, so again, any of my colleagues that want to jump in, I mean, I'd certainly welcome. Well, no, I mean, I just would say, like, those are the conversations of senior leadership that we've had, right? Like, how can we improve our efficiency in our department? So I'll just give you one example from the academic world, right?

[02:08:28] One of the things that we do every year at the end of the year, obviously, is we look at our state assessment results, and we try to analyze where students, you know, could grow and maybe where our curriculum needs to be enhanced well that's a pretty time-intensive process but with AI one of the things that we've been able to do is to take all of our curriculum standards take the state standards take the test blueprint from the state analyze the items that students did well on analyze the items that students consistently struggled with and figure out where we need to strengthen our curriculum we can do that with AI much more rapidly than we could ever do that before right we would spend weeks and

[02:09:05] months doing that work before. Now we can spend, well, weeks still, but days and weeks instead of months. Every department is developing use cases about how to improve their efficiency and effectiveness in the same way. I'm just not as familiar with what business office might be doing or human resources might be doing. But Gotham continues to support all of our departments in deepening their understanding and trying to build out those use cases to improve our efficiency and effectiveness. Mr. Moon, I'll jump in here just to respond that as well. You know, my department is working on building a chat bot for SR&R. So our students

[02:09:41] future can look up anything in SR&R without having to go through that huge booklet to find the things that they want to learn about or know about right away. So we're in the testing phase of that right now working with our IT department to do that for our students. And we use it when we are, you know, searching for things in srnr as well you know our documents are now loaded up into a safe space so that we can use ai to be more efficient and not have to worry about reading through documents that can find it for us right away and i can add on a personal note i think that

[02:10:18] i have used it as my own personal coach in certain areas and when i upload documents i use it as a thought partner to help push me in particular areas am i missing anything here i have a safe space where it understands who i am and my role in the organization that i work for a superintendent who follows policies and regulations and answers to the board it has all of fairfax county and it's in the profile and so based on that information i do use ai to push me to think of things that i

[02:10:53] hadn't thought of before and mr. Moon each department operational departments actually working with the concept I know our HR department very recently we previewed and senior leadership the possibility of having an after-hours answering service that would actually comb through all HR and benefits policies because a lot of times staff call after hours with questions around leave and benefits and that type of thing so we're loading tools to help provide better customer service for our staff so I think our operational departments are

[02:11:32] looking at things and we'll be providing updates to the board as we're contemplating what that could actually look like in a safe and measured way because we want to make sure we're safeguarding data and privacy of our staff and students thank you thank you but you're not waiting for school board policy for you to be able to do that The policy we expect will guide this work.

[02:11:57] But in the interim, we're using our acceptable use policies. We have technology policies. We have privacy policies. So we're utilizing those policies that exist. I think AI is one facet. It's one tool.

[02:12:12] It's obviously a powerful engine. But we're working within all of our set policies to try to be thoughtful. However, as Dr. Presidio said, I think we're not proceeding in that student realm at this point yet.

[02:12:28] We're waiting to see what the policy's gonna guide. - Okay, thank you. - Thank you. Ms. A. John Cunning. - Okay, so first of all, thank you for this presentation and for putting this together. I appreciate it. I'm not one of those early adopter people, so.

[02:12:48] One of the questions that I have is in one of your slides, you talked about, and I know you're talking, right now we're talking about the staff, not the students but one of the slides talked about supporting families and managing their children's AI use outside of the school that as a division we would do that what what does that look like to you I actually can answer that the st. John Cunning I it's been one of the topics of our family quad meetings this last round and we also are going to be working on developing a parent academy just on the topic of AI so we're looking forward to that and we want to

[02:13:27] make sure it's responsive to parents actual questions which is why that group is a really I know Dr. Riley was speaking to the group on a different topic but it includes parents from all schools in the school division and we want to make sure that whatever guidance is representative of the questions and concerns and ideas of our families here in Fairfax County Public Schools so my question is I love that idea but I want to make sure that we have a good cross

[02:14:02] section and representation of all of our families when we're talking about IA and if you're having those meetings and that you do have interpreters that's available and that you do have people that are competent in AI or technology to assist those families whom I worked with a lot that are not familiar with with basic technology okay my next question my screen just went I had my question prepared so please stop my time just till I get back to my screen

[02:14:36] because it just went off so I know we're talking about the overarching and what we're working at and so one of the things that you mentioned in terms of guiding principles was monitoring impact to maximize benefits and avoid harm so are you in this process developing specific metrics or data points where leadership can report back to us to prove that AI is increasing instructional efficiency rather than AI-diminished learning?

[02:15:06] Yeah, absolutely. We've actually engaged the research office to try to identify how they might be able to support us in conducting kind of some, you know, program evaluation work because we are going to need some additional assistance there.

[02:15:23] But that, you know, development work is underway. The other question is, are you guys also developing a checklist in terms of the ethical, equitable, operational conditions that must be satisfied for each new AI tool that we're going to bring on for our staff?

[02:15:40] Yeah, so that's kind of in the framework of our tool adoption process and I mean we had a really strong tool adoption process to begin with. We don't just allow you know a teacher or a school to adopt something. It's got to go through a central review process so we've enhanced that process to include obviously the review of any AI infused tools as well to make sure that they can comply you know with the data privacy the security but more importantly that there has to be a strong educational benefit for that before we would you know just adopt a tool and bring it in it's got to align with our you know instructional model the the learning model that I talked about it's got to align with you know

[02:16:19] the curriculum standards that we have in the state to support teaching and learning in a way that you know we wouldn't be able to support as much absent that tool you provide the board with that checklist so that we can see that and then another thing that even though I'm not one of those people that is first adopter are we teaching our teachers because then they're going to be teaching our students about the the biases mistakes or missing information in AI generated content so that they aren't misled by technology we know that AI depends on what it's fed and we know that a lot of times what it's fed is

[02:16:59] from very specific demographic groups? - Yeah, so when we talk about AI literacy, that's one of the AI literacies that we're talking about, right, like how to evaluate content for bias, for accuracy. So the student-facing lessons that we've developed around AI literacy, that's part of the work that we're doing there.

[02:17:22] - You know, it's important not just for students, but for adults as well. You know, sometimes when I'm using AI, and I know that the answer that they're giving me is not accurate, you know, I have that conversation with them right with with them with with my AI bot and so I think it's not just students that we have to make sure that we teach this AI literacy and to challenge when you know something's not right or don't just depend on one resource or source that we ensure that our teachers do that as well and my final question is I do agree that the portrait of a graduate attributes that

[02:17:59] we look at are even more important now so what are we going to be doing to enhance the development of making sure that our students have those skills in schools so that they can use those to navigate AI?

[02:18:17] - Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question. It's not really as much about AI, is it about really prioritizing the types of teaching and learning experiences that are gonna help students develop those skills, right? So, you know, the learning model, and again, I didn't go into it in a lot of depth and detail, but that provides the framework.

[02:18:36] If we work through those four different domains, using the pedagogies, using the resources that we've developed to support developing learner-centered environments, universally designed curriculum that's accessible to all students, meaningful learning experiences that privilege, instructional strategies that are rigorous and are gonna support students' problem-solving abilities, problem-based learning activities, project-based learning activities that are gonna develop those critical and creative thinking skills, and purposeful assessment that really gives students the formative feedback that they need, and engages them in the reflection process about what they've learned, what they haven't learned, and where they need to go next in the learning journey.

[02:19:14] We have to privilege all of those pedagogies, and we've developed out a wealth of resources to support teachers across grade levels and content areas in all four of those domains, and that's where the instructional support work and training and professional development that we do is always centered in the FCPS learning model.

[02:19:32] So it's making sure that those types of practices are happening in our classrooms on a daily basis. And then the question is, how can AI extend that, right? How can it create more opportunities for students to engage in really difficult problem-solving activities without a teacher by their side, right? Or without that tutor support that some students might have and that others might not have, like Mr. Moon talked about.

[02:19:53] How can the technology provide some of those access points and supports? - I would like to see a fidelity in terms of developing, Ensuring that those resources are being used because I really firmly believe that that is what makes the difference with our kids.

[02:20:14] - Thank you, I appreciate it. - Thank you, Ms. Marin. - Yes, I'll keep my comments not focused on the policy since that is what the Governance Committee will be working on on Tuesday. So I am challenged to be as excited as I'd like to be about this, Dr. Reed.

[02:20:32] First, this conversation is not student-centered. I don't understand what students are going to engage with. This conversation is adult-centered. All the examples I've heard are about adults and how our staff are using AI. That's not really the biggest concern. Of course, you wanna make sure it's done safely and with fidelity, but I don't understand, other than it's not generative AI, what is really happening.

[02:20:54] There's no examples given. It's certainly an opportunity to get us excited, but it's all very intangible. Second, my experience as a board member has been sporadic in terms of understanding what's happened. I've dug into the informations the superintendent has shared, mostly by internal communications.

[02:21:14] And from what I can understand, I'm perplexed because, Dr. Reed, this board engagement piece is really tough for me. You sent us on February 3rd ahead for this meeting this four-phase framework for AI adoption from AI for Education, a nonprofit organization.

[02:21:33] And the very first thing in the phase is to establish a foundation, host an introductory meeting and Gen A literacy training for district and school leadership board and other key stakeholders that hasn't happened the horse is way out it says to create a cross-functional team including leaders teachers students and community members to workshop generative AI review the organization's vision and strategy how when are we going to get an update about this in the strategic plan goals in what goals item three phase three is engage students in the community build common understanding by sharing your gen a guidelines and how they support your

[02:22:12] organizational vision with caregivers and community members via newsletters town halls etc just as you've done for school boundaries for name change we've done it for budget we've done it for facilities I also am extremely concerned that this school division has entered into contracts with multi-billion dollar organizations and I don't know what they are I don't know what was promised I I cannot get my head around this, and the bottom line is, how are you going to measure how instructional priorities intersect with the existing and planned work related to AI?

[02:22:48] That was on the slide. This session will explore how instructional priorities intersect with existing and planned work. How are you going to measure that? How are you going to show that, that any of these tools is good? I also will say the board has, by policy and traditionally, had a role in reviewing curriculum and tools.

[02:23:06] Alexia, NuZella, Benchmark Advanced, each of those was selected and approved publicly by the board. And now we have a slew of education technology which is unclear and not contained in a centralized place.

[02:23:23] Where can parents find information about what's being used, let alone the board? So those are a lot of questions. I think the roadmap you're reading from is one option. one set of ideas from one organization there are many but it is the one I chose to share with us I did provide all access to all 50 states AI policies all of which demonstrate a range of approaches to AI though they all have some commonalities which we did summarize for you in terms of the those

[02:24:00] states that are sort of on the watch list so I think that in terms of the number of tools that are being used I know that that's something that instructional services could provide and dr. Presidio I'm not sure if you want to be able to provide a list we can publicly post that or if it is available I can currently let me just clarify on that point again I know there were a number of questions you asked but just on this point what I tried to address with dr.

[02:24:25] Anderson's question is we haven't adopted any AI tools outside of our regular curriculum adoption process other than this very limited power buddy pilot which is optional and does not require participation so that that is it so that's the list so there isn't a longer list okay so I think there's the answer on that topic I do think we could provide a more detailed explanation of that optional piloted tool that would be helpful absolutely be happy to do that

[02:24:59] - Thank you, Ms. Dixit. - Thank you for the presentation and all the work which went into this. I am definitely a believer in AI for education and I think this is the way to move forward.

[02:25:21] I know that our students will be ready for the jobs or their career, chosen career, if they had good knowledge, foundation knowledge of AI in the school. Even in the colleges, they'll come across that. So not preparing them is not an option.

[02:25:37] We have to prepare them. I think some voices, we hear the loudest voices always from the community, which are against something. And then we don't hear from people who are agreeing with it, agreeing with the thought we are moving forward with.

[02:25:53] There are a lot of parents I talk to who are supportive of this type of education, and they want to bring their students how to do ethical use of AI. That's the concern. It's not like, oh, we don't want our kids to learn AI. it is like, how do they learn a responsibility?

[02:26:09] You can't shy, you run away from it. You know, you're in the right, I guess, environment right now in nurturing, caring, protected environment to learn this properly at the school rather than just going online and just doing chat GPT themselves. So I think ethically teaching them AI is our duty and that is what we should prepare our students for.

[02:26:33] I wanted to ask what multi-billion dollar contract do we have, which companies do have the contracts with Dr. Reid? - We have just an agreement with OpenAI that it's not a cost agreement. We are in alignment with 12 school divisions in the country to partner to provide free access only to the adults in our division.

[02:26:58] And we know that it's safer to have an enterprise agreement for our staff to utilize tools rather than what was occurring, which is staff using free tools online that then don't protect our data. So we wanted to make sure we had an agreement that would protect our data and have it be, if you will, a safe guard railed space for experimenting with AI.

[02:27:24] So it's not a financial transaction, but rather a partnership agreement as we explore new tools for adults only. Are we giving anything in return? - No, ma'am. - Okay.

[02:27:39] So there is nothing that we are giving you, our data, our sensitive information, our things we should not be sharing? - No, ma'am. The agreement was reviewed by both legal and data and went back and forth. It's similar to those agreements signed by other states and divisions across the country and were approved by legal.

[02:28:01] - And the legal agreement prohibits them from using our data to train their model? - Okay, great, yeah. Actually, the federal government, all agencies use AI now, and ChatGPT or OpenAI has given them like a dollar of license charge.

[02:28:19] And any federal employee working in the government using have access to a lot of information, have been using AI, ChatGPT, both Gemini and ChatGPT. So I think a workforce can definitely use it mindfully and using it for the right reasons, we should not be a problem with that.

[02:28:41] I think I just want to voice that just from the first video we saw and just seeing next 10 years, we all will probably have a robotic assistance. Please be ready for that. And we have to be, you know, our kids have to be ready for that too.

[02:29:00] So I'm very supportive of this and hopefully we'll keep continuing this path. Thank you. - Thank you. Ms. Anderson. - So I am one of those people that believe strongly that we need to be focusing our policy not only on AI, but actually on innovation and innovative technologies.

[02:29:23] Because I think that as someone who, since I was little, has gone through five different ways that I have consumed music over my life. And I look at my grandmother who was born in 1919 who literally went every iteration of the phone that went through her life.

[02:29:42] We're moving faster and faster. And if we try to go at the pace that we're necessarily comfortable with, we are going to be outpaced by what's going on in the world so quickly that we can't keep up. And I actually think that's what happened with social media. And so I think that we're at a moment where we have to use innovative technology ideals.

[02:30:03] when we're talking about this. And I think we can use AI as a framework to create that within the division. It gives us a pathway so that we don't have to have this conversation the next time it happens because we already know what we're gonna do. And so I would like to use this as we're looking at other policies.

[02:30:19] I want us to make sure that we're not locking all those policies solely into issues that are going on with AI. I think that's what can happen in regulation. I think that the policies themselves should be looking at how we deal with innovative technologies. because I think that as we move forward, the board needs to be responsive and be able to work with the superintendent staff to be able to be responsive to those issues.

[02:30:42] So I am fully in agreement with my colleague, Mr. Moon. I think that we are probably, while we're not behind the power curve, I think we're probably on the safer end at this point. We have not solely jumped off, but our kids have and our teachers have because this is a tool.

[02:31:00] And as the example that you shared about your son, I can't even, if I was still in the college classroom, I can't even imagine how I would be using it with my students. And I actually talk with some of my professor friends about how they're using it and what they can do.

[02:31:17] Because I think those things are already happening at the college level where kids have more access and we can use them to inform what we're doing here as well. - I would like to just tag onto that. One of the things that we realized is many of our educators have had no formal instruction on AI because unless you were in university within the last three years, you really have not had a class on the effective use of AI because the technology is evolving that quickly.

[02:31:47] And I'm proud that many of our Fairfax staff have many more than three years of experience. And that also necessitates really a grounding or a foundation built for our adults as we learn more about the tools to guide our young people responsibly.

[02:32:04] So we're excited to learn more. - And this is a pretty common thing. And I think that the board absolutely should take advantage of trainings that are offered so that we can see what our teachers are learning. I know that some of my colleagues have already done those types of trainings to see what's going on around the division.

[02:32:22] I did have a constituent reach out to me when they saw the things that were on the schedule for today and mentioned the fact that it makes a whole lot of sense for us also to talk about the environmental impact of AI when we're talking about environmental stewardship. I think that that's a portion of the conversation that has to be included, particularly as we look towards more closed loop systems where we're conserving resources and things like that.

[02:32:44] So I just wanna say, I think we need to keep going. I wanna keep it as general as humanly possible and use AI as an example, rather than having it be that we're only structuring our policies around this technology. - Thank you, Ms. Anderson. Mr. Prisch.

[02:33:00] - Thank you. I'm looking forward to next week's conversation in governance. We have a lot of policies to review that have been shared by our chair that could be potentially impacted by this. I wanted to riff a little bit off of our chair's comment about what policy shape kind of takes.

[02:33:21] Not that this would happen here, but in Congress, one of the issues that technology companies love is that Congress writes specific laws specific to a piece of technology and then in a year when that technology is changed or out of date congress never goes back to address those changes and so as we get our head around the policy as we know from looking at our list of outdated policies there's no assurance that in five years time that whatever board that is is going to be picking up the policy to update it but

[02:33:56] I think ensuring that the eventual policy aligns not only with our expectations around AI but could be put on top of future technologies that we've not yet imagined, I think that's going to be important. And among those things is ensuring that staff and students are prepared for best case proper usage of the tools that exist out in the real world, regardless of what's happening in our school buildings.

[02:34:28] And that any technology used by our educators, AI or otherwise, align a bit with what Dr. Presidio was talking about in terms of our instructional models, the efficacy, etc. And then there are a host of policies that have some tie to our work in AI or other technologies from procurement to student privacy to data usage to data sharing through procurement.

[02:34:57] And it'll be interesting to see if those policies have any gaps in them. I think of our school trust policy, which talks about personally identifiable information and prohibits the sharing with contractors. So we have various pieces of some of the protections that people have talked about in our policies already.

[02:35:17] I think a future policy on technology that encompasses the work around AI and potential future technologies with that in mind, and perhaps points to other policies of note, will be important as we proceed.

[02:35:36] But I appreciate the information that's been shared. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and take a turn before we get to gobacks. So many of you know I worked at TJ 20-plus years ago, and we taught a course called AI. I didn't quite know what they were doing I will tell you this I would talk to my students about their research and they were researching cameras on cars backup cameras they were researching face recognition everything they were touching has happened and and some quite some time later some pretty short in

[02:36:11] short order so you know we we are behind in my opinion we do need to keep up but I do like the sort of live within the guardrails of being intentional instead of fast. I also want to, you know, raise this that, you know, I am in a unique situation because my wife is an ESPIT, so I hear a lot of what is going on. Teachers' utilization of AI is absolutely student-centered. They are making their lessons better. They are differentiating instruction to

[02:36:46] people across different learning platforms. They are generating different ways to assess students for the nonverbal student to the kinesthetic student to the next whatever they're finding ways to assess knowledge we all did it paper pencil it didn't work for every one of us back in my stone age you dropped out nobody went looking for you okay but if you were a hands-on learner forget it and now we have all these tools at our disposal to do this with fidelity so i just want to make sure that people understand when teachers are using this it takes them time to put perhaps

[02:37:22] an entire health curriculum in if you teach health in PE 7 or 8, and you're trying to enhance that health curriculum, which hasn't really been touched or enhanced in a long time. And the examples you were given are so outdated because of new information. So the other thing I want to talk about is instructional services here at Willow Oaks, because from my perspective, our specialists, and this is why we need to get moving, need to be finding ways to integrate AI into lessons.

[02:37:51] Right now, our teachers at the base level are doing it. I'm not aware of it happening at Central, and probably because it can't. You're not empowered to do that yet. But I think we just need to continue to work smarter so that we can make sure that our kids learn. And the other thing I want to say is there's a huge difference between technology use and putting devices, computers, in front of children, okay, and using AI.

[02:38:17] They're separate. I personally believe that we put devices in front of kids too much. And I mean, we as a society, you know, my hope is that parents won't give devices to their children and you work on a grocery store, every two or three year old sitting in the little seats got a device in front of them.

[02:38:34] We've got to stop this as a country, as a culture. We are getting them dependent. That's why kids can't do sustained reading for 15 minutes because it's not entertaining enough. So we have a lot of work to do in that arena, but we as a school system, we're not putting devices in children's hands at young, young ages.

[02:38:51] My hope is that with the utilization of the devices that we have with kids, that they are being used appropriately and to enhance and not to take up some time. And I do think we need more intentionality and training on that and I'll maybe take a go back. So I think our first go back is Dr. Anderson.

[02:39:10] - Thank you. Something that you said just a little while ago kind of raised my interest. You mentioned that the open AI contracts that we have Dr. Reed, that you shared that 12 school divisions also have similar contracts that prohibits the use of data to train their model.

[02:39:28] What is the data that we are utilizing that our teachers who are taking advantage of this are inputting? So, again, I mean, I think the use cases are probably going to vary somewhat, but I think most frequent is differentiation of the curriculum materials that we're providing.

[02:39:50] That has nothing to do with specific students. It's because, you know, I've done this when I was a teacher, just trying to differentiate different things. It's, I have this concept, I want a lower level, I want a medium level, I want a high level. So that's what they're dumping in. Why are we stopping them from using that kind of unnamed data to train their model to do it better?

[02:40:15] Just because of some of the, I think, privacy concerns and data security concerns. So, again, we have policies in place. We have things in the legal agreement to protect student information, staff information, and privacy.

[02:40:31] But I think one of the concerns is how these companies, we don't want to feed them information that they're going to use to train their model and use in ways that we don't know or understand or can't even contemplate. So it's just another security precaution because one of the things that I think people are genuinely concerned about in society is you put your information into something, you don't know how it's going to be used later.

[02:40:53] Sure. So it's just another layer of protection. Thank you. Dr. Reed, let me confirm, the OpenAI agreement that speaks to, I think you said there were two, Gemini and ChatGPT, those are the two that this agreement is speaking to, or are there others?

[02:41:13] It is not speaking to those two. It is only speaking to ChatGPT for teachers. Got it. Thank you. I said this before, and I'll say it again in this conversation as I wrap up my last few seconds. Two things can still be true at the same time.

[02:41:29] can have great excitement around this and I and I do if there's a space for there to for us to reduce workload for teachers and increase productivity and give more differentiated work to students yay that's like the sweet spot but there's also concern with parents because it is an unknown world and when they're seeing that when students are interacting with AI tools that they are engaging and self-harming I appreciated that in this conversation you said over and over and over again we don't have any tools for students at current it's

[02:42:05] just tools for teachers and it's a limited set of tools I think we could do a much better job dr. Reed for us to harness kind of the excitement that it exists in our community and reduce some of the angst we have to kind of organize and package and deliver this in a different way it's a little bit complicated if I could just finish my sentence it's a little bit complicated for parents to find where all the things live and they don't hear what we're talking about today all they're seeing is come to this big show and we'll do these things and all they're thinking is oh my god my kid is not protected so I

[02:42:42] think there's a communication gap that could reduce a lot of the anxiety that I know I am hearing from the community thank you thank you miss Marin for go back yes so I appreciate that about family I have very little that I can share with parents who are contacting me and the student guide is not anywhere on the FCPS website that I can find it I looked generally in on two high schools while we were talking so look I'm seeking to make space for this board to thoughtfully consider the viewpoints and data about really the bigger picture which is incorporating technology into education and this is really what miss Anderson was talking about I agree you know just thinking about the

[02:43:21] conversation an AI policy seems much too narrow we're really talking about technology and education and when I look at the other there are only six other policies about technology the one about data security was last reviewed in 2015 so that's the kind of thing that makes it really hard for me to be excited because I don't think that it's being taken seriously if the board is not being you know included in this update and even to not have our chief technology officer here seems very strange to me because if it's a partnership they've got to be lockstep so you know I'm wondering if the AI policy should be

[02:43:57] more broad to make it more evergreen I think the content largely stays the same from what I've seen of the draft which I believe will be shared soon before the Governance Committee meeting but perhaps that's really a task for governance to consider is how do we make it more evergreen I still continue to wonder if what if being a leader means approaching this with children's development in mind We haven't talked at all about six-year-olds, seven-year-olds.

[02:44:20] We're talking about these high school kids going to college. What about the 10-year-olds? Those kiddos need different kinds of experiences. In 2020, when I got on the board, we had just started doing one-to-one, one laptop for high school, and we were starting to figure out, should we do middle school?

[02:44:36] People were protesting us doing that, okay? And then COVID hit, and now everyone has one. But what has been the result? What's been the benefit? What's been the drawback? what's the data that's you know what is the data that shows that technology is helping students learn like and just for instance like our multilingual learners made tremendous gains last year well was it because they used benchmark advance which is an excellent curriculum was it because we had a separate curriculum for MLLs was it because teachers were in smaller classrooms I don't understand how we can keep moving forward if we don't know if it was the technology and the last thing I'll say is we're giving brand loyalty that's what

[02:45:15] we're providing okay open AI is an AI research and deployment company and they might do good in the world like many other companies but that's not our mission okay miss Anderson I just wanted to respond there for a second because as many of you guys know I'm a hardcore Mac user not a huge fan of Microsoft but that is a tool that we utilize with our students the same way as Google Suite is a tool. AI is a tool. And so we don't necessarily have to, we use lots of tools related

[02:45:54] to our teaching the same way we use textbook companies and the same way we have testing software. We have all kinds of things. And so whether or not we believe strongly, and you will not hear a stronger proponent of ensuring that we have multimodal methods for our kids to learn.

[02:46:14] I used to teach success and study skills in a college classroom, and 100% I understand why pencil and paper is still as important. But that doesn't mean that we live in a world that is only surviving on pencil and paper. So while we may be nostalgic about the things that we're upset are going away, it doesn't change the fact that we have to be responsive to the world that our students are walking into.

[02:46:37] And so I just want us to figure out how to thread that needle carefully. And we've seen our division focus on those things. We are moving towards making sure we have textbooks. We are moving, we want the tangible, we want our kids reading. And as someone, I don't want us to characterize it as no kids read, because I know it's anecdotal, but I am watching my 11-year-old who's read 3,000 pages of, in the last, and I can't get him off the books.

[02:47:06] So I just am telling you that, like, I think for every anecdotal case where we can talk about the worst case scenario we can talk about the exact opposite too and that's the joy of having 176,000 students and so we're gonna find a rich breath in our in our division and I want us to continue to make sure that we're looking at the needs for all the kids and what we can do to make sure that they're all but I don't think you can have any conversation about what we're doing and not think that we're being student-centered so I just want to make sure that we put that forward that we stay student-centered and I agree I just want us to keep that firmly in mind okay seeing no other placards I'm going to

[02:47:44] take a go back in terms of the developmental comments I 100% agree all I can do is share something anecdotally which was the kindergarten team at an elementary school using AI as a thought partner around how kindergartners can demonstrate learning because the program of studies they were working from only had them drawing a picture and I think that just like our 17 year olds are way smarter than we were when we were 17 our kindergartners I mean you know we they can think critically they can problem-solve I mean we are stretching and developing those young minds in ways that you know I don't believe I was as

[02:48:21] a preschooler or kindergartner because I was just doing basic coloring and whatnot I also think that this board would probably benefit from some sort of course on machine learning and AI I know that we reference examples but you know I think we need to see and hear from people who are doing this in the field IE in our schools with fidelity and share their success stories with reaching children that they otherwise were not reaching and I also want to just re-emphasize that part of this entire movement moving forward is the Parent Academy you know we're full I mean the entire time that I did presentations as a school counselor and as a director I held up the phone all

[02:48:58] the time and asked parents where are you charging these in your but in the in your bedroom or your kids charging them when you leave devices in your kids hands overnight you've basically given them permission to go anywhere in the without your permission and that's the problem we have with Jennifer AI as a companion we have to talk to our children we have to get devices out of their hands and we as parents have to do a better job to make sure that that is that is happening because we social media ran us ran us rugged and destroyed the self-esteem of our young people and we are rebuilding it slowly but surely and we are working hard as a school system but we are working hard as a community because we need our faith communities we need parents we need

[02:49:38] teachers we need coaches and mentors to show children how beautiful and wonderfully made they are and how unique they are and in terms of this work I think we're doing extremely well but I just think that from a board perspective it'd be good to actually see some real examples of those success stories happening in our classrooms thank you so not seeing any other placards I will thank staff again I think this is a fantastic presentation and appreciate the time and attention to that and we'll take a quick brief maybe our work

[02:50:17] session is adjourned then then we will start again with the budget committee

[02:50:21] thank you starting now we are now moving on to the discussion of the budget board

[03:03:16] budget committee on the FY 2027 proposed budget I call on dr. Reed for a presentation thank you miss Dixit this afternoon it's my pleasure to introduce our chief finance officer and her team they've spent a great deal of time working on this budget and we're very pleased to be presenting what we believe is a frugal thrifty needs-based budget that will continue to support world-class education for our students here in Fairfax County and we look forward to

[03:03:53] partnering with our county colleagues our board of supervisors and our delegation to the General Assembly in supporting this world-class education so Miss Burton if you want to begin the presentation please typically at this first work session I just do a real quick overview of what's actually in the budget because it's been a couple of weeks and I'm sure you all have had other important things to deal with during that time so if you could go

[03:04:29] Go ahead and go to the next slide, plus. The fiscal '27 budget totals 4.1 billion. That's an increase of 197 million or 5% over the '26 approved budget.

[03:04:45] The budget again is needs-based and focuses only on the base requirements for the school division. We're requesting an additional local transfer of 138.4 million or 5.1% over the '26 transfer. And it's important to note that that's about half of what we requested last year in the superintendents proposed.

[03:05:07] So let's look at what's new. The total expenditure increase of course is 197 million and compensation makes up the bulk of that at 178.4. Certainly we wanna honor our collective bargaining work and the FEU compensation adjustment is a 3% MSA plus step increases.

[03:05:29] The SCFPSA is the compensation adjustments for them are 4% plus step increases. We do have some benefit rate changes. You may have heard that the VRS contribution rate was reduced in the governor's budget that came out in December, and that is offset by increases in healthcare, so we actually end up with a net negative 2.3 million, and again, with compensation being about 178.4 million.

[03:05:56] We also have baseline adjustments, and that includes a reduction based on the enrollment loss for enrollment and student needs of 35.7 million. We also were able to include a partial class size restoration.

[03:06:12] You may recall that last year we cut 120 million out of the budget and we know with a reduction that large and a budget that is 90% salaries and benefits, there's really only a couple places you can go to get big dollars and that is class size or compensation and we had to do both.

[03:06:29] So we increased class size by one student for fiscal '26, and we're able to restore a half a student back in the fiscal '27 budget. We also restored the special education department chairs. We pulled those down to half-time.

[03:06:47] Each elementary had one special ed department chair. We pulled that down to .5 in fiscal '26, although all of the elementary schools were able to use other funds to trade to be able to complete that 1.0 for this year.

[03:07:04] But those are one-time funds. we would like to have that be funded with recurring dollars and so we've restored that, those 71 FTEs at a cost of 9.5 million and then that's one at each elementary school. We also have contractual and recurring baseline adjustments.

[03:07:21] Those are things like inflationary increases to contracts, fuel rate increases, utility rate increases, those kinds of things make up the contractual and baseline adjustments. Advanced academic resource teachers restoration, same thing as with the special ed.

[03:07:37] We reduced those down to .5 at the non-Title I schools only, and, but the schools were able to fund those with traded dollars in the current year. But again, those are one-time dollars.

[03:07:53] This puts them back in the base budget so that they're funded with recurring dollars. That's 48 FTEs, and so each elementary will go back to having 1.0 position, and the middle schools, which wasn't touched, has .5. We do have some slight transfers to other funds.

[03:08:10] That's mostly major maintenance and workers' comp reserves. On multi-year investments, the family liaison position conversions, this is the last tranche of family liaisons that were hourly that we're converting to FTEs.

[03:08:25] Student activities and athletic programs will add JV boys volleyball and some other opportunities at middle school, after school programs like soccer and basketball. fine and performing arts students stipends at the middle school for dance and guitar and at the elementary for dance, music, and theater.

[03:08:45] Certified athletic trainers, we're the fourth year of a phase in for that. When we started this four years ago, we had one athletic trainer, which of course is problematic if you have two sports events going on at the same time. So we have phased in having two athletic trainers at each school.

[03:09:03] This is the fourth year. Next year we'll add five more and then all high schools will have two athletic trainers at each school. We've also included a little bit of money to expand access to robotics, and then educator math credentialing, which will provide endorsements since we're expanding algebra one and those kinds of things.

[03:09:24] So again, the total expenditures are 197 million. We're very proud of this chart, because it shows our unwavering focus on restoring market competitive compensation.

[03:09:39] Just two years ago, we ranked seventh of eight with the master's beginning salary. Last year, we ranked fifth of eight, and this year, we are second of eight, so we've made great progress there. Even during last year's difficult budget process, we were able to maintain that commitment to closing the gap.

[03:09:59] It's important to note that about 70% of our teachers have a master's degree, and that is the preferred. We often get a question about why we're not looking at bachelor's, although I think we rank second in bachelor's as well. But it's because the master's is the preferred. Most of the universities, all of the universities in Virginia offer a five-year master's for education degree, and so that's the preferred.

[03:10:21] So that's why we always look at the master's schedule. And then finally, a shout out to our colleagues at HR. For the second consecutive year, teacher retention surpassed 90%. So they're doing a really great job in making sure that we retain our staff as well as the recruitment efforts.

[03:10:41] This is the compensation comparison for fiscal 27. At this point, Fairfax Loudon and Prince William are the only people that have salary scales out in public. And so you can see what they're doing. We do expect to maintain air rank of two based on what Prince William has stepped out with.

[03:11:00] But again, as what has happened last year, some of the divisions who are a little more flush with money will do a last minute enhancement to their salary scale, and so that could change everything. But for right now, our biggest competitors, of course, are Loudon and Prince William, 'cause they're about half our size.

[03:11:21] But hopefully they'll stay with what they put forward and we'll maintain our ranking of number two. And then this is just a showing where we are in fiscal 26, and again, where we are fiscal 27, and then the dates of when some of the other smaller divisions, the budgets are expected to be released.

[03:11:42] Again, the projected revenue for the school operating fund is 4.1 billion, it's an increase of 197 million. Our request to the county is 138.4 million, which if you remember from the fiscal forecast, 51.4% of what they stepped out with then was 116 million.

[03:12:04] So our gap right now is essentially about 22 million. State, we are expecting about 71 million in additional state funds. And all I can tell you is the stars aligned. The re-benchmarking benefited us significantly.

[03:12:20] Our local composite index went down. That also contributed to the amount of funds that we're gonna get. And this is the December budget. This is without having the new governor and the General Assembly make their mark on the budget as far as public education goes.

[03:12:36] So we're very pleased with being able to get additional funds from the state very early on. And then the last category is other. That's a reduction of 12.4 million. That's all of the other avenue that's not classified as state or local funding or federal funding.

[03:12:54] Federal funding, of course, we're not assuming any increase or decrease, but the jury's still out on what's gonna happen with federal funding. Looking forward, if additional state funds did become available, or local.

[03:13:11] I mean, I've never seen that happen, but it could. These are the items that we would prioritize in the event that we were able to get additional state funding. And that's the restoration of the additional .5 for a class size reduction, elementary STEM programs, inclusive pre-K, the major maintenance backlog, professional technical partnerships, and world language expansion.

[03:13:38] And we urge all of our parents, everybody, to stay involved and to contact your local and state representatives and let them know, share your views about public school funding because I'm sure they'd be delighted to hear from you. And then our next steps, we're having a budget work session today.

[03:13:55] We have a public hearing this evening. Then we have another work session on February 19th and then the school board is expected to adopt the 27 advertised budget on February 26th. And just because I forgot to mention it earlier, the county executive releases his budget on February 17th and that's when we'll know what their numbers are and what they might have included in their budget as the level of county transfer for FCPS.

[03:14:21] That's it. - Thank you, Ms. Burden and the budget team. At this time, I now invite board members to ask any clarifying questions or provide comments. I see Dr. Anderson first, followed by Mr. McLevin.

[03:14:38] - Thank you. I'm so sorry, I think I missed this part a little bit. did you say that the landscape, the outlook, at least at the state, seems to be more favorable, favorable enough to fill that $22 million gap that you just talked about?

[03:14:57] - Dr. Anderson. - You know that I will not speculate on what a group of elected officials might do or not do. - She has never said this before, by the way. Not once has she ever made that statement. - I have no idea of what the General Assembly and the new governor will do, but I am always optimistic and hope that we will get additional funds.

[03:15:18] - This is true, you are optimistic. Way more than I tend to be. But Dr. Reed, I'm going to ask you this again because I asked you during the presentation and I'm continued to be perplexed. On page, I don't know what page this is on, on page three where it says baseline adjustments, the partial class size restoration.

[03:15:43] I guess I'm confused. said this to you last time and you said yes I would revert this back to the language we used last time last year FY 26 we had a staffing adjustment which at the time I remember very very very clearly you talked to that this was not a class size increase this was a staffing adjustment yet we are talking about class size restorations here please make this make sense for me sure I think mr. Smith probably can clarify this because we've talked about this

[03:16:18] a couple different ways over the years and essentially there's sort of a way that staff understand it and then there's the actual formula driven staffing if that makes sense so in this case what we talked about last year was a formula driven staffing how what buildings are staffed and I think mr.

[03:16:39] Smith can clarify that since he works closely with our HR department on this good afternoon everyone so we have staffing standards and we have class size caps that we provide so that we ensure that no class is above a certain number of students and when students push up against those caps and we look at our staffing standards and so this would be a staffing standard adjustment class size increases common nomenclature but we would really be looking at the staffing standard that we're using to staff our buildings okay you said a lot and I don't know if I understood all of that so let me try to connect the dots

[03:17:18] for myself last year's budget what we had that was in multiple presentations was a staffing adjustment which the rationale at that point was that that would not result in a class size increase across the board but certainly in some places because we were taking staff members down by one is that accurate well I'm not asking if it's accurate because that's what was said I'm asking is this your recollection yes we adjusted the staffing standard okay so why are we not having a staffing adjustment restoration here rather than

[03:17:56] a class size restoration that's the piece that I don't understand we're using in my mind's eye two different sets of vernacular for the same activity yeah dr. Anderson you're absolutely right I think the short answer is that the language that you're using is the language that should be on the slide class size is the regulation we wouldn't be changing the regulation without board input and so staffing formula restoration I think is the correct so that I'm asking you dr. Reed for the second time so we have the documents reflect so that we can connect the dots with what happened last year and what

[03:18:34] we're trying to adjust this year or at least address okay thank you as one board member who does ask about the bachelors thank you for sharing that we are two of eight you said on the bachelor so now we're on equal footing with both lanes it's that after yes okay thank you for that can you say again I know you mentioned it but I I didn't capture it properly which two school

[03:19:08] divisions have already come out with their Latin and Prince Latin and Prince William Latin and Prince William Alexandria's budget is out but they have not publish salary skills as part of their budget because they're doing something else anyway and the others their budgets are just not out yet so right so with loudon and prince william um sharing what they're anticipating doing and what we are anticipating doing where do we do we still rank ahead of loudon yes we and still below prince william yes but

[03:19:44] you know they could do a last second change i mean just because this is what what they stepped out with doesn't mean that they will hold there. - Well, they're swimming in that data center money, so who knows. Yeah, they are, it's a good place to be.

[03:20:01] And my final question, hold, I can't find my page here. I guess my final, it's not more, it's less of a question and more of a statement because Ms. Burden cannot see into her crystal ball, even though I push quite a bit.

[03:20:23] do wonder to avoid being in the position that we were last year if we have a budget gap what is that plan I guess that's it I guess it's a question after all well I think that we've listed the things that we are going to be including or attempting to fund this year and miss burden if you could bring up the slide that talks about our investments for nope back back please the things were multi-year investments here compensation and baseline

[03:21:03] adjustments those would be the areas we'd have to look at if we were going to have to make up a any type of a budget shortfall so McLevin um thanks can you tell us our LCI percentile now what has it decreased it went from six five seven nine two six three eight one which is right at two percent which is huge I

[03:21:42] I mean, I've never seen an LCI change by that much. - Congratulations. So, thank you for that. Going to the more programmatic things, you mentioned dance and guitar. Can you unpack that for me? What, and that may not, that may be a particular question.

[03:21:59] What does that look like? - It's stipends for the middle school dance and guitar and elementary dance music and theater. Just like you would imagine in high school, if you've ever had a kid in one of those programs, amount of time that teachers spend supporting those programs outside the regular day is huge and so this provides stipends for those and how widespread are those programs do you know not know that I'll check in with dr. Presidio and

[03:22:36] we'll get you that answer in a Friday letter okay because I know they are not offered in my community so I'd be grateful to hear we're there so middle school sports you mentioned soccer and basketball are we confirmed with that or those still two options that are floating out there those are still options middle school principals are working through with mr. horns office national board certified teacher stipends we've been getting a lot of communications on this can you let us know the current state of play sure those are actually video we assigned so we are advocating that video we support those

[03:23:15] positions for some reason I think it's the librarian specifically that the video he is for some reason identified is not receiving those but we are advocating for those and we believe with the new administration they're likely to reinstate those because for years those have been part of the monies that flow through from Richmond and then can we go to the priority list not sorry the looking forward list yes thank you so I know this is not this is alphabetical

[03:23:54] and not exhaustive right but if we were to stumble upon a massive mine of data data center money or something like that what is our superintendent where would you guide us on that list well I think that in many ways I suspect my I would guide us to the class size restoration because that also gives our principals a certain amount of flexibility which would in turn impact elementary stem and world language expansion so I think that would be more of a global restoration

[03:24:34] do note though that each of those we split that in half and it's about 15 I believe leave 15.5 million for each of those have so the but again we can incrementally increase it because as dr. Anderson mentioned earlier it's a formula distribution it's not like bits of people so I would that's probably where I would guide the conversation. Thank you. Sandy, Ms. Anderson. Thank you so much for all

[03:25:12] the information. I appreciate it. I did want to start off by asking a question that it can, if you look at slide three, it can give the impression that somehow everything that we cut last year has just magically started to come back. And I don't think that that's a fulsome, I don't think that's a full picture of everything that we actually did to reduce our budget last year in order to meet our obligations in a bunch of different ways and so could you talk a little bit about other than the the staffing numbers and things like that the other thing that I want to say really fast is that the special education department chairs and advanced academic resource teachers those were funded last

[03:25:50] year they were just not funded in the same way as they had been previously and so what that actually did if I'm understanding correctly is it impacted our end-of-year money which does things like impacts the amount that we're able to put forward towards the maintenance backlogs and other things that we use end-of-year money for so I do while I understand that this is about putting it back in the main budget I do want to make sure that the community understands that those were not cut last year they were funded out of you know additional carryover at the schools and you know reallocation of money at this from the school level but can you talk about some of the other things that we cut out of

[03:26:27] our budget last year in order to make the compensation possible yes we the employee compensation adjustment remember the FEU contract had to be renegotiated to pull that down 1% and that saved about 33 million we deferred social studies curriculum materials that was 15 million post-COVID classroom monitors 13 million central office department reduction seven and a half million we reduced EV bus funding 2.8 million and we cut non-local travel

[03:27:05] system-wide in half and that was about 750,000 and along with the staffing for the special ed department chairs the AARTs at non title one schools were funded differently but they were reductions to the recurring funds that we have in the budget as well as the staffing formula adjustment and that we talked about so while this may be restoring a few of the things that we did cut last year there are several things still on the list that we did not restore in this yeah about about 90 million of it

[03:27:38] we is not in this budget nor was in the current year's budget i believe also some of the elementary creativity is because it was as a result of us allowing a greater percentage of carryover of one-time dollars which because they're one time aren't there any longer so it's uh also necessitated a different approach and if you could move forward to slide four I was hoping that we could hit this point a little bit harder how did we end up as seven like what was the what was the process that it took in FY 24 for us to

[03:28:15] end up that far down on the list I mean we just weren't able to give the salary increases that the other divisions around us were able to give over the you know like right after COVID I mean because most people's you know budgets were a little bit depressed during the covid years but then immediately after that some of the other divisions you know started moving forward with trying to improve their salary skills and we just didn't have the funds to be able to do that so i i guess my point here is

[03:28:53] it's taken us several years to kind of dig out of that and what would be the danger of us sliding back where we're not i mean i guess the point i'm trying to make is we can't let this happen again where we can't we can't allow things to be flat because it does put us so far behind the rest of the divisions and i think that it i think it's a large part of you know our ability to retain staff and all the other things that are going on so i just want to stress this particular slide because i think it's so important as we're talking about the the viability of our division and moving

[03:29:30] forward that we have to make sure that we hit we continue to do everything we can to meet our salary obligations yeah we would prefer not to get that far behind again because it's just a bear to try to catch back up and I have 30 seconds so the only thing that I do want to say is I know it's a great news story in terms of our budget at this moment that our LCI has changed however overall it is not a great thing for talking about the economic health of our community and so I just want to stress that that yes any sense that we can get

[03:30:05] back from the state is essential however it does say something about what's going on within Northern Virginia that I think is very alarming and that we want to keep an eye on. Mr. Moon. Okay thank you Madam Vice Chair. Thanks for the presentation. First question goes to do $12.4 million of less revenue other than Fairfax maybe perhaps tuition payment from Fairfax City where else are you

[03:30:42] expecting I'm not looking for a small amount from whether where are the larger buckets of the money that we'll be losing from yeah it's it's it's that it's a tuitions from Fairfax City it's tuition from the students from other divisions that attend Thomas Jefferson but also the reason it's a negative number is that before I got here the county stopped budgeting for a beginning balance that they believe that's a structural imbalance and that

[03:31:19] we should not be relying on a beginning balance and we have taken that out as a commitment to long-term fiscal sustainability by transitioning to a budget that does not rely on a beginning balance to fund it in the next year I I don't think I understand what you have just said.

[03:31:39] I mean, all that I understood was Fairfax City and TJ and then second part. Yes. Could you put that into writing so that I can go over very slowly? Okay, Fairfax City's, the revenue from Fairfax City is going up.

[03:31:54] That is going up? Yes. The revenue for TJ is also going up, but this is a negative number because there's an offset of $25 million that we used to budget for a beginning balance every year and have received criticism for relying on one-time money to fund a budget that is all recurring, and so we have eliminated that.

[03:32:20] This is simply a changing the accounting method. Yes. So that we can write our accounting method to the system Kauni had adopted long, long ago. Yes.

[03:32:35] Okay. Now I get it. back to that later at a better time and for that one next question goes to the perhaps superintendent is we have a joint meeting coming up with a you know county board of supervisors that is on 24th 20 which is already a couple of days before we are scheduled to you know vote on the proposed budget and you know depending upon where a county executive comes down on his proposal for the transfer to the school system, there could be a gap. Could be whether it just

[03:33:15] remains to be 22 or something else, I do not know. But let's say that if there is a gap, how we, I guess we have another budget work session on 19th prior to the joint that is after county executive releases budget uh i guess what i'm asking dr re at this point is for november not november february 19th work session will you be able to recommend us a

[03:33:47] certain approach to take to the joint meeting if and when there is a certain gap i would say that on the 19th we'll know what the county is going to present on the 17th correct it won't be their final but it'll be what um the county's proposal budget's proposed budget is and if it closes the gap we're ecstatic if it comes short of closing the gap we still believe that the state is likely to add more funding because again we're basing this budget on the prior governor's budget and

[03:34:25] And we believe that there's been discussion that there may be an adjustment to SOQs or other funding formulas at the Commonwealth level. So my recommendation at that time, I don't have Ms. Burden's crystal ball, mine's a bit cloudy today, but I would say that we would want to be patient and believe that between the General Assembly's adjusted budget and the county's budget that we're going to make up the ground on the transfer.

[03:34:57] I'm trying to anticipate what the meeting will look like with the county board of supervisors if there's a gap between a county executive proposed budget and ours, superintendents, is that we'll take some criticisms from the members of the county board of supervisors and not heeding to their advice that we are still, you know, presented a certain number that far exceed their revenue projections, et cetera. So I want us to be prepared for that, whether we're

[03:35:33] going to take a joint approach, unify the voice, or are you going to have 12 different voices on this, and we'll be divided and defeated. So that's something that, you know, Dr. Reed, if he could consider between now and then and if there are just some you know great recommendations you can come up with for the 19th yes sir i'll uh i'll take that under consideration i think this burden is helping me consider even as i'm speaking yeah historically that meeting has been i do the you know the little presentation of the advertised budget christina jackson does a little presentation

[03:36:11] of their advertised budget, and then everybody goes around the room and makes a comment. But there's not, it's not like a traditional work session like we're having here. And the General Assembly won't adjourn until March 14th, so we won't really know anything at the time of that joint meeting to be able to discuss in any detail.

[03:36:37] My time is up, but could I use 20 seconds extra to just come? i'll put you to just go back go back um mr injun cunning um first of all thank you for all your work all the staff for all their work um i'm really glad that a colleague highlighted had you highlight everything that was not funded and is not being funded and this is when i feel it's really important to give kudos to all of those people that are in the school school buildings that are taking up the slack and that takes time that takes energy and we just have

[03:37:14] dedicated staff members in our buildings that just do the work and so first of all I want to commend them because I know what that looks like the other thing I want would ask for you and I don't know if you could have it off the top of your head but there are state and federal mandates that are not always funded and what are those what is the gap between they say you have to do this but they don't fund us and where does the money come from for us to comply with those mandates well of course the the most obvious unfunded mandate is I DEA you know the 40% is the promise for us it's about 9% we would need to get

[03:37:54] like another hundred million in order for that promise to be realized as far as the federal government impact aid same thing you know there was there's a formula and then there's the amount of funds we get and they're different numbers but you know there's a lot of unfunded mandates that we have we're at the mercy of I mean I asked that question for the general public to be aware of the fact that even though there are mandates they're not funded and

[03:38:29] somehow our staff everyone leadership manages to make it work and it's more pointing out that we're still making it happen the other question I have actually might be for Dr. Reed when we looked at looking forward and what we could use money for if we had extra money one of the things that and I don't know what this would look like because it's operational and where you would fit it in is maybe looking at funding programming that we know can help reduce

[03:39:03] the the academic gaps so and I didn't see that on that list and I thought you know I know high impact tutors was a big thing and do we expand it just looking at funding that gap I think for our students would also be something that for me particularly would be a high priority I don't know what it looks like programming wise but just something to consider yes ma'am I think in response to mr. McElveen's question as well if we look at that class size formula or the staffing standard adjustment whatever the language is from a year ago that

[03:39:38] we're gonna adjust that gives schools flexibility also for high impact tutors right so in our office of school support has been able to maintain high impact tutoring in some form this year and we know in the schools where it's being implemented it's you know it's showing progress so I appreciate the feedback and I just want to make one last point at the last joint board session I just did not say this out loud and I wanted to say it I just want to give kudos to both of the chief financial officers and say that they did a great job and just

[03:40:15] note that they are dynamic professional and highly qualified women miss lady thank you and thank you to the team I do agree that we have a phenomenal chief and also all the folks who work with her I think that my colleague was referencing was the chief for the county and the chief for the school system which are both female chiefs so just to just not but yes our entire staff here in Pierce County is excellent um I just want to reiterate some things that have

[03:40:51] already been said once again you know from from a public facing document it would be nice if the PowerPoint included what was cut last year that we can't afford to reinstate I think it was also 3% from free from each department which was a loss of personnel or programming that had to be absorbed also want to reiterate that it you know not only is the IDEA not fully funded but 504 law is not funded at all and it is overly burdensome and a lot of situations in a

[03:41:24] lot of our schools as we see some populations continuing to add 504s to the to their among the number of students have a 504 at their school and then I want to talk about the salary gap right so you know unfortunately what was me I lived through the freezes I lived through the freeze on administrators while we pay teachers and I mean I can't recollect and go back to that time but I do know that it throughout my tenure that it felt like there were times that we were fat meaning we were we had money to spend money to play with and I

[03:42:04] think that you know I've been I've been told that historically and I'm talking probably 20 ish years ago or plus that you know superintendents you know we're supposed to bring a needs-based budget and I'm not sure that was done with fidelity from the perspective of our county I can tell you this is a needs based budget those times are long gone this isn't gamesmanship this is bare bones for us to operate I'm not sure that people fully understand how much we are operating with less less personnel than we should have in front of our kids

[03:42:39] less resources less in every category and to that point I want to elevate the talent of our workforce I want to recognize our teaching professionals our counselors our administrators our instructional assistants our custodians food service everyone who works for this system bus drivers to make our school system what it is go above and beyond and I can't say that enough but I I need our parent community and our community members who love the fact that they live in Fairfax County love the education their children got if they have older

[03:43:16] children to understand that you know we're in a weird and an unfortunate conundrum with our county especially when it relates to real estate tax so that real estate tax hurts all of us everyone who lives in this county and it's just the way the revenue source works so I really am pleased that this year I feel like the collaboration between our system and the Board of Supervisors has been very collegial I do believe and I am very optimistic about this budget and I just want to lift the work that the Board of Supervisors is doing as well as the work that we're doing because we do understand that both

[03:43:55] of our sides are pinched and struggling to fund required programs thanks thank you miss lady mr fish thank you i appreciate some of the context that miss lady brought up and i would note though that even when it seemed like we had all this money sloshing around in the system staff were missing steps right they weren't getting necessarily the raises that they deserved we see the trajectory of the reverse trajectory, rather, that staff had.

[03:44:23] And so as many of our educators have been down in Richmond lobbying our legislature, our General Assembly and the new governor, to invest more in our schools, to be closer to the national average in a variety of different ways, I think it's worth pointing out that, you know, we didn't end up in the position we're in overnight.

[03:44:45] It's gonna take a while to dig out of it. And you're exactly right. this budget is bare bones right there are two primary things in this budget that really move the needle when it comes to cost the first is following through in our collective bargaining agreements for all of our eligible staff which is virtually everybody with a small subset of employees who are not eligible and the second is the changing demographics of our schools students who are multilingual free and reduced meals students special education students and other students who need additional supports to get everything they can out

[03:45:20] of our school system and so that's it there's a few things here and there that are finishing the funding cycles on a multi-year investment but that's the crux of it and I you know I remember early budgets when I was on the board where there'd be we're launching this program and this program and this program in this program and while those things may have been nice to have there's none of that and there hasn't been for a few years so you know I look forward to seeing what we can get from our state lawmakers and I look forward to being down in Richmond to talk more with them in person I've been on the phone with

[03:45:57] many of them already as things move forward and I look forward to talking with our county counterparts as well I'll take a turn quick one I agree with my colleagues and all the sentiments today here I will just say this living in all like all of you in fairfax county and in general in virginia the cost of living has gone so much higher than pre-pandemic time everything is more expensive now and actually the average when you go for groceries is like almost double the price of what we were paying

[03:46:37] before salaries don't show that for teachers it doesn't show for i think most of adults right now but even with 69 000 the starting salary for our master lane teacher it's not enough we are not there yet we have done better but in today's economy i think we just have to support our workforce more so we have to keep that trajectory higher we can't go back like a lot of my colleagues said our building needs investment too our our buildings are old they are they need a lot of

[03:47:11] maintenance and we are behind all of that because we didn't have the budget and even now we are not putting any line item to specifically address that because we are going with the basic minimum what we need to spend on a budget so I would just you know request you know everybody who can fund us to please take care of our people and our buildings because that's the you know basically that's how we educate right in those in those places and with these people so thank you and I think the miss go back will be dr. Anderson first I

[03:47:48] think our buildings have been long forgotten all right just very quickly do we have any sense because I know this was ongoing work dr. Reed about the middle school after school programming because we have some things here that that is tethered to the existence of those programs where are we headed so as you know the middle school after school program comes as a separate below the line distribution from the county and we are working with the county and you know continuing that program we certainly heard from our community last

[03:48:26] year about the importance of those activities and that engagement with our middle school students so we anticipate that programming to continue and I know that we're looking at some type of a bridging year where we might look at what could some type of a fee structure at schools that are not CEP or not significant free and reduced lunch population schools what could be possible in terms of some kind of a fee structure I know we've got a team working on some possible models that we'll be bringing to the board for

[03:49:05] discussion probably it once we know for sure what the county is going to do with that topic is this from the skipped committee and may I ask we have until like 5:30 can I have three minutes miss Dixit instead of starting at 2:00 because we have a lot of time left I think Claire's gonna adjust that thank you is this the skipped committee work because now that I'm no longer skipped I don't have a sense or do are we doing something kind of separate in addition to the recommendations that could come out of that group it's likely both and

[03:49:38] all I know that mr. Emory and mr. Horn the activities office is working with the staff of the county the neighborhood and community services board staff Lloyd Tucker Chris Leonard so I've spoken to Chris you know I think they're everyone's trying to put together a plan so that um because we all value that program significantly and just trying to make sure that we're able to continue that program okay looking forward to that one of the other things i wanted to lend my voice to was to make sure that we have a full list of things

[03:50:14] that have been cut to make that be visible to the public because we also have cut out bridge to kindergarten summer programming and a lot of summer programming for our kids right and i don't see those returning so I wanted to make sure that those got added the social studies curriculum we're not returning to this in this year's budget not at this time again we're going to have to we sort of did a holding pattern of continuity of what we had been doing but we didn't add new resources last year as you know and I think that's something that's being held at the moment

[03:50:52] and we'll see what's possible depending on where the year-end monies come in as well as the new budgeted allocation okay thank you and if you could refresh my memory the k-12 multi-year investment I know it's 300,000 how many schools were we trying to get there and where are we since this is the last year or I think I'm assuming it's the last year for some reason yes the k-12 robotics so that's a program where we're looking to expand our first Lego robotics clubs

[03:51:28] competition and materials and Joey Kearns at Hayfield Secondary School has been a very active in that work and currently we have very few elementary schools who are participating we know that that's a high interest for our young people both at elementary and middle and so we're looking to we have multi-year to have robotics in all of our elementary schools over the next four years as well as middle and high school as part of an expansion with equitable access to the robotics program so this would be a new multi-year

[03:52:05] investment so this would be in this budget year one or four yes ma'am okay I don't think that was clear do we have any savings that have been realized from the budget work I think we are currently looking at some efficiencies I know know we've had departments when we did our 3% cuts we had to essentially maintain the same level of service with less money either less people less program dollars but I couldn't turn that over to mr. Smith because I know we're moving into a new phase of that work and I think we're gonna continue to see it's

[03:52:43] not a cliff of efficiencies but rather a slope and an on-ramp to more more efficient division but mr. Smith certainly I know that last year we did recognize some savings through our nontraditional programs and using our Baldrige approach to looking at our efficiencies and effectiveness this coming March we will have examiners and we will be providing an update to the board with that schedule but our examiners will be coming on site for three days to review and observe our practices and our processes and with

[03:53:16] that full review we will be getting many recommendations on our overall effectiveness and efficiencies and with some recommendations on how we can improve upon those current practices and I'm anticipating that with those recommendations we will see some cost savings there I'd like to come back to that because I do have some questions there but the last thing that I want to talk about here well next the last thing as Miss St. John Cunning talked about academic gaps we have a line item in our budget that speaks to closing the

[03:53:56] achievement gap I believe the first year was six million dollars it was kind of what we were just starting and then we had to reduce that but then we re-embedded that that's a line item that's been going on for a few years does that not have about 19 million dollars in it currently and I know I asked you this question a couple of years ago and as of that time the only expenditures out of that fund were Miss Neal's position and there was something else that oh a textbook or some supplemental program was purchased out of that but there's

[03:54:35] still a healthy balance out of that fund and it's embedded in this budget so there's gonna be an additional six is that not accurate miss burden not it's not an additional part of the transfer at this point it's within the operating budget and one of the things we maintain that line item for is we added language specific math textbooks this year which were have shown some tremendous potential we're gonna be adding more of those we didn't want to spend you know the entire I think we set aside 8 million for that we didn't want to spend the entire amount all at once because we want to make sure that we try

[03:55:14] several pilots and figure out which one has the most likely to be successful we're looking at secondary reading interventions as well and with the oncoming also the multilingual support for literary literacy text and I think with the upcoming math adoption we're going to be looking at both multilingual support as well as 504 and IEP support materials with those to make sure that we're able to you know close those gaps so those dollars are not we're not

[03:55:53] asking for additional but we're rolling those forward as a line item right but it's also embedded in the base budget so every year there's that six million that's going to be with punish for those purposes that's right I think I was looking for that to be raised as a response to the question in terms of closing achievement gaps that we already have allocated dollars and that balances is it still 19 as of today no it's about 17 but that is mostly one-time money only 2.8 million of it is recurring dollars yeah and that's why we use following I thought we I thought was built into the base it's only three so

[03:56:29] three's built into the base and then she took a 3% cut as a result of reductions to each department which is why it's 2.8 okay so as of right now now 2.8 is built into the base and so the balance of that is 17 million and expenditures that are already kind of encumbering parts of that which are the materials you talked about that's correct in the amount of eight right that's correct because they're well we're looking at the math it would be more significant than that that's why they're one-time dollars so those dollars will be utilized they can't be utilized for ongoing staffing or anything along

[03:57:06] those lines because they're one-time sure so we're looking for literacy particularly secondary literacy materials and then we're going to be looking to support our math materials moving forward we've had several school visits and looking at a variety of support materials I'd be very interested in because I know I've captured it here and there it's not really organized could could I get a list of items that were already used for that fund or are being considered for that fund that would be helpful for me to organize my thinking and I'll take a go back for my final question thank you

[03:57:46] Miss Marin first time thank you I'm not sure I'm just getting a little tired but I I was when I was preparing I looked over the materials we were given and it was a set of slides and then I was like well I remember in prior years we used to get like a lot of a lot of stuff and so I went back and the lot of stuff is on our budget page it's the actual proposed budget but it was never transmitted to us which is odd I just feel like I'm it's getting harder and hard to understand and these questions trying to there's just this continuing

[03:58:21] theme of having to dig for information that like robotics you know dr. Reed you said children have shown interest in robotics in elementary school wonderful what's the data say about that what's the investment what's the trade-off the board has shown interest on world language why did you choose robotics over world language these are the questions I keep coming back to and I just as I said I'm just getting I feel like I'm saying the same thing again and again and not getting further and maybe I'm a solo person there but even just saying there's no new research I went back to the presentation just now and

[03:58:58] it's important because when I say to a supervisor there are no new investments to show them that we're doing everything we can, but then here I learned that there is a robotics investment. Now what I'm gathering from the slides I just looked from the presentation is no new resource requests, so that's fine.

[03:59:17] But I know that I've also asked, well, what was then removed? I was excited when you had somewhere and you said, we are going to look through and basically stop funding what doesn't work. That has been something the board has asked for for years. Show us what you sunset.

[03:59:33] But instead, I'm hearing now that we have a new program, and I don't know why you picked it over others. You said because somebody was interested in it and somebody led it. I'm just trying to get consistency over how you're advising us to make decisions.

[03:59:49] And I wanna be sure I'm accurate because I'm trying to advocate for your budget, but I keep getting corrected at unexpected times. So yeah, I don't know how else to ask for what I need other than I just need to know all the facts and not because I'm continuously asking or the board is asking.

[04:00:19] - Mr. McDaniel. - On slide three, the expenditure adjustment, the baseline adjustment for enrollment and student needs, the negative 35.7. Do you know off the top of your head or if you could get the information, how many, what was that enrollment number that led to the 35.7?

[04:00:42] Meaning what is the assumed, I presume if the number is in parentheses, it's a reduction in enrollment that drives that. So what's the projected reduction in enrollment that was used to calculate the 35.7?

[04:00:57] - If projected enrollment from 26 to 27 decreased by 4,900 students.

[04:01:16] - Okay. - And this represents 260 positions. - Okay, thank you. - So we'll go back for Mr. Moon.

[04:01:33] - Thank you, Madam Chair. Again, I'm gonna go back to, could you stop the clock? - Please stop the clock. 'cause I'm trying to get superintendents' attention.

[04:01:55] You know, Dr. Reed, I'm trying to go back to a, what I was saying earlier about preparing for the next joint meeting with the County Board of Supervisors. You know, having already heard from, even though it's one supervisor's, you know, passing remarks on our superintendent proposed transfer request, which wasn't, you know, too positive from my perspective, is that there could be more of that coming from other supervisors as well.

[04:02:26] And I need to find a way to react or revert to that and hopefully in unified voice amongst us as that. And as a part of that strategy, I also want to be able to, for us to be able to present to the County Board of Supervisors and public that what is on slide number eight are not just nice to have.

[04:02:56] It's something we do need. We should approach this, put it, show it to the public in that way. It's not, we'll do it if we have additional money. Well, we really need to have these.

[04:03:13] We do really need to have these. I mean, that's a different approach, because I don't know when the, after the upcoming joint meeting, when the follow-up joint meeting would be with the County Board of Supervisors, whether it's going to take place anytime before county adopts their final budget and let us know our final number to us, whether we're gonna have that opportunity or not.

[04:03:37] But I don't want them to take any additional state funding as a cue to reduce their money to us, rather than us wanting to use additional state funding to be able to support what we do really need.

[04:03:56] So again, I am asking superintendent, between now and 19th, whenever work session, start thinking about how we should approach this upcoming conversation with, even though it may be minimal going around, as Lee Burden stated, they may be just, you know, taking comments from each supervisors, and so I want to be prepared for that, and I want to be able to send a message that these things that we are trying to restore, et cetera, those are vital to us.

[04:04:30] It's not nice to have. So with that first, big request, the question on a small question that I have is, 14 seconds left, is do you have funding for alternative teacher certification support?

[04:04:50] - We did put that funding. It's not unlike the achievement gap closing dollars. What you'll see in the budgeting work over the last several years is you'll see the initiation of a program or a line item. Closing the achievement gap is one or we've seen some real growth in our multilingual learners.

[04:05:10] So then we realize that works, and then we're gonna roll it into our base funding so it becomes part of our budget. The same with our alternative pathways for our underemployed staff, or our alternative pathways to licensure. We did do a pilot several years ago.

[04:05:27] It bore fruit, so we've continued now a very modest fund in the budget. I think we've got maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars support that program because we know it works and so I think that's what you'll see is kind of a let's pilot it and then we need to have a proof of concept and then we want to bring it to scale if it shows promise so we do have some funding for that program in the budget it's not new it's not a new item but just as the you know other programs that once we begin they're not new they become

[04:06:01] essential okay thank you thank you mr. moon I'm just gonna quick and make a quick remark and maybe get a talk about robotics a bit k-12 robotics starting from FLL to FTC FTC FRC my kids have done that but I always thought about the kids who did not have access to them because they were an after-school club had a significant cost to the parents to participate in this club almost like $200 of to BMM to be the because the kit itself costs like thousand dollars and

[04:06:40] then you have to participate and go to this competition and sometimes they're not in town it's it's an additional cost to every family so I think it is an amazing effort done on your part Dr. Reed is bringing that as a multi-year investment because this is like the achievement gap which we talked about is that we bridge that is bringing these programs to Science Olympiad, Math Olympiad, Robotics, Spelling Beach, you know, any kind of those classes can be offered in the school by the school system.

[04:07:15] I mean, maybe not as a PTA sponsored activity would be very equitable. So, and the amount is written here covering all the schools and all the, I just wanted to ask, is it going to cover, is only three hundred thousand dollars it's gonna cover all their schools no it's only the very beginning it's for materials primarily because we're gonna we're trying to match small grant funding donors who are going to help with materials and stipends so we're looking at a four-year roll-in and so

[04:07:54] this is just the very initial beginning of that and the the team building obviously it is amazing to see when you go to this robotic competition I've been to many is that when you see a group full of like a room full of thousands of kids making those robots and and then then sometime they don't dare and move the from the point like from the point A to point B they just and the kids have this ex not understanding of like oh our robot didn't move but you know what it's okay we will we will come back again next year or so it's it's a very

[04:08:32] different experience when you go there and and I think our school system if we can input put money into the right program this is the one good program we are putting the money in so thank you for that miss firm go go back or okay go back miss lady first and miss cunning I'll be quick I just you know I appreciate as well everything we're doing with robotics and stem you know as child who I guess was pretty astute at mathematics had lots of people telling me I should be an engineer when I grew up but I didn't actually know what one was

[04:09:08] and I was too embarrassed to ask that question and I also realized at the time that that was not something females were doing and it's the same today I mean I do believe that providing access at the elementary level of all of the science Olympiad robotics the Lego version of that the things that we're doing I just think we're gonna see gender equity in terms of interest in those and I just want to I just really appreciate that you know I love when I go because even now when I go to robotics competitions you know there are not a lot of females

[04:09:45] on the teams and this needs to from my perspective as a woman this needs to change because our young ladies can do this work too and we need to provide that platform you know there was a time when at our Chantilly Academy we had a girls in engineering class and then unfortunately the law stopped it okay because we couldn't have something was just for one gender and sadly once we had to blend and mix them again the numbers of women taking the course just went way down and so I think with these you know grassroots things exposing our girls to more of this work I think it's really gonna you know open them up to a

[04:10:22] lot of opportunities in the future so I just appreciate that work and also as someone along those same lines you know we don't have the money but I would love to see the day where we had the money to fund a STEAM classroom in every single one of our elementary schools that certainly would be a priority of mine and I also have to mention because I haven't the pre-k for all that's not in there yet either and that needs to come before anything really a lot of the things we're talking about because we do know the earlier kids have access to learning in some organized fashion the better that prepared they are for kindergarten not only developmentally emotionally and academically so that's

[04:11:02] obviously got a random priority thank you miss engine cunning so I really want to compliment our chief financial officer and dr. Reed for coming up with this budget I think that we learned from last year and I think we can't have it both ways of coming up and presenting a budget that last year was perceived as unrealistic by our by our partners and this year we've cut back and I do agree that looking forward these are important things but we didn't put them in the

[04:11:38] budget we just said these are important things I think that when we do present the budget we should show everything we did cut that we're not reinstating that we think is just as important and I think that it shows our good faith to our partners that we're trying and I know our Board of Supervisors value education as much as we do. I think it's just a tough financial year for our county. We've seen a lot of families hurting for a lot of reasons and I think we're all trying to work within that. So I just really want to commend you

[04:12:12] because we're coming with what we think is workable and not offensive and but we're saying that this is important and look at everything we have not reinstated. In terms of robotics it's just for materials and I think robotics can be taught with with within a math class with an esteem class and it could be integrated into more schools quicker than some of this other programming and I think when we can get more bang for our buck by integrating some of this programming more comprehensively I like that and I really want somebody to come

[04:12:47] up with a robot that cleans a house more than a Roomba I want the Jetson version okay miss Madden is not here so mr. McLevin yeah I just wanted to follow up on this lady's good point about preschool we have inclusive preschool up expansion up there but sorry we have inclusive preschool expansion up there but we but that's just one part of pre-k expansion so for your consideration

[04:13:25] expanding that thank you I think miss Marin still away so miss dr. Anderson

[04:13:34] Thank you. Can we go to slide three please? Okay, just so I have clarity. The family liaison positions conversions. This is the last year. So it's the last year of three or four? Four. Okay, so that's the last year of four. So four of four. The student activities and athletic programs. That's the last year of three. It's the second year. So that's two of three. The fine arts performing arts stipend. So that's three of three.

[04:14:21] four oh boy four to four time is flying a lot faster I thought I knew that the certified athletic trainers I won't even venture a guess now or five four of five thank you the K robotics one of four this would be the first year of a four-year initiative based on what dr. Reed said it depends on matching grant dollars we've applied for grant dollars sometimes to get a grant you have to

[04:14:56] commit to a certain in kind but we're looking at minimal three more likely four-year expansion absolutely the educator math credentialing that's two of is there an end or that's just kind of an ongoing thing well it's ongoing let me sometimes there well there are a variety of strategies at play right that's a parallel strategy and the parallel strategy is we for example at the recent job fair on Saturday which by the way was extraordinarily well attended i think mr smith said that many of the principals were saying fcps is back

[04:15:37] people there were just fabulous candidates and there were hundreds of them but anyhow making sure that we're hiring sixth grade teachers for example who have an algebra credential and middle school math teachers who have that algebra credential so that's one strategy hiring people that already have the credential the second strategy is credentialing those people within our division who want to be able to teach algebra so that's what these funds are for and so I think there are as many years as we need to do that to meet the need and once we've met the need we don't

[04:16:13] need to continue funding a separate parallel track absolutely I would agree 100% with what everybody said regarding k-12 robotics you know as a principal in Loudon this was a huge push in in the school that I had the opportunity to open, STEM and robotics was a huge component of that.

[04:16:31] And I could go on and on and on about its merits for all of the reasons that were named. But I think the piece that I'm struggling with and perhaps Miss Marin, and I don't wanna speak for her, is the fact that it's under the umbrella of we have no new initiatives.

[04:16:48] It is, by definition, a new initiative. It's a great initiative, but it's new to our budget component because we did not fund it in this way before. Is that not accurate? - It's not a new initiative in the sense that we announced this actually, I wanna say two years ago, and several of you were at Hayfield and we talked about this, that we wanted to bring it to all schools.

[04:17:10] We've drafted a plan actually two years ago and we've had some micro grants, probably 10,000 here, 20,000 there from different businesses. So we've begun to fund it, but it has not, we've not been able to catch the flywheel, that makes sense to so it's not new in that sense what we're doing now is we wanting to make the beginning of an investment for the first robotic kits for schools and that's why we began to put a very modest $300,000 in the budget to begin that as part of a multi-year commitment but it isn't a new initiative that we have been working on for a couple years but our funding of it and our

[04:17:49] base budget is new correct and I think that's the piece we have to tease out a little bit so we can go full-throatedly and say there's no new new resources I I don't know if I agree with you that it's not new in terms of an investment in our budget I think it is and it's harder to say we have no new initiatives in our budget while we've had it it is a new investment for us it's not a continuing investment for which we're already beholden even though the conversations may have been long ago it's the same way that they are with preschool the same way that they are with so many other things there's a

[04:18:27] tinge there that kind of strikes me as a little bit off I don't want to say disingenuous but for me it's not fully accurate so I want to say that the other piece that I want to just quickly say that I'm struggling with is we talk about the bulged work all the time in terms of how it's going to help in our budget processes and it always seems to be it will come I would expect that in this conversation that we would have whatever efficiencies could yield to potential savings the same way you were able to note the non-traditional with the past work I was really hoping that there would be something that could be named in this discussion and not having that for me it's a little bit of a

[04:19:04] struggle thank you see no further speakers I wanted to see if anybody wants to make last comments who have not gone before okay so at what time is it 4:11. This work session is adjourned. Madam Chair, I have documents that I'm going to pass out to everybody that just gives them a little more information about the budget.

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