Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, March 3, 2026

Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2026
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 3h 14m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DPXtspmXg0
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] - Okay, the March 2nd, 2026 work session is called to order at 11:30 a.m., it says, yeah.

[00:00:22] - Ms. Makonnen has submitted a request to attend this morning's meeting remotely due to personal reasons, as she has a school conflict and is located in Laurel Hill, Virginia. I have performed the initial review of Ms. Makonnen's request and have found it to be in compliance with the school board's remote participation resolution, and I have approved the request.

[00:00:44] It's gonna be a hard speaking day. Ms. McConaughey, please check your audio. Okay, then we will call her. We will move forward with voting her in when she arrives.

[00:00:59] - Okay, in order to comply with section 2.23712D of the Code of Virginia, it's necessary for the board to certify that since the Fairfax County School Board convened a closed meeting on March 3rd, 2026, to the best of each member's knowledge, only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements, and only such public business matters were identified and the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board during the closed meeting.

[00:01:23] Do I have a motion? Moved by Mr. Moon, seconded by Dr. Anderson. All those in favor? Unanimous for those at the table.

[00:01:38] No action was taken and closed. Now onto item 2.04, strategic goal to report. Safe, supported, included, and empowered. I call on Dr. Weed for presentation. - Thank you, Mr. McElveen. It's my pleasure to introduce the interdepartmental team that has worked so hard to pull the data and Goal 2 report together.

[00:02:00] And just a reminder to our community that's watching that these goal reports are the result of the work of all of our educators across the school division and the many, many thousands, tens of thousands of students. So this team comes together to lead and help us with our monitoring reports.

[00:02:17] So I'm gonna turn it over to Ms. Neal and ask that everyone on the team be introduced and I look forward to our Goal 2 report, thank you. - Thank you, Dr. Reed. - Good morning to the members of our board. I'll have Marty Smith kick us off with introductions.

[00:02:33] - Good morning, Marty Smith, Chief of Staff. I'm not usually introducing myself, so. - Giovanni Ponce, Chief of Schools. - Good morning, Deanna Shin, Senior Manager for the Office of Equity and Student Conduct.

[00:02:56] - Good morning, Sloan Presidio, Chief Academic Officer. - Good morning, Candace Hunstead, Executive Director for Strategy and Planning. - Good morning, Nardis King, Chief Equity Officer. - Good morning, Tara Heughan, Executive Director for Equity and Student Relations.

[00:03:12] We do also have several members of our departments here, and we have some of our goal champions here as well. I see LaRonda Peterson, one of our principals, who's our goal champion. So we have a large group here to support today's conversation. If we could bring up the presentation, please.

[00:03:34] We are gonna go through the full presentation and then turn it back over to the meeting managers for questions. So our objectives for today, you can see on this slide, and we're looking forward to the conversation with the board. Today's presentation is on goal two, which is our safe, supported, included, and empowered goal.

[00:03:53] And there are six measures in goal two, and we're going to touch on all of these today. The six measures for goal two fit under the broad umbrella of school climate. So collectively, they provide us with insights about how students are experiencing school.

[00:04:09] Our report uses student voice data from several surveys to support our continued understanding and work to create environments where all students are safe, supported, included, and empowered. So today's presentation is gonna cover school connectedness and belonging, attendance, discipline, and inclusion of students with disabilities.

[00:04:27] And I'll now turn this over to Ms. Hunstead, who's gonna go through the first two sections of our report. - Our first section looks at school connectedness and belonging. We know that when students feel connected and supported by peers and teachers and others at school, they are better equipped for success.

[00:04:44] They feel better, they're engaged, and they have better academic outcomes. Last spring, we launched the Student Experience Survey to learn more about students' perspectives and experiences. The survey was given through grades three through 12 and had a 63% response rate.

[00:05:01] The majority of students responding to the survey reported a sense of belonging, positive relationships with teachers and peers. Students reported especially high rates of feeling that teachers care about them and that they trust their teachers. There is variation by student group across questions.

[00:05:18] We also looked at this data by grade. Students in late elementary and middle school reported the lowest levels of belonging and positive relationships. We saw particularly low rates for students in grades five and seven indicated that their peers treat one another with respect.

[00:05:38] Another indicator of school connectedness is participation in activities. Activities can provide enriching experiences that strengthen the ties to the school. On the most recent Fairfax County Youth Survey, 69% of our students reported participating in after school activities at least once a month.

[00:05:56] This includes off-campus options. Additional survey data provides insights into why students may not participate in school-based activities. The barriers that were listed include liking the available options, not having the information on how to participate, permission to participate, and for social reasons.

[00:06:18] We have three strategies to improve school connectedness and belonging. First, we are focused on developing students' social and emotional skills through lessons provided during morning meetings in our elementary schools and during advisory in our middle and high school.

[00:06:34] We use data from the social emotional learning screener to inform practices across the division. For example, we use insights from the SEL screener to develop new toolkits to help staff and teachers support students' sense of belonging and emotional regulation.

[00:06:49] Schools can also use SEL data to discuss overall examples with students who provide critical insights and help identify strategies to any school-wide issues. An example of this data can be found on the slide.

[00:07:05] Our second strategy focuses on encouraging positive interactions outside of the classroom. We're implementing several key initiatives under this strategy, such as establishing peer ambassador programs to welcome and support new and transfer students in connecting with their school community, and providing a wide variety school-based activities to engage diverse student interests including spaces where students can connect on issues of identity and wellness on this screen you can see an increase of percent of students who participated in 15 or more days in the middle school after school program as a reminder in

[00:07:43] school year 2324 this program began offering after school sports our final strategy is centered on preventing and responding to incidences of bullying harassment and hate speech within our schools data from the youth survey shows that 33% of our students report that bullying is a problem in their school and 14% report having experiencing bullying at their school in the past year this data follows national trends of bullying by grade level and the full report we have also identified significantly higher rates of bullying for students

[00:08:19] who identify as gay lesbian bisexual or transgender to prevent bullying harassment and hate speech, we strive to create a safe and respectful school climate where students learn clear expectations, form positive relationships, and develop social skills. Lessons are embedded within the health and school counseling curriculum. We also equip students with strategies if they witness bullying, such as reporting to an adult. School teams intervene with students exhibiting risk factors or low-level violations that do not meet the definition of bullying or harassment and finally we have a standard protocol for

[00:08:56] responding to incidences of hate speech our next section regular school attendance provides another view of overall school climate as students with strong levels of connectedness and belonging also tend to have better attendance regular attendance is strongly linked to several positive student outcomes missing even a few days of school can have a negative impact on students learning and overall experience chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of the school year or about 18 days this includes both excused and unexcused absences this slide presents the chronic

[00:09:36] absenteeism rates as defined and reported by the Virginia Department of Education these rates for the last school year include adjustments from the impersonal flexible instructional time also known as IP fit which allows school divisions to offer every instructional time to reduce the rate of chronic absenteeism for students schools and divisions this data matches the official state report and aligns with state policy however it is important to remember that IP fit was not available at baseline this slide shows chronic absenteeism over time and by student group as a reminder we want to see these

[00:10:15] rates decline any bar that falls below the star indicates the target is met and and any bar below baseline, which is that first light-gray bar, shows progress. Last year we met our overall annual target, and many student groups saw substantial improvement from baseline. I want to note for the board that this target was updated from last year's report to correct an error in prior calculations. We also monitor student attendance by grade.

[00:10:46] Chronic absenteeism rates vary by grade, with the highest rates seen in kindergarten, 11th grade and those categorized as 12th graders this is consistent with what we saw last year and with national trends on student attendance by grade level this slide provides a detailed look at last year's student attendance broken down by student group this data represents the percentage of school days missed and does not include adjustments for ipfit monitoring days missed also helps us identify students who may be at risk for becoming chronically absent

[00:11:20] and may need support with missed learning. We have three strategies to improve our regular attendance. First, we are clearly communicating our expectations as a division and creating student-centered plans with families for those who are missing school.

[00:11:36] Second, we help students and families access a range of services that address barriers to attendance, including health and mental wellness services and basic needs assistance. This includes wraparound services to support students and families with multiple needs.

[00:11:51] and finally we strive to help students catch up academically following frequent or extended absences this includes our offerings through ip fit such as spring break programs at some schools and return to learn plans that support smooth transitions back for our students before we talk about our key findings i want to highlight the data on the screen looking at our chronic absenteeism rate at this point in the school year compared to where we were at this point time last year we see that our rate has gone from 12.9% to 10.5%, that's a 2.4 percentage point improvement.

[00:12:28] We're moving in the right direction and we're doing it mid-year which suggests that our strategic actions are working in real time. This slide summarizes our key findings on the first two sections. While we see that most of our students report high levels of connectedness and belonging and are coming to school regularly, we acknowledge that there are student groups where this is not the case our strategies continue to focus on encouraging positive interactions in and outside of the classroom communicating clear expectations and providing the support that students need to engage in school

[00:13:03] I will turn it over to miss Neal for our next section we're going to be looking at limited and consistent use of suspension so this year we're not looking at overall discipline as you may recall last year during the goal 2 presentation the board shared some questions and concerns about setting a target on overall discipline and given the important role that discipline plays in teaching appropriate behavior and a desire not to discourage schools from continuing to conference with students or parents and intervene at a lower level we've adjusted our focus to look at suspension data so suspension is the temporary removal of a student from a learning environment following a

[00:13:43] behavior violation as outlined in our students rights and responsibilities or SR in our handbook while it is useful at times for maintaining a safe orderly learning environment suspension can have a lasting negative effect on students academic behavior and connection to school it can also impact overall school climate so to minimize the impact suspension should be used only in response to serious behaviors and they should be applied consistently overall we see the numbers of both in school and out of school suspensions have gone down from the prior year last year we saw fewer students suspended with 1.75

[00:14:21] percent of students receiving an out-of-school suspension all school all student groups made progress in several met annual targets this progress has reduced the gap for some student groups but we continue to see disparities which we'll examine and the next slide when we look at risk ratios this slide shows risk ratios for out-of-school suspension a risk ratio compares the suspension rate of one student group to the suspension rate for all students who are not a member of that group so for example students who are economically disadvantaged were 3.2 times more likely than students who were not economically

[00:14:57] disadvantaged to receive an out-of-school suspension. We include the five student groups with risk ratios of 2.0 or higher as we use that as a threshold for disproportionality. This slide shows in-school suspension data that is new in this year's report. 2.84% of students received one or more in-school suspension last year. This rate is also down from the baseline. As with out-of- school suspensions we see disparities in in-school suspension and we'll take a look at that on our next slide when we look at risk ratios so this slide shows the risk ratios for in-school suspension for student groups with a risk ratio of

[00:15:35] 2.0 or higher this slide shows in school and out of school suspensions by grade so as we've noted in prior years suspensions peak in grade 8 and show declines beginning in ninth grade we have three strategies focused on improving these outcomes first we're focused on establishing and communicating clear expectations about student behavior and the use of consequences through revisions to the SR&R. We're training administrators and teachers and informing students of their rights and responsibilities. Second, we're monitoring the consistent use of discipline across schools. This year we

[00:16:12] implemented the division discipline requirements that standardized practices across FCPS. We're also monitoring and supporting schools with disproportionate levels of discipline and schools logging very few referrals. Finally, when incidents do occur we want to support students to reduce additional or more serious discipline involvement we're continuing to certify staff as restorative justice facilitators and as of this January 98% of our schools had at least one certified school-based facilitator we're also piloting a new system for teachers to document incidents that they manage in the classroom with the goal of responding to minor incidents before they escalate

[00:16:51] the system was piloted in seven schools last year and expanded to four additional schools this year so to summarize this section we've seen discipline declines in the number of in-school and out-of-school suspensions as well as fewer students receiving these exclusionary sanctions disproportionality remains high however for many student groups we expect to see continued improvement and reductions in disproportionality as we focus on clarifying expectations responding to inconsistencies and reducing repeat and more serious incidents our final section of our goal 2 report focuses on inclusion for students with disabilities and we are specifically going to be

[00:17:29] looking at inclusion in kindergarten through age 21 as we looked at pre-k inclusion as a part of our goal one report inclusive experiences create a sense of belonging support positive relationships and help all of our students reach their full potential one marker of inclusion is the extent to which students with disabilities spend their school day in the general education setting this data is presented in video ease annual special education performance reports and are also monitored by FCPS. As we expand our inclusion work we'll continue to look and explore additional data relevant data points to report on.

[00:18:03] This pie chart presents our estimated outcomes for last year on indicator five of VDOE's special education performance reports. We've also included the percent of students who spend 40 to 70 percent of their day in an inclusive setting which you can see in yellow as this is not included in the state reports but this is the whole piece of the pie.

[00:18:25] So about 61% of our students with disabilities in kindergarten through age 21 spend 80% or more of their school day in an inclusive setting and you can see that in dark blue. About a quarter spent 40 to 79% of their day in an inclusive setting, which is in yellow.

[00:18:41] About 12% spent less than 40% of their day in an inclusive setting, which is in teal. And then finally, under 3% spent their day in a fully separate setting, which is shown in light green. This chart summarizes our progress over time on indicators 5A through C as it relates to the annual state targets.

[00:19:01] We've made steady gains in the percent of students with disabilities educated in an inclusive setting as shown in indicator 5A, and we continue to meet the state's annual target for indicator 5C. This slide shows rates of inclusion for indicator 5A by grade level.

[00:19:17] We see particularly large increases for students in grades three through seven and grade 10, and rates of inclusion were highest for our elementary schools and decline beginning in seventh grade. This year we're pursuing three strategies to increase inclusion of our students with disabilities.

[00:19:34] Our first strategy is focusing on increased access to general education settings. We've partnered with external consultants to implement a phased approach to this work, and this year we're working with cohorts of schools to provide intensive training and support, including with scheduling and identifying opportunities to increase inclusion at each school.

[00:19:53] We continue to expand the use of the advisory period and middle and high school for executive functioning interventions, which allows our students with disabilities to free of time in their schedule for additional courses, including electives. We're also clarifying how general education teachers can provide special education services.

[00:20:11] Second, we're creating resources to guide decision-making during the IEP process. We've updated the least restrictive environment data collection tool to help IEP teams consider and document placement discussions. As we've developed resources, we have also developed resources and guidance to support staff when having conversations about inclusion with families during IEP meetings.

[00:20:32] And we've worked with an external consultant who's reviewed all of our IEP forms and provided feedback and recommendations. As you can see from the slide, our early estimates of this school year show more students with disabilities being included in the general education classroom, 80% or more of the school day.

[00:20:49] Third, we're focused on preparing every teacher to provide inclusive instruction in the classroom. We've aligned teacher performance evaluations to the FCPS learning model. We also continue to provide learning for teachers and staff in the principles of Universal Design for Learning, or UDL, and in close practices.

[00:21:06] UDL is also embedded in our content area planning and pacing guides. And we're working with elementary schools to increase inclusion for students currently served in enhanced autism classrooms. Lastly, we're sharing our vision for inclusion with students, families, and the community, including offering a number of public-facing resources that share the how and the why of the work.

[00:21:27] This includes continuing to work with our disability advisory and advocacy groups. So to summarize our final section, we continue to see steady gains and inclusion, and to continue to progress towards the state targets, we're implementing a multi-year phased in approach to improve how students access special education services and provide more opportunities for students with disabilities to access grade level content and curriculum and connect with their peers.

[00:21:54] This concludes our goal two presentation, and now I'll turn it back over to our meeting managers. Thank you so much for taking us all through that data so quickly and helpfully. So we have a lot of time allotted for this discussion.

[00:22:11] So I see Dr. Riccardi-Anderson wants to start us off. So over to you. All right. Thank you. Just a couple of overall things that I wanted to raise before I got into my specific questions. one I noticed throughout the document that you began to identify either a continuing strategy or a newly added strategy that is entirely so helpful because it gives a little bit more sense as to the growth and when I compare this year's with last year's not that I love doing that but I could see that the strategies which are no longer in use which is also something that I always

[00:22:49] look for because we can't do everything all the time some things have to come off the table. So I'd love, even if it's not marked here in some way, I'd love as part of the presentation to say, you know, these are some of the things that we've discontinued because it really gives a good lens to that evaluation of whether or not these activities are having the desired impact.

[00:23:11] So that's one. The second piece, it's more of a question than a wondering. In the baseline, and I I believe also the first year. You provided with all of the reports, the intersectional data.

[00:23:26] I have not seen that the last couple of years, and it has been inherently helpful. Can you speak to why that's no longer provided? - Yeah, Dr. Anderson, so I think we're always trying to balance the breadth of these reports with focusing the conversation in some of the areas, and so this is always a constant conversation we're having with where to pull in intersectionality and where to not pull in intersectionality data.

[00:23:49] If that is something that the board would like see more of we can certainly make sure that that we're pulling it I think it is the attempt to balance hundreds of pages of data right with being able to stay focused on some key things and I definitely understand I think we had been provided in all the places and that wasn't necessarily helpful but there are some places where I think it will give some real insight as to why we've landed the way that we have okay so I'm gonna start with my questions you know another kind of overall question there were some references to the youth survey and I know we did for the first year the experience survey these being used interchangeably is it

[00:24:27] both is it one or the other i want to kind of ground my thinking here so our youth survey is looking and i will certainly turn it over to dr presidia and mike axler for some from color and content on this our student experience survey was really designed to look at the experiences students are having in school and to help us answer some of the questions related to our strategic plan goals right having student voice in particular as a part of goal two is an important piece of this our youth survey is pulling in data that's also looking at risk factors and risk behaviors to make sure that we as a

[00:25:03] school system and the county are providing support for students just briefly I want to I think that I think that's a good response but I'm just remember to with the year you survey we're only giving that in grade six eight 10 and 12. So it's a smaller student sample in terms of experience information. And additionally, as Ms. Neal was pointing out, we don't control all of the questions in the use survey because that's really owned by the county and community agencies. We're a partner in that development process. But we don't have the ability to add questions that might pertain more specifically to some of our strategic plan goals. So that's why I think that the two instruments kind of in

[00:25:41] concert work well together so both are represented in this report okay wonderful so now getting into my questions on page 10 of the report where you talked about the um the climate survey the climate statements and just looking at this and i just go through and i highlight the lowest numbers in each and every category and there are a couple of groups that show up as having the lowest levels of satisfaction black students show up in every category and students with 504s show up in four of these six categories can you speak a little bit to what did you find in the root cause analysis

[00:26:19] of this data set so we did do some initial focus groups as a part of the first administration the student experience survey so recalling that this was our first time doing it last year we did not do any specific focus groups with this data in particular dr anderson but i think we had similar questions as we were looking at the data as i think you're raising today yeah i just find it very curious that we have um some sets of students whose experiences have

[00:26:56] not me or the rest and so i i would love for you all to look into that a little bit more and get back similarly with the chart below seventh grade students again just showing that the satisfaction and so I have some wonderings there and then with the last chart it shows the eighth grade student speaking to the activities the after school activities that's the figure six on page 10 I would have expected that we would have had

[00:27:41] way I think where we are seeing the growth if we go back to slide 11 is in our middle school after school program data so we do see to sort of reference your point after we added middle school sports you do see that increase of students who are participating in 15 days or more in the middle school after school program and I I don't know the extent to which the youth survey because as Dr. Presidio said is not given at every grade level may or may not be

[00:28:12] picking up on some of those nuances thank you good morning it's really great to see the increases going in the direction or the decreases going in the direction there are some slides I wanted to ask our clerk team to please pull up as I reference them so can the slide 12 please be pulled up thank you so can you share please why these particulars selected these grades were selected 6 8

[00:28:48] 10 and 12 good morning business Marin great 6 8 10 and 12 were selected because those are the grades that take the Fairfax County Youth Survey, and this is where the data is pulling from. - Thank you for that reminder.

[00:29:04] Slide 10, please. Okay, so the sense of belonging is the place that really needs further attention, feeling they're valued members of their school community. Just wanted to reinforce that that's the lower of the numbers we have there.

[00:29:22] And then on slide 11, the second strategy, So the safe spaces, again, just thinking about that to connect on issues of identity. And then 17, please, that it shows that our eighth graders are among those with the highest chronically absent.

[00:29:49] And then slide 19, please, shows that in strategy two, a basic needs assistance is a strategy, just for the basic needs, as well as access to health and mental health. And then slide 28, please, thank you.

[00:30:08] We see that grade eight is the highest percent of in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension. So thank you. So those data points jumped out to me, and I'm just gonna go ahead and address it, because we voted to not provide busing to students going into eighth grade, as well as fifth and sixth grade from our boundary policy.

[00:30:30] And when we talk about belonging, access to basic needs, I feel that the board's decision last week to not fulfill the boundary policy promise of providing, especially to these eighth graders who we see need extra supports. Again, I don't believe that was the right decision and I want to know what anyone else thinks about are we going to readdress this, especially knowing that Skyview still is coming up to be decided.

[00:30:56] Are we going to have that same approach to the boundaries? And I also just do want to say, there are families right now, I'm hearing from them, whose kids are stressed because they're eighth graders. They don't know where they're gonna go. The Kilmer AAP, the Thoreau, I've been getting emails all night.

[00:31:14] So the stuff we do impacts how well our students feel. And so I'm looking at this really fantastic presentation and thinking about the real world application. I wanna understand when we're going to determine the phasing for Skyview.

[00:31:29] We cannot do it last minute again because it really harms our community. and when we're gonna actually schedule for action the vote on the sky view boundaries and the transportation and the phasing. We still have not decided the phasing for sky view.

[00:31:46] That's gonna feed the next time we see this data. Thank you. - Mr. Moon? - Thank you. Oh, thanks for the presentation and a lot of good data.

[00:32:03] I am gonna ask you some questions regarding page number 10 of the slide that grades six through 12, or sense of belonging, that 59%, that is, you know, to me, you know, very low.

[00:32:27] You know, there are 40%, more than 40% of the students who are indicating that they don't feel that they belong to the schools. But my question goes to what I see on same page number 10 of the report.

[00:32:51] I have a hard time matching the numbers between what I see on the slide versus what I see on the report. You know, for example, sense of belonging. On page 10 of the report, figure number four, top line is I feel I belong in my school, and numbers there is different from what I see.

[00:33:16] Of course, on that slide, it has right under sense of belonging, it has description of students feel they are valued members their school community which is not the same as what I see so I don't know how to you know use this two different sets of data and mr. and so we noted that as well when we were working on the report and I think what I would say this is we've got two different samples who are taking the surveys so there's different student populations providing information at two different points in time so students may have different sentiments at different points throughout

[00:33:55] the year the questions are not the exact same on the SEL screeners they are on the student experience screener and so that also impacts students interpretations of the questions it is certainly something that we're looking at as we make some decisions about student experience survey changes potentially for next year but I guess by you pick this set of data to present today session why are the report we have a different set of data so yeah I think it's a good question and I apologize that it's not easier to follow as Miss Neal said there's different instruments that we're using for different purposes so slide ten

[00:34:32] in the PowerPoint presentation is using the SEL screener results which we use here to really talk about kind of the state of student sense of belonging in schools because we have more items on that that start to help you really get at you know what maybe are some of the root causes and start to try to unpack a little bit what these particular issues and concerns might be whereas the student experience survey is looking at a lot of different things and doesn't go into the same level of depth and detail so on slide 10 when we're looking at the SEL screener results I think it's just important to kind of remember that these

[00:35:11] are given on a kind of a cyclical basis multiple times throughout the year and every one of our schools has an SEL lead who is part of the multi tiered systems of support team in their school that coordinates responses based on the data that they're getting so they get individual student data look at which which could trigger maybe the need to provide individualized supports to students, but more importantly they're really looking at that trend data like we're pulling out here because this was one of the lowest points in the SEL screener survey that we wanted to make sure that everybody was aware of.

[00:35:46] So the SEL leads, the MTSS teams, the administrators of the building use this information to develop additional supports to students throughout the course of the year. We provide the SEL leads training every quarter to help them develop action plans to think about what they can do in response to their data.

[00:36:03] So that's why we chose to highlight this one on this slide here, but I take your point. It doesn't align easily to some of the other data points in the report. - Okay, I think I understood what you said, except then what do we do with data provided in this report?

[00:36:24] What's the value of this? - Well, that's still important data, but I think our challenge always is when we're thinking about what we wanna highlight in the slides is we wanna pull out the things that we think are the most important to highlight. So that information is also important, but this was one of, again, the lower points in the survey responses that we got back, so that's why we pulled this one out.

[00:36:45] - Okay, could I then make a request? Because I was, you know, when I saw this pretty low number of sensible belonging on page 10 of the slide, I was interested in seeing, you know, seeing subgroup data, similar subgroup data, just like you did for the report itself.

[00:37:10] If we could provide, I would appreciate that. The next one, under 30 seconds, goes to the school attendance. Do we have any data showing impact of student absenteeism on student achievement?

[00:37:38] - I know that we presented some of that data the last year or the year prior where we looked at chronic absenteeism and I think SOL performance in third grade. It is certainly something we can pull again. We only have a third grade? I know for sure we presented that one year. I'm trying to remember where we intersected chronic absenteeism with performance. We go back certainly and do some key data points and how chronic absenteeism is differentiating student outcomes, but we know it has a significant impact. As I was reviewing the report for

[00:38:10] today's work session I was quite alone. We're talking about chronic absenteeism being 10% or more today and 12th graders seniors 22% of the students are 10% or more. What are students thinking? What are families thinking about students going to school or students coming to school? My time is up. Thank you Mr. Moon. Ms. Anderson? I have a few points that I want to make so I'm going to start on this screen actually though.

[00:38:50] One of the things that I noticed when I was actually a community member attending strategic goal or the strategic plan meeting was that there is a drop off that happens right around eighth grade where kiddos don't necessarily see the point of what they're trying to do.

[00:39:08] And there's a lot of dissatisfaction that happened in the numbers. And then when they hit ninth grade, they realize this certainly happened in my house is that, oh, my gosh, this is actually the same as what was happening in middle school. And so there's this moment where they're still unhappy, but the satisfaction increases significantly as they get closer to the nostalgia of Lee to Began High School, right?

[00:39:31] So there's this natural thing that kind of happens. So one of the things that I'm wondering is, is this sense of belonging, is that a normal trend of what we're seeing at the time, or is this specific to just this year as a standout? No, it is a trend, and it's not just a trend for Fairfax.

[00:39:50] It's really a national trend. So when we look at things like sense of belonging or instance of bullying or harassment, we're going to see them peak kind of in this period of early adolescence, right, when students are developing more of a sense of self, sense of identity that might not, that might conflict with somebody else's sense of self and identity.

[00:40:08] and then you have to kind of put all the societal factors in context of these ages as well like this is typically when many students might be getting their first access to individual electronic devices now we know some earlier but this is kind of when students start getting a cell phone for example which can then kind of exact some of these issues just through social media and other things so this is a trend that we do see in our data there's a trend that we see in national data as well the other thing that I would say here is what are we doing within our SEL practices that kind of make sure that students understand what we mean by sense of belonging because I think there are lots of adults that you could ask on a bad day that they would say the same thing

[00:40:48] and so I want to make sure that we're kind of I mean if you ask any kiddo in one of our schools what bullying means they all know exactly what it means and can tell you so I'm very interested in knowing whether or not we're going to work on developing some lessons that will help kiddos understand what that sense of belonging if it's something that we're going to ask I feel like it's important for them to understand what we're asking them.

[00:41:10] Yeah, we kind of have two different delivery mechanisms for learning opportunities in this area that would target all students. So the first is through our advisory program or our morning meetings, responsive classroom at elementary, advisory at middle school and secondary. So we have developed lessons around all of these topics that we're talking about in these slides here today.

[00:41:31] And then those are supplemented with lessons that the counselors provide. And again, counselors will work kind of across the tiers, right? So they'll provide some general instructional lessons to students on these topics. But then when we see issues, maybe if a school is struggling in one of these areas in particular, the counselor in that school might do some small group work.

[00:41:51] They might even do some individual group work. Those are the two primary kind of responses to instructional opportunities. And I just want to harken back to what we know about gratitude practices overall, is that we know that once the actual act of recognizing what you're grateful for encourages you to seek out the opportunities where you do feel gratitude throughout your day and I'm wondering if the same kind of thing can be done with kiddos to talk about where do you feel belonging in our school and how can you start looking for those opportunities so I think that there are some things that are already going on for adults that certainly can be scaled

[00:42:27] appropriately for for kids so I'm gonna stop there for now but I have some other things that I'll come back with to related to the other topics thank you Miss Anderson I am going to take a quick turn before I go to go backs first of all to thank the team for all the work that they did this report is jam-packed with a lot of information and I don't only want to thank the team because you are the faces that we see in terms of you bringing all of this to us but I also wanted to thank the people down on the ground that are doing the work

[00:43:02] because the fact that we're meeting so many targets and that we are exceeding them means that the people that are in our schools are doing the work so I really want to thank them for their day in and day out of doing the work I think that overall this report was really positive which I think portends to overall of the work that Fairfax County Public Schools does and like anything nothing is perfect and we do need work in some areas but what I really like

[00:43:37] about this report is the fact that the strategies are outlined in terms of how that work is going to be done and it also shows a thoughtfulness of the fact that you have maybe eliminated some strategies that were not being successful so that's what I want to do first and foremost is what my turn that I wanted to take also when we're talking about this particular slide I want to commend what we are doing because we are not taking the report that is the youth survey from the county which is a good survey and I'm on the skip committee and

[00:44:15] so I understand how that all works but we're going a step further we're actually going like maybe ten steps further because not only are we screening the kids not only once but consistently and we know like if you are a newcomer the first time you come in you may not feel a sense of belonging and as the time goes by you may or you may come in as someone that's always been in school and you may feel a sense of belonging and as time goes by you might not and so the fact that we're able to identify that and identify the kids and then provide services and that's the question that I wanted to ask before I make one point is

[00:44:52] I think it's important for the public to understand that once you get this information and you did talk about certain strategies how that is how that's responsive to the students not only maybe individually or as a group and I am going to go to the seventh and eighth grade data just because I my experience in the schools having three daughters there's so much going on with those students that we have no control over and that they have no control over sometimes in their little bodies you know so I think that the fact that we

[00:45:27] see this as a trend throughout the nation is not surprising. You can never pay me to go back to that time when my body was changing and things were happening. And I got a tiny pimple that I thought everybody was going to look at that to me looked like it was the size of a crater. And I certainly focused on it. Nobody else did. So thank you. Yeah. So if you could just answer the question that I asked about what they do, what the strategy. So actually, I'm going to ask Dr. Axler, whose team is leading this work, because maybe you can provide a little bit

[00:46:07] more detail than what I did initially. Thanks, Dr. Presidio. So for our SEL screener data, it guides our social and emotional learning and wellness planning at the division level, at the school level, and at the student level. So if we're looking at a school, let's say a middle school, we have our school MTSS teams review the data after each window in the fall and in the spring, and then they plan support across the tiers.

[00:46:28] What are we seeing as a need across our whole school, and how are we, if that need is belonging, to implement practices that foster a sense of connection and belonging and identification with the school at the student level we can help to see which students are showing the lower levels of connection of relationships of belonging and how can we help to connect those students where are we seeing needs for skill development and how do we work in that in explicit skills instruction into our curriculum and into our lessons and it allows us to integrate these into our structures like advisory and morning meeting into school-wide belonging campaigns some schools have explicit SEL curricula and

[00:47:06] lessons that they implement and also there are schools that have school improvement plans focused on SEL and wellness goals and this allows them to implement them within the structured metric focused outcome thank you we're going to go back now Dr. Anderson thank you I wanted to talk about the strategy that is on page 12 because I thought that was interesting action 1.3 this is the engagement of the group of students to go through the data can you speak to other discussions specifically with the students whose data show

[00:47:44] concerning results yeah we we definitely provide supports to the schools and do work directly with individual students but dr. axler do you want to provide a little bit more information about what those individual student consultations look like?

[00:48:03] - Sure, so for students who are showing data that we have concerns about, the first step is usually to have the MTSS team, a site intervention team come together. You might call this a kind of staffing team or a student-focused team, kid talk team. They come together to say what do we know about the student?

[00:48:20] What else do we know that helps us to inform our understanding of what the student might need? How are their grades? How's their attendance? What's their discipline record? What do we know about their home life? What do we know about them that can help us take a look at this data and contextualize it because we don't want to make decisions just based on one or two data points we want to make sure we fully understand what we know about the student and then what are some ways that we can try and target what we think to be the underlying needs of the student because sometimes if we see a challenge with bullying that might reflect underlying difficulties with relationship skills or social skills and so how do we figure out what those needs are and then in partnership with the family how do we come up with targeted interventions that might support this

[00:48:56] particular student well we have in our MTSS insists database records of all the interventions including group and individual interventions that are conducted and so those related to behavior wellness I don't have a sense offhand but I think it's roughly in the you know 1,500 to 2,000 intervention is thus far this year that we have documented across our schools thank you that on page 14 where you talked about some data regarding sixth graders my wondering is is the data consistent depending on where because we have sixth

[00:49:34] grade sixth graders that are elementary and sixth graders are in the middle schools is the data consistent across these two configurations or do we see any differences I mean generally it's consistent we probably have I mean we'd have to disaggregate the data completely to tell you what the level of differences but when we've looked at it it's fairly marginal marginal don't look into it too much but I'd just be interested in that on page 17 of the report we talked about we're talking about here with students with

[00:50:10] disabilities and their chronic absenteeism you know we have a lot of students with disabilities who are medically fragile and so attendance tends to be a little bit more impacted how do we hold that consistent I know there's no waiver there's nothing but how do we kind of understand that in the realm of what we have to report here yeah I mean I think the approach that we take again it's a tiered approach right so starting with universal messaging about the importance of attendance to families and to students and kind of making sure

[00:50:50] that we're tracking and monitoring student attendance so when we find students that are absent five or more days, we kind of start the intervention process with those students understanding, trying to understand what the root causes are, help get them to school. Then when we get to the third tier, it's really like the individual solution seeking and trying to figure out like what are all of the root causes for an individual who's not able to attend school on time. And it could range from anything.

[00:51:14] It could be medical issues. Some of these students are in the hospital on days on days. How do we account for that? Because we still lock them as chronically absent. Yeah, we have to do that because we have to report for state reporting purposes, but our supports to those students and those families is very individualized and case management centered in terms of how we respond.

[00:51:36] So again, those teams, those support teams at the school have your counselors, your social workers to really try to figure out based on what the individual student and family situation is, what additional supports might they need. It might be access to transportation that's reliable.

[00:51:52] It might be a situation where, again, it's a health and medical situation and the student we learn is going to be out of school and is going to need a continuity of learning plan and then a return to learn plan when they come back from a medical issue. So it's really trying to treat every student, not just students with disabilities in the data, individually and try to figure out what we can do to support them best.

[00:52:13] Is there an opportunity for an IP fit type of approach to mitigate the attendance data? for such students or let's say at the hospital for a long time? Well, I think the IP Fit program has been successful. So I think the question is for us right now really is like how can we expand that?

[00:52:31] I don't think it's for one particular subgroup of students necessarily. I think it would be for any student that could benefit from that. But I think I wanted to relate it to the continuity of learning opportunities that you shared. Could that qualify as IP Fit? It could, but I was more referring like if we know a student is going to be out for a prolonged period of time, proactively trying to make sure that they've got the supports that they need so that they don't fall behind and then need a remediation plan.

[00:52:57] So again, when we know students are going to be out and sometimes we don't know that because the families don't have the opportunity to tell us, but monitoring the data and being responsible or responsive to the data sometimes, we can make contact with families and find out what the situations are.

[00:53:14] - Thank you. On page 18, you talk about some other, again, all attendance data. And my wondering is, have you had the opportunity to tease out the out-of-school suspensions to see, because that is, you know, whatever the reason is, that is something that we are imposing.

[00:53:31] And I'm not saying it's incorrect, but it is still an act that we're taking. Have we teased that out? If we take out the suspension, what does this data show across these subgroups? I don't believe that we've specifically looked at that, but that is certainly something we can take a look at.

[00:53:48] I would be very interested to see that, especially given the disproportionality data that we C that you've presented in the other pages which I'll get to in short order I just want to go in order here on page 20 yes I want to add something we are we are looking at for example students who are suspended something that we are trying to implement is that they're going to be receiving classes at home if they are in-house suspension rather than just be suspended is that they will

[00:54:27] be assigned with some classes as well so this is through Edmentum that is something that we are looking at that's a plan. While they're at home they'll have instruction? Yes. And then it won't count as a suspension? So this is exactly what we are trying to look I know we haven't planned yet until I know the last time we had a conversation before I see all the details I'm going to bring to the table for Dr. King and Dr. Presidio and see if we can do it in that way. I know that there

[00:55:04] is an a memo from superintendent from Virginia superintendent about the three hours may count however I don't know that we're gonna be in conflict when the student is being suspended so something that I will have to work with Dr. King but this is a project that has not been totally finalized with some rules and regulations I will have to work with both of them but I was thinking in the part of instruction bringing instruction to the students who are suspended if we have a service that because sometimes you see this is a punishment for the

[00:55:43] student or correction I was thinking on the other side is a rather than just punish them go home and that's if sometimes you are rewarding them hey and punishing the parent which you know is something that we can uh figure it out together but i think that uh what we are looking is to to make sure that the students are actually receiving classes hey you're not going to be just at home doing nothing you are actually going to be assigned to classes well i'm very much willing to to hear more because i do agree because i sometimes i i look at it with my head

[00:56:19] to the side when students who are cutting class their punishment is to go home well yay thank you you've just solved that and I want to add dr. Anderson to that also now it's about the multilingual students or or the immigrant students were sometimes sending them home this that's exactly what they want in some cases some students just they don't want to be a school sometimes so rather than uh i wouldn't say punish that in that way sometimes it's just

[00:56:56] to discipline them and teach them differently and and this is what we are uh looking is uh understanding because sometimes uh we have to be uh culturally uh aware of things that happening in some cultures, and so I will say another one to call punishment, but discipline, to discipline them or correct them should be in a different way.

[00:57:25] Sure. And my last question for this round is based on the data on page 23. I'm always looking to see what the correlations are or the causality of activity. And I see here there's huge increases, if I may just finish this question, huge increases in terms of parent notifications and parent involvement and conferences, et cetera.

[00:57:45] Are those parent interactions a substitute activity for suspensions, both in school or out of school? Or is the result of that increased parent interaction a decreased number of in-school suspensions in chicken or the egg situation here?

[00:58:08] - Yes, thank you for that question, Dr. Anderson. And so one of our changes to the SRNR last year was to require interventions for every single discipline incident. And so what that means is that we're ensuring that when schools are entering an OSS or an ISS, that they are also pairing that with an intervention, which is why we see those increased interventions very particularly around parental notification, parent conferences, student conferences, et cetera.

[00:58:32] So it's not in lieu of, it is in addition to. Okay. I have some follow-up. So we're going to go to Mr. Moon. Thank you, Mr. McAuliffe. Just a couple of questions. You know, some of my questions related to strategies have been already asked and answered. So, but this particular one might not have been asked. I'm going to focus on what I see on page 19 of the slides, that

[00:59:07] strategy one, two, and three, but I'm going to focus on one and two, one and two, and each one of them has two sub-strategies underneath. So whenever we come up with a strategist, in this case, whatever we see up there, a couple of strategies, or four strategies altogether, that you came up with for 25 and 26 school year.

[00:59:35] How do you come up with a strategist? Is that you analyze the data, and you see this is where we are lacking, we could do a better job, or how do you do that? You know, for example, you say first one, first bullet point on the strategy number one, consistent clearly communicating expectation about attendance.

[00:59:55] You think we hadn't done that well? That is why we are doing this? Or is that what the parents are asking? - Well, I think it's an excellent question. So where we always start when we develop the strategies is kind of two places.

[01:00:13] What is our data telling us? What trends and patterns are we seeing in the data? And then what does the evidence base tell us is an evidence-based response to that particular issue that we're seeing in the data, right? So we go to the research base, and when you look at how to support positive attendance and address issues of chronic absenteeism, that kind of multi-tiered approach really is supported by the evidence base.

[01:00:38] So the first thing is we have to be clear and consistent with our communication. In a school division our size, I think communication is never going to be perfect, right? So there's always opportunities to try different strategies, different mechanisms to connect with individuals to really get your message to the folks that you wanna have receive it.

[01:00:55] So that is very important. I think it's particularly important for us in Fairfax, given the amount of multilingual learners that we have in the school division as well, to make sure that everybody understands the importance in this case of regular school attendance. Because as you pointed out, I think sometimes students and families don't realize how those absences, Even excused absences are accumulating, and what kind of a deficit it can really create for student learning.

[01:01:22] And you see that manifest itself in different ways at different grade levels. In the earlier grade levels, oftentimes our families are a little bit more cautious with sending their students to school if their students might have a cold. Well, I mean, we have pretty clear guidance about when you should keep your students home for medical reasons and when you shouldn't.

[01:01:42] But getting that message out so that everybody understands when it's safe and when you should keep your student home is something that we're continually working on. So broad strokes to your question. We look at the data, we look for the trends, we look at the research and the evidence base for what we need to respond to. And then as Dr. Axler was kind of pointing out in some of the work that we do, getting direct information from students about some of the issues and barriers is also really helpful for us in designing our responses, as well as seeing what schools that are making really big reductions in chronic absenteeism in their schools are doing that might be transferable to other schools in the system.

[01:02:16] So it really is kind of a multifaceted approach to strategies, but it starts with the data and it starts with the research. So I want to add that. Thank you. You know, believe it or not, Mr. Moon, sometimes as I meet with parents and go to community and everything, sometimes, oh, I didn't know that I had to send my child every day.

[01:02:41] I have heard over and over, especially high schools, and that's why I reinforce it every time that we have the opportunity. It is so powerful. It is so powerful with flyers, and every time I go, "Hey, remember that your child needs to be every time."

[01:03:01] Something that Sloan said that is totally is tell them, explain them, "Hey, when the weather is a little bit cold." A lot of them were parents, they don't have insurance and they are afraid if the child gets sick, then how can I get medication or medical service for the child?

[01:03:24] So that is something also that we have to, especially in some areas. If you see some regions that are very, that chronic asymptotism is very high or they're really low. And some others, high school, what I'm about to say is every time that I have a meeting with them, I really tell, hey, remember that if you don't go to school, even if you get 100 on the test, you will not get credit because chronic absentism, you know, being absent.

[01:03:56] So that really, to tell them and put it, every time that I have a parent in front, the first thing that I say, hey, remember that you have to, the children must be, because it is a lot of implication when they are in school. Thanks.

[01:04:11] Yeah, okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your responses. You know, I absolutely agree with the necessity of providing consistent and clear communication about our expectations and how that's going to affect, you know, students' learning. I bet that that's a data-driven, but let me go to something on the strategy two is access to health and mental wellness services and something you know Dr. Ponce alluded a little bit to you but so is that something that students

[01:04:47] provide you the data related to this or parents that is why we are putting in this if you are doing a data driven yeah no in part but again remember the entire kind of framework for how we're supporting attendance with those tiers so once we actually have students that are manifesting five or more absences right we start to have individual interventions and conversations with the students and the families to find out what the issues are so this particular strategy is coming more from that tier two response where we're seeing students that are already

[01:05:23] manifesting poor attendance patterns and we want to be able to support them and intervene before it gets worse some of the things that we're learning is the students and families in some instances maybe the student doesn't feel safe at school maybe they're dealing with issues of anxiety or depression right and we need to be able to get them the mental health and support services that they need you know I'm asking these questions again again again you know I have to believe that they are all data driven data driven whatever we provide the strategy that require investing our resources so yeah you know where how

[01:05:59] where we put our resources would have to really be the kind of services investments that is the best and most needed for the students to address the issues on end and I'm hoping that as we provide this implement these strategies those result in positive outcome and that's why I want to see next year as you present the next, start thinking about doing that.

[01:06:35] How this one, this particular strategy resulted in this kind of positive outcome? - Okay, just to set the stage for where we are. We're supposed to break at 12:30 for lunch.

[01:06:51] However, my preference is to exhaust all the questions so our friends at the head of the table can go about their day and we can then take lunch. So, okay, well, in that case, it looks like we have multiple people with questions.

[01:07:10] So let's break for lunch now, and then we'll come back. Sorry, we'll be back at 1:07.

[01:07:37] - Oh, thank you. I'm just gonna start with my last set of questions. This speaks to the disproportionality data. Looking at on page 24, the out of school suspensions, while I'm always talking about the achievement gap, I do wanna point out that I see this closing.

[01:07:57] It went from 4.15 was the difference in during the baseline year to 3.33 in the current year. So I do wanna point that out. But it's still like significant disparity. What is happening here? What else can we, I know I see the list of initiatives and ideas, but if we're looking at the students who are the most impacted by this, it's the black students and students with disabilities.

[01:08:24] So it's hard for me to just gloss over this. I'd like to hear some of your thoughts. - So again, thank you for that question, Dr. Anderson. So we are really building out our systems and our frameworks and supports around addressing discipline, disproportionality.

[01:08:42] And so this very initial year was around addressing suspensions and being able to see that reduction and then of course continuing that. And then at the same time, we've launched many of our policies and practices and staff capacity building as well. And so we should be seeing, of course, like continued impact of those things that we've implemented this particular year in our upcoming data as we proceed throughout those initiatives.

[01:09:05] But they're very specifically focused on changing our policies and creating practices that align our discipline practices across the division and then also building capacity of staff. - What's the cultural responsive work that's being done? Because we're talking about two very specific group of kids.

[01:09:22] Well, as soon as the disabilities, I heard some other things you talked about earlier, although I'd like to hear more, But with our black students, what's happening there just so we don't end up having this data over and over? Because all of the groups are decreasing, but the gap is closing very, very, very slowly.

[01:09:38] - Yes, so one of the things that we're doing in those initiatives called our School Discipline Consortium is requiring that schools perform root cause analysis very relevant to the subgroups of students that they're seeing that have these rates of disproportionality. And then based upon their root cause analysis to determine how they're gonna provide action plans, interventions and supports for those students very directly.

[01:10:02] So we have a very targeted approach to how we are addressing student groups that we're seeing are continually being represented in OSS and ISS as well. - So then are you seeing this trend across all schools or at particular schools? This consortium, does it involve all of the schools?

[01:10:21] How many schools? I don't need to know which schools right now, but how many schools? - So it's currently 24 schools that we work with, but we do perform the data analysis for all of our schools across the division. And we do release that discipline, disproportionality data to every single school in the division and then follow it up with coaching and support from our team.

[01:10:42] - Okay. I thought you wanted to say something else. Just looking at also the information, the data on page 26. And again, these are without students, black students being what 10% of the population.

[01:10:59] it's just really striking me that this continues to persist. I did wanna follow up with something I heard in the presentation regarding the teacher evaluations being linked to the learning model. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

[01:11:14] - Yeah, so that's a big part of the work that we're trying to do around inclusion, which in my view continues to be probably the largest initiative that we have in the school division right now because what we're trying to do is train all of our teachers, all of our administrators, all of our school-based staff, including instructional assistants, at making sure that we're doing everything that we can to educate students in the least.

[01:11:38] So as I think all of our board members know, we're working with some national experts on inclusion. We're just in year two of that work right now. That work actually started in January of 2025. We have schools that we're working with in three phases. So phase one, we have 12 schools.

[01:11:54] The second phase just has come on board with completing some of the required foundational professional development. got about 80 schools there and then phase three will come on for next school year but all of that work around inclusion at the end of the day centers on this idea of universal design for learning and building a strong foundation so that our general education classrooms are accessible to students and we remove barriers proactively not reactively so when we talk about UDL we talk about the big ideas basically of multiple means of representation engagement and expression right It's giving students choice in how they access learning materials.

[01:12:33] So not everybody necessarily has to learn from written text. Some students can get information in graphic organizers, videos. Similarly, when students present their learning outcomes, not everybody has to do it all the same way, right? So it's creating choices and options as well as a learning environment that really stresses belonging and connectedness, right?

[01:12:54] Building a strong cultural in the learning environment. So to do that work well, if those are the expectations and the focus for what we want our practices to look like, we felt like we really needed to align the teacher evaluation to the actual instructional expectations that we have in the school system.

[01:13:12] So going through kind of the seven standards and the teacher evaluation framework, if you look at it, oh sorry, you'll see in there connections to UDL in terms of planning, the work that you need to do to plan to set up your classroom. that's right we have multiple gold champions the room so I'll do my best on this one can our gold champions who are in the room raise their hands so they

[01:13:51] work with teams that represent various members of our school communities so we may have teachers sitting on teams we may have various staff from different departments sitting on teams I know last year when we did some updates with our algebra one goal we had students and family members come in and present as a part of those teams but what they're doing is going through a process every year at looking at our data making decisions about our what strategies do we need to adjust back to what dr. Presidio was talking about earlier evidence-based strategies what are the impacts we're seeing where do we need to make adjustments based on the information that we're understanding and And also looking at where are some innovative opportunities where we can try some different

[01:14:29] things even at small scale to see how those things impact student outcomes. So they're looking for what's working globally but also scalable solutions that we can test out in different settings. No, I appreciate that because I don't think I recall what the role was.

[01:14:46] And next to last is the certified restorative justice facilitators. One of the strategies that you mentioned is that you're looking for each of the schools to have at least one are you seeing some sort of correlational relationship between a certified restorative justice facilitator out of school and their discipline data yes so we do see correlations between our restorative justice practices work across all of our tiers and the impact that we see in terms of discipline data very specifically with our work around restorative practices and our

[01:15:21] restorative schools project we see that we those schools and those classrooms that participate in in those restorative practice circles in their classrooms, that they have greater sense of belonging as represented through the SEL screener survey data. And then we also see that schools which are utilizing their school-based facilitator are relying more on restorative justice than perhaps other consequences like exclusionary discipline like OSS or ISS.

[01:15:48] And they're also increasing their intervention work. So we are seeing an impact with our restorative justice practices across tier one through three. - Thank you. On page 56, part of the appendix, this is where you talk about the percentage of high school students with VHSL sports participation, and it's essentially stagnant from 23-24 to 24-25, and in the 24-25 year, if I'm correct, we introduced boys volleyball and girls wrestling.

[01:16:19] Is that correct? I would have expected some increase because of those two additional sports. I didn't seem to show that. I just think it's a numbers issue. I mean, we have more students participating in those, but when you talk about the thousands of students that we have in the high school data set, just adding a few additional students isn't going to change the percentages dramatically, I think.

[01:16:44] But we also have fewer students, I believe, or at least I thought. Okay. And going to the page before that, which is page 55, this is the middle school after school program, I see that you've broken this down by any participation, 15 days and 30 days, And I know some of these markers are, you know, being asked for by the county, but I'm really wondering about the average participation.

[01:17:07] What does that look like and what kind of student is participating? Because these are very different data sets. Thank you. Okay. We're going to go to... I'd like a response before you go.

[01:17:24] I know Mr. Horn's in the audience. I don't know, Tom, if you want to get to a mic, if there's any thoughts about Dr. Anderson's question about the average number of days of participation, if we have that. - If I understood the question, I think the question was about how many days per average the student attends.

[01:17:43] - Right, because if you look at the demographics, the type of student that's participating once or at all versus 15 days or more or 30 days or more, they're very different students. And that FRM level of student is very different. So I just wanted to see if we could present the data a little bit more broadly just to get a sense of who are our kids who are in these programs.

[01:18:05] My first commitment is we can look at all and disaggregate that data. I don't think we have it for you today. I think the second challenge we would have and will have with that is programming is different at each school. And we have some programs that operate weekly. We have some programs that operate over the course of months.

[01:18:22] We have some programs that operate in short windows. So we may have an eight-day program and we may have a 16-week program. So we may have kids that are attracted to a five-day program. We may have other students that are attracted to a once a week for 15 weeks program.

[01:18:38] So some of it is availability of programming and how it functions in each school. But we'll provide some more data for you. Yeah, that's definitely good context. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the report, staff.

[01:18:55] Great work. As I was studying all the data related to incidents of discipline, to me, it's just the developmental model. I mean, clearly things escalate in those middle school years where kids are hormonally challenged and awkward, whereas it was indicated they're getting on devices.

[01:19:15] Just my word to the public, please wait as long as humanly possible to put a device in your child's hand, and please charge their devices, including their computers, in your room at night, and make sure they can't get to them when you fall asleep, because there's danger out there. So a couple comments on that, you know, in terms of belonging, in terms of having an adult that you can trust, I'm a little bit more interested in what strategies are being approached for the 30% of kids that indicate they don't have a trusted adult, and I think that very much correlates to whether they're involved in an activity or a club or a sport after school.

[01:19:52] So are we doing any targeted things to do outreach to those kids because we know who they are, to try to map them and get them engaged in something of interest? We are, and I'll just mention a few things, and then maybe Dr. Axler might want to add a little bit more.

[01:20:09] You know, at the secondary level, one of the components kind of of the theory of action around advisory is that you're going to have somebody who's going to know a smaller group of students and know them better and start to actually see some of the needs that that student might have because, of course, a classroom teacher with 150 kids and a counselor with 500 kids can't provide that amount of personalization, so it's just another strategy to help us with that.

[01:20:32] So oftentimes the advisors will try to, you know, help facilitate opportunities for students to make stronger connections at school and also hopefully serve as one trusted adult in the school building that they've got a relationship with. So that's one thing that we try to do.

[01:20:47] And then, of course, our counselors and psychologists and social workers, when we've identified students that, you know, do have a lack of those supportive, trusted adults as resources, try to facilitate those connections as well. But it's a very intensive student by student, you know, and it's a lot when you think about the number of students that we have in our schools to be able to facilitate that well.

[01:21:11] But, Mike, do you want to add a little bit more about some of the things we do? Sure, and I think one of the things that we want to do first is to figure out why might a student not feel a sense of belonging, right? If we have a student who hasn't been to school very much, then the reason they don't feel a sense of belonging might be because they haven't been to that school.

[01:21:26] So then we have to look at our shift to what might be the barriers to getting them into school. If a student is there and they still don't feel a sense of belonging, what's their connection like with the adults around them and with their peers around them? For connections with adults, we sometimes do like the two-by-ten relationship strategy, right? have two-minute conversation an adult with a student for 10 consecutive days around how that students doing getting to know the student fostering a connection because as we know and as you alluded to a strong connection with a caring adult is the number one protective factor for any student and the number one contributor to feeling a greater sense of belonging and the more that we can have students teachers and other adults in that school doing that with a student in a targeted way the more likely they'll feel that sense of belonging we also connect them with mentors sometimes with peer mentors other

[01:22:06] times with adult mentors so they can establish a more long-term connective relationship and have a positive association with coming to school and sometimes there might be things like academic barriers or lack of participation in other activities with like-minded peers and so we try and set them up with activities that may align with their areas of interest or identification but really it's a targeted student by student process to figure out what else do we know about the student that might be contributing to a lack of sense of belonging in this community and how do we try and address that and tether it to our tier one initiative because we know that this is something that they need for all of our students.

[01:22:41] Okay. Thank you. Nothing new or innovative since I was in the system, but other than the two by 10, I like that two by 10 idea. Because part of the reason I'm asking is I think that, you know, during academic advising was an expectation of me as a director that my, we weren't just counting credits to make sure they were on track. We were asking them, what are they doing? What are they involved in? You know, who's at home with you? You know, that's your get to know you moment.

[01:23:03] And that's the opportunity as you're talking about interest in electives to then say, well, Do you know Mr. Smith, who is the sponsor of the investment club, and make those connections? So I think there's just more we can do.

[01:23:19] The other thing when you talk about advisories, I just wonder if we're giving any, 'cause I remember it was a constant debate when I was at Chantilly about whether you wanted your advisory to be the same for four years, because then that's really the relationship. And that's what I wanted.

[01:23:34] I'm not sure that I won that battle. I also worked hard with multi-language learners to get them with someone who spoke their native language to make an advisory of students so that it was more meaningful for them. I bring this up just because I think these are things that sometimes need to be more rolled out to people as best practice, and I'll bring this up again, health and PE.

[01:23:58] We can't have specialists in the high schools because at Chantilly they change teachers every quarter, and their classes have 35 children in them. It's not 150, it's like 200 kids. You're meeting new 200 kids every single, and you can't build a relationship. So, sadly, I'm gonna run out of time.

[01:24:14] But on suspensions, you referenced you're changing some policies. What are those changes? - We made several policy changes to the SRNR last year. One of which was requiring interventions for every discipline incident, requiring parental notification for every incident, enhancing our SRNR student lessons.

[01:24:37] So all of those changes that we made last year, we're now beginning to see some of those implementations this year. - Excellent, thank you. And then my other question is, are we checking to make sure that all of our schools are actually entering discipline?

[01:24:53] - Yes, we are in fact doing that. So we have initiated our Essentials of Discipline Data Entry training. It's a professional learning and coaching program, which works with schools when we see that by the end of quarter one, we either do not see discipline entered, or we see that there is low discipline entered.

[01:25:09] And then we provide direct professional learning around what are the data expectations around discipline entry. And then we also help them to do root cause analysis and then develop what's called a data action plan in order to make sure that they're increasing their consistency. And then we've also created internal data tracking tools that help us to be able to determine any kind of like discrepancies in referral rates between all the way from elementary to high school.

[01:25:32] - So does that also mean you're tracking by administrator? - There is the possibility for that, but it's very specifically looking more at the school level. 'cause I would encourage you to do it by that because that was a problem in all my years of wherever I worked. There were the people that were all over it and worked with kids and built relationships with kids, worked with their counselor, and then there were people who never sent for a kid when they had referrals.

[01:25:57] And if they did, they kind of slapped 'em on the hand and they never took the time to put it in. So I think that's part of our, some of our disproportionality is that we're not, in theory, logging things. Can I just finish real quick and not take a go back? So the other thing, I read about these things.

[01:26:15] Have we reached, thought about establishing mentorships? I know we do with faculty, but with outside mentors or parents or fathers. I've seen a lot of press around fathers coming in and being part of a school culture.

[01:26:32] And yeah, the dads that are helping in the hallways, get kids to class, and it's like addressing behavior too. Have we done any work in that area? Yeah, I mean, we have, and our schools, unfortunately, are kind of, you know, in a position where they have to do a lot of that recruitment themselves, right?

[01:26:53] So some schools, I think, have been able to kind of crack the code on that a little bit better than other schools. So we do need to find better ways to provide centralized support to it. Right now, one of the things that we've tried to do is work through the skipped process, right? So the successful child and youth policy team at the county level that has all these county agencies, That's something that we've talked about repeatedly there, is trying to figure out how we can get more community partnerships through agencies like that.

[01:27:19] One of the newer programs that skipped is My Brother's Keeper, the Obama Initiative, to try to provide positive mentoring for young men. We're seeing a little bit of traction that's starting to get off the ground, but we need to do more to develop those community partnerships so schools don't have to do everything on their own.

[01:27:37] Yeah, I mean, I'll take something like EduFuturo. They got into a couple schools and then expanded, so I would ask that... still working with them yeah yeah but I would ask that we pick a school that's got an issue got disproportionality and target it and do recruitment and pilot it and then it'll grow it's my opinion so the last thing is are we doing any and I know when I was Chantilly we had like thank you Miss lady your time is okay I wasn't gonna do go back this is my last thing yeah I haven't spoken so we used to do men's groups and women's groups and it's you know trying to help with

[01:28:13] behavior, trying to help connect them, you know, and I know our counselors and our, it was not just counselors, our entire mental health team would be doing that. I don't need an answer, but I just hope that that's still something that's happening or empowerment groups, you know what I mean? Like I think sometimes when you have a positive interaction, then it breeds more positive interactions. So, and the last thing I'll say is one thing that I did when I was at Chantilly was something called an on a roll ceremony where basically every teacher could nominate one kid a quarter who was who had momentum going in a positive direction and for many kids it could be a behavior shift it could be an

[01:28:51] attendance shift it could be an academic shift it could be a collaboration shift but I will tell you that those were many many of the kids recognized had never had a positive experience in a public school before and their parents came and their grandparents came and it was it was a game-changer because they'd actually never been recognized for something positive. So things like that I think are helpful.

[01:29:14] Again, thank you team for your report and all your hard work. And can I just two finger on the mentorship thing? We still work with MentorWorks, right? Right. Because as a community member, I have volunteered through MentorWorks and they will assign you to a school. So it may just be about community. No, that's a great program, but we need more of those. Okay, Ms.

[01:29:36] Anderson. Okay, so I'm going to gently channel my former colleague for just a minute and I want to talk a little bit about the inclusion data. I am incredibly happy to see that our trend is going in the correct direction and it continues to increase in that way. I'm a little concerned still with the chart that's on page 35 and the fact that it still seems that we're a little bit more successful at the younger grades than the older grades related to getting kiddos in included environments. So I was, to start, can you guys talk a little bit about what we're doing to kind of make that work better yeah I mean and I'll kind of

[01:30:14] keep it brief to start and then if you want me to go and expand just just let me know but first thing I would say is this is really lagging data so we're looking obviously at last year's data but remember that data doesn't even reflect any structural changes that we had made at the division level as a result of the inclusion initiative so you just have to have that context a little bit the secondary data particularly when we get to high school but this is true of middle school as well a couple of the big problems that we've identified there one oftentimes the schedule drives the services at the

[01:30:50] secondary level much more than it does at the elementary level so if we have a student who's scheduled into a self-contained class for example to two periods of a self-contained class and they're already not going to meet the inclusion targets right they're not going to show up in the positive data so that's a real challenge for us we've got to figure out ways to you know get around some of those scheduling constraints and concerns and our model for that is a co-teaching model that we're working with all of the schools of the inclusion initiative to implement but that's a huge transition from a special education teacher and case manager educating students in the self-contained environment versus pushing into the general education class

[01:31:28] and co-teaching right and you've got to be in different places at different times and it's a big you know adaptive shift and change and that's why we're going through an entire year's process to do professional development, training, provide the schools with time to do planning about how they're going to make those shifts in practice the following year.

[01:31:45] So this data is lagging data. Even next year's data, like we're projecting now, is probably going to be up like four or five percent, we think. But that's only going to reflect changes that 12 of our 200 schools have made. So we're a couple years out, I think, to seeing some of those bigger jumps as we start to eliminate and shift our service delivery from a model that really in a sense doesn't allow us those same opportunities that we have at elementary for the push-in support at the secondary level as much okay thank you I appreciate the context there I guess my other question is is I know that we look at these reports as discrete reports often but what what intersectionality

[01:32:25] are we looking at particularly related to tracking inclusion with success in general education classrooms because that is something that I definitely think that as we're working towards we we want kiddos included but we want them to be successful and included environments so I want to see some cross cross pollination there just a little bit more and then the other aspect is is I mean I always wonder because we have such a large student disability population whether or not some of the state percentage requirements are are still as feasible for us just because we have kids with greater needs and then the

[01:33:02] thing that you've heard me talk about throughout this entire year so far is those kiddos on the VAP that have been taken out of a more restrictive environment which is great that they're in a less restrictive environment but they haven't had the skill set that they need to be successful in that class and so I want us to see what we're doing to kind of get them more on track and and I think that it's largely particularly I mean I've talked to many of you about the fact that a lot of the supports that we have for mm or MLL learners like it would work it seems like it would work similarly and so

[01:33:39] understanding as kiddos move closer to becoming or becoming eligible to come off of that like what are we doing to prepare them to be ready to be in those SOL track classes so I really want to see us work more towards those transition moments i think that transition across the board is something that we um that we need to work on and working on the transition between the major grades where we see a decline in inclusion i think it's going to be really successful because i can i can see where kiddos that may have been firmly included in a in an elementary environment it would be devastating to lose that inclusion as

[01:34:16] they get older and so i would hate to see that be the continued trend so i think that we're on the the right track but I want to I would just encourage us to kind of look at this holistically a little bit more I appreciate the comments and suggestions thank you thanks Melanie thank you I have two topics I wanted to touch on one is the middle school after school program and this is really more for dr.

[01:34:43] Reed when we were at the joint meeting with the supervisors there was new information about how they were budgeting for it I wonder if you could explain further we had some questions and would just appreciate understanding how anything's changing please yes ma'am I I think that one of the things that we recognize that obviously this is an important program it received a lot of attention last year and I think we've discussed how important it is for our students to be active and connected to school in our goal to report as well

[01:35:17] historically the middle school after school funding from the county has been housed in the health and human services part of the county budget and has been transferred as part of what is characterized as a budget transfer this year the budget instead of being housed in the health and human services and part of the budget transfer is being provided in the school operating fund transfer which I think is obviously generating a different level of concern

[01:35:52] because then it competes with other commitments within the school operating fund traditionally these funds have paid for staff and some operating expenses but it hasn't been line itemed from the county it's was put in this budget transfer but it was generally used to pay for the staff our middle school after school specialists and some operating expenses worth the matching funds from from the school division to support transportation, stipends and other expenses.

[01:36:26] - Thank you, and so when you say it pays for staff, are we paying FCPS staff or county government employee staff? - So it's used to pay for the middle school after school specialist positions, which actually are FCPS staff.

[01:36:41] The funding for those positions traditionally had been housed in this Health and Human Services County part of the budget. right mr. Smith could probably provide a little more historical and I was going to add there is a schools match to that as well not a one-for-one match but there is a school's portion of that funding as well thank you and from what I recall the conversation their financial officer said something to the effect of they're transferring it so it's maybe perhaps neater and more organized and they would keep track of the revenue and I'm wondering what because

[01:37:19] there was an interest in moving to a revenue or fee based model I wasn't quite I don't know if you have any clarity on that so there's been some discussion about the possibility of I believe it's 1.2 million of their transfer being transitioned to a fee based model so some way of collecting fees I know county staff and school division staff had been working together to try to put together what that model might look like I don't believe they've completed that work and I believe it's been paused at this point just waiting

[01:37:56] to see what actually the total dollars are that we're gonna receive from both the Commonwealth and the county because our 43 million dollar gap it is inclusive of middle school after school at this time so I think that that work around what a model could look like, who would collect money, all of that would have to come before the board before it would be possible to be executed. So I, Dr. Ponce, your team has been working on that, I'm not sure, I think they've paused that work. I think that's enough, that's great, that answers my question because I just, the question I want to ask is if the program, is it forty, four

[01:38:35] million dollars last year that was under our side of the budget, right? Or no, was that was what they provided to run the program yes so 3.9 I think right so when we say that there is a gap of 43 million isn't it really like a gap of 47 million because this is to please correct me or you know clarify this brings me back to my days working in title one at the US Department of Education and it sounds like the exact definition of supplanting where we asked for money and they said we'll give you the money but we're going to reduce the amount overall that you asked for furthermore it sounds like they're

[01:39:13] directing us how to spend our money so if they're gonna lump that four million into the transfer we could do whatever we want with that and that could include not paying for middle school after school or something else can you confirm is my understanding correct yes ma'am I mean I I think your initial point about the 43 to 47 clearly is because we would have to we've committed or in the budget that we adopted or not adopted but advertised the budget that I

[01:39:49] presented that you advertised voted to approve to advertise does have a 43 million dollar gap and if we need to add the in the 4 million and it at this point I believe it was the middle school after school there are some public health topics well well debt services in addition to the middle school after school but then there was also a transition for our graduating adults with special needs transition program so there were I think several programs that have been moved from the health and human services part of the county budget

[01:40:28] to the school division operating fund so that would be an accurate statement well thank you I think you know I would certainly like to start talking about a 47 million dollar deficit or gap plus those other things you know we instruct our staff again especially in title one do not supplant and this is the fear honestly that the state's going to come in with money and then the local government will say well see you have that money so we're just going to move our money elsewhere I mean that is the definition of supplanting which is not supposed to be happening so I would like to know if you could please at some point the total gap or you know that the county is moving into our column that

[01:41:07] will supplant our investments unless we reroute those investments the other thing I'm glad to hear you say that the work to propose a fee has paused because in very clear language many times I personally and others have said this program it was tried to have there was a pilot done with fees and it did not work children did not come so that the county continues to use time and money to look at ways to get this middle school after school program covered by a

[01:41:36] fee is really wasteful and I just wish we could move past it I see no further plaques okay then Melanie okay I do have another question around universal design for learning which I'm so excited about and I remember one of the kickoffs we had an outstanding person a consulting group who was helping us and it's really wonderful to see the the increase. I just want to share an experience I had as a parent of a student who's dyslexic. So my kiddo's in seventh

[01:42:13] grade and he was meeting with his counselor to determine whether or not to take world language because you know he's told all the advanced diploma and if you want the best diploma then you're gonna need world language. Well I did my research and it turns out unless you differentiate instruction for a dyslexic it is really hard. So against the counsel you know that he had been hearing and from his peers and teachers I said look buddy this is going to be a really tough road for you and you've got your advanced math so you know colleges you will find we'll find the place for you and he finally said okay mom I guess you know something okay so but I think that and this is again

[01:42:49] something our previous colleague would say about inclusion in the secondary grades especially for our twice exceptional students right so I didn't feel comfortable with my son going to learn a world language unless it was differentiated and I would at least like to put a plug in for that because I feel like it's constantly touted to kids get your advanced diploma but if you have a learning disability I mean and we're also starting the language instruction when he's 13 which we know is not developmentally the best time to start a language so I share that feedback in terms of counseling and also in continuing to advocate for differentiating instruction in those

[01:43:25] secondary grades for kiddos with disabilities thank you okay seeing nothing further oh wait oh dr. Anderson I want to ask for clarification regarding one of the strategies on page 30 this is action 3-4 the pilot process for responding to minor incidents what I'm sorry I'm not sure I'm fully clear on what this means is that just a technical change with codes or are there more

[01:44:01] things involved yes so the Office of Equity and Student Conduct has partnered with the Department of Special Services in a pilot for schools that allows schools to be able to enter their minor referrals insist consistently and of course kind of like having data coaching and support around that so that we can be able to take data and learnings from that in order to be able to provide a systematized division-wide kind of like protocol and policy for to strengthen and enhance how we're entering minor referrals minor referrals are those things which are not necessarily accepted by an administrator for SRNR

[01:44:41] support but there are still behaviors that we're seeing that we absolutely want to be able to monitor and have preventative support for before we get to that major level that's where it is accepted by an administrator and so initially that pilot started last year and then it expanded I believe by four schools this year and I'll also defer to dr. axler who within the Department of Special Services who's supporting that pilot project thanks Diana I think you hit on the main points really the idea is to empower classroom teachers to be able to get a better sense of those minor behaviors and to be able to respond based on the data they see before they escalate into more major referrals so

[01:45:18] this is training for the classroom teachers what are the minor referrals that fall into this category that are not accepted by administrators so they're they're the same codes that you see in the SRNR so for example like classroom disruption but it's not something that an administrator should probably handle it's something that could be hat that could happen at the classroom level and so as a result we would consider that to be a minor referral versus a major referral which an administrator would handle thank you so I actually just have one quick suggestion and we had discussed this because our schools are

[01:45:57] accredited by the degree of absenteeism if if we can have the data of unexcused and excused absences because as one of my colleagues stated and as I have had experience sometimes a child is in a hospital for a month and that's counted against us and there's no way that that child can be in school and I think that that's an unfair character characterization of some chronic absenteeism and that's what we're judged on and I just don't think that's a fair metric when it's something that we're not going to bring a kid from a hospital and you can't even have instruction for some children if we can have that

[01:46:37] divided because I think the picture would look a little bit different okay great well this concludes our discussion of a goal - we will be taking a 11 minute recess so see you back at 2:00 p.m. for discussion of SRNR so I know that a lot of us are really excited because we see some of our school people here and I know calling you guys back was a little bit hard because you didn't want to tear yourself away from that before I move forward I do want to take

[01:47:16] this opportunity to allow miss lady to introduce her representative for the student leadership program this is my student GG from Langley thanks so for those of you that don't know our student leadership school board student leadership program the students come to a school board meeting a work session and they have other opportunities but it really is enlightening for them and I

[01:47:51] just spoke with her and she said oh this is so fun so I love to hear young people say this is so fun because maybe they will be sitting at this dais in the future we are now moving on to the discussion of the students rights and responsibilities I call on dr. Reed for a presentation thank you miss st. John Cunning and this afternoon we are gonna undertake our annual conversation to review our student rights and responsibilities document and regulation so I'll turn it over to dr. King to launch our presentation thank

[01:48:26] you dr. Reed and good afternoon school board members today is our time will be spent engaging in meaningful discussion regarding the students rights and responsibilities regulation for the 26 27 school year our work is refining the SRNR is not just about proposed policy adjustments it's about ensuring that our schools or spaces where students feel safe supported included and empowered where educators are provided valuable resources to make positive discipline decisions and community members relationships are further strengthened

[01:49:03] and all these efforts aligned to goal 2 and our division strategic plan today's presentation will review and seek approval of proposed changes and recommendations and to determine alignment between school board and staff around the community engagement feedback.

[01:49:19] After reviewing these proposed changes, our team will pause and allow for collaborative discussion and questions. At this time, I would like to introduce members of the Chief Equity Office who have been instrumental in leading this work. I have Dara Hewing, who is our Executive Director of Equity and Student Relations.

[01:49:36] I have Deanna Shin, who is our Senior Manager 2 for Equity and Student Conduct. Lisa Forrest is our Superintendent Administrator's Hearing. Ben Clota is our Data Specialist equity and student conduct and there are several members can you raise your hand everybody let them know that you're here as part of this work we have some principals who've joined us today we appreciate it members of the instructional services team we work collaboratively to ensure that we're bringing the best recommendations to the board that are going to impact our students and experience with students SRNR in our schools I'd like to invite Tara Huynh to begin our presentation and guide us through the fundamental

[01:50:14] elements of today's discussion thank you good afternoon everyone today's session is intended to achieve two desired outcomes testing is that better okay today's session is intended to achieve two desired outcomes review and seek approval on proposed changes and recommendations to the srnr and determine alignment between school board and staff around community engagement feedback in addition to following this model guidance the work of the srnr is guided by the mission and vision of the chief equity office which is fully aligned to our fcps strategic plan

[01:50:53] and mission our vision is to ensure every student staff and family belongs and thrives our mission centers on cultivating equitable beliefs and practices throughout fcps our team helps support the fcps strategic plan by reviewing and ensuring the consistent implementation of the srnr in terms of goal two safe supported and included environments and goal three academic growth and excellence the Virginia model guidance which governs state discipline codes of conduct requires that school board policy provide for the

[01:51:31] systemic review of local discipline regulations as such FCPS reviews the SRNR on an annual basis to ensure alignment with any state mandated changes, staff recommendation changes, and community feedback. During this annual review, our team works alongside principals, central office collaborators, and the community to cross-reference discipline-related legislation updates, make requisite revisions to the SRNR, and facilitate opportunities for community engagement relative to the proposed revisions. Our community engagement was

[01:52:09] multifaceted and included board two by two sessions meeting with principal associations and follow-up opportunities to obtain additional feedback principal workshops meeting with the Advisory Committee for students with disabilities monthly virtual sessions with administrators to ask and answer questions about proposed SR&R changes and implementing a division-wide survey for all parents and caregivers school-based staff and middle and high school students. These community engagement efforts have played a crucial

[01:52:46] role in shaping these proposed changes and align with the FCPS strategic plan. Building on the feedback we have received, there continues to be a need to ensure consistent disciplinary practices across the division that are developmentally appropriate and help reinforce a safe, supported, empowered learning environment where all students can achieve academic growth and and excellence community members desire the consistent application of discipline and behavior wellness interventions we will now begin our review of these proposed srnr discipline changes

[01:53:24] and assisting in this review is diana shin senior manager for the office and equity of student conduct thank you tara our team has organized next year's changes to the srnr into two parts core changes, and secondary changes. There are three core changes for SY 26-27. They are establishment of universal grade matrices, regulation of the creation and distribution of intimate images, and requirements for in-school suspension of students with disabilities. We will first discuss these core changes and then review proposed secondary changes. The universal grade

[01:54:04] matrices, or UGMs, are an accompanying guidance document to the currently established discipline matrix the ugm however provides standardized discipline responses by grade level for each listed s bar code these matrices clearly outline sanctions required interventions and administrative actions for each disciplinary action rollout will be phased over three years beginning with category c and d behaviors these behaviors relate to relationship behaviors and behaviors of a safety concern behaviors of a safety concern have been the most frequent reporting category for two of

[01:54:40] of the past three years. As a result, our office determined the need to begin the three-year phased rollout with categories C and D. Category A and B and fractions will follow in the subsequent year, and finally, we will finalize the matrices with categories E and F. You will notice the matrices list the precise SBAR code and whether it is classroom or office managed. This is in alignment with already existing MTSS behavior wellness frameworks. Each code is also assigned a specific sanction and intervention at each level.

[01:55:14] The matrices correspond to current CIS codes and align with MTSS interventions and the use of MTSS site intervention teams. Lastly, the UGM also provides indications for administrators about discretionary or mandatory referral for discipline incidents to the division superintendent.

[01:55:35] To support, the matrices are designed with the following in mind, multi-tiered systems of support for behavioral wellness and restorative frameworks are emphasized and required for all incidents at all levels and for all students. Levels correspond to severity and impact and not frequency. There is an exception for drug offenses which are guided based upon the precise infraction. Detailed guidance to help administrators determine violations including a definition for severity, a definition for impact, and a chart outlining levels by severity and impact.

[01:56:10] clarifying that administrators shall determine disciplinary levels based on severity and impact and may go outside the matrix based on already established srnr factors including incidents in which the principal determines that the misconduct has substantially impeded the learning of the students or others interfered with school operations endangered the well-being of others or the conduct was repetit was repetitious following attempts to intervene guidance that administrators may code up to four s bar codes the first listed offense must be the most severe and include a UGM sanction and leveled UGM intervention. Any additional codes must receive

[01:56:48] only the UGM leveled intervention from the same level as the selected sanction level. To assist with consistent implementation, we've created a severity and impact chart to assist administrators in determining the appropriate level of severity or impact.

[01:57:05] There are three major aims of the UGM which help to provide support and accountability: to prioritize mtss and restorative behavior to ensure interventions and sanctions are developmentally appropriate to promote consistency and application of the srnr the universal grade matrices and protocols across schools and division our team has made four minute formatting changes to the universal grade matrices in response to community feedback and feedback from this board we will walk through each of these formatting changes there is now a header on each page

[01:57:44] of the UGM. We have removed the administrative actions column to allow for easier navigation. Further, we have removed running tables and now each UGM will fit on one page to allow for easily accessible navigation to the appropriate sanction and intervention.

[01:58:03] Our office engaged in research on other K-12 discipline matrices or frameworks. Most divisions use tiered matrices but not necessarily grade banded models. A few have started this work but FCPS's model is more comprehensive in its detail, standardization, and grade development alignment. Some districts formally align discipline responses by grade level. FCPS's model combines grade level alignment, standardized steps, and restorative practices.

[01:58:32] FCPS's proposal intentionally combines specific responses aligned to student grade levels, standardized administrative steps tied to specific infractions, and required MTSS, SEL, and restorative-based interventions. Together these elements balance subjectivity and discretion, increase consistency across schools, and ensure discipline is developmentally appropriate. This approach positions FCPS as a forward engineer in developing consistent and developmentally responsive discipline practices. This proposed change requires

[01:59:07] language support services for multilingual learners ELP levels one through four when collecting verbal or written student statements. It defines language support services as the provision of a translated student notification statement issued by the office of the chief equity officer and administered to students by school administrators it provides the translated student notification statement in the students requested language stating the alleged violation and the and that participation in providing a verbal or written statement is voluntary it does not require a student statement for disciplinary action to proceed and does not modify or erode existing

[01:59:43] protections for students with disabilities this proposed change focuses on in-school suspension protocols for students with disabilities. The same protections for out-of-school suspension now formally extend ISS to ISS for students with disabilities.

[02:00:01] There are no changes to these protections, only a formal extension of the same protections for students with disabilities. Our team conducted a division-wide survey and I will now turn it over to Benjamin Clota, Data Specialist in the Chief Equity Office, to walk us through some of the key findings.

[02:00:22] We sent a survey to over 300,000 members of the community to understand how much they support or oppose the proposed changes. The target audience included all parents and caregivers and school-based staff. It also included students in grades 6 through 8 who make up just over half of the responses.

[02:00:38] We received about 9,000 complete responses. This is in line with other large-scale FCPS surveys administered this year. We are grateful to have heard the voices of so many in our community and to share their reactions with you on the next two slides.

[02:00:54] Here you see reactions to the proposed changes, with support in dark blue on the left. Staff showed strong support, with three quarters reporting that they strongly supported or supported the changes. A clear majority of parents and caregivers also supported the changes.

[02:01:10] Students were largely neutral on the first two topics, with nearly half reporting that they neither supported nor opposed the changes. All respondents strongly supported accommodations for multilingual learners. In this slide, we broke down support for the different matrices by reported grade level.

[02:01:27] This means, for example, that for the grades 9 through 12 matrix, we report results only from students in grades 9 through 12, and parents and caregivers with students in grades 9 through 12. When comparing with the overall ratings at the top, we see that respondents are notably less neutral when rating matrices that are directly relevant to them.

[02:01:46] We also see that parents and caregivers showed slightly more support. I'll now turn it down, turn it back to Deanna to walk us through some additional changes being proposed to the SRNR. Thank you, Ben. Our next proposed change adds a formal definition of developmental disability aligned with the Virginia Code.

[02:02:05] The Code-aligned definition defines a developmental disability as a severe and chronic disability that begins before age 22, is expected to last throughout the person's life, is caused by a physical or mental impairment or combination, does not apply when the only diagnosis is a mental illness, and results in substantial limitations in three or more major life activities.

[02:02:30] This recognizes that children from birth through age 9 may also be considered to have a developmental disability if they have a significant developmental delay or a medical condition likely to cause significant limitations later in life without early supports. In addition to the criteria above, the definition allows for a developmental disability to apply to students identified as having intellectual disabilities, autism, or any other disability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that causes the student to require specially designed instruction and significant support in the areas of self-care, understanding,

[02:03:06] using or expressing language, mobility, decision making, living independently, or work skills. The next proposed change focuses on the creation and distribution of intimate images, also known as deepfakes.

[02:03:22] This change introduces two new SBAR codes related to the creation and distribution of intimate images and provides a definition for intimate images. Discipline requires Title IX review and authorization. Once formally clearing the Title IX process, students can receive up to a five-day suspension as appropriate, referral to the division superintendent, and a required intervention lesson.

[02:03:45] This proposed change establishes a dedicated SR&R section detailing hate speech and/or slurs related disciplinary procedures. It establishes a definition for slurs. It requires tiered interventions as part of a disciplinary process related to these incidents.

[02:04:02] At level one, students are required to participate in the part one culturally responsive learning intervention. At level two, students are required to participate in the part two culturally responsive learning intervention. At level three, students receive a referral to their school's MTSS site intervention team.

[02:04:19] At level four, students are again referred to their MTSS site intervention team as well as to a school-based mental health support team member. At each level, an administrator may make a referral to the FCPS Restorative Justice Department central office team member.

[02:04:34] And lastly, administrators are required to issue a standardized community letter regarding the incident. This change proposes updates to training for all FCPS team members in the SR&R from biannual to annual to reflect division practice.

[02:04:50] It supports principals and delivery of SR&R instruction and clarifies their role in providing follow-up support, answering staff questions, and reinforcing expectations. The Office of the Chief Equity Officer will continue to support principals with turnaround training for school-based staff through the annual integrated discipline training for administrators these changes are intentionally designed to assist in addressing discipline disproportionality across the division this address includes the limited consistent use of discipline alongside a critical counterpart policy practices and people alignment regarding

[02:05:29] discipline and student support we know that reducing suspensions is one arm in addressing disproportionality we must also ensure that discipline expectations are clear, responses are consistent, and supports are embedded at every level. This work reflects a systems approach aligning how we define behavior, how we respond to it, and how we build adult capacity to support students and staff so that discipline is applied fairly, predictably, and with appropriate interventions that reduce repeat behavior and improve outcomes.

[02:05:59] Policies set clear, consistent expectations for discipline. Following last year's sr and r changes and annual review discussions with the board we implemented several policy changes including requiring interventions for every discipline incident and launching the division discipline requirements which requires standardized sr and r training for school-based staff the appointment of a school discipline lead establishment of discipline review teams and two discipline data dialogues per year we also updated cis to align with sr and r changes including required interventions and leveled responses,

[02:06:39] ensuring structural consistency across schools. Practices ensure consistent supportive discipline responses and support for every student. To implement division-wide discipline practices, we piloted the essentials of discipline training in nine schools to support those with no or low discipline data entry and launch the School Discipline Consortium for 24 schools where discipline disproportionality data signals an opportunity for collaboration and coaching consortium schools receive professional learning and ongoing coaching and that professional learning includes root cause

[02:07:15] analysis goal development and support in implementing preventative tier one pbis systems we introduced neurodiversity toolkits into every school and central office-based restorative justice facilitation these efforts are reflected in early data trends from quarter one and quarter two of SY 24-25 to quarter one and quarter two of SY 25-26 interventions saw a 32 percent increase advanced interventions increased saw a 37 percent increase and out of school suspension saw a five

[02:07:50] percent decrease we've also focused on strengthening staff capacity and discipline implementation and monitoring while expanding behavior wellness and restorative supports for students as an ongoing effort 98 percent of schools now have one to two certified restorative justice facilitators reinforcing our commitment to restorative practices further we've created standardized srnr training for school-based staff and updated student srnr lessons to a modular format which focuses on student rights and responsibilities lastly our office hosted two webinars for families called the power of restorative justice rj practices to support students and families at

[02:08:29] school and at home. The webinar reviewed the FCPS RJ program, the RJ Mindset, dove into Tier 1 and Tier 2 RJ supports, and concluded with some ideas for using RJ practices at home. Together, these efforts reflect a coordinated strategy to address discipline disproportionality through the implementation of policies, practice, and student and staff capacity building. As we've outlined, this year's SRNR updates, alongside the initiatives strengthened from last year, reflect a coordinated effort to clarify expectations, standardized responses, and address discipline

[02:09:06] disproportionality through aligned policy, consistent practice, and strengthened staff capacity. And while division-wide systems create the structure, the true impact of this work lives in our schools. To bring this to light, we've invited three principals who are leading this work, implementing required interventions and engaging in data dialogues. Our principals today include amanda burke principal of edison high school lindsey kearns yes please lindsey kearns principal of lake braddock secondary and angela thompson principal

[02:09:45] of newington forest elementary school in addition to sharing how they are operationalizing these expectations they will speak to why they believe these sr&r changes matter how the clarity consistency and required interventions position their schools to respond to behavior more effectively limit exclusionary practices and strengthen outcomes for students moving forward we will first hear from Amanda Burke principal of Edison high school good

[02:10:23] afternoon my name is Amanda Burke and I'm the proud principal of Edison high school and I'm in my 26th year at FCPS over the course of my career I've served as an administrator in a variety of settings including a comprehensive high school a comprehensive services site or a CSS program deaf and hard of hearing hearing program and schools that support Academy models those experiences have shaped how I think about clarity consistency and equitable access in the discipline and practices Edison serves about 20 to 2100 students grades 9

[02:10:55] through 12 our population is roughly 35% Hispanic 20% 26% white 18% black and 12% Asian one of our strengths is our strong PBIS framework grounded in restorative practices, we're a pilot for the minor referral process, and our administrators also work in pairs on complex cases which supports careful investigation and calibration. Regarding the proposed SRNR changes with the universal grade matrices, it will significantly strengthen consistency in the implementation of discipline. The levels now clearly correspond to

[02:11:35] severity and impact, with the exception of drug offenses. Impact includes consideration of whether a behavior impedes the learning environment disrupts instruction or affects the safety and well-being of others the addition of the clear definition for severity and impact along with the chart outlining levels by both factors provides detailed guidance to help our administrators determine the appropriate violation level this reduces subjective interpretation and increases consistency across cases the emphasis on behavior interventions and and restorative approaches at all levels reinforces that discipline is not just about consequences.

[02:12:14] Required interventions are embedded within each level, ensuring accountability while also supporting students in repairing harm and restoring the learning environment. The guidance clarifies that administrators must determine levels based on severity and impact and may only move outside the matrix based on already established SRNR factors that protects consistency and transparency.

[02:12:37] Operationally, clarification around SBAR coding also matters. Administrators may code up to four SBAR codes consistent with the VDOE limits. The first listed offense must be the most severe and must include both a UGM sanction and a leveled intervention.

[02:12:57] Any additional codes receive only intervention from the same sanction level. That structure increases clarity, prevents over-penalization, and reinforces limited consistent discipline. I also wanna highlight the proposed revision regarding the accessibility of interpretation and translation for students' statements.

[02:13:16] As a school with high multilingual learner population, ensuring multilingual learners, LEP levels one through four, receive translated notification statements in their requested language strengthens clarity and fairness. It allows students meaningful, meaningfully, sorry, it allows students to meaningfully participate and understand the voluntary nature of their statement.

[02:13:39] This reduces misunderstanding, prevents escalation, and reinforces due process while maintaining the administrator's authority to act when necessary. Finally, the division's discipline requirements have shifted our leadership conversation in meaningful ways.

[02:13:56] Required data dialogues and the expanded discipline dashboard have increased visibility and accountability. We can identify patterns by student groups, location, and time of day. Just as important, the structure has given me, as a principal a clear framework to ask targeted questions of my administrative team instead of broad conversations about what are we seeing I can press into specific data points what student group is most impacted what time of the day your incidents occurring are we seeing behavior that is impeding the learning environment in particular classroom or grade level what interventions have already been attempted for an example our initial

[02:14:34] our initial review focused on academic integrity because it represented 45% of our category a referrals and aligned with what we were quantitatively seeing and hearing from our teachers as a major concern however when we look we look deeper into the data we identified notable trends among Hispanic males within our 10th grade class that shift happened because we had the data in front of us and structures to part in a structure process to analyze it beyond surface level totals that level of analysis changed our action planning it It helped us refine our MTSS and PBIS supports

[02:15:11] and plan more targeted proactive lessons for third quarter. Instead of reacting to the highest category count, we can now prevent escalation through earlier identification and intentional intervention, leading to stronger outcomes for our students.

[02:15:26] Thank you for the opportunity to share my perspective today and I'm now gonna turn it over to Principal Lindsey Kearns. - Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lindsey Kearns and I am so proud to serve as the principal of Lake Braddock Secondary School. I've been a part of the FCPS family since September of 2008 and it's a privilege to lead such a unique and vibrant community.

[02:15:50] Lake Braddock serves over 4,000 students in grades 7 through 12 and our success is rooted in the collaborative spirit of our staff and community. We represent a beautifully diverse population including 15% of our students with disabilities, just over 20% of our students receiving free and reduced meals, and 9% are multi-language learners. We view this diversity as our greatest strength and we're committed to maintaining proactive systems that ensure every Bruin feels supported and included. I'm very encouraged by the proposed universal grade matrices. They

[02:16:27] provide the clarity and predictability our staff and families need. By ensuring that accountability is always paired with required interventions, we're giving students the tools to truly learn from their experiences. I especially appreciate the updates clarifying hate speech and slur interventions, including providing a formal definition for the term slurs. This clarity is essential for our secondary students. It allows us to have more honest and educational conversations and ensure our response to these incidents is both consistent

[02:17:03] and impactful across the division. Our work with the School Discipline Consortium has deeply impacted our leadership team's approach. We've moved away from simply asking what's the consequence and focusing on what is the necessary support.

[02:17:20] At Lake Braddock, we've implemented intentional guard rails. We utilize exclusionary suspension only when there is a direct safety concern. If an administrator is considering an out-of-school suspension, They first consult with a teammate. Then they review the incident and their rationale with the associate principal or myself.

[02:17:41] This collaborative layer ensures that we are being thoughtful and consistent across both the middle school and the high school levels. We've also enhanced our alternative instruction arrangement or AIA room activities.

[02:17:57] We now have a clinical team member come in daily to provide an added layer of intervention for any student who's received an infraction. They support the student through the incident in real time and help them navigate the social emotional side of the situation, which ensures that they're truly ready to reset and return to the classroom successfully.

[02:18:17] We're already seeing the results of this work with a measurable reduction in escalated incidents at Lake Braddock this year. We truly feel these proposed changes will only further that positive trajectory, allowing us to focus on the long-term growth of our students, rather than just the implementation of rules.

[02:18:34] I'm looking forward to continuing this journey with our incredible community, and I will now turn it over to Principal Angela Thompson. Thank you. - Good afternoon. My name is Angela Thompson, and I am Principal at Newington Forest Elementary School, and I am proud to say this is my 32nd year in service in Fairfax County Public Schools.

[02:18:55] Newington Forest Elementary is a diverse K-6 community of approximately 580 students. We are now a minority-majority school, with Spanish being our largest language group. Our school is deeply committed to strong academic progress and social-emotional support for every child.

[02:19:13] One strength we have already brought to this work is a robust PBIS framework and consistent use of restorative conversations to increase students' sense of belonging and problem solving. The proposed SNR changes, particularly the universal grade matrices, bring clarity and consistency to how we identify infractions and respond.

[02:19:35] The matrices help leaders clearly determine the appropriate level of behavior while ensuring that required interventions are embedded at each level. This structure anchors us in a consistent disciplinary practice. Students are held accountable, but the accountability is paired with meaningful, developmentally appropriate interventions, especially for our most vulnerable populations, like students with disabilities and multilingual learners.

[02:20:01] In addition to the proposed SRNR changes, it helps us focus on interpreting and using accessible language for students around the areas of clarity and equity. When students can fully understand and communicate about the incident in their home language, we're better able to respond accurately and embed appropriate supports and ensure fairness in the process.

[02:20:24] This year, the change to the SRNR clarifies that interventions are required at every discipline incident and the central focus around the discipline practices consistently by aligning interventions directly with the discipline matrices we ensure consequences are addressed at the root cause and not just the behavior themselves itself for example when a student demonstrates repeated classroom disruption our team implements daily check-ins and check-out systems explicit self-regulation instruction and ongoing family communication to create a a cohesive home school support plan.

[02:21:02] Since implementing the new division discipline requirements, our discipline conversations have evolved. We continue to meet monthly as discipline/clinical teams to review student data, monitor student progress, and collaborate with families to identify targeted supports.

[02:21:17] However, we now place stronger emphasis on proactive problem solving that engages students as a part of that problem solving. Overall, our focus has shifted from addressing rule violations to understanding student needs and building essential skills.

[02:21:34] These proposed changes better position our schools to serve students by strengthening the clarity of the SRNR, ensuring consistency and prioritizing prevention and intervention so that discipline promotes growth, reflection and accountability for students.

[02:21:52] Thank you for the opportunity to share my perspective today and I turn it over to Deanna Shin. - Thank you to our principals their feedback and perspective on the proposed sr and r changes and their leadership and innovation in implementing our current enhanced discipline practices we'd now like to review pending state legislation the three bills displayed on this slide have potential for impact to our discipline code within the division these three bills have passed in one chamber and await action by the other hb 298 proposes that no student shall be suspended expelled or excluded from attendance

[02:22:29] unless an evidence-based restorative disciplinary practice was first implemented hb 957 proposes the creation of a video we managed bullying cyberbullying report tip line and sb 108 proposes to update the current virginia code regarding cell phones from restrict student cell phone and smart device possession and use on school property bell to bell to prohibit cell phone possession and use on school property bell to bell we will continue to monitor these bills and their potential impact on the SRNR.

[02:23:04] Reviews of cell phone discipline data, excuse me, and discussions with administrators indicate a need for an updated cell phone matrix. While cell phone infractions are part of category B violations scheduled to be rolled out during next year's matrices, first year implementation of the cell phone policy suggests support for earlier rollout of this specific violation.

[02:23:25] The proposed cell phone matrix would align itself overall to the format of the proposed universal grade matrices. Levels would be determined by frequency, there would be continued standardized responses at each level, and expanded interventions for cell phone violations. For example, Tier 2 cell phone restorative practice groups would be included. So we appreciate the time and dedication of our school board members, our staff, and our community partners in engaging with these important updates to the students' rights and responsibilities. Your commitment to fostering a safe and supported learning environment is essential as we refine our policies to better serve our students and schools

[02:24:05] and to achieve the goals outlined in our strategic plan as we've outlined these proposed discipline updates are designed to clarify definitions enhance enforcement consistency and ensure more consistent application of the srnr across all schools by expanding the universal grade agencies providing clear guidance and accommodations for multilingual learners when collecting student statements, and extending requirements for in-school suspension for students with disabilities, ensuring clarity by providing a definition for slurs and developmental disability, expanding interventions for hate speech and slurs,

[02:24:42] updating the matrices to include MTSS and restorative based interventions, and aligning training frequencies and methods with division practices, we are strengthening the consistency of enforcement of disciplinary decisions. Thank you for your time, dedication, and engagement, and we will now open the floor for two questions. Just kidding. Okay, so for question number one, Dr.

[02:25:12] Anderson. Okay, Mr. Moon. I'm sorry. Mr. Moon, number one, go. Mr. McKibbin, may I have both questions? One and two? Okay, thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna start with the two questions, right? Two at a time. The universal grade matrices, obviously, that is getting a lot of support from principals, not just you, prisoners. And we have some snippets of those from presentations, right? Is that, what am I

[02:25:51] seeing? Like, for example, 29 is, so where is the rest of it? Are you referring to the community survey data? I'm sorry.

[02:26:10] UGM. Is that, is that something, something? something top secret that it cannot be revealed? - Oh, no, of course not. So we're starting, of course, with the Category C and D UGMs, and then we provided those, of course, to the board during our two-by-two presentations.

[02:26:31] - But this is a public discussion, correct? And we're not supposed to look at it, we're not supposed to show it, or we're not supposed to disclose it, or? - The UGMs were also provided in the division survey, so the public had the opportunity to review them as well.

[02:26:48] I wasn't looking for it on the bold doc, and unless there is a really legal reason not to provide that on the bold doc, I think public needs to see that so that they can comment on it as well. It's not just, you know, administrators, but all of us need to be able to provide the input as we make the decisions on SLNR changes.

[02:27:12] So with that said, since I don't have that, you know, principals seem to be saying that it makes it easier for them to be consistent to be able to apply. So is that going to be so detailed and specific that for certain offenses or infractions, a prince administrator can easily be able to put that into certain location on matrices and lead out consequences

[02:27:50] that this is gonna be automatically right here and this is going to be yes. This is going to be automatically ideal, it's gonna be that. Is it gonna be that or I'm-- - Mr. Moon, are you asking that it's going to be simple as they look at the matrix and they follow it across the line?

[02:28:07] - Yes. - That's the starting point in every conversation between the student and the administrator. It sometimes might be nuanced, but to ensure that we're having clarity around what the expectations are at the division level, this is the starting point for all disciplines. - That's the starting point.

[02:28:24] And there was where I was gonna go. That's a starting point, whether there is a room for discretion or judgment on the part of administrators, and if there is certain discretion and judgments to be respected, then whether that's also going to create some inconsistencies amongst different schools.

[02:28:51] Since I'm not looking at the matrices, I don't know what I'm saying. Am I asking the question? So, yes, so there is still principal discretion retained within the universal grade matrices. So the levels correspond to severity and impact, and then we provide a very specific definition for severity, a definition for impact, and then we provide an aligned chart to be able to determine what the severity and impact look like.

[02:29:19] Then within our training of our annual integrated discipline training, we'll continue to norm administrators around how to utilize this chart and how to be able to determine severity and impact based upon the guidelines. So the discretion that remains for administrators is when they're determining is it a level one, two, three, et cetera, that they're using the provided guidelines that are issued by the division, and then we're pairing that, of course, with that coaching and that professional learning and training, as well as progress monitoring.

[02:29:51] So a purpose behind a providing these matrices is when you say, is that mainly to provide consistency? Yes, it is. Does that, if that is, and Dr. Kim was nodding her head, I don't know whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with her, but if that is in fact, in fact, the reason behind, purpose behind providing matrices is- Consistency, fairness, fairness- we are being inconsistent and we are being unfair. Well the data shows that sometimes we are being inconsistent in how we respond to discipline and that all of our students are not having the same

[02:30:31] experience when it comes to SR&R in some of our schools. Okay since we have a three hours and a half for this discussion I'll ask my next two questions next time. Dr. Anderson. Yes firstly I do want to say thank you to the principals who have come here. I want to be a little bit responsive to what I believe I've heard.

[02:30:57] That was pretty much common across the three of you. What I heard was structure. In your schools, you have a structure in terms of expectations and a structure to teach how to behave. I also heard that you don't penalize the struggling student.

[02:31:15] You try to figure out how to actually discipline because discipline is to instruct. It is not just to be punitive. but I'm hearing that you're finding ways to address the behaviors in terms of why is it that you're doing what you're doing and let's figure out how this does not happen again rather than you did this, you're going to get this as your punishment.

[02:31:41] So I do appreciate hearing this. What I also heard across the three of you is that you are being proactive. So you are putting measures in place before the discipline comes up. Does that summarize it, is that accurate?

[02:31:56] I thank you so much for coming here to share this because I would, I'm not asking to answer, don't even shake your head, but I would wonder, given the conversation we had just a little while ago, is the disproportionality at your schools different than in other places?

[02:32:15] So don't shake your head, don't respond in any way. But I do wanna thank you for sharing all of the work that you're doing because this is hard because it is really challenging to not just be responsive to the behaviors that you're seeing, because we want our schools to be orderly.

[02:32:32] Former principal myself, I don't want anything to go outside of what you call a typical day, which you get very, very few of. You want people in class, you want teachers in class, no substitutes, nothing out of the ordinary. That's what we strive for.

[02:32:48] But all of this work is out of the ordinary so that you can have more ordinary days. So I do applaud your commitment to going the extra mile to do this. I will spend my next 50 seconds on the second piece, which is the UGMs.

[02:33:07] I do think these are very helpful. When I talked to you all about this during my two by two, I thought these were an important way to address what we have talked about every single year that I've been here on this board, which is the discretion that is being applied across schools is inconsistent.

[02:33:29] I guess that's the whole idea about discretion. You're going to do things differently because your tolerance levels may be different than my tolerance levels. I think this provides a level expectation in terms of how we're going to address certain things.

[02:33:46] My question is the removal of the required administrative actions. You mentioned you did that based on feedback. Where does that live now? - Yeah, that's a great question. So what will happen is we will create an appendix document for administrators called the SRNR Intervention Library, and it's already beginning.

[02:34:09] And it takes that column that had the required administrative actions and then puts it into a separate document that they can be able to access to see for each and every single incident, what are the very specific actions that they should take? So for example, for an act of bullying, It has to, of course, be documented in BIMS, like the investigation process.

[02:34:27] So it will say, please make sure that you implement this into BIMS, et cetera. So it just gives them a comprehensive list of actions that are required for each discipline incident within the SRNR Intervention Library. - I'd like to go back, please.

[02:34:42] - So before we go to go backs, I do wanna take a few minutes to thank the team for all the work that you've done. I also wanna thank all the principals that are here, some of those who have spoken and some of them who haven't. I've had the privilege of working with several of you, some of you since my children were in elementary school, so we've got some of the cream of the cream here, and the top, did I mix my metaphor there?

[02:35:07] The cream of the crop here, yeah. So I really do wanna thank you for your time, and for your perspective, it's invaluable, because when we're talking at this level and looking at these charts, a lot of the times, if you haven't been in a school, don't understand how this plays out I think that's very helpful for our board to understand so so thank you for being here now and I hope you're available we have questions later on to let us know how it's all playing out and I and again

[02:35:40] I I do go back to a change in tenor where we're not looking at a consequence but what's the necessary support and because we have students and children I think that approach is so positive with our kids and going back to discipline actually having the root of to teach versus to punish so thank you for that great Miss Anderson I just had a quick question because I wanted to make sure I

[02:36:15] got it right on pay on slide 22 when we're talking about the definition of disability development of disability is what's on the slide where where we ended up because I know it's not necessarily where we started so I wanted to just clarify that i was understanding that this is kind of where we're going to end up with what's going to actually be in the final document yeah yes so that this is the proposed change to the definition based upon the feedback that we received in the survey and from the board yes okay wonderful thank you so much okay um we're back to mr moon thank you mr mccullin uh i'm gonna go to easy one

[02:36:56] next in the cell phone news anybody can give me an update on will this is in the house it passed the senate and what's the current current status in the house anybody knows i believe it's currently in committee but it has not passed the second chamber and so we are still awaiting you know assuming that this is going to pass and i'm seeing how the center reacted to the proposed bill

[02:37:28] that if he passes it's a belt-to-bear prohibition are we expecting more violations because now because based upon a what has been presented to me and two by two uh the meeting that that administrators are overwhelmed in the number of violations that they have had to deal with is that gonna even worsen we have some principals at the high school level that are here that probably can tell you that they are probably grateful for the 30 minutes during

[02:38:07] lunchtime so that the students can get that necessarily that necessary tech break I believe that if we prohibit bell-to-bell that we will probably see an increase in cell phone violations in our schools particularly our high schools so how do you address those violations then do we either strictly enforce what do we ignore them or do we close our eyes or how did we don't we don't close eyes to rules all right so how do we how do you handle them then honestly mr. moon we already have a process in place and to be honest we've had a process in place for many years with this board's

[02:38:45] adoption of a cell phone policy before principals just need to implement the rules as they are and and i'm going to say this as well the if the if it changes you know students are going to be disappointed in this but the majority well over majority of our students do what we ask them to do every day they might be disappointed but they do follow the rules and I believe that the inconsistent well not the inconsistency but the increase may come from some students who are still having difficulty following those rules but the majority of our students follow the rules they might not like it is there

[02:39:19] are any any help or assistance that school board can provide you want to march to Richmond I'm just kidding I'm just kidding no I just think that you know we just have to wait to see what the law is and we're gonna continue to work with our principals to see how we can support them from central office as they deal with maybe a slight increase in cell phone violations I think that Deanna wanted to share something and I can confirm this in just a moment but it looks like Senate bill 108 did not pass the house so I'm going to confirm that

[02:39:55] but it looks like it did not pass the house may be recognized it's scheduled for a committee meeting tomorrow at 9:00 a.m., so I know it's a minute-by-minute around here, but it is scheduled for tomorrow morning. A new day in the Commonwealth, yeah, I do have that confirmed. Okay, my next question goes to for multilingual parents and students, the translation and

[02:40:34] interpretation service that we do provide or we fail to provide along the way. Could you comment on that? My understanding is, again, correct me if I'm wrong the only time we are required to provide such a translation service is when we provide a notice the students or families about needing to provide a written statement is that the only time we are required to provide service are you speaking about outside of the SR&R process are you talking about within

[02:41:13] this within the SR&R there are no other formal requirements to provide translation services when a discipline incident occurs. This is establishing a precedent that when we are collecting a student statement relevant to discipline that we will provide a student statement in the students requested language. It is a requirement of course to inform the student of this information and to let them know that it is voluntary in accordance with the regulation of the SRNR but this will be setting precedent to make sure that those

[02:41:49] statements are provided in the student's language. So this additional accommodation is the, if we call that accommodation, being provided to the multilingual students to provide, when they provide the statement.

[02:42:09] But in general, a SRNR, our distribution process does not require us to provide any translation or interpretation service in SRNR in itself. expect our principals to provide any accommodation that each of our students need when they're addressing them in our schools this past year we received a call from a parent of a multilingual student who went through the discipline process and shared with us that our student did not understand what the principal this was an elementary school student and the parent the student did

[02:42:45] not understand the process that he was going through and he was asked to provide a statement and so we wanted to make sure that we address that concern that was brought to our attention by adding this to this year's but in essence our principals know that we have students that have needs different needs and that their expectation is they address those needs okay thank you i mean i appreciate that that's expectations and principals live up to expectations i have to

[02:43:15] believe uh is there a reason for us not to codify that codify the expectations expectations there's no reason for us not to okay thank you that's the direction that the board takes us we will gladly do that okay you mentioned about direction of the board what about what does staff think i mean i think that it's an enhancement that we will just be um helpful to our students and parents okay Okay, thank you.

[02:43:46] Mr. McKibbin, I'm done. - Back to Ms. Anderson. Dr. Anderson, sorry. - Yes, thank you. I just wanted to follow up on the UGM. You mentioned that administrators will have a separate document. So they would now have to look up this piece and that appendix in order to get the full breadth of what their actions should be.

[02:44:06] That seems a little cumbersome. - So we are working on trying to, in fact, digitize the UGMs and of course, make sure that they are available on our intranet so that they don't have to go to separate places to be able to access the documents. They can be able to align them and see them together.

[02:44:23] - Yeah, because this is just so very clear across the page, it's very helpful. I know last year we talked here about disproportionality and how your office, Dr. King, as well as Dr. Ponce, and I don't know if there was a third in there, if Dr. Presidio was involved, that you would be capturing and monitoring, least on a quarterly basis like that discretionary piece in terms of if students are not put forward through the system you would be capturing that and evaluating that in some way does that ring a bell a little bit more dr.

[02:45:03] Anderson when when principals decide not to put students forward for particular activities this is many activities that you would be monitoring that with dr. Ponce's office that you would collect that data quarterly I believe are you talking about moving forward to the hearings office or just when you say put forward what do you be clear no it was to we had discussed that when principals again going back to individual thresholds do you is this coming to you yes I'm

[02:45:39] aware last year we made a change to the SR&R around monitoring enforcement and that monitoring enforcement was around the very specific violations that we enhanced last year around assault and weapons because there was a provision that said that for assault and weapons that an administrator could not suspend if there were certain factors that were in place and are we monitoring which students are receiving potentially like this non suspension and which students are and so the answer to that is yes and it is part of the quarterly sorry the

[02:46:14] semester discipline report that the board receives and so the board will of course be receiving that report shortly so you'll be able to see the implementation of that required SRNR regulation around monitoring okay so it is semester not quarterly so I will hold my questions until that report is produced on slide 18 you talked about protections that would now be provided to in-school suspension can you speak a little bit more in terms of what that entails so currently right now the SRNR requires and provides several

[02:46:49] provisions around out-of-school suspension requirements for students with disabilities. Things like manifestation determination reviews, consultation of the IEP prior to suspension for a student. So we are extending the requirements for students with disabilities that already exist in the SRNR and just formalizing that those same protections also translate to in-school suspension for students with disabilities as well.

[02:47:20] - Thank you so much. Just last two things. Again, just going back to the disproportionality of students, you know, this is a systemic issue which will require a systemic effort. I so very dearly appreciate what our principals are doing, but how are we taking potentially those kinds of activities and elevating them to a system-wide approach?

[02:47:43] So I think we're doing that through that process of policies, practices, and people. So this year we built that framework around policies, ensuring that every single school is providing an intervention-based response for a discipline incident.

[02:48:01] And then, of course, we're monitoring those interventions and then providing coaching and support to schools in the implementation of that. We're also releasing discipline, disproportionality data to schools directly and then following up with monitoring and coaching around that.

[02:48:16] So we've built in not only the policies, then we've built in the practices themselves, and then we support schools very directly in these concerted efforts across each one of our schools. And then we provide targeted support to those schools where we see that there's just opportunities for further collaboration and for support.

[02:48:35] so it's really kind of like an aligned approach and I appreciate that that actually sets up my last question very nicely I you know during the goal to report that we just had a little while ago lots of ideas that are coming in from your office from dr. Presidio's office in Marcy Neal's office in terms of strategies in terms of actions you're there you're providing the guidance you're providing the support you're providing the coaching in the instruction who provides the monitoring because you all are not directly schools are not

[02:49:13] directly responsible to you per se for conducting these activities with fidelity so I don't know if this is a dr. Ponce or dr. Reed question but who is supervising and monitoring that all of these things that these offices are pouring so much into are being implemented with fidelity is the accountability out of yeah because I know you don't have that authority yeah thank you dr. Anderson actually all our senior leaders have the expectation of that authority and that responsibility so in collaboration with dr. Ponce's

[02:49:52] office and the region offices I would expect that principals would respond to dr. King and I see some nodding here in the same manner they would respond to any of our senior leaders so I I feel like it's a shared expectation and when dr. King has an expectation or request I would expect principals to be responsive to that I think you might want to respond as well dr. King I do we work very closely with the chief of schools office and we are working very closely with the RAS who are directly working with our principals anytime trends we

[02:50:29] see trends and behavior differences we are meeting with the RAS during their weekly meetings that they have to ensure that they see the same things we do and then we also coach them around how they can support their principals around this as a so it's you know Deanna's team works hard and they're they're a small team but they have big impact in this district I want to say that publicly because I think it's important this is a lot of work we've come a very long way in SRNR and how we support our schools and students in regards to equity and discipline but we also recognize that we don't touch principals every day and the

[02:51:08] RAS touch principals every day not touching it that way Dr. Anderson but we want to make sure that we are partnering with not only the chief of schools but also the chief academic officer as well through there are collaboration with the different departments in our district that can support students through this process so dr. axler's team is very very collaborative with our team so yeah we we we ensure the monitoring because the data speaks to us our data tells our story and we respond to the story can I just finish my sentence so I don't have

[02:51:44] a go back the reason why I asked this it's because I've kind of struggled a bit in some other areas particularly the school improvement plans you know in conversations with the RAS as well this office has a piece that office has a piece and I've talked to you about this quite a bit dr. Reed where well who's gonna own when it's not happening it's never super clear and so that's why I'm asking it here who's gonna own when these good ideas are not being implemented and what i'm hearing is you all have direct access to work with those who are

[02:52:20] the evaluators to provide that feedback for additional follow-up so it's not loss in the sauce because you have it that direct authority that's what i believe i'm hearing so i'm feeling comforted and that you're just not going to be left out in the wind or not you but these ideas that are expectations are not left out in the wind because you're not necessarily the direct supervisors of school folks right and you know we're responsible for the data we're responsible for improvement through our strategic plan and so we as a team take that very seriously and when principals need to know that we're

[02:52:57] falling short in areas I don't have a problem picking up the phone and calling any principal and saying how can we better support you because this is what the data show and I actually had a conversation with an assistant principal through the work that Deanna's team is doing with the consortium you know they have their data and they can see that their data might be different than their colleagues in the school and it's forcing them to have conversations they've never had before sometimes people work in isolation and I think that Miss Lady had mentioned that to her time in the schoolhouse and you know sometimes people are just so busy trying to get their job done that they don't pause to see and calibrate their practices amongst their colleagues

[02:53:35] within the school Deanna's team through the consortium is reminding them that data tells a story and what story do you want to tell at a school what story do you want to tell at the region level and what story do we want to tell us the district I just want to add yes we work definitely together and when something needs to be qualified we are next door pretty much as a hey can you go and say that clarification on this to the to the principles and we have been doing it thank you and this is fantastic work I really would agree as someone who

[02:54:14] that was trying to navigate this work as an administrator. I do like this universal grade level matrix. I think it makes sense. And I think it takes subjectivity out of it. And I think we've had too much of that subjectivity. I think that's where that bias comes in, where unfortunately the disproportionality sometimes is a result of that.

[02:54:37] And just, I've observed it, right? So trying to take some of that out. So these are great. But the one thought I have is, well, two thoughts. when we talk about what our great principals are sharing, I'm worried about staffing. I mean, let's just throw it out there. We're in a budget year, we're $43 million short, and staffing is where we save, and we're doing great things, but without people, we can't sustain them.

[02:55:04] And so I just wanna put that out there, that we need staffing 'cause we need people, and we talk all the time about school-based instructional people, but there are definitely school-based folks are not, they don't have classes, they're not student facing, but the work they're doing is unbelievably important and life-changing for kids. And for faculty who feel supported without the behavior specialists and things like this, they're not. Then I want to throw this out there. In the age of AI, it seems to me we could put the SRNR in Notebook LM, and there could be a way that because it's insular that what we do that to make things even less

[02:55:42] subjective you know put a description of an incident in and hypothetically see what it tells us the matrix is supposed to do because there is some interpretive dance that still is gonna have to go on but I but without something like that I just think it can help yeah are we because I just we got to work smarter right and so that's all I'm saying I just think it's another area where it's sort of on the operations side, but Notebook LM because it is a confidential space is something to think about.

[02:56:18] I think we can do similar things down the road, even the question of a manifestation hearing, right? If we're going to put an IEP in and put the incident in, I don't know, what might we get out as guidance?

[02:56:33] I just think we've got to work -- I mean, obviously, the human side is first. I have to keep saying that. I'm not asking for this to replace that. I just think it's a tool that could help. But overall, fantastic work. I can see in the data over time, we're making changes.

[02:56:53] And as Dr. Anderson points out, we still have work to do. But I see and admire the commitment you have to that work. And in hearing from principals, the commitment they have to doing that work. And I think that we're in a good place. and I just really appreciate all you've done and the changes this particular year look like they took a lot of time for the SRNR, so thank you.

[02:57:16] - Thank you, Ms. Leidy. - Can I also have before we move forward that you're absolutely right about the potential use of Notebook LM and we have already started thinking about ways to be able to digitize the SRNR and of course the matrices and have absolutely explored Notebook LM with some preliminary success, so yes.

[02:57:38] - Ms. Maron, for your first round. - Yeah, for some reason I keep remembering the first time I reviewed the SRNR and it was during the spring of 2020 and I was outside on a tennis court because I was walking around trying to do something during COVID and get active.

[02:57:54] So that keeps coming into my mind. So I agree, we've come a really long way. I think the conversation's really changed and I'm really pleased with the direction that it's going. So thank you. I wanted to ask, well, first I want to talk about cell phones And I do think it would be wise of us to prepare for a new law that puts them away for the day even more fully.

[02:58:17] I am very eager for that. I don't think it's served our students well to not do that. So I do hope that as we get closer to the, that in whatever next round happens, that you have language at the ready for that. I wanted to relate this to the development of our AI policy and instructional technology because we've been having conversations about, okay, well, if there's bullying on AI or misuse of AI, but really the platform isn't the area, right?

[02:58:46] It's if poor decisions are being made, if misbehavior is happening, whether it's on a device or in person, that the SRNR speak to that. And so I think ensuring that the trainings underscore that, that as more technology expands, making sure we're applying the same rubric and being consistent.

[02:59:05] So that's something that's been on my mind a lot as we work on the AI policy, which brings me to the SR&R policy itself. It's now 10 years since it was last reviewed, and I've been making some notes to see maybe we could just put some of our real foundation commitments, like some of the comments from our principals who summed it up so nicely, you know, data collection and analysis, consistent staff training, discipline is not just about consequences, it's about addressing harm and restoring the learning environment you know if we could put these in our policy we doesn't have to be a long policy but just these values that I think we were

[02:59:42] saying that data dialogues you know the necessary supports I would really love to see us do this and I know we've got the AI policy and the calendar policy cooking but I think that we could get this updated to just have a shell and protect the things that that we really care about I also wanted to mention just another plug I say this every year I don't think that the parents and families our interaction is very authentic or fulsome I think I accidentally click something on parent view at the start of the year and I that

[03:00:19] was it and I couldn't get back to reviewing the whole SNR and R I think from what I can tell the students are engaging with the content but as as parents and families I just don't think it's I don't know whether it's just literally not having not being able to just click it all away and something more authentic so those are my comments yeah I just wanted to touch base I know I was one of the large proponents for us giving a scaffolded approach related to cell phones last year I just want to I am a rule follower by nature so if the

[03:00:58] law changes we absolutely should follow with what the law says I will tell you that it was in subcommittee today and it did come out with they came out with recommendations to the language that would also ensure that students that are dealing with this or diabetes plan and things like that so I would want to make sure that whatever we have echoed in our policy echoes what's in the law the other thing that I want to make sure is that we recognize the fact that the possession of the cell phone alone is not necessarily something that we should be disciplining students on as long as it's outside the hours. But that also means that you know I just want to make sure that this isn't something that is

[03:01:36] going to cause damage to students who have a cell phone in their backpack or anything like that. The other thing that I'm going to go and I've talked to several parents about this who have brought this forward to me. I understand that we want our kids to talk at lunch. We have an entire group of kids that don't want to talk to people at lunch and that's okay. We you know some kids need a chance to recharge and be away from people for a minute and if they want to use their lunch as an opportunity to do that I don't think that we should try to interfere I would always encourage interaction to happen between students but they're getting a lot of interaction in class and having those moments to recharge I think is just as important for those introverts out in the world

[03:02:14] other than you know us extroverts we make people tired sometimes and so I would just basically want to encourage us the other thing I get always concerned about is when we have strict rules that are particularly in law that don't have support that we can use through discipline and so I get very concerned about the amount of time that we're gonna spend policing cell phones without any real mechanism to create discipline for students to understand why it's significant so I hope that we're gonna do whatever we can to have those opportunities to talk about why this is in place so that it doesn't just seem

[03:02:51] like one more thing that we're pushing down on kids as a way to control so anything that we can do to talk about respectable you know responsible electronic use and things like that as we're developing language around how we're going to introduce this to kids I think is going to be hugely important and also talking about the fact that we understand that they're not the same as kindergartners I think is also a really important aspect of this because that's my only concern about we're not scaffolding the approach here but as I said I am fully in support of us doing whatever the law tells us to do I

[03:03:26] actually do have a question about the possession the use of the word possession and of attorneys here it's a prohibition of possession and use and I think about the kid that has is not using belt fell a packet of marijuana them but he's in possession and if you're in possession of a phone I'm just

[03:04:00] how are we gonna work around that well I know but but the way this is worded the wording is possession cell phone possession and use the view it's saying that before it was a prohibition but now if now it's a violation if you are in possession of a cell phone at school that that is that is like a leak like I know in my head how I'm interpreting it like they could have in their pocket and

[03:04:33] not use it but are we in violation of however this is going to be structured legally that that's just my question of how the workaround is if we can have a workaround i know what my interpretation is but is that in compliance with the law we would have to work with mr foster on that and dr re because if you look in sr and i see um miss forest behind me shaking her head up and down

[03:05:08] when it says the word possession is an important word in that law and that's something we would definitely have to work closely with the vision council and our superintendent to determine how we move forward in what we share with our principals about that because they are allowed to use them on school grounds before school and after school so you know some of our schools don't have lockers you know our students don't have anywhere else to put them but in their possession if we allow them on school grounds for before school and after school use this is something that

[03:05:45] would have not triggered my thought process but since I've been on this board where sometimes we argue about where comma goes and how we can change the sentence I'm a little bit more aware of those things I actually wanted to just kind of revert back to this conversation around how we're supporting students with cell phone violations I've heard a number of school board members discuss that so in the proposed cell phone matrix that will be updated for next year We have included, as you said, kind of like leveled and scaffolded interventions as well.

[03:06:25] So it starts, of course, like parent phone calls and conferencing, but it proceeds all the way up through ensuring that students who have anywhere from two to five cell phone related referrals are evaluated for a tier two restorative practice intervention group. in addition those students are also referred to their mtss site intervention team to be able to solution seek around what are some of the root causes around why we're seeing kind of these repeat violations so we have intensified the interventions and supports for students relevant

[03:06:55] to cell phone violations thank you miss marron for a go back yes i i just want to preempt the discussion that might come when when i'm expecting the law to come down the reason there is this second law is because this board didn't follow the intent of the law so the first time and while legally an interpretation was offered for us to have it during lunch that whole lunch argument was

[03:07:29] made the week of the vote with zero research attached to it so i just hope that we can learn from that and make decisions that are based on data and data show that young children and children do not have the cognitive development to be resisting devices kids with neurodivergent brains also also resist it so it's not perfect but again the reason there is a bill the patron of which was a school board remember last term is to have us follow the law and put cell phones away I just

[03:08:07] see so much parallel in the AI discussion it's like I want to get to the innovative discussion but all we seem to talk about is access to devices and kids have brains that are not fully developed and while we might anecdotally know some people who can handle it and some people who want to sit at lunch the research shows that it is not good for kids so I again I just really hope that this board can make research-based decisions and certainly follow decisions about the law and not debate what possession means and what all day means because if we want to be research-based let's be research-based that's all oh

[03:08:47] actually that's not all I want to just have one thing we're not talking about family engagement even if our kids do everything we want during the day they go home to whatever their home is and whether that's supportive or not as much so this is why and we haven't really talked that much about family engagement Why, when we click through the SRNR, what are the parents, I mean, we talked about having parents or family members come in and sit through a presentation about cell phone use.

[03:09:15] I had to sit through such a presentation for my daughter when she did the online summer driver's ed. I thought it was a great idea, required. So if we want kids to practice healthy behaviors during the day, yeah, we can teach them, but we know that their families are their first teachers.

[03:09:32] So I don't want to accept full responsibility how kids use cell phones in schools because we're never going to have full responsibility so let's just do the best we can follow the research and keep engaging our families as children's first teachers Dr. Anderson did you want to go back let me speak and I won't have another go back no I just wanted to you know as I was not going to speak but I just wanted to say this

[03:10:06] I wanted to underscore what Dr. King actually shared a little while ago some of our students this will not be an issue for them and i've received letters from students who are saying this will actually help me it will relax me in the classroom just like it has right now when we had you know put it away in the the shoe thing put it in the box thing they just feel a relief that they're not going to be missing out on things and i am also a board member who participates very routinely and the VH the SBA Friday roundups where they talk about all the

[03:10:42] bills I find it super super helpful and when they started talking about this bill multiple weeks ago literally the comments in the chat well well who's not doing it we are an outlier everybody else is doing it for the most part Fairfax County is a big fish so it covers a lot of kids but most school divisions just did it it yes I don't want kids to be arrested for having their cell phones I don't think that's what we want the idea is you walk into the building classes start you tuck it away and unless you have some externing you

[03:11:20] know extenuating circumstance or some accommodation you pull it out to use when classes end and then you move on that's what it is and that's what a lot of people are making happen right now and we're wringing our hands over it a little bit when it's already happening all throughout the Commonwealth this lady so obviously I have very every intent of following the law I actually believe to miss Maron's point about the safe partnership and teen driving presentation that we need to do a more robust job with our kindergarten

[03:11:57] orientations that's our most captive audience the majority of parents come to those and I think we need to be talking about the dangers of putting devices in front of their children and many of them have already done it unfortunately by the time they're kindergartners but we need to start working with preschoolers and explain that that is that that when putting something in front of them to keep their attention off of something else is is in the long term not not great at least that's certainly my opinion I also want to say that you know I agree that teaching kids responsibility about their cell phones is important and I'm gonna throw a completely different monkey ratchet and monkey wrench in this

[03:12:36] conversation because to a certain extent a lot of the things that we do with grading don't exist in colleges and I can't tell you I just heard from a kid recently who attends the College of William & Mary who was going to miss a class and got an excuse from their professor because of a school activity they were involved in and thought that in doing that also meant that whatever was due on that day didn't have to be turned in so guess who got a zero and And I'm not trying to joke, but we do.

[03:13:12] We need to think about, I mean, I believe that time is a variable in learning, but the extent to which with our advanced learners, especially AP, DE, IB kids, you don't get retakes in college. So I'm just gonna throw that out there 'cause it's similar to the addiction one has to a cell phone.

[03:13:30] And, you know, college professors are certainly not making them take it out of their hand, but if they show up with the addiction, it's harder for them to concentrate as well, so. But yes, we will follow the law. do expect it to come down then it's going to be a prohibition and if the word is prohibit versus possession we'll have to work with that and no we're not going to be I mean hopefully kids will have it on their person and we never see it and I will reiterate the majority not some the majority of our children and students and young adults do what they're supposed to do we have great

[03:14:03] KIDS. THANKS. THANK YOU, MISS LADY. SEEING NO OTHERS. MEETING IS ADJOURNED AT 3:29 P.M. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME, EVERYONE.

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