Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Public Engagement Committee Meeting, Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Date: Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 37m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Len5_ly2Uyw
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 2026-10-26. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:03] - Good afternoon, everybody. This September 1st, 2026, regular meeting of the Fairfax County School Board Public Engagement Committee will now come to order. Mr. at 4:40 p.m. Mr. McElveen has submitted a request to attend this afternoon's meeting remotely due to personal reasons, as he has a parental caregiving duties and is located in Herndon, Virginia.

[00:00:24] I performed an initial review of Mr. McElveen's request and having found it to be in compliance with the school board's remote participation resolution, I have approved the request. Mr. McElveen, please check your audio and visual. here can you hear me yes all right now thank you I know as committee members who are physically present to vote on the following all those in favor of confirming the approval of mr. McElveen's request and it mistakes it miss Anderson myself opposed abstentions all right thank you we will now vote to approve the minutes of the April 20th 2026 meeting of the public engagement

[00:01:04] committee and give a second if we run if we want to post them or not but do I have a motion second all in favor I've got mr. back with his hand up Miss Anderson and mistakes it and myself and mr. McElveen that is unanimous for the board all right it's our housekeeping so again appreciate folks taking the time to come today I know we talked a little bit beforehand first off I think we have an opportunity to do some really good stuff this year and I've had conversations

[00:01:43] with both of you about this and saw some messages and others with others as well and so I can't speak for myself but I know I really wanted to be on this because I feel like we've got a lot of opportunity to do good things and a lot of things we've been hearing and ways we can continue to improve so excited for that one of the things that did come up was just to talk through and kind of maybe reaffirm our charge and I don't know if it's easy to post that when it's online on the screen for folks to review but I'll talk through it as well but if we confirm it all makes sense great if there's an appetite for making changes

[00:02:21] to it we can take that as a follow-up action but I wanted to just start there so our current charge is to plan strategies topics timelines and other matters related to board and community dialogue and to coordinate physical logistics related to the board's outreach to stakeholders on top of that the committee advisory committee manual further signs peck to quote provide the school boards community advisory committees with a structure needed to successfully discharge their duties engage their members and complete their annual charge so I'm going to pause there and see if folks have any initial comments or questions we'll do the typical three minutes for initial

[00:02:59] comments and then two minutes for go back so again the question is you know does this charge still make sense do you have other thoughts on it things that you really like about it things that we need to maybe add to it yep take your time miss Anderson I think this is something that I struggled on when I first came with the board because I don't think necessarily the charge matches what people think of when they think of public engagement I think

[00:03:35] there's a lot I also don't want to be duplicative of other organizations within the division that are doing this work real time and so I I think that there's room to adjust the charge through the governance manual and everything else that it would need for that to happen it's I'd be interested to see what way we would like to go because I think there are some aspects of this that are still relevant but I know that in the time that I've been on the board we've done a lot related to like the PAC committee has worked a lot with like

[00:04:10] proclamations and the community advisory committee stuff I think that that's a strong place for things to live but I'm not a hundred percent sure that that was originally the intention of the charge so I do think that having a committee of people that are mindful of what's going on with the community advisory committees is a good thing so it would be interesting to see how we could adjust this to kind of capture some of that work to make sense appreciate it I'll take a turn real quick so that makes sense and I know we've got staff here as well and as a new board member I'm kind of curious what kind of overlap or

[00:04:50] opportunities there are to collaborate between our own public engagement committee and the superintendent's committee as well and what it comes to be is that we this is something we just take over the course of the year and think about if there's no strong feelings about making changes to it mistakes it thank you I also agree with the Miss Anderson that the charge seems to be a little bit vague and a little broad I like to get it more specific and

[00:05:24] we discussed about SMART goals, about the charge, and we just want to make sure it is something doable, and we're actually accomplishing something. I want to go to maybe a goal here, which I think is very, very important.

[00:05:45] PEC has such a great potential for our community outreach, and I think we can do more here. so that's what I want to say and I have some ideas and thoughts to share I'll do that in a few minutes sounds good any other comments questions on the charge all right well let's get into that then so the goal for the next discussion here is to talk through what we want to work on this year and I know some folks came

[00:06:18] with different ideas and suggestions and so forth and so I just to paint a picture some of the things that I captured in a mistakes and mentioned about smart goals where I've heard people talk about coordination with FCPS communications potentially getting more engaged with topical issues like mental health another idea that came up was around ways to improve board outreach to underrepresented communities and their item we could talk about is the review of participation at regular meetings and the big item that keeps coming up is our

[00:06:56] enhancements to community advisory committees so are there other topics that weren't mentioned here that folks want to have us consider for our work this year all right so let's start with the big one that I keep hearing is the enhancement of community advisory committees and this is one that I come back to as well so I'll put another round of questions out there comments about ways to improve our committee engagement work because miss Anderson will attest during our first very my first meetings listening to community

[00:07:35] advisory committees I was fiercely writing notes about ways we could do that better so miss Anderson so my first six months or so on the board I was in charge of peckin one of the things that had been left over from the previous board was getting the advisory or the community advisory committee handbook kind of done and so we did that during that six months and we got it through but we had pretty big plans for things that we wanted to do in the next iteration after we got that passed so we there's some work that still needs to be done so I think that we need to I haven't been on this committee for a year or so and so I would like to be able to reassess where we are with that

[00:08:15] there was community outreach that we wanted to do related to creating a training I do understand that I believe IT has now purchased the platform that is appropriate for us to put this training because we want to make sure that it's forward-facing enough that it's accessible to community members who aren't necessarily in our system.

[00:08:36] So we do have a possibility of creating that course that kind of tells people what they would need to know once they've been chosen for a particular advisory committee that is a reiteration of what's in the guidebook. So that is something that I would very much like to see us get done this year as a way to kind of finalize and finish that work that we started a couple of years ago.

[00:09:03] Ms. Dixon. Thank you. So I'm just going to pick up from where Ms. Anderson left. The work is going in the right direction.

[00:09:18] I think that organizing that six months, Ms. Anderson is talking about, it was a good work. But I think we have to catch up a bit here. One of the things I know that-- and talked to several people who know me now as a board member, but didn't know what I do.

[00:09:39] And a lot of our community parents, even teachers, don't really know what school board does. And I think it is one of the things I want to create awareness in terms of what are we doing as elected official for our community and where they can come and reach out to us and what can we do for them.

[00:10:00] So I know superintendent does this listening tours and other outreach community outreach team meeting. I just think maybe school board should do that, something like that. I know we have a very busy calendar to the meetings and all, but maybe one or two a year, we could set up something, maybe magisterial with ones at large and set up something like that in their community.

[00:10:27] - I'll just, I'm not seeing other placards, I'll go. I really like that idea because leading up to the back to school nights and so forth, I know my staff put together a lot of materials and so forth. And we collaborate really well with other staffers, but I feel like it would be nice to have some standard templates and language that explain, like here's how school board members can assist and so forth, so that's a great idea.

[00:10:52] Okay, other comments, questions, ideas? I'll add, so just my thoughts from watching the advisory committee, oh, Mr. Macklemy, please. - Yeah, there are two holdovers from last year that I hope we can address, which include first and foremost, the adding a second student representative to the school board.

[00:11:22] And secondly, doubling the size of the student leadership development program. There was support for both of those ideas on the last PEC committee, but in talking with the clerk to the board, it was told that there was no approval formally that came for those plans.

[00:11:41] So I hope that we can bring resolution to that in short order. thanks excellent so what I'm thinking and I actually had a great meeting last night with our student rep to talk about this so what I'm thinking then if we can put on our November agenda unless there's any objection to discuss that the student rep piece just because that could take a little bit of time to get involved is there any objections or concerns if we talk about that in November excellent so I'll speak to that a little bit too so the my

[00:12:18] understanding and mr. Shostak can speak to it better than I can but my understanding is that it's a lot of work for a student rep to do and you know we could discuss whether we want two reps there at the dais I know other divisions have them rotate every other meeting but just handling their constituent work and so forth getting the pulse of students and inputs from students so forth is a lot so I think I mean I'm speaking for myself but I have a lot of interest in finding ways to do it and I recognize too FCPS does this really well like there are other school divisions that do not even have student representation or

[00:12:53] it's not as meaningful as ours. So I'll take a turn. So speaking about the advisory committees, what struck me, and I'll be a little bit blunt, but hearing from a lot of committee members is that they felt like they did a lot of work, but somewhere along the line there was a disconnect between their advisement to us and our ability to implement some of those recommendations, right? And so that's something I would love to talk about again finishing November and a little bit here to do to see if there's consensus around that because it seemed to me almost like a project management challenge where you've got the

[00:13:30] committees developing their own charges we don't even discuss it at the end of the year because we've got so many things going on and then they go forward and do their work and then the other year there's sometimes there's a disconnect between what they've recommended and then what our budget situation will allow what other program initiatives are allowed so a couple of things that jumped out at me from this in our governance manual is updating the guidance that we give to advisory committees and I guess we could talk about this more as you redo the trainings but um I'd love to see clearer guidance around like policy updates regulation updates budget items we also

[00:14:07] talked about giving direction to the chairs in terms of like you know here's our priority that we voted on six months ago we want to make sure that gets reflected in the committee charge and the committee work for the coming year I'll say too I think the ACSD was a really great example of where committees doing excellent work because they said in my first ACSD meeting and they had and I recognize they're different by law but they had a regulation that they had worked hand-in-hand with staff to update and I was like this is exactly what a combined community advisory committee should be this to make those kind of meaningful updates so if we can be puts I could take for action to unless there's

[00:14:44] any objection to put together some potential recommendations for the for our November meeting around the guidance that we give to advisory committees miss Anderson yeah I just want to make sure that and I'm going to say this delicately we haven't actually implemented all of the guidance that we've already created because we did not create the training that went with it so I just want to make sure that that I see that as a living document that but it took a lot of coordination with all of the existing advisory committees at that time so I

[00:15:21] want us to be extremely careful as we move forward just to make sure that we don't undo things because a lot of those advisory committees have started working towards doing what we've asked them to do and we haven't really given them enough time to fully implement all the changes that were requested like last year they did bylaws like all those things and so I don't want us to undo things too quickly because that is also a pretty significant concern for work that we sometimes do and so we can't create that whiplash with the folks that are volunteering to help us and I do also want us to be careful conflating

[00:15:59] some of the work that are legally required advisory committees do compared to other advisory committees that we've chosen to include is that there's always going to be the opportunity for recommendations for different things that we're doing and I fully believe that actually the person that we need probably to start with is the board liaison to all those advisory committees to be a little bit more involved with the the feedback that you're giving the group as they're creating the content but I do think that it's partially I understand why we have the timeline that we have I do that think that that sometimes the timeline is what actually creates this feeling of

[00:16:39] because it's at the end of the year and it feels rushed when we receive the information and so we've always been looking for ways to make sure that people know kind of along the way what the different advisory committees are working on so just something to keep in mind so can you clarify then what is included what guidance are given to is given to the I asked as a new person and for any public members of public that are watching what guidance is given to board members who are liaising with the communities well mr. Dan what guidance were you did you receive there we go that's your answer so one of the things

[00:17:17] that we wanted to create was a board toolkit that gave all the past reports all the past and that's something that we've been working on with a number of different committees so some of this is just organization and logistics that we need to get our information together and so it's not it's easy everything is publicly available already it's just whether or not it's easy to be found and so we have all of this stuff shared and saved in different locations we just need to make it accessible to the board liaison that takes over so you can kind of really have that clear and honestly I think there are tools that we could

[00:17:53] utilize to help us in some of this creating a notebook of all of the information and then being able to ask a quick question if somebody has done something in the past or made a recommendation before I think those are that we could use as board members to kind of ease our work just a little bit in a very closed environment of information that's already publicly available. Excellent. Other comments or questions on advisory committees? Okay, I'll take a turn again. So a couple of the ideas that had come up and talking to

[00:18:28] various former members and so forth was the idea of doing two-year charges and And that way, the committee has more consistency and so forth. And if you've got turnover, then they're still carrying forward the work.

[00:18:44] Another idea that came up-- and I put these out there to see if folks have strong feelings either way-- was doing committee charges at the beginning of the school year and having the board play a little more direct role, perhaps, in drafting those initial charges and then providing to the committees.

[00:19:00] And I understand the push and pull, because if I'm serving on a committee, I'm going to want to have a stake in that and not necessarily be told what to do. But on the same hand, you know, these committees are advising us as a board and we should be providing some better direction, in my view, to those committees. So another idea that had come up, I think, was around having two-year terms for members.

[00:19:19] So there's a little more consistency there. Other ideas that I had heard throughout the committee meetings was potentially a touch point with chairs. And another idea was having the chairs come here to pack and present status updates.

[00:19:35] But that if we do give better guidance to liaisons, could be replaced by just having regular check-ins with your with your committee members and keeping the board updated on that progress and the hope of that is that there shouldn't be any surprises at the end of the year when we get recommendations right like ideally there should be a change management process there where members the whole board is brought along you know committee's working on some topic the board's aware the superintendent's team is positioning funding perhaps to be able to address some of those things and then by the end of the year we get the final recommendations and it's a lot easier to move forward so the other thing that came up a lot and I've talked

[00:20:12] to dr. Reed about this is around staff availability for the various committees I heard one committee said that we had a 30-minute working session with staff and we got two months worth of work done because we were able to sit down and go through that so there's something you know I'll continue to talk through with dr. Reed and others I think that's everything I have but other comments or questions on Advisory Committee support mistakes it yeah I think I'll just add one thing I think the cross-sectionality I know a CSD and MSC SCOC and then our

[00:20:49] ACE and other committees I think there should be some way of kind of connecting between the charges and I don't know how to do that but I feel like sometimes we are all kind of going to the same direction but in a very different ways towards the goal and I was I know it's very hard to do a meeting with everybody present but maybe if we can have a meeting the board with the all the chairs of the committees and again that's just a thought and I want to see what other board members think of that I'm curious if we were to use maybe our

[00:21:28] last meeting of the year to have that kind of discussion with the committee chairs perhaps come interesting okay yeah I can see that I remember last year it's from which committee at one committee they give is Shaq I think it worked on mental health and then this year ACSD has that as one of their parties is mental health so yeah okay other comments or questions on advisory committee support so it sounds like that is probably the second thing we want to

[00:22:07] talk about in November and to Miss Anderson's point seems to me to make sense and correct me if I'm wrong but a good approach might be to come to November's meeting with recommendations for changes to the handbook if need be or maybe recommendations for trainings and so forth is that a fair assessment I'm happy to bring forward some of the or definitely get it to you some of the things that we had already planned to previously work on on those things just so that we can see like I said the work that it took to vet every change with

[00:22:43] all of the advisory committees was no small task and so that is something that because we have we have members of the advisory committees that have been in their positions for a very long time and have been serving the school board for a very long time but I do want to make sure I speak up for them in that we should be very careful on how we make changes to some of these things just because of the fact that they did have input when the board made the decision the last time so we would have to go through so I think that it's fine to make the changes I think we just need to make a plan on how we're gonna do that in a way that again that everyone feels heard and so if we were going to do that I

[00:23:19] would want to give the committee chairs enough notice that they could come and talk speak to us if we were planning on making those changes so we can kind of vet them through them makes that's appreciate it one other item that I have on advisory committees is just the plan for the five-year review of that I think I think we're in year three right now I don't think there's any appetite for starting that review jumping ahead of that five-year schedule I'm seeing shaking of heads okay the next topical item that so it's sort of again sort of

[00:23:55] November meeting will come back with recommendations and we'll have it to allocate time for a discussion about the advisory committee process and support okay so the next item that had come up was just review of community participation in regular meetings some of the ideas that had come up where I think the clerk had made some recommendations before I'd seen some folks that talked about reexamining the camera view as well are there other things that folks want to talk about as far as community participation regular

[00:24:26] meetings okay anybody comes after the words we can talk to your future meetings other topical idea I think I wrote down everything else other discussion items or questions or topics that folks wanted to discuss potentially for the coming year mystics it so I wanted to see how we can reach the hard-to-reach population

[00:25:05] and that is where I want to spend my time is that people who don't show up on our school board meetings or who are not aware of what's happening and language barriers or just their job timings doesn't work with our school board timings I really want to go to the voices we are not hearing because we hear some voices a lot and again and again over over but I know we are not hearing for a mass section of our population so I would like to you know maybe discuss that with other board members but here if we have we want to

[00:25:41] talk about that a bit I'm happy to brainstorm so like proactive engagement with communities is that accurate yeah maybe I would you know go with FCPS staff remember here but of you know how do you reach to the community which is not that easily approachable like they're they have their cultural barrier language barrier work commitments or they cannot connect with us how do you do that you

[00:26:18] know I definitely think that our community relations team does a very good job trying to generate opportunities for community members to maybe engage in ways that aren't necessarily specifically about the school for example the summer extravaganza which is a way for families to come where it's not about coming to be a part of a school board meeting or a parent meeting but they have the opportunity to hear and get information and interact with people so I think that those kinds of opportunities that can happen at times where they are able to bring their children and there are

[00:26:55] things for the kids to do but they're happening at the same time is really something strong that the community relations team has been doing one of the things that we recently experienced in senior leadership was we had a parent panel and they came in and provided some feedback about ways that they would like to interact with FCPS and one of the things that came out of that was the use of another texting tool.

[00:27:26] Now, we have a lot of communications tools. So there is an argument on one side that too much can be a challenge. But in particular, WhatsApp was a tool that families said is very heavily utilized by multilingual families.

[00:27:43] So we did stand up a WhatsApp channel. We're trying to find different ways, again, to reach families. But I guess my question to you would also be, are we talking about the FCPS families who we don't hear from or the broader community?

[00:28:00] Because one of the things that we're trying to do is figure out how to reach those folks. Because as we know, the majority of people who live in Fairfax County don't have children. But we need them to be invested in the school division and the things that we're doing. And so that is an even bigger challenge to me, is how do we engage those folks?

[00:28:19] because they don't have a reason necessarily to ever be a part of the school. They don't have kids in the system. So those are kind of two things when you're talking about engaging with disengaged communities. You have the families, but then you also have our taxpayers who we need to engage with as well.

[00:28:40] And that's kind of been a challenge that we've tried to brainstorm how to do that. Those are just a couple examples. Appreciate that. Ms. Anderson. To that end, I think that there are opportunities for us to participate with some of the county events as board members.

[00:28:57] I think that as long as we're following all the guidelines related to making sure that everybody knows where we're going to be. But I don't understand-- like, I've been to the summer extravaganza. I think it would be an awesome idea to have a booth where you could ask a school board member kind of like a question or something.

[00:29:16] And it just might be a cool way to give people little bit more visibility as to like what we do and who we are so that's one and then I think that there are probably different events throughout the county that we could do the same thing understanding that we won't have everyone that loves the opportunity to speak with us but that's okay I think that there are some opportunities there that we can make sure that we have a little bit more visibility as to what's happening makes sense and I'll just add I'm always curious as a new person like I promise someday I'll stop saying that but where the role if there's like where the superintendent's kind of advisory

[00:29:55] work ends and the board's work begins and I've attended a lot of the superintendents meetings to listen in as well I'm trying to think through like as a board where would our unique thing be is there some area where we're not that we should be so mistakes it so I did one think about the community outreach and yeah if they are not signed up for the newsletter or the hundreds of notifications of CPS sense I think one of the channel is FCPS has great Facebook page and it is widely utilized by the community to see it and it's free

[00:30:34] of cost I mean obviously it's a cost for to manage the page but the marketing aspect of it I think I've heard from somewhere Fairfax County residents use Facebook a lot so I think that's one opportunity to kind of reach out to the people and invite them for some those those events which are publicly I probably can attend and I think it does cost money but I was wondering if we can send some highlights of FCPS once or twice via mail like posted mails to community members I know that legislators have a budget for sending their mails out I

[00:31:14] don't we don't as school board members so I'm wondering if that is something we could use is to send letters out to the community you know having come from a different marketing world when I worked at Inova having newcomer material is very common and I do think that if there was a way to find the budget to do a mailing to new families that that would really be a wonderful thing that either it could be at the magisterial school board member or from FCPS direct kind of

[00:31:52] welcoming families to the neighborhood and making sure that they know I didn't know when I moved that you know when you needed to enroll your student if you don't know somebody that knows something sack thank God I knew somebody who knew about that those are the kinds of things that we could include in a you know because you can get you know customer lists that will give you those demographics and it would be great if we could do something like that but to your point I mean the cost of postage keeps going up so there's a bit of a challenge when you're talking about the volume of families that we have but I think it's a great idea I'll just ask and don't funny on the spot but is there

[00:32:30] anything else and you can take this for action afterwards is there anything else that you need from us in terms of reaching out communities that might not being be heard or communities that we need to be more proactive with say beyond budget well including budget support but also beyond budget support I'd be curious to know that just so we can, to Ms. Dixit's point, make sure we're not forgetting anybody that's here. I think I would definitely want to talk to Lisa, who can't be here today, and sort of ask her that question as sort of the chief experience with community relations side and our communication side to sort of see because I know there are a lot of things that are

[00:33:08] happening on the community relations side that I might not always be privy to because we're two separate arms now we used to be one community communications and community relations and so sometimes I'm not fully aware of the things that the other side is doing one other thing I'll mention is so to that end about reaching people who might not have kids in school I know our newsletters go to I believe people who have children enrolled I've coordinated with my predecessor and the current supervisor we each do a blurb in each other's

[00:33:48] newsletters and she's very kind she puts mine at the very top which I don't know if I would have done if I was in her shoes but it's very nice of her to do that but I and I've had key members reach out saying this is great you know I my kids have graduated but I appreciate this and they've got suggestions for different things so that could be something else that individual members would be something that goes maybe in our guidance or something so other comments or questions potential work topics suggestions nothing comes to my mind but I will definitely keep thinking about this and add to more

[00:34:26] topics because I think there is a lot we can do but well I want to see what we are start starting now to get that accomplished yeah well I could go on forever about this but I appreciate your ideas especially as an executive thinking in terms of smart goals and so forth like you know I know committee members spend a lot of time dedicated to these advisory committees and and other various facets and I know we all want to make sure that work is very meaningful and so it seems like there's a ripe opportunity for us to do that so final

[00:34:59] call for anything else people want to share before we adjourn how do we need to review that okay there is so the agenda we're looking at for a November meeting is going to be the student representation discussion ways to enhance that and then the advisory committee handbook and guidance and so forth recommendations for that and there's also proclamation language I

[00:35:38] understand that we'd be looking at as well so anything else for that November meeting that we want to cover okay mistakes we talked about I think having like chairs from me you just mentioned that earlier so is there anybody coming from any committee advisory committee that on that meeting not to my knowledge but it could be worth as we're talking about enhancements to the handbook it could be worth and I can send a note out to the rest of the board that they want to invite their committee chairs to attend and give feedback and thoughts

[00:36:17] and join the discussion if that's allowed I'd love to have that so that's a great point all right so our next scheduled meeting is November 17th then We've got a meeting for January 5th, March 23rd, and May 4th.

[00:36:35] Mr. McElveen, please. - Thanks so much. So I did raise the topic about the Student Leadership Development Program. I don't know if you're considering that part of the discussion about the student rep, but I do hope we have the opportunity to address that as well.

[00:36:53] - I think that makes sense, yep. So student rep and-- - Great, thanks so much. - Yep, I appreciate you bringing that up. We're gonna have a full agenda, that's great. okay okay I'm seeing no further placards up for their comments we will do we need a motion to we will now vote okay did all that do you need a motion to adjourn this is my first committee meeting as a chair we are officially

[00:37:30] adjourned at 5:17 p.m. thank you all

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