Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County School Board, Special Education Advisory Committee (SEAC) Meeting, Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Date: Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Place: Loudoun County Public Schools / School Board meeting (see BoardDocs / LCPS-TV)
Length: 2h 50m (video)
Official meeting video (Vimeo / LCPS-TV): https://player.vimeo.com/video/797419723?rel=0
BoardDocs (School Board): https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/loudoun/Board.nsf/Public

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 2026-10-22. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:00] for an electronic sign-in. You can also sign in at the back table. Good evening and welcome to our SEAC monthly business meeting. My name is Sharon Trofe and I'm the current SEAC chair. This evening we have Dr. Slavin here to provide some opening remarks. Good evening everybody. My name is Neal

[00:00:39] Slevin and I am just Mr. Slevin. I don't have the doctor title but I appreciate that. so I'm just here tonight to introduce myself I am serving as the acting chief of staff for Loudoun County Public Schools through June 30th as you probably are aware we are actively in the process school board is actively in the process to fill the superintendent role the acting superintendent Daniel Smith couldn't be here tonight but he plans on coming to a future meeting to say hello and introduced himself so I'm not here on his behalf he's just going to be here

[00:01:19] tonight we together have a goal of building connections and relationships with our community and our advisory groups is an essential part of that community so I'm happy to be here for a little bit and mainly I just want to say that if you need anything please know that you can connect with the superintendent's office personally I have been a teacher a school administrator and a division leader in Loudoun for over 20 years I see many familiar faces in the room and I have had the opportunity to work with SEAC over the years my day job as I call it is the executive director of teaching and

[00:01:55] learning so we've been doing a lot of work in collaboration with the office of special education and the SEAC community around literacy and while there is acknowledgement of a lot of work to go a lot of a lot of ways to go down that path towards working on our literacy program we've we have accomplished we've had some good progress and accomplishments within loudon and working closely with the state so at some point i'll be going back to that work and i look forward to continuing that so again thank you for

[00:02:27] giving me a few minutes and a little bit of face time and i hope you have a great meeting thank you We're going to move on to our presentation.

[00:02:44] We have Kathleen Gibson here from PITSI, who is going to walk us through our presentation on SMART IEP goals.

[00:03:02] We did it. Yeah. I feel good. Oh, I have this one, too. Hello. Hey. Then I can walk around and not have to have you.

[00:03:20] Hi, my name is Kathleen Gibson. I am the Early Childhood Specialist for the Parent Educational Advocacy Training Center, which is also known, more commonly known, as PITSI. And Sharon and Shanelle has asked me to come this evening to talk about measurable IEP goals.

[00:03:36] Before I get started, I do want to get a show of hands of how many people know who PITC is and or what we do. Hey, too. Well, then I'll be quick. All right. I was asked if you have questions for tonight's presentation to submit them via the Google form on this fancy QR code.

[00:03:56] Is that all I needed to say about that? Okay, good. Thank you. All right. So I'm going to go very quickly because for those of you who don't know who we are, I want to kind of tell you why I'm here. So the Parent Educational Advocacy Training Center is a statewide nonprofit whose passion is to empower families of children with disabilities and learn about special education and disability service systems in Virginia.

[00:04:19] We are the parent center for Virginia. Every state is required to have at least one under the Office of Special Education Programs, and PEATC has been doing so for over 40 years. We have targeted areas of outreach, because as you probably know, there's varying degrees of what it looks like in early childhood, transition to adulthood, and then in between.

[00:04:40] And we serve children and families from birth through 26, so families who have children from birth to 26. I knew what I meant. All right, and as I mentioned, I'm the early childhood specialist. I get to talk to families who are navigating new diagnoses, who are navigating Part C of IDEA for early intervention, as well as Part B IDEA.

[00:05:05] So my primary audience that I serve is birth through about third grade. But if you know IEPs, you know IEPs. All of our services are free and confidential. And we spend a lot of time on the phone, emails, doing IEP consultations.

[00:05:23] trainings and workshops and then we have a number of fact sheets on our website went very quick all right since the majority of you knew who we were all right so our objectives for this presentation we're going to talk a little bit about IDEA as it relates to goals okay very quickly we're going to discuss high expectations and the parents role in special education and in drafting those goals so this all goes back to goals we're going to talk about the two types of goals and then we're going to talk about writing goals and so I have a little bit of examples throughout here. So special education services are not optional services

[00:06:03] for school divisions for children who are found eligible under one of the 14 eligibility categories assuming that Loudon does DD for developmental delay. They do? Okay fantastic. So special education related services are required under federal and state regs for students who are identified with a disability and who are found eligible under one of those categories. In 2004, Congress updated IDEA to emphasize some very specific points. That was, the first is high expectations for children with disabilities, and we're going to talk about that a little bit. And

[00:06:39] then the second strengthens the role of parents in the special education process as equal and valuable team members. So high expectations, what do you think high expectations mean? That's your question, I promise. Maybe. What about you, Sharon?

[00:06:59] I think that would be, if you're talking about students at all, students are competent. Let's start. The Zoom competence. Okay. Don't be shy. It's okay. Talk about this. So in the past, with the initial law, which went back in 1975, it guaranteed the right of children to have access to education.

[00:07:22] But what happened was that many of our students were just like in daycare centers, and they were just placed there, and there was not high expectations. Educators had low expectations. Many families had low expectations, and every school could decide what they could teach, and there were no proven methods that were expected.

[00:07:40] In 2004, right, they added the expectations to be high because our children's expectations of them often mirror how we and what we expect of them. So if we have low expectations as parents, we have self-fulfilling prophecies.

[00:07:58] Same thing with educators. So consistency is key. And then parents need to convey their expectations for the child, what they envision for their child, their vision statement, what they expect. And so the team works together, and that was the piece of it. Because IDEA, three cornerstones, to prepare our children for further education, future employment, and independent living.

[00:08:20] So when you're drafting IEP goals, that's what you're preparing our students for. Further education, future employment, and independent living. And high expectations for one child may not be the same as the other, and that's okay. but we should still have high expectations to meet them where they are.

[00:08:37] I like to tell a story. So my son has Down syndrome, and so if he was born with his disability, he wears it on his face, I automatically got the, oh, we're so sorry, started at birth in the labor and delivery room.

[00:08:55] Fast forward to transitioning to early childhood special education, and I was told, it's okay, he'll just live at home forever, and he'll be down the hallway, and it's okay, we'll teach them life skills, and it'll be okay, and they just kept saying this over and over again, and I was like, huh, well, if you think that, and I am supposed to think that, then he'll never, never, just like if I was, I was born with blonde hair, and in the 80s, when you had blonde hair, you were considered ditzy, right, you weren't smart, maybe dating myself, but that's okay, and if somebody, if I was born, and they said to me, well, you have blonde hair, you're never going

[00:09:34] to be anybody, and they put me down the hallway, and they never engaged with me, and they never had high expectations of me, I wouldn't be aware, right? It's having those same high expectations of all students. All right, so parent involvement. So IDEA explicitly says that parents are equal and valuable members of the IEP team and require that parents and students, as appropriate, participate in each step of the special education process. That's important to know because it's not just what we want, but also our students as appropriate. Parents are experts in their child.

[00:10:11] We know what works for them. We know what triggers them. We know their routines. We know their preferences. We understand them, right? We're not all educators by trade, right? We're not all specialists, OTPT. That's why it takes a team, right, to build those high expectations for further education, future employment, and independent living, right?

[00:10:32] And so it's important to think about those things as you're drafting us because the information that we have to share with the IEP team is valuable. And sometimes we're not listened to, sometimes our expertise is not valued, and it's important that we share those in our parental input, in writing, in the IEP, use Virginia IEP, in the parental consent or parental input statement.

[00:11:02] It's important to add a vision statement if you can, you want to, what do you envision for your child to do, and then have your input for them. So for example, I should have put this on here, but I didn't. So for my son, so my vision for him is the same, he's only he's in first grade now he would be in third if i didn't do two years of preschool and then covid didn't do something to kindergarten um and um my vision for him is the same as his siblings i want him to graduate with a standard diploma and to pursue a career in the field of

[00:11:34] his choosing i won't limit that i will do what i can to make sure that that happens i'm not going to not saying that he will have to change that later but for right now that's where we're doing and then I input information about his disability this is how his hypotonia affects his fatigue this is how his hypotonia affects his focus this is how xyz happens right he also has some some other medical things but um and so I I list this is how it happens so that the person who's reading

[00:12:07] the IEP knows and doesn't have to go look it up right because we're all busy and knows okay well that makes sense. He's tired. He's slouching. Maybe they never met a person with hypotonia before. Lots of kids have, by the way, lots of kids. So why is he kind of this? Why is he drooping? X, Y, Z.

[00:12:30] All right, so you want to begin with a simple list of four to five items. Think about where your child is, what their abilities are, what they like. I do a one-sheeter. He's young now, so I just, I do a one-sheeter. What does he love? He loves the aquabats. He loves to sing. He loves Hamilton.

[00:12:47] He can recite all of the words of Hamilton, the entire thing. Now, you may not be able to understand him, right? He knows what he's singing. I know what he's singing. And some of the words, you know, get a little jumbled. But he knows all of the words. And so I put that. Like, he really loves music.

[00:13:02] Music motivates him. He loves the Aquabats. And he loves grilled cheese sandwiches and recess, right? And so these are the things that motivate him. So when you think about it, think about all of these areas. Think about functional, right? Think about those academic goals.

[00:13:20] Social skills. This is really important for some of our kids who have pragmatic delays, social comms. Where do they look and what do you want to see? Transition. So as your kids get older, you have to start thinking about transition goals. As the early childhood specialist, I will argue you should start thinking about transition at like three, right?

[00:13:41] Because we're preparing them for their education, future employment, independent living. We have to lay a strong foundation. So what does that look like? I have my oldest is 13, and I feel like I am not prepared for high school graduation. I'm just not. and then their online skills.

[00:13:59] That's really important right now. IDA also says that the IEP must contain a present level statement of how the child's disability affects their child's involvement and progress in the general education curriculum. For preschool students, it's how the disability affects the participation in appropriate activities.

[00:14:19] Present levels are very important because it tells us where our child is now. So if you haven't had comprehensive evaluations and we don't know the present levels, we need to do that because it's going to tell us where we're going to start and where we're going to be. All right, so this is exactly what it says in IDEA.

[00:14:40] Measurable goals clearly tell us what we expect the child and the student to do. An IDEA requires that a statement of measurable interval goals including academic and functional goals are designed to meet the child's needs that result from the child's disability to enable the child to be involved in and make progress in the general education curriculum and meet each of the child's other educational needs that result from the child's disability, right?

[00:15:11] Before we go, I want to talk about two key Supreme Court cases that talk about this. And this is just good to know and kind of understand educational benefit because that's one of those things where it's like, what does that mean? What a high expectation means.

[00:15:27] So in 1982, that was a long time ago, the Raleigh case determined that in order for FAPE, free appropriate public education, to be satisfied, the IEP must be reasonably calculated, right, to enable the child to receive educational benefit, but it didn't define educational benefit, right?

[00:15:50] So what does it mean? Fast forward 35 years. 2017, Andrew F., that was not too long ago, right? That case clarified what was meant by educational benefit because some courts were allowing de minimis, right?

[00:16:06] they were allowing minimal educational benefit to satisfy faith and the supreme court decided that children with disabilities should make meaningful progress and achieve appropriately ambitious objectives they ruled that schools must offer an iep that is reasonably calculated to ensure the child to make progress in light of their circumstances goals may differ but every child should have the chance to meet challenging objectives and that's key right i was told that all kids with down syndrome go down the hallway work on life skills starting in kindergarten i can

[00:16:42] teach them how to cook need you to do that and do that what about the alphabet what about reading what about standards ieps right standards-based ieps are required um i have in the um presentation at the end with some qr codes that have access to the video e standards-based iep web page the new one they just updated their website um and you can go on there and you can see what is the standard best iep you can take they have videos on their website and they have worksheets on what that looks like for each grade level all right so goals fall into two categories anybody know what they

[00:17:21] are i've said them like three times i'm not gonna ask sharing because that's cheating anybody thank you academic and functional right so academic goals are based on subject studies in school these are our standards of learning the skills are expected um to master our students are expected to master in that area. Reading, math, reading, language arts, math, science, etc. These may not be in the same depth as their typical developing peers, but they should be standard-based. So I

[00:17:57] encourage you, if you have not had, if your child does not have a strength-based IEP, if they do not have a standard-based IEP, visit the VDOE, standard-based IEP, and look at that. Pull the SOLs, pull the worksheets. What is my student doing now? What's their present levels? And then that's how you connect the goals. So functional goals, those are the skills and activities of daily living, right? Our dressing, our eating, going to the restroom, our pragmatics, our social skills, communication. These are what our student is to be independent and self-sufficient. I hear

[00:18:35] all the time because I talk as the early childhood specialist for the entire Commonwealth. I have the pleasure of talking to families from across most of the school divisions and I can't tell you how many times I hear and it's funny because it depends on what school division sometimes I hear well I was told they only do functional goals in preschool because there's no academics in preschool and then I'm told sometimes it's opposite same thing in early elementary high school and middle school like oh we only do academic goals we don't work on functional goals right but what is the IEP for? What does IDA say about the IEP? Further education, future employment, and independent

[00:19:12] living, right? So it's important to balance those. And what does it look like in the present levels? All right, so we'll talk a little bit about SMART goals. So goals are created by the IEP team to address those areas of need in the present levels. So if the present levels are not accurate, that can affect what goals you're developing, right? And they should be high expectation goals, right, based on those present levels. And then the specialized instruction that's used to meet these goals so smart goals so specific means that they're not vague on what's being trying to be

[00:19:47] accomplished yeah thank you um and these go back to the present levels they target those areas of academic achievement and functional performance the palaf present levels plop functional levels however you want to call it measurable we're able to count it we're able to see it um we're able to

[00:20:27] ensure that we're making meaningful progress towards those goals our students shouldn't just be making sufficient progress they should be mastering those goals in the time allowed that's why we use action words for attainable right will be able to right they're relevant and they're realistic for our child's abilities as documented back to the present levels and then anything can be done in those annual IEPs how many of you have children who actually mastered their IEP goals in the timeline allowed do you

[00:21:04] you see how many there are of you compared to the others? And so we're going to talk a little bit about that in just a second. I went too far. That's good. We're going to talk about what happens when we're not making meaningful progress. So here's the components. I try to color code it. I'm very, I'm early childhood. I'm expected to have fun. I usually do dance breaks and stuff, but I wasn't sure about tonight, so I didn't do them. But we like to dance. We do a lot of cuckoo kangaroo in my presentations. But components of a measurable goal, and I broke it down for you with this simple goal so the area of need and level of tainment should be included in all of the goals right

[00:21:43] the direction and the accommodations may be included depending on the focus of the goal right so you may not always see the direction as like the increase decrease maintain so we see a lot of that in like behavior goals behavior modification goals um or it will increase right um area of need right that's the running writing speech running transition um calm hands I saw one of those and then the level of attainment this tends to be 80%, 90%, 100%, etc.

[00:22:18] And then accommodations and modifications. So with what accommodations or modifications are our child able to use? You may not always see this in a goal, but it can be helpful. And so in this one I added when given a reading passage in large print, that's the accommodations modifications that the student needs.

[00:22:37] we'll use questioning strategies to increase right the direction of expectation comprehension the area of need of what was read four out of five times with 90 accuracy the level of attainment you should always see area of need and level of attainment the other two are yeah you may or may not okay all right so when you're looking at goals you should be able to answer these four questions who what how and when does this goal answer it i made it easy for you i color coded

[00:23:16] i color coded right right so we have given four basic geometric shapes jason is the who identify the shapes as the what given four basic geometric shapes the how by the end of the school year and this i'm just assuming for for own um for my own sake it's just easy when we talk about the annual iep just being in the end of the school year i do realize that i'm changing like

[00:23:55] november october for this example i did that okay benchmarks does anyone know what those are Do you ever see them in your goals? Benchmarks can be very helpful. These are indicating the steps that the child's going to take, right, to reach that annual goal.

[00:24:12] And they really help the IEP team as a whole, both teachers and parents, monitor if the child is making sufficient progress. They are very helpful. I look at a lot of IEPs, and a lot of times when you see benchmarks, they're actually separate goals.

[00:24:32] They're separate goals, right? You shouldn't see, like, an annual goal that's very broad and then benchmarks that are, like, separate individual goals. Those aren't benchmarks. So if you see that in your child's IEP, it would be worth a conversation to have to break those into actual goals and then set benchmarks for each of those goals.

[00:24:52] I can't. I see that a lot. Do you? So these are typically broken across the four grading periods and just gradually increasing. I'm going to show you an example in just a moment. And they're only required, and I think this is a big thing, they're only required since 2004 for children with disabilities who are on VAP, that are taking alternative standards.

[00:25:19] But I would say and recommend them for anybody. Anybody can have them to help measure those goals. I have them for many of my son's goals because it helps us kind of get on track. Because if your student's not making meaningful and expected progress, The IEP team should be meeting to address that lack of progress and ensure that the services and accommodations are appropriate in meeting the student's needs.

[00:25:45] Because if the student's not making appropriate progress, then the IEP's not reasonably calculated for them. And so it's worth the conversation to say, what does that look like? It could mean increasing frequency of services, right? It could be adding services like tutoring or parent training and counseling.

[00:26:03] It could be ESY, extended school year. It could be a one-on-one. It could be adjusting the manipulatives, whatever it is to ensure that that student is making sufficient progress. Because remember, I think you've probably heard this, the IEP is a fluid document. You have one, your child has one IEP, and then it has amendments and addendums until they are no longer eligible or they age out.

[00:26:27] And so it's a fluid document, and it should be revisited frequently. All right, so I'll give an example here, just to kind of visualize. Again, I made it very simple, because I think it would be easy. So our annual goal is by using positive reinforcement, Jason will be able to keep his hands and feet to himself for 10 minutes during the morning circle time and four out of five opportunities.

[00:26:50] And I went and used your calendar, by the way. So that's your end of the school year. June 8th of 2023. And then I broke it down by each of the grading reporting periods. Does that make sense? So Jason, by October, will be four minutes. It will increase to six minutes and then eight minutes.

[00:27:07] Does that help being able to see kind of how we're making progress? So if Jason, let's say by October, 2028, right? School just started. We're only in school for, you know, nine weeks.

[00:27:24] He's only, his baseline was two minutes and he's still at two minutes. Then the IEP team needs to meet and have a conversation. What can we do? What's different? What's happening? Maybe it's nothing. Maybe we're going to go ahead and reassess and we're going to look. Well, maybe we'll come back and visit in four and a half week mark.

[00:27:43] That's okay too. But it's ensuring that he's going to meet that goal by the end of the school year. Because if we're saying he's going to meet it, We've all agreed he's going to meet it. We need to work to meet it, all right? So here we go. Is this goal measurable? Given support and visual cues, Emily will create a system for organizing personal items in her notebook in four out of five observable opportunities.

[00:28:09] Is it measurable? Thank you. Thank you. There you go.

[00:28:24] Yeah, boom. Fuck. Did you learn that here or did you know that from before? Oh, there you go. No, just playing. But seriously, it does, right? We're targeting. Emily will create a system for organizing.

[00:28:40] That's the targeted behavior-specific portion of the SMART goal. Condition, given support and visual cues, and level of attainment. Do you know what the level of attainment is? Man, you get two gold stars. Man, yeah.

[00:28:56] We're rocking it. What's today? Wednesday. God, I don't even know what day it is. Okay. Is this measurable? All right, this is a trick question, but not really. With 100% accuracy, Jason will get off the school bus in the morning and independently walk from that location in the school office.

[00:29:13] He will also navigate independently between his classes, whether he is going to lunch, PE, or another class, and board the correct bus at the end of the day. What do you notice about this goal? What do you notice?

[00:29:34] Okay, if I have to walk out there with this microphone, I will do it. Thank you. Yes. There's a lot going in on this goal, right? There's a lot. What are we even measuring, right? Remember how I told you I see goals and benchmarks?

[00:29:51] That's usually what I see. Like we have a goal, oh, they'll get off the school bus, and then in there are others. This isn't a real goal. We just made this up. But these are three goals, and they're all tied together into one, right? The first one is he's going to get off the school bus in the morning and independently walk from that location to the school office.

[00:30:12] Number two, he's going to navigate independently between his classes, whether he's going to lunch, PE, or another class. And number three, he's going to board the correct bus at the end of the day, right? It has all the elements of a good goal, right? We're assuming 100% mastery, which I don't know about you, but I kind of want that in this goal, right?

[00:30:30] If my child's getting on the bus, I would prefer that he gets on the bus 100% of the time the correct one. Unless we're having a bad day, and then I'm like, eh, you can keep him. That would be his brother. So it has all the elements.

[00:30:47] It's just too many components. And I have seen goals like this before in IEPs. And it would really work better as three goals. Because if he doesn't succeed, you could put this in one goal. The issue is that he may only hit one out of the three. And then he doesn't master it.

[00:31:05] As our kids get older, it starts affecting self-esteem, right? So that's another reason. It has nothing to do really with this, but it's fine. All right. I want somebody to make a goal, write it up. It's your turn to make a SMART goal.

[00:31:23] Using this as information for present levels. Jamie is a fifth grade student. She can currently recognize quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies and can count to 100s by ones, fives, and tens. She does not know how to count money or give correct amounts for a purchase or correct change.

[00:31:43] What might be a good goal for her? I'll give you a couple minutes. I won't judge your syntax.

[00:31:55] I promise. Remember, do what, how, when, and smart criteria.

[00:32:41] Anybody want to share? Don't be shy. I'll preface this with as parents, it's not our role to write goals, right? I can usually, I'm not really great at writing goals, but I can tell you when a goal is not good. And I'm like, what are we measuring here? Are you ambiguous? I don't do ambiguous. We had one this week that got proposed.

[00:33:04] I can't remember what it is now. I wouldn't mind sharing it. I just don't remember what it was. And came home and I called and I was like, I do have a question. I was like, what are we measuring here she goes you're not wrong i just don't really know how to write it i was like i don't either because we're working on aac well and implementing aac we fixed it but it was hard anybody want to

[00:33:24] share oh gosh thank you it's okay i don't well i might i might take away a star i don't do like it so by the end of this school year giving a manipulative coins jamie will be able to account

[00:33:52] money up to $1 with 95% accuracy. And four out of five opportunities. Five out of five. I mean, you know, trying to prepare them further education, future employment, independent living, right? That's good. Does that make sense? Does anybody understand kind of like where that was going? So I had an example here in case someone didn't write one, because that does happen sometimes. As I said, given a variety of coins, and in parentheses I put EG, penny, nickel, dime,

[00:34:29] quarter, right? Because, you know, we like to be specific. Jamie will add and subtract given amounts with 80 accuracy on four out of five trials by the end of the school year so good job gold star you have like four now um all right so if you want to know if your child's IEP goals are measurable get a copy of your child's IEP if you don't already have one you should but in case you don't ask for it usually tell people make a copy of that IEP if you want to do it on the screen

[00:35:07] that's okay too you know just duplicate it get the highlighter out digital highlighter or your regular highlighter. I'm a tactile person. I like my screens. I'm a tech person. That's fine. But I also like to hold it and write it and make notes, right? So at the original side, get the extra copy.

[00:35:25] With the extra copy, highlight the goals and then ask yourself, are the goals a balance, a functional, mark those with an F, right? Or academic and mark those with an A. And if you don't like that because of A and F and what that, you know, grades, feel free to, you know, adjust us, you know, stars and hearts or whatever, right? Are they a balance based on your child's present levels? So the only time I, there's many times where you wouldn't maybe have functional and academic goals, right? I have a child, my youngest, so I have three children. My youngest is six.

[00:36:01] He just turns, okay. He has a speech language. He's obviously, for him, it's not going to have functional goals, right? So, I mean, I'm sorry, academic goals. We have functional goals. We don't have academic goals. His present level is only related to his speech. Now my other son, the one with down center, he's eight. We have a 43-page IEP. And there's a mix, right? And then does it

[00:36:31] answer the WWHW and the SMART criteria? Ask yourself that. And then go back and see if there's something that you want to work on. So if you go back to that VDOE standards-based IEPs and you're going through the SOLs, I cannot stress how important this is. It is so helpful, even in kindergarten go through them see where your child is now and then say hey get the pals testing get your vk or p testing get all the tests sol testing the map testing what else do y'all do yeah i know you do map you do all that right okay good do all get all of that data look at them look at their

[00:37:10] grades see where they are see where they're progressing and if they're if we know that they're not doing it hey let's make a goal for this what do you think iup team right let's have a conversation and the pals is really and i use again because i'm early childhood you know i use pals testing i use that those emas i use those scores same thing with map testing and his like growth looking at where he is it's saying okay well we know that he needs more help in this especially with pals because they had that breakdown right you can say get the parent report

[00:37:48] because not all i don't know if you'll get the parent report but get the parent report and look at where he is in each section or they are in each section, for example, could be SOLs, et cetera. Where they are, you can get down the detail and you can say, okay, well, we need more assistance here, right? You can use all the data, not just our evaluations. What do we need more help in and write a goal for it, right? Depending on what your goals are. All right, so I have some additional fact sheets. There's some on the tables. I also put QR codes in here since you don't actually have a copy of the digital version right now. And I gave you links to the measurable goals fact sheets

[00:38:28] that we have, which has additional resources on it as well. The VDOE standards-based IEP webpage, and then the VDOE SOLs by subject and grade. Because you'll notice when you go to the VDOE standards-based IEP, it only has math and reading SOLs. There's other SOLs. But for whatever reason on the standards-based IEP it's only math and reading so that's why I gave you both all of them so you can break it down by grade right and some of our kids may be really great in math and they're doing they're in the sixth grade and they're doing ninth grade level math their SOLs

[00:39:05] are off the chain they're like right but then their reading or their pragmatics are delayed so we can kind of go through that and check it I appreciate you I will be here for 20 minutes I rushed through that Sharon I'm sorry I didn't bring more examples but I almost always have questions so i left some time for questions okay oh oh keyork if it's a trick question or if it's personal in nature i do ask that you talk to me personally um just because well there's lots of

[00:39:40] people in the room and um it's on tv and all kinds of fun things and if you're talking about your child they may not want all their business okay first question is if it's hard i'm not gonna i will say i don't know it how do we make sure that the child is making progress towards the annual goal if there are no benchmark dates? So you look at progress reports, right? And so you should be receiving progress reports every four and a half weeks, right? So Loudon does four and a half week, interim progress reports, and then you have your progress report. You don't do four

[00:40:18] and a half. I thought somebody, I thought I saw that you did. Is it only some, do you get interim progress reports? Somebody told me that you did. If requested. Okay. Cause I was like, I feel like i had this conversation with someone recently that's why i said four and a half weeks okay if their interim progress reports are received by general education students then yes you should be receiving them every four and a half weeks if you do not receive interim progress reports

[00:40:49] then it will be every nine weeks okay so my apologies i was misinformed okay you know how you can answer your question look at your school board policy documents so anyways going back to the question the original question was um so you want to look at progress reports and ensure that

[00:41:28] are making sufficient progress. When you get your progress reports and it says emerging skills, sufficient progress, insufficient progress, mastery, whatever the case may be, there should be notes there and it should be a summary of the data. It shouldn't just be, John is making progress.

[00:41:47] Good job, John. I've seen that, by the way, right? It should say, if the goal is, let's say, go back to her, let's go back to Jason here. It shouldn't just say, well, Jason's doing a good job. It should tell us well how many minutes is he doing like right so we're let's say we just got a report card on january 20th right because this is your dates right so you just got a report card in the last couple weeks um it should say let's say he doesn't have benchmarks let's say he just has because that's what they said right no benchmarks oh no dates oh no you should have dates on the

[00:42:26] benchmarks if you have benchmarks you should have dates on the benchmarks i'm trying to understand thank you it could be but the premise still holds benchmarks should have dates because you want to be able to measure the progress and ensure that you're making meaningful progress so there should always be dates and it doesn't necessarily have to be by i mean you can set whatever date that you

[00:43:06] you want for them it just typically when you're looking at an annual goal you have four reporting periods we're just going to divide by four and we're going to break it down as easy as we can um but no they should have dates and you know and and i have seen goals too that we know that this this goal is pretty simple again i i'm using my son as an example because so we're working on on his aac and ownership of him carrying his his uh his device with him right so we have a goal for that we know it wasn't going to take the whole year for him to take so we set it we want him to

[00:43:43] do it and we set it for like four weeks because we wanted him to have value and ownership over his device so we set it for that because we reasonably calculated that he would know that he should take with you know we did fading prompts right because it was new to him so that's a simple example so i'm going to ask a question then with that if you have a benchmark that says that after four weeks would you get a progress report after the four weeks then like let's say you were not getting normally you were you talking about in my example that i just gave about my son no that was the

[00:44:17] actual goal the goal will be completed in four weeks we didn't set benchmarks for that no that's sign what happens if the kid did not master the IEP goals by the end of the year so this happens very often right you I don't like to speculate but in my experience personal and professionally the IEP team tends to just well we'll just make new goals and the next year we'll have the same

[00:44:57] or we'll have the same goals and just continue those goals for two or three years that's not appropriate it's not reasonably calculated um so it's really a matter of where are we where did we get on this goal and do we need to continue this goal next year do we make enough progress that we feel pretty confident that he or she is going to make it or they right he's shooting so what does that look like um i i think we get kind of complacent sometimes and we just kind of go through the motions and we're not mastering goals but the whole point of having goals is to master

[00:45:33] them right the whole goal is to like work towards mastery and that doesn't necessarily mean that maybe if we have 10 goals we don't master them all but maybe we mastered it we should be mastering at least some of them right we can only learn one major skill at a time right we can only learn one major skill at a time so it's also important to remember to be reasonable and appropriate and really think about at the end of the day how is this appropriate for my child for further education future employment independent living and it builds on each other they scaffold right this goal is

[00:46:12] going to lead to this goal this goal is going to lead to this goal and my example about my son my goal is for him to graduate with a standard diploma it is not going to be easy I know that I don't live in like rose-colored glasses thinking it's not going to be easy right but what are we doing now to lay this foundation and we're going to scaffold every single year to get to that point right that's my goal so that's the important thing and it's all very individualized so it's really hard for me to be like well what was going on right to be fair we just we have a pandemic

[00:46:48] right we're still working through that and what does that look like anyways is that it um that's it for the ones that were um from the live stream anyone else have any questions they're really great questions i do get asked those a lot what don't what's not the end of the world but what are we doing to make mastery it's like sols you know just like for our typically developing student typically developing students. Sometimes we do really great at math but maybe not so great at

[00:47:23] reading or vice versa and that's okay. That's okay. Any other questions? No? Okay well I appreciate you having me. Thank you for coming. Um you oh I'm sorry. Oh I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Oh you get a gold star too. I just like to give everybody gold stars. I don't do behavior charts but I love to get so are the goals limited to just the disability category that student was

[00:48:00] identified under or should they be addressing all areas of deficit of that question that's my fear oh she she told oh my gosh that is such a great question um no right so when we're talking about goals they we should be they're not driven by disability category services are not driven by disability category idea is very clear when we're doing initial evaluations and triennials and all of the things if new data comes up throughout the course we should be evaluating in all areas of need of

[00:48:39] suspected disability including right health communicative status that are so

[00:48:46] and so forth, right, so no, right, if it's reasonably, I'll use autism as an example, right, it's a spectrum, right, some children are really, really great academically, right, but they need a speech language evaluation, and it may be OT for pragmatics and sensory, same thing with speech language, right, because speech language is not just expressive and receptive, it's also pragmatics and social calm, the language part, speech language, right, and so doing evaluation is another

[00:49:22] to determine areas of need right a suspected disability whereas other children who may have an autism diagnosis or characteristics of autism may not be able to they maybe also have comorbidities like adhd etc and they need additional evaluations right so it should be all areas that's why you have conversations with parents ask those questions like what are your concerns what are you seeing and sometimes we don't know right we don't know so um i recently learned that my son has some vision which is pretty common for children with down syndrome because of hypotonia and your eyes

[00:49:58] are muscles um but he had some challenges and so i was like hey we need to look at and he has slow processing speed so we need to look at xyz for specific learning disability to see if he has dyslexia or dysgraphia because that could be part of it as far as vision and so we looked at it and now he doesn't but we're still keeping track on that like is it something else because we don't always know. Does that answer your question? Yeah, it should not be. Absolutely not. IEP should not be driven by disability category, and you should not. Well, we don't do that here. Could you put

[00:50:38] that in a prior written notice, please? I got one more came in. Sure. How many goals are too many? Oh, another good question. Gold star. Our fireworks. So you can have as many goals for areas of need that are reasonably calculated for the child-deprived master within the time allowed.

[00:50:59] it's my official answer you don't want to have too many right that we can't reasonably work on and make progress right sufficient progress the average average is eight to ten goals eight to twelve excuse me eight to twelve is the average but again you know my son with speech language impairment he won't have an iep but probably by the end of this year he has two goals whereas my son with down syndrome was and it's not the down syndrome by the way he's not the down syndrome other stuff that's happening we have 16 17 18 goals we have 18 but a lot of those are aac goal

[00:51:38] like the ownership goals right so like it's reasonably calculated that we're gonna we're teaching them how to you know walk with the device and things like that we have easy goals what i call them easy but it's just kind of right right so um but i would hesitate because i think sometimes less is more and it's very important to sometimes our kids want to be kids too and i don't know about your kids but you know we're doing as parents thank you for being here tonight um but you know we're working and we're going to so I was working going to school right um we're driving

[00:52:17] our other kids to sports and and then we all and then we have ot pt speech tutoring etc so on and so forth and so at some point our kids have to be kids too so it's important to kind of have a balance and that's a very individualized family decision eight to ten or eight to twelve is the average. Is that it? Okay. I don't, hopefully I answer their question. Yes. Oh, okay. I do couples.

[00:53:00] Which goals would you recommend for benchmarks? And what do we say when they say no, that's not an appropriate goal for benchmarks? Okay. So I think, so her question was related to benchmarks and getting pushback about adding benchmarks to goals. My question is always like, why do we have resistance? Right? So that's the question that I'm having, right? So, hey, I would like to see benchmarks because i want to ensure we're making meaningful progress well no miss kelly we don't

[00:53:30] think that's the case well why can you help me understand like how is it appropriate so could you explain to me what an appropriate goal for benchmarks would be my follow-up question but that would be my fault right but that's my follow-up so help me right and that's my follow-up question is so help me understand because i really i want to see the i don't have an example of the goal that you're talking about but i want math is a really great one yeah reading math i mean

[00:54:04] i mean i wouldn't say every goal needs benchmarks but it's really what is important here and like is this a goal that we really like is really really important to us and we want to ensure that we're making meaningful progress i mean all of our goals are important but like where do i what sword do i want to fall on and which one zone i right and so that's a conversation is like how is this appropriate you know i would really like to see benchmarks because i want to ensure that the level of services that they're receiving or maybe the curriculum that's being used or or whatever the case may be, is appropriate to meet my child's individualized area of need.

[00:54:39] So I would really like to see benchmarks. I don't understand the resistance. And I personally don't have experience with that. But my question, when I'm told no, oh, no, I'm sure. No, no, no. And for the record, I don't think that you're the only one.

[00:54:55] But I think, well, no. And that's why I really like when people ask questions, because I guarantee you there's other people in the room that have the exact same question. They just don't want to talk on the microphone. Well, I appreciate that you did. so thank you. But do you understand, does that make sense? Anytime I'm told no, I don't think I'm always right. My husband doesn't always think that we're right, but we're equal members of the IEP team. We are not educators by trade. We're not OT. We're not PT. We really are just trying to understand how is this appropriate, and I would need it in plain language that I understand, because sometimes they'll get in all this technical language, especially in speech,

[00:55:32] And they'll be like, and I'm like, okay, I just need you to tell me like, like, what does this mean? And like, I trust you, but I really just want to understand. So I would, I would try to get to the root cause. And sometimes there's this fear that there's going to cause more work and, and it shouldn't, right?

[00:55:54] Because we still have to do data collection. So it's not really creating more work because we're already doing the data collection every nine weeks anyways. So it's like, Hey, let's kind of alleviate that fear. like what is what why do we have concerns about adding benchmarks well why do we want to add benchmarks because right that's going to be that follow well I'd like to add benchmarks because I'd like to see that we're making meaningful progress to ensure that we as a team are supporting my son to ensure that they're making progress towards this goal to ensure that they're going

[00:56:24] to master it by November or June or does that make sense next question um consecutive opportunities so i see that sometimes in goals like four out of five consecutive opportunities versus four out of five opportunities and for the very first time i had this where over a nine-week span you were making progress at the beginning and now we're not at the end so to me it seems like we should have consecutive opportunities on every goal but i don't know if that's appropriate so i

[00:57:01] want to i would say that it's not and i'm going to tell you why and it's okay you can come back Okay. So this is, it depends on the type, it depends on the goal and what we're trying to accomplish. So always ask, what am I trying to accomplish with this goal, right? What are we trying to do? Sometimes consecutive is important, like safety goals, right? We want them to, you know, generalize across environments. I don't like consecutive because let's say we have four, five consecutive, four consecutive data collection periods for a goal, not necessarily related to

[00:57:40] safety where they have to be 100% of the time on the right bus because if they do three and then the fourth day they just have a bad day they don't master that goal because it was consecutive and did it need to be consecutive right maybe we just want to make sure that generalized because sometimes maybe I'm really good at math like even now I'm really really good but maybe tomorrow my brain just goes because I'm stressed and I'm tired but it doesn't mean I can't recruit right like and come back and then say yes I know how to do this you know that makes sense maybe like

[00:58:18] some days I have good days at work and some days I don't maybe I don't know just but I it depends on the goal and what you're trying to accomplish because when you put consecutive in there it just can set our children up for um I don't want to say failure because it's not the right what I

[00:58:36] want to say but it can right right right right and then all of a sudden right so then we regroup So then we regroup as an IEP team and say, why is the student not generalizing that in the classroom?

[00:59:15] They're able to do it with me outside of the classroom 85% of the time. But what's different? What is it? And then do we need to make a new goal or do we need to tweak the goal or do we need to adjust the setting? What do we need to do? That's when you pull together as an IEP team and say, okay, what are we doing?

[00:59:33] But it also goes on the goal, right? What does the goal say? does it say classroom and like it there's so many factors that go into that too but I mean under consecutive I mean I think it goes back to like safety many of them are safety I mean some of them are like you know basic like alphabet like I want to know that like for sure that my child knows the alphabet for um rote counting those kind of things but again you know it's it's what is this current present what are their current present levels and is it appropriate for that student so it's really hard to give a blanket statement because there's times when

[01:00:10] consecutive is appropriate but i i cringe on consecutive um but that actually happened to where um my son had to have surgery so he came back when on his fourth consecutive he failed or not fail but he didn't meet the goal criteria and the goal and so then what we had to start all back over again you think he wanted to do that he just got back from surgery he was not feeling it but like again but we met as an IEP team we had a conversation we were like this is what's appropriate we know that who will get it um we just had to adjust so I it but again it just

[01:00:45] depends on the goal but I I mean just because I want my kids to be successful like you know what I mean like I want and I and I think especially it's one of those especially as they get older and they start becoming more aware of their disability or their differences or their you know what I mean like I feel like that can start affecting and I've seen it happen I've seen it happen with oral? Oh, the plot. My kids, my school uses a lot of online applications. So advanced

[01:01:22] reading, Dreambox, Epic, Solve or Reflex to test math and reading and all the comprehension, all these different things. Those are done daily, weekly, monthly, whatever, but they're not included in the plot. And for something like, when you're trying to figure out what my present levels are, shouldn't we be including data that like that that is giving us a more accurate more widespread

[01:01:57] span of data you know all available data that's available to you all of it right and so you and some and i don't know the policy of laudan county but typically speaking i haven't seen that in the policy right and so if anyone ever says to me that it's a policy we don't do that here can you show me that policy yeah yeah so that's the question i ask because a lot of times what

[01:02:31] happens and this is parents and professional everybody i love like well another parent told me so it must be true um speaking of which my school division is calling me please hold okay there um they must be watching um so what were you talking about i'm sorry i had a brain mode yes yes so it's good to have that into review right it's good to have it as part of the review process i mean it doesn't mean that you have to list every single thing but what's applicable to

[01:03:08] to what we're talking about and that present level for all of those testing it's not inappropriate to put it there absolutely not usually I see like I've seen IEPs that have like all the test scores over like the last like in middle school I saw a middle school IEP the other day they had it was an eighth grader sixth seventh grade SOL scores and like had all that data so that it's all there so when they looked at it it was there along with their standardized assessments that they had so remember but always ask yourself why am I asking for this to be there yourself where you ask I'm not disagreeing but I always ask myself when I start having questions because I know if they ask me I need to have justification

[01:03:47] of why I'm asking and I think like why do I want it there right exactly but is it appropriate based on whatever area you're working on that I don't know the answer only you do yeah oh two more questions I thought I was going to get off the hook and have no questions what are all the information that needed to be included in the IEP progress report is there a template or a format

[01:04:22] how much of the collected data can be shared with parents so what all information that in the IEP progress report well typically you're going to see I mean you're going to have the goal right it's all standard based right it's Virginia IEP we already confirmed that okay so you're going to have the goal and then you're going to have the progress report with the date and it's going to say sufficient progress and sufficient progress mastery emerging skill right I went through those really quickly but it's all there and then it's going to it should have a statement underneath it um that says whatever the statement is toward that is related to that goal on that progress

[01:04:57] i mean is there a template or format no no it's all it's all individualized goes back to individualized and i think one of the are they asking for the data is that what they're asking yeah what i think you know when you're seeing the progress report right and you're seeing that okay well uh instead of uh 10 minutes they did four minutes so what what kind of data was collected to support that i think it's okay to ask like you just ask your case manager t i don't again i'm not

[01:05:34] sure how you do it here everybody is a little bit different whoever your point of contact is bed teacher case manager admin i don't whomever right like hey so i got this progress report it said that jason's making sufficient progress great job have a little bit more information please where are we he's supposed to be doing 10 minutes four to five opportunities what was the last data that you gathered i'm just i would like to really just be a more informed team member because remember you're a team member an equal member of the team i would like to see that

[01:06:08] information you can always request to see the raw data you can always do that um it's under verpa it's required to have it um but it does that information doesn't necessarily have to be on the progress report it's not a pro i mean honestly it could just say sufficient progress jason's doing seven minutes or whatever based on his goal great job jason at least that tells me where we're at quantity quantifies it versus just he's making progress he is he is he maybe I'm sorry there's

[01:06:43] not a template that I'm aware of what happens when the school states that the child has mastered a goal at school but doesn't show mastery at home the good question so that could go lots of different ways you could always go ahead and request evaluate comprehensive evaluation that area of need to be completed to see a report not to do that once a year triangles of course are required every three years but you could request evaluations every year so if you say it's mastery

[01:07:19] you don't see it you could well my data shows this can you help me understand and it may have been a goal that it only needed to be done at school how was it written right and if that was the case then i mean there's lots of things that around that yeah absolutely but again it matters what kind of goal is it right was it only at school like how is the goal written if it was across environments and I see this that that happens sometimes sometimes you might say I'll say for example we get an evaluation and it says that my child's speaking in four word utterances

[01:07:57] right but at home he's speaking in like 20 word sentences right or vice versa then I would question that but again it depends on the goal but you could I mean you could absolutely ask for because now we want more recent present levels right because what are we going to do next in this area of need unless it's clear that the depending again if it's clear that they've mastered

[01:08:23] there's lots of gray area because it's very individualized okay oh vcu elon all the things general statement that if if a child is mastering something in the school setting and you're not seeing at home it's important to have asked to see the data but then have a conversation because tying into your question it could be a goal written to generalize it across environment

[01:08:59] so that may be the next step in an iep goal it's mastered in a school setting in this area so we can generalize it more to ensure that it's across settings it's all that scaffolding right we're talking about and i don't know about your kids but my kids act way different at school than they do at home way different oh mom i don't want to count to 20 i'm like count to 20 espanol my kids are in dual language so all of them and uh he's like oh that's at school mom

[01:09:33] not here okay fine let you off the hook for now anyways but yes Kathleen any other questions all right yes yes so you can have parent training um in consultation as a related service in your IEP so if there's something that you're also trying to learn and work across generalized settings right um you can request a parent training and consultation again I'll use an example I like to

[01:10:10] use personal examples, because I do live this, I breathe this, is what I do. We had parent consultation in our IEP related to AAC, because it's a learning curve. And so we had parent consultation added in order for us to have it, and parent training included as a related service, so that we could ensure across environments that we were also reinforcing and doing it appropriately. But it's a lot different for us at home, as familiar listeners, than as at school but just as part of the team to ensure that we're all on the same page so that's just

[01:10:47] an example of AAC but you could do OT you could do PT you could do reading absolutely absolutely yeah you just have that conversation and usually it ends up being like a parent consultation but you could say how and sometimes you don't have to add it in the IEP like sometimes you could just have parent teacher conferences and just you know have those meetings not everything has to be listed. But it is good. Right, Sharon? Good to have it listed. Yeah, ASL, mind language, working on speech goals, articulation, how can I support that at home? But parent training is also

[01:11:26] underutilized as a related service. But, you know, you don't need hours of training sometimes. You could be 20 minutes. Okay, we're going to take one last question. Okay, how detailed should the strengths needs and assessments be on the IEP are we talking about the present levels so that's what we're talking about I think so I don't like to make assumptions no no no I am also I mean that's yeah I figured but we'll make the same assumption okay good I won't go on this alone they should be detailed right they should be detailed based on the evaluations on the parent observate on

[01:12:05] the parent observation the teacher observation all of the reports that were considered. Where's the child at now in all areas of need? And sometimes it's really helpful because I've read some really great IEPs where like they break it down by area of need. And then I've read some that are like, they never end. There's like no periods. And then I've read some that are like this big. Child has challenging behaviors, but then under factors of consideration, it says that he has no behaviors that impact his education. Okay, great. So yes, it should be

[01:12:41] detailed. That's usually where the parent input typically goes towards the end. What's that? Yeah. With all that information, but you want the data there. It's like a summary of the reports that you have. Does that answer the question? Okay, good. Well, I appreciate, again, all of you being here, educators, professionals, administrators, on a Wednesday evening, on a beautiful day. We should have gone outside. So thank you for having me, and thank you for your dedication to our children and our students because they really they're going to be taking care of us later so thank you

[01:13:20] okay we will take just a couple minute break so be ready we really should be starting our business meeting but we're going to switch over our technology and we'll be ready to go so just just quick two two minute break and then we'll get started on our business meeting for an evaluation we are grant funded so I do have to collect some data so if you wouldn't mind just

[01:13:58] doing the evaluation, that would be very helpful for me. And I do have printed copies as well. So if you don't have access to the internet or you don't have a smartphone, I do have them as well. So thank you. Yes, that QR code right there goes to the Microsoft form for evaluation.

[01:14:19] So thank you.

[01:18:23] Can I get everyone to take your seats so we can get started, please?

[01:18:53] Hello.

[01:19:11] The whistle. We're going to get started. Thank you, everyone.

[01:19:27] It's just as a reminder that if you are watching at home or if you are here in person, if you could scan the QR code and sign in so we know you're here, whether you're live stream or whether you're here in the room.

[01:19:47] If we could have our PTA, PTO rep sign in and our members sign in, I would appreciate it. We're going to go ahead and get started. So we're going to start out with our centering work.

[01:20:13] Tasha Richardson, our Director of Special Education for Specialized Instruction, will kick us off. Good evening, everyone. How are you? It's fantastic to see you. Thank you for joining us on what is quite a beautiful February evening.

[01:20:31] As promised, back in September, we always go back to what grounds us, those common bonds, the common ground that we have. For those of you that weren't present for that meeting, we broke out into separate groups and we brainstormed as tabletops within our clusters to come up with just common themes that connect us through the work of supporting and furthering the successes of our students with disabilities across LCPS.

[01:21:01] So we always have three takeaways. We all want to continue learning, certainly. We are results-driven. and while we are all in different roles we support one another and celebrate success so let's make sure that we hold on to that because there's so much to celebrate especially as we have moved through the course of this school year we do have another bumper sticker to highlight we did some work in October and came up with a symbolic representation of our one LCPS

[01:21:38] strategic plan as tabletop cluster groups and so we turn those into magnets I'm not sure if they're back there this evening but we can certainly make sure that they are passed out and thank you for that work all right we're going to skip this slide because we know that we're going to transition to our business meeting but we did have a starter of just sort of and we have some pictures that you can sort of tap into as metaphors goals are like are they like puzzle pieces to put together are they like targeted dart boards is it the

[01:22:15] long road ahead is it like navigating a map and sort of because and so as you reflect back on the time that we had with mrs. Gibson and her presentation on creating smart goals be thoughtful it's nice to have a pictorial representation because sometimes we do understand that it is difficult to come up with the words especially as a parent and we know that our teams are often large so just be thoughtful and think about other strategies that you can use to help to support your planning and participation

[01:22:51] in the educational process for your students so with that i will hand it over to sharon again the qr code is here if you haven't signed in at the back table or if you're online for our live stream audience to please scan and sign in so we know if our PTA-PTO reps or community members can also sign in and let us know you're there. And our members can also sign in on the QR code. I just

[01:23:30] wanted to go through and introduce our SEAC leadership. My name is Sharon Trofe. I am the current chair. We have our vice chair of planning, Shanaz Khan, our vice chair of membership, Liz Crotty. Our vice chair of communication is Craig Metz. Katie Rosenbrook is our SEAC secretary. She is not able to be here. She's at her school awards ceremony. We have our LCPS staff liaison is Tedra Richardson. And our school board liaison is Tiffany Pilefko. And our alternate is Erica Ogadegby.

[01:24:05] Just a quick overview of SEAC. We are mandated by the Virginia regulations, and we have As such, we have items in the regulation that shape what our work does, and we are an advisory committee to the school board, and one of our biggest or two of our biggest things that we are responsible for is reviewing policy before it goes to the school board and to participate in the review of the local school board's division's annual plan.

[01:24:46] A public comment, I did see that we have some public comment.

[01:25:04] We're gonna start out by just kinda going over some of the framework of our public comment. We use our public comment to inform our work that our subcommittees do and that SEAC does. We ask that the speaker focus on a system-wide issue rather than their individual concerns.

[01:25:26] We ask that you give a, of course you stand up give your verbal comment but we also ask that you give us your written comment so we can include it in our annual report and I also want to share that you know public comments if you cannot be here in person can be submitted to the SEAC chair or secretary and we will make sure they are read for you at a meeting and we ask that you limit your remarks to three minutes. So we have Liz Crotty for our first public comment. Good evening. I am here today to speak about our district's

[01:26:05] early childhood special education program. It is a preschool program that our children with disabilities can be placed in. I have now had experience with two of my children going through the program, and while we have had some phenomenal teachers, there are some systemic opportunities for growth that I think we need to attend to.

[01:26:24] For those who are not aware, there is a document from the Virginia Department of Education called Virginia's Early Learning and Development Standards, Birth Through Five Learning Guidelines. This document does a great job detailing the skills and abilities our children should have across developmental areas at various ages.

[01:26:44] Our family had concerns recently regarding our child's fine motor skills. The occupational therapist and teacher found no reason for concern, even though we were being told that at our child's private preschool, he could not keep up with typical peers who were a year younger than he was.

[01:27:00] I went and read the VDOE guidelines and saw that my child was unable to do any of the skills in the pre-writing and fine motor categories that he should have been able to do by his current age. It seems that there is a disconnect in what we are expecting from our students in ECSE and in how we are identifying students who need additional assistance, possibly including the related service of occupational therapy within our preschool program.

[01:27:27] My other concern is regarding pre-academic skills. I have spoken with our ECSE supervisor and understand that our programs are play-based, but I think that it is important that we are giving our youngest students access and exposure to appropriate pre-academic learning as defined in the VDOE guidelines.

[01:27:47] There has been a lot of talk about our reading curriculum starting in kindergarten, but there are many foundational pre-academic skills that should be taught in preschools. Most of the private preschools in our county are teaching these skills. I have had my children at three different schools over the years, and they all taught these foundational skills.

[01:28:05] I want our preschool children to have access to the same learning which the Virginia Department of Education has made clear is critical to our students' success. Our children with disabilities show up on the first day of kindergarten likely with some disadvantages and particular obstacles to overcome.

[01:28:22] We don't need the gap between them and their peers to be any greater. I think it would be helpful to re-examine how we evaluate our children once they are placed in ECSE to make sure that they are having their needs monitored and met when it comes to their ability to access their learning.

[01:28:37] My understanding is that we use the Patel to monitor, but when I examined the Patel, it did not cover any pre-academic area, nor did it appropriately identify delays in fine motor. For example, the Patel says that a student should be able to scribble between three and four years old.

[01:28:54] The VDOE says that they should begin scribbling between one to two years old. By three years old, begin to use distinct letter-like symbols and letter formations with curves, lines, circles, and dots to represent words, ideas, phrases, sentences, and stories or events with or without drawing.

[01:29:13] And by four, begin to use letter strings or a group of letters to represent words, ideas, phrases, sentences, and stories or events. These are very different standards than the Battelle, and this is why it is very important that we have something to monitor our students that is better aligned with the standards crafted by the VDOE and experts in their fields I know we are all looking to set our students up for success and that trajectory begins in ECSE thank you our

[01:29:46] next public comment is Lisa Williams hello my name is Lisa Williams my pronouns are she/her my husband and I are the parents of two girls in Loudoun Loudoun County Public Schools and our youngest is a fourth grader and she's severely and profoundly dyslexic we've been part of the special ed system for

[01:30:22] five years and after our experience over the last 25 days with Loudoun County Public Schools delaying services by trying to make us change our partial consent I decided to comment this evening would dovetail into the agenda items of the last two meetings which is the IEP I want to acknowledge and share what I think we all talk about and what I believe the IEP process should be it should be a collaborative process between the family the admin the school the teachers in service to the child. It should be a valuable tool that recognizes the relevant diagnosis, strengths, and differences of the child. It should be a document that captures the

[01:31:00] collaboration and demonstrates the respect for the child's needs and includes their services, goals, and accommodations that both service the child and challenge the child to become their best self. That's what it should be. The gap between what it should be and what we experience move me to address all of you tonight what we experience unfortunately is not what I shared the IEP process starting at the meeting coordination all the way through signing and capturing consent is one of the most grueling mentally challenging emotionally jarring and heavily systemically focused the most

[01:31:39] unsettling realization for me was that this process is not actually about my daughter it's a process that we experienced Loudoun County Public Schools uses to protect the system. It's fraught with unbalanced power dynamics, complete lack of transparency, poor to non-existent communication to parents unless the parents initiate it, and then it goes into a circle of bureaucratic policy.

[01:32:04] There's limited proactive coordination on progress, and when progress or data is requested outside of the nine and a half weeks, you have to go in and take pictures of everything with your phone and come to your own conclusion on progress. For those children like mine, Tier 3 services, that require CIFRs or CIFMs, they don't talk to parents.

[01:32:27] That was shocking. And the last, most probably familiar experience to most at the school level is that the teachers and school admin are not trained in facilitation skills, conflict resolution, or in our experience, informed about the key contents of information captured in very specific, relevant information and documentation and assessments about how your child learns and what they need.

[01:32:54] The impact to our daughter was both her academic progress and her mental health. She couldn't learn, and she thought it was her fault. We rejected reading special ed services just over ten months ago, after two years of services, and three months ago, after working with her academic language therapist, privately provided, she realized she could learn.

[01:33:20] Her excitement of knowing the alphabet at 10 years old is palpable. It has taken just over two years to reverse the negative self-talk and help her grow her self-esteem. I continue to work with her on techniques to embrace her learning differences and embrace her true self.

[01:33:40] There is so much work to do. And while we move to the business meeting after talking about and evaluating goals, I just ask that we all continue to name what's actually happening, center our children, and And make sure in elementary school that they get the basics of how to read, how to write, and how to do math without technology.

[01:34:05] Thank you. Lisa, before you leave, can we get a copy?

[01:34:21] Thank you. You can just give it to Liz here. Thank you. So in our last meeting, we had a request to readjust our agenda. And we do have a rather lengthy policy to look at tonight.

[01:34:39] So we have moved that to the beginning of our meeting. So we will start with draft policy 8640, the disclosure of personally identifiable information. You can scan the QR code and go to the redlined version of the policy proposed by LCPS.

[01:35:04] So Jennifer, Craig is here.

[01:35:21] So I'm going to let Jennifer talk about this policy. So for those who don't know me, because I am rather new here, I am Jennifer DiDonato. I am gonna be seeking membership on the board. This is something that's near and dear to my heart.

[01:35:37] I am an information security officer for a Fortune 50 company here, and we manage a $5 billion business, and this is what I do for a living, right? I have certifications of a certified information privacy practitioner, certified information privacy manager.

[01:35:52] I'm a fellow of information privacy with the International Association of Privacy Professionals and a whole bunch of other random letters after my name which just means that I spent a lot of money taking certifications to show you all how smart I am, right? So, when looking at this, this is something that we wanted to talk about, but again, as I mentioned last meeting, it's something for all of our students, but our students with disabilities have an extra sensitivity on the unauthorized release or disclosure of their information, as it can very systemically negatively impact them in both their job pursuits, in their academic career, in outside organizations,

[01:36:32] and their ability to volunteer and support there. So, right, with respect to personally identifiable information, there's a few things that the LCPS has to do. They have to comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, FERPA.

[01:36:51] This was created, though, in 1974. It's been amended over the last 11 amendments, over the last, what is that, 23 plus 26, 49 years. But this law was never intended to regulate the amount of data that our LCPS is collecting of our students right now.

[01:37:16] Things like kindergarteners with Chromebooks, where everything they type, that information is being stored. When they take it home, the locations of the wifi points and the IP addresses, if they go to a library to take that, They know where your child is at all points in time during the day, and they can tell you with very accurate, if they use the data, where they will be in the future.

[01:37:38] So the amount of data that we're taking is large. The type of data that we're taking is large. And it's been 15 years since it was amended at all to try to address these changes in technology with the respect of student records, but we're really not there yet with the type of data that we're collecting.

[01:37:56] just all right so one of the other things about personally identifiable information is the united states right now is moving to stronger protections and rights for the citizens and residents within our states virginia has just passed the virginia consumer data protection act that went into effect in january 1st of this year it gives all of you with respect to businesses a lot of control and rights with respect to your data the ability to opt out the ability to know what's being accessed what they're collecting about you to delete it to edit it now this regulation does not apply

[01:38:32] currently to government organizations meaning that it lcps is not currently required to comply with the vcdpa however it is setting minimum baseline standards and expectations that virginia residents should expect not only from commercial entities but of our governmental entities with respect to the handling of personal data additionally within this we wanted to use some common industry standards and frameworks. Things like NIST, which is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, they put out things like 853 Rev. 4 and Rev. 5, which are security

[01:39:08] and privacy controls for information systems, things that house data. It's what our federal government complies with and requires their organizations to comply with. It is what large corporations set as a minimum baseline standard for controls, and we should be looking to replicate that here in Loudoun County. Additionally, some guidelines for media sanitization, which is just how do you delete data, right, and some actual guidelines on how you get rid of that, and the Fair Information Practice Principles, which again is an international standard adopted by governments

[01:39:41] and corporations globally, and we talked about this. While the VCDPA, the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act does not directly apply to LCPS it really is setting that minimum baseline so moving into that we I've categorized our concerns and things that we want to move toward our school board instead of going through them consistent or with every single one because they are really in groupings one of the concerns is on the inconsistent reference to define terms so in this policy we took very specific efforts and so did the school board in defining specific terms what does it

[01:40:20] mean to access? What does it mean to transfer? What is personally identifiable information? But right now, where it is throughout it, they use similar terms, maybe not the same one. Instead of personally identifiable information, they use personal information, and that just creates ambiguity throughout the policy on what are we actually talking about. So standard practice in policy documents and contracting is to use what we call a defined term, which means stick to the terms that you define in the definition section and capitalize them when you use them throughout the policy so everyone knows you're talking about a specific term. So that was something that we

[01:40:58] found throughout the entire policy is they weren't consistent with that, right? So it's something you'll see small little markups, lots of underlining to capitalize letters, but our recommendation is to update this policy document to use those defined terms consistently throughout it, utilizing the of capitalization to indicate that this is a defined term the second idea is that the current definition of personally identifiable information directory information access and transfer they're very limited and do not

[01:41:34] appropriately reflect either the breadth of PI being collected by LCPS under things like FERPA and the VC DPA so we've suggested modifications to our actual definitions of these terms right with respect to personally identifiable information we're pulling more from the definition of FERPA and then pulling into the concept of the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act so moving that to say any information that is linked or reasonably linked to an identified or identifiable natural person that means things like you know your name

[01:42:12] Students, parents, family members, all of that is very obviously linked to you, but other information, too, that could be linked to you. So say things like that you could create inferences on. So if you look at, well, not mine, but maybe I have an eight-year-old or nine-year-old.

[01:42:30] So nine years ago, if you looked at my internet search history, you would see that I was looking for prenatal vitamins. I was looking for maternity clothes. I was scheduling OB-GYN information. I didn't say I was pregnant, but all of that information all linked together creates that inference of that personal identifiable information.

[01:42:50] If I gave that to any of you, you would say, oh, she's pregnant, right? There's a medical condition there. So that sort of information that you can link together to create this idea, this information, this personal information about a natural person should be covered under here, right?

[01:43:06] Things like if they have an IEP, things like if they're getting reading specialists, right? If they're getting all this, you can make a general assumption just in by the fact that you have that information that this child may have a disability, right? And if you start looking at the actual goals, like for my son, you would very visibly be able to see he has dyslexia, right?

[01:43:28] So trying to make sure that all of that information is covered by this definition. The next information is on directory information. So directory information, I wish we could get rid of, but it is a defined term under FERPA, so it needs to be there.

[01:43:44] Right now, though, it was missing some information, some sections from FERPA in our definition. And the section was any information that was contained in an educational record of a student that would not generally be considered harmful or an invasion of privacy if disclosed.

[01:44:00] We had left out that term not considered harmful in an invasion of privacy, and I think it does a great job to the actual term. to give it some legs for this kind of what we're talking about now with the amount of data, right? Maybe a whole long time ago when we're talking about personal records, birth date wouldn't be considered as harmful.

[01:44:20] But now if you give your child's name and their birth date, somebody can tie that to another social security number and your child will have identity theft that you won't know about until they're 18 and try to go to college, right? So this data now would be considered an invasion of privacy.

[01:44:36] So we're just trying to get those terms that are currently in FERPA into our definitions here with LCPS to create that alignment. And then for things like access, right, again, this was written back in 1974. They weren't thinking about this electronic access, where right now that's most of the access that they're being given.

[01:44:56] So adding in, it's the ability to inspect, review, view, read, right? And so all these suppliers and things that we have, you were talking about Epic, right? Epic has access to a ton of your information, right? It might not be, we're not giving them paper records, but they will have electronic access to be able to view it.

[01:45:17] And if they have that, they should have to comply with this standard, right? And then for transfer, before it meant surrendering, right? Again, but the surrender of records really is back to when you're talking about a paper record, right? well, I'm going to give it from me to you. I don't have it anymore. But now, in line with all of these regulations, a transfer really means just giving access. If you're going to give it access to somebody and they could download it onto their computer, you've transferred it. You may still have a copy yourself, but there has been a transfer. So aligning that definition to the other regulations that are in place in Virginia, in the United States, also with the California

[01:45:55] Consumer Privacy Act, as well as internationally and those international standards. I'm going to talk a lot today the third concern is how they state that third parties need to comply with the redisclosure of personally identifiable information so again we have all of these suppliers now that we're using their applications that they are the people who are managing our IEP connect right they all have access to this data in their database previously in what it states in 8640 is it says

[01:46:32] they need to comply with this but there's no real teeth right the standard practice now and under the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act it requires you to sign a contractual agreement with third parties to state that they will not redisclose this data they will comply with that we should be following the same thing we should be making if we disclose data to third parties or entities outside of LCPS and the parents we should be making them sign an agreement that states that that we will not redisclose this data.

[01:47:03] Again, gives it more teeth, gives it more right of notice to the suppliers and third parties that we'll be sending this to, and gives us some recourse after the fact in case there is an issue. So we wanna update that policy in line 102 to say provided they have contractually agreed to not redisclose the data.

[01:47:21] Again, inserting the requirement to have them sign something. In line 324, provided they have contractually agreed to not redisclose. Again, just giving it some teeth, making them specify that they will not redisclose that data. So concern number four, and this is really on how do they implement it.

[01:47:41] So currently the policy requires a custodian, a data owner, to complete a record of disclosure to include what they call a specific legitimate purpose for disclosure. But this term is not defined, right?

[01:47:56] We have other definitions in there, but there's none that you can find in there. So what that's going to lead to is a lack of consistency with applying that, what the heck is a specific legitimate purpose, right? An inability for our data custodians to actually implement this and for them to have that information that they need to take this out.

[01:48:17] So it's really trying to help support those custodians in their requirements under this policy. So what we've done is added the definition for specific legitimate purpose. so we're adding in that a specific legitimate purpose is the justification for the disclosure of personally identifiable information. It needs to be specific to the reason for the disclosure and the type of personal identifiable information disclosed. In addition, it must state under what policy area it's being disclosed pursuant to either legitimate educational interest,

[01:48:52] a disclosure of records with consent, or a disclosure without parental and eligible student consent. Again, we're trying to give our data custodians the information they need to be able to comply with this policy. Concern number five, there are multiple areas throughout the policy that allow for the disclosure of student personally identifiable information without consent.

[01:49:17] So again, they don't need your consent to disclose this currently, and there are minimal or no requirements for legitimate educational interests to support it. Meaning that they could disclose your student personally identifiable information with very minimal restrictions or in some cases none at all.

[01:49:34] So this can lead to unauthorized disclosures and data laws. So where the disclosure isn't required by law, federal, state, or local program, or a specific exemption within the policy 8640, we recommend that they need to update this draft to only allow disclosures without consent if there is a legitimate educational interest to disclose.

[01:49:57] If there's no educational interest to disclose information, they shouldn't be disclosing it, right? So we've edited line 131, changed it to records may be released without prior written consent of the parent or eligible student upon request to the school officials pursuant to a legitimate educational interest provided such release does not violate any state or federal law.

[01:50:21] meaning that you can only disclose it if there is a legitimate educational interest to do so and it's not in violation of any other laws. So adding that extra requirement there. Concern six is the policy right now is not following things like privacy by design allowing for the disclosure of PII without consent and without legitimate educational purpose, right?

[01:50:43] So again, making sure that there has to be a reason why we're disclosing to achieve that goal. If we're not, and there's no reason why it actually has to be personally identifiable information, we shouldn't be releasing it. A lot of the things in here, they talk about things like if you want to disclose it to a staff or college or university for development in a laboratory or the discretion.

[01:51:07] There is a reason why colleges and different programs need data in order to improve what they're giving. But they don't need personally identifiable information. You can anonymize the data, you can aggregate the data, and still get at the root causes to enhance their program without saying that Jennifer DiDonato's social security number is, right?

[01:51:32] So the idea here is we only need to disclose personally identifiable information when no other alternative will work. If you're looking to enhance programs, we should be following privacy by design practices, which mean only disclose the data that absolutely needs to be disclosed.

[01:51:50] So in this case, we shouldn't be disclosing that personally identifiable information. It should be aggregated or anonymized data that could achieve the same purpose without that type of data risk. Concern number seven is on the additional language on communicating with the community for the release of PII.

[01:52:10] So this is an amendment that they currently made, and I don't know if it's proposed, they currently proposed it. It seems to be trying to address the issues that we had in LCPS with the recent incident with the girls and the assault, right?

[01:52:28] That is a very valuable and needed transparency requirement, and I agree that LCPS should be doing things to change their policies to allow for that. However, putting it in a disclosure of personally identifiable information is not where we should be putting it.

[01:52:46] Right now, there's policy 3070, which talks about transparency and communicating with the community, right? We should be communicating with the community about these things. That policy is where it should be, and there have been amendments that allow for that.

[01:53:03] Additionally, currently in policy 8640, it talks about in an emergency event, it authorizes data custodians to release the minimum personally identifiable information they need to address the emergency. So there's that language in there at all.

[01:53:20] This additional language is creating additional rights to disclose an unlimited amount of personally identifiable information. That we should not allow. So I've moved and we've moved to strike this duplicative language, the language they need is already in the other community transparency communication document.

[01:53:40] The ability to disclose this when we are in an emergency situation to the limit necessary is there. But we should not be giving them another right to potentially disclose very harmful personal information when it's not needed. Concern number eight.

[01:53:56] So right now there is a concept of records of disclosure when they disclose PII. They have to create this, right? And it's good for you because it shows that any time personally identifiable information is disclosed, they have to create some record of it so you'll know where it goes and why it's gone and for what purpose.

[01:54:14] However, currently, there's an exception where they don't need to disclose or create a record of disclosure if they're just disclosing what they call directory information. But directory information is a lot of information. It's things like dates of birth, name, address, right?

[01:54:32] And when you think about that type of data, that is sensitive data. If they are going to disclose that, we need to know where it's going, right? If one of our suppliers has a breach and we don't know if we've given them that data directory information, how do we know if we need to start communicating out to our staff and to our children and start putting things in place, right?

[01:54:52] There are very sensitive situations too, especially when you start getting into the high school arena where you might not want your daughter or son's address given out generally to the public, right? And there have been really real cases where that sort of data has been released or the data of a parent, right?

[01:55:11] Especially when you're talking about a situation of an abusive spouse, right? And if you disclose that family's address, there have been serious crimes committed because of that. We need to know, and they should be creating these records of disclosure when they're disclosing any personal information.

[01:55:28] There should be no exception that directory information doesn't need to include that. So we are looking to remove the exception for not requiring a disclosure of directory information to contain a record of disclosure. Concern nine, for unauthorized disclosures of personal identifiable information.

[01:55:49] Again, I'm sure everybody here has gotten a letter saying that we lost your data. It's been involved in a data breach, right? I just got one like a few days ago. The government's lost my data. Everybody's lost my data, right? But when we have these unauthorized disclosures of personal information, we need to be alerted as soon as possible.

[01:56:07] If there are things in your record that you know about that are very sensitive, you should know that there's been a breach and that that has potentially been compromised. Again, we're talking about children, and unless you proactively start looking at credit reports of children you will not find out until they're 18 and by then it will take years to recreate credit years to get that off and a lot of money in lawyer fees right so we are looking right now there is no specific timeline for lcps to inform parents or guardians it says what was this it said as soon as practicable and i can tell you what as soon as practical means is maybe

[01:56:47] never right unless you give teeth to this stuff it just doesn't happen because no one wants to make that disclosure so what we're looking to do is include the time frame of 90 days right so we're we can leave as soon as practicable but at least within 90 days of the identification of the unauthorized disclosure this sets a timeline from the very beginning of when they find it 90 days is industry standard there are reasons we don't want that to be 30 days because usually an investigation has to occur they have to figure what type of data right and they have to be able to tell you well what if they're doing about it and that does take a little bit of time and we acknowledge that but 90 days should be

[01:57:25] the cutoff after that they should be able to tell us I think I'm almost done right two more concern ten right now so in the policy 8640 it only allows a parent to opt out of the disclosure of the release of directory information again, this is the release of data without your consent, within 14 days after they make written or public notice that they're going to disclose this data. And usually that happens at the beginning of the year. This is what I do for a living. I didn't know they had this written disclosure. I

[01:58:01] don't know where it is, but somewhere, somehow, they make a statement saying that they will release this data. And per the current policy, you only have 14 days to object. Otherwise, you know, you're done for the year. Realistically, what we should have is the ability to opt out whenever we want, right? If at some point during the year, which is probably when you're going to find out is when the first release happens, but even if you change your mind, we should be able to own our data. We should be able to say when we want our child's data to be released. So throughout what we're giving is a right for any parent or eligible student that they can notify in writing that they

[01:58:40] want any or all of their directory information of the student cannot be released without prior consent, allowing for a 30-day calendar implementation timeframe to implement it. So what that means is instead of just 14 days after they write it, any time throughout the year you can request that that's not released. The only thing is it may take 30 days to implement that request. And again, the reason we're giving 30 days is we have multiple systems. All that has to be pushed through. Sometimes there's 24, 48, 72-hour time frames from all of that to populate throughout we understand that we're giving them the opportunity to implement that but after that 30 days there should

[01:59:17] be no disclosures so again giving everyone the right to opt out of the disclosure of personally identifiable information and concern 11 right now that is the section on the disclosure of directory information has language in it that doesn't make it clear about the selling of student PII in directory information and the obligation to not further disclose what you'll see in In Virginia's, California's, and the other, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, all of the laws that they're making, they're very clear on the fact that you should not be selling personal information, and if you are, you need consent to do so.

[01:59:49] So what we're trying to do is further clarify this policy that states any entity requesting directory information shall not sell directory information, and then any entity requesting directory information shall not redisclose that data and has to comply with this policy.

[02:00:07] So again, just making it very clear you can't sell the data and you can't send it off to somebody else I think that's it any question. Am I allowed to ask absolutely. Yeah, what are we that was a lot for y'all? Why don't we open it up to discussion and questions?

[02:00:30] Very simple just drafting thing on recommendation number two might want to capitalize access In that third definition because you're using it as a term of art in the definition minor drafting thing But I just noticed that access was was not capitalized. Thank you Second thing is on recommendation number three, and you're familiar with CMMI, I'm sure.

[02:00:54] So there's the whole flow down provision to subcontractors, perhaps add including subcontractors to that language so that we cover any subcontractors to the contractors that are direct suppliers to the county. No, that's a great, you're talking, so what he's talking about is not only our contractors, but their third parties, right?

[02:01:12] Anybody that they have that are suppliers to them. That's a great idea just to make sure that's clear. That was recommendation three. any other questions I mean I know you all just look so excited and we're so happy that you got to listen we talk about personal information oh we have no one oh hey thank you I just also I want to thank you so much for presenting this information tonight because it is incredibly important and and it's I think something that people often overlook because we become so

[02:01:51] desensitized to just assuming that our data is going to be flowing out there and everybody can And anyone can access it at any time. But my question is, if I'm not mistaken, I believe that in the VCDPA, there is a specific opt-in.

[02:02:09] Is that correct? It's an opt-out. Only an opt-out. Which is unfortunate. I would have rather them had had an opt-in provision. Like our international friends right over in Europe, they have opt-in provisions, which means in order for them to collect data, disclose it, all that, they have to ask you first.

[02:02:27] Here in the United States, unfortunately, we're doing things where you have to opt out, meaning they can do it unless you tell them not. So a little bit of the transverse, but I would love an opt-in. So opt-out like that is the minimum required by law. Our school board could decide that the right public policy for Loudoun County is to do better than that.

[02:02:51] Yes, great point. And actually, on my point, I just looked at this one, but get ready, Loudoun County. I'm coming for the rest of them, too. Great questions anything else On the selling of information Does that apply to Loudoun County Public Schools like can Loudoun County Public Schools sell our information?

[02:03:26] Are we prohibiting that as well? So right now there's language in policy 8640 that talks about it the intent of that language is to not allow that sale of Of that personally identifiable information. Unfortunately, it's a bit ambiguous So we're trying to clear it up what I was talking about for Virginia right for the virginia consumer data protection act that is just for commercial entities because again that law unfortunately right now does not apply to government entities meaning that lcps does not have to comply with that however just because we don't have to doesn't mean we shouldn't

[02:04:01] right so we should 100 implement that and they already had to be fair something in there i'm just trying to make it abundantly clear and remove some of the ambiguous language around it Yeah, because it appears in Recommendation 11 that that only applies to outside entities, can't sell.

[02:04:19] So if you remember, we, before, that's a good distinction, right? So we're talking about third parties because right now in order for LCPS to disclose, we took away all the rights to disclose for whatever reason they wanted and made it for legitimate educational interest. So now the only reason they can disclose it all is because it needs to for, right, If they're taking tests or things like that, or if they're using Epic, right?

[02:04:44] There's a disclosure of educational information, like their student ID, their name, and all that, in order for the person to participate. So they can't sell right now, but we could put in an affirmative statement that just states that LCPS will not sell personally identifiable or student personally identifiable information.

[02:05:04] Yeah, because there could be legitimate educational reasons that, you know, let's say a curriculum company wanted to do some kind of research study, they could pay Loudoun County for that information. I just don't think it's out of, you know, the realm of possibility that a legitimate educational purpose could also be compensated financially. And that's what we did try to take away, right, for the studies and the college. We tried to take away those rights, but I wouldn't be object. I think it's a fair point to just make it, again, remove the ambiguity, make it 100% Clear so I think we should take that back. Thank you when we get to motions

[02:05:44] I basically have heard two amendments that need to be in motions Anybody else should we do you want us to go ahead and make a motion each time or do we gather them all out? Another question. Yes, please be able to answer this question but what would it need to be stipulated for those who have children who are 18 to 22 because some of them are in the school system still at that at that age that those are you know, they're considered adults with this cover those that

[02:06:24] That age range. Yeah, so that is covered any any information that LCPS collects about things we have this concept of eligible students about those within it. They would be covered by this policy Even those who are that 18 to 22 right that they are covered good question Never had so many people who aren't privacy professionals interested in what I have to say. This is great. Anybody else?

[02:06:59] okay so we have 11 recommendations uh would someone like to make a motion yeah um so what i heard from the discussion was that there there may be two as amendments we wish to make the first

[02:07:29] is the flow through to subcontractors uh to number three and then the second i'm sorry i forgot could you what was this to just to strengthen that LCPS simply shout out cell so I'd like to make a motion that we amend recommendation number three to include

[02:08:03] coverage for subcontractors okay as a point of order do we wish to go for adopting this as a slate or vote 11 times so perhaps if we had a motion to adopt as a slate but shouldn't we adopt amendments I think yeah what but we don't have that base motion that's you just made a motion on three exists specifically that's what I'm wondering is is we don't have a motion to adopt do we want to do a substitute motion because it's moving second do we want to

[02:08:41] do a substitute motion yeah I think we need a base motion to adopt okay so I think we can do a base motion to adopt as amended and be done as amended but we haven't amended yet that's what I was trying to amend okay but I think that then yeah okay okay X there's only two okay that's fine it's been moved and seconded the motion is to amend recommendation 3 to can add the flow

[02:09:18] through provision it's been moved and seconded is there any discussion hearing none all those in favor please raise your hand and say aye I do want to clarify please only voting members yes all those opposed please raise your hand and say nay any are there any abstentions the motion carries by unanimous consent I'd like to move that recommendation number 11 from the policy subcommittee be amended to clarify that LCPS also would not be allowed to sell PII been moved and seconded

[02:09:54] the motion is to amend recommendation 11 to clarify that they should now sell PII is there any discussion hearing none oh the question is PII and data is would that be a friendly amendment okay so is there any further discussion sometimes um so actually in recommendation we are

[02:10:31] discussing specifically directory information um so is that the question should we limit it to directory information versus pii in general because those are two different things my interpretation was that the spirit of the discussion is we shouldn't be selling any personal information period sure let's pull it back up here we go okay that's yeah it was recommended that we amend in

[02:11:07] the directory information part of the policy but perhaps what we need to do is substitute a new change that is back in kind of the the parent part of the policy we will need to figure out editorially where it goes could we just make propose a new recommendation 12 okay so I'd like to move to amend my original motion substitute please except I would move to substitute my original motion uh for new motion that loud we we add a recommendation number 12 that loudon county

[02:11:45] public schools not be allowed to sell pii movement movement seconded the substitute motion is to add a new recommendation 12 that lcps is not permitted to sell pii is there any further discussion and you've accepted it as friendly because you made the base motion uh who seconded that one should not second it is there any further discussion hearing none all those in favor please raise your hand and say aye aye opposed please raise your hand and say nay and are there any

[02:12:23] abstentions motion substitute motion carries by unanimous consent I'd like to make a motion that we adopt recommendations 1 through 12 as a slate moved and seconded the motion is that we adopt recommendations 1 through 12 as a slate is there any further discussion hearing none all those in favor please raise your hand and say aye opposed please raise your hand and say nay and are there

[02:12:55] Any abstentions motion carries by unanimous consent. Thank you all. Okay. Thank you, Jennifer for moving us through that. I really appreciate that. So another old business item that we had were two things that came up in the budget that SEAC was concerned with. One was the elimination of Virtual Loudoun Elementary.

[02:13:29] Last year, SEAC had put forth a document supporting Virtual Loudoun for the elementary, middle, and high school, but as a continuum of options available to our students. We heard a lot of public comment last year regarding that for some of our medically fragile students, that this was the first time that they were ever feeling a part of their classroom because they've been on homebound and they've not been able to be a part of a real classroom, and what a fantastic educational benefit that was.

[02:14:09] So we had submitted through our schoolboy representative our concerns regarding this and had asked a number of questions so we could have some clarification on that. The budget book and the clarifying questions was very hard to find information this budget cycle.

[02:14:30] So we had submitted some questions about this. We were concerned of how it's limiting some of our more medically fragile students and students with disabilities from being able to participate in their education at the elementary level.

[02:14:50] So we had a number of questions that we submitted. Secondly, our other concerns with the budget related to FTEs. Again, it was very difficult to tease through the information provided to the public.

[02:15:08] I appreciate Jennifer's public comment on that topic. It was very difficult when comparing 2019 to what the three-year plan was to 2024 and figuring out where the changes were.

[02:15:24] So we were concerned about maintaining our maintenance of effort requirement to receive state and federal funding with the proposed cuts. We were concerned of which schools or groups of schools, especially for related services and teachers in age, should expect to lose special education staff.

[02:15:49] Can the school, we requested the school board just move the hold harmless provision for 12.7 special education FTEs into the budget. That would have been a net cost of zero.

[02:16:05] Thus, that would remove the uncertainty of when, in the hold harmless, when somebody would retire or maybe they moved and had to not be able to fulfill their contract. we would lose that position, and we were asking to maintain those positions.

[02:16:24] The other information that we were looking for is really the number of occupational therapists, PTs, and SLPs in the FY19 and 2024 budgets. When we compared the numbers, it looks like we are going to have more students and less related service providers.

[02:16:43] So we were very concerned about that. So when I can add, I believe it was 10 speech language pathologists cut and four occupational therapists cut, I believe, were the number that appears to be a pretty big cut.

[02:16:59] So when I spoke to the school, I thank you, Craig, when I spoke to the school board, giving them our concerns for the budget season, our top priorities were staff, maintaining staff, which included our related service providers, because all through the beginning of the pandemic through today, CX number one concern has been having enough.

[02:17:25] we called it boots on the ground those service providers to our students the people who are working directly with our students we're very concerned even in light of our one lcps uh new vision or uh yes that we're we're really are are we holding up to that right are we putting our teachers and students first because if we don't uh give our student our teachers enough support we will lose them and we will continue to lose them and we have classrooms now that do not have

[02:17:59] special educators in them. Sharon if I might add so you know the the justification given was the loss of COVID funds and the positions that were supported by COVID funds expiring but don't you worry the special education supervisor position was moved to the base budget even though the related service providers and teachers were not. We were concerned about our more supervisory or admin positions this has been an ongoing concern for SEAC so these these were

[02:18:36] also these concerns were also relayed as they related to our asks for the to the school board okay so moving on to quickly moving on to our reports and updates all the members have been provided with the January 11th meeting minutes to review prior to the meeting were there any changes or updates to those okay seeing now we will move to post those as our meeting minutes we still need three members to represent our CX interests on the career and

[02:19:14] technical advisory committee the gifted advisory committee and the equity committee I'm not going to go through these concerns these have been raised every every meeting but they have been moved to the different standing committees so all of the things that have come up this year as community concerns are now in committee our for executive committee our monthly meeting will be tonight and you are all welcome to join us we will be going over to

[02:19:46] Clyde's our SEAC awards date is June 6th we are on track to open our awards nomination at the end of February for the 21/22 survey data analysis we met with our Dr. Winsler and we went through our action items or all of our action items are in progress and we are on track to publish this annual survey by the end of March I will present our quarterly report to the school board on March 14th and our nominating committee is Carla Sola

[02:20:24] and Nancy Walker it's my understanding that the first email has been sent out to our membership and please members consider stepping up to be on the executive committee if you have any questions you are welcome to reach out to myself or any executive committee member or of course to Carla or to Nancy. Our membership we are up to 69 schools having a PTA or PTO representative we

[02:20:59] have 27 schools that are outstanding we currently have 17 voting members with four open membership positions we have one membership application that we have received that the executive committee will review and three possible pending applications we're very excited about that subcommittee reports can we start well the policy and compliance committee will meet twice in March we will be going over all the action items as of right now I did not see any new

[02:21:34] policy reviews come through just yet so we are beginning to work through our list of items I'm going to move on to the specialty programs transition do we have a new meeting date I know you had a conflict for the 14th can you check on that I'll circle back to you specialized reading Lorraine let me bring you a

[02:22:13] instructional subcommittee which includes reading we met on January the 18th the next meeting will be held virtually on February the 15th at 5:30 p.m. and we did establish I don't think Margaret Osprey is here tonight but we have three different collaborative work sessions that are scheduled one has already happened on February the 1st with Loudoun County staff and members of the SEAC specialized instructional subcommittee the next collaborative work session will be held in this building it's on the first floor I don't have the room number right now but it is on the SEAC website in the minutes and

[02:22:51] it will be held on March 7th at 11:30 a.m. so anyone who's interested in participating and that specialized instructional collaborative work session that will be on March 7th at 11 30 a.m. I think that's everything. Thank you, Lorraine. Meaningful inclusion, Liz, Heidi. So we focused in our last meeting on the 24th of after-school activities and supports. We shared a lot of powerful instances of inclusion and how that benefits our children.

[02:23:26] The Office of Special Education will have discussions with schools regarding after-school activities that are available for support this will include all activities that are school-sponsored drop-off activities also language should be added to flyers newsletters disseminating information about activities to notify parents of support availability and who to contact that language has been drafted and is currently being vetted another action item we have is case managers will engage in proactive communication to identify activities that will require support so there is enough time for finding aids and peer assistance also we

[02:24:05] are looking into existing peer programs within LCPS and external as to whether they can provide credit grades or our pass/fail we need to determine whether peer programs can be used for social events discussion regarding a need for descriptors to be provided when notifying community of events and what types of sensory conditions might exist at those events so that accommodations can be made or events can be avoided.

[02:24:34] And then we have also started taking submissions for the meaningful inclusion recognition. We'd sent out the link to that, but we'll continue to put that in our PTO notes in the minutes so that people can continue to make submissions. We've gotten a few so far, so I'm really excited in the last few days.

[02:24:53] we'll start spotlighting things at our next general meeting and our next meaningful inclusion subcommittee is meeting on February 28th at 6 p.m. and it will be virtual thank you Liz um parent resource services on on up good evening everyone I'm Leanne Kidwell with parent resource

[02:25:29] services and February and March are jam-packed full so the first thing that's happening is Tomorrow night, Liz Martinez is going to do the transition from middle school to high school, and it's going to be here in this building. So please come on out if you have someone that's transitioning.

[02:25:47] Let me see if I can get this. The next one is social-emotional learning, and that's next week. And that will also be here in the building. And then we have a new one.

[02:26:03] It's eating disorders. February, I think, is eating disorders awareness month. So we're doing a presentation on eating disorders. And then finally, we have When the Bus Stop's Coming. So for those of you who are new, When the Bus Stop's Coming is our big event for the year.

[02:26:24] It is for all parents of students that are going to have more significant support needs when they leave high school, not just for those last few years of high school. So elementary, middle, high, all levels.

[02:26:41] What we will do, you can kind of see the agenda. We have presenters come in. We do a student panel that is wildly popular. And then from 11 to 12.30, we have vendors come in.

[02:26:59] And right now, we have about 35 or so. We have some new vendors this year. So very exciting. Mark it down, the 25th of February will be in this building. All the different rooms will be used.

[02:27:14] So we hope you can join us then. Just a little sneak preview. I am bringing back the Summer Activities Resource Fair in March. So that's for both government, nonprofit, but also for-profit private businesses that may have summer activities.

[02:27:35] It is designed for, I let the businesses know that it is designed for parents of students with disabilities, so they may have specific disability programs, or they may just be disability friendly. So that's what's coming up, and I've been really busy.

[02:27:52] The tutoring list is almost done. I sent it out to our tutors today. Once we build the database, then we have to vet it through safety and security, and then it will go live with the parents. I'm really excited about this. So you as a parent want a tutor for your child, an in-person tutor for your child. You will put in the criteria that you want and it will match you with tutors, which is really, really good. I'm really excited. So it won't be an

[02:28:25] Excel spreadsheet. You will get specific people. So that's us. Here's Leanne's contact information. If you don't have it, it is on the LCPS website. Our next month's presentation will be on meeting the needs of twice exceptional learners.

[02:28:48] I want to give Tiffany an opportunity to catch us up. Thank you so much. I actually, I wanted to go back and just thank Ms. Crotty and Ms. Williams, I believe it is. I want to thank you for your comments this evening, because I think that probably one of the most important things that parents can do is to advocate for their children.

[02:29:08] and it was really enjoyable for me to be able to listen to the two of you stand up and speak about what you're experiencing as parents and what your children are experiencing because there really is no better advocate for your children than you.

[02:29:27] So I just want to thank you both for standing up and doing that and speaking for your children. But I also want to let everyone know that I've started some school visits this month And my first visit was to actually one of the ECSE classrooms in the county last Friday.

[02:29:43] And that was a joy because I got to get into the classroom and actually work hands-on with some of the children. And it was just truly enjoyable for me to be able to have that experience, get to know the teacher and the aide that's working with the students.

[02:30:00] And that's really what I'd like to be doing over the next several months, and I'm making it a mission to plan visits to special education program classrooms so that I can be in there in person, get to know the teachers, get to know the aides, listen to them in their own words to hear about what's working well in the classroom and also to hear about what they're struggling with and what they need that they may not be getting.

[02:30:27] so that I can probably in some ways help to bridge that gap. That's at least my hope. So I'm actually going to be visiting Hillside Elementary this month as well as Moorfield Station at the end of the month. So that's on tap for February.

[02:30:44] But I just also wanted to bring to the committee's awareness that I have received quite a bit of outreach from parents just regarding concerns with behavior that their children might be experiencing in their classroom. And this is a particular concern to me when we're talking about students who cannot go home and tell their parents what's happening, who do not have the functional communication skills to be able to go home and say, hey, mom, this is something that happened today in school.

[02:31:12] And so what I'm doing and what I would continue to do is to advocate for parents to be the advocates for their children. And so when parents come to me and they ask me about what they can do, My first, the first point of contact that I give to them is to go to their, you know, go to your base administration, bring up your concerns with your base administration.

[02:31:34] But I think it's really important to also make sure that parents are aware that they can call for an IEP meeting anytime they want. So a lot of parents think that they can only have that IEP meeting once a year, and that's not the case. They can call an IEP meeting whenever they feel a need to do so.

[02:31:51] And I think it's important for them to know that because that's critical to how things are documented for your, you know, for your children. So an email is fine, but emails often they get lost or they, you know, inadvertently don't get responded to. I also think face-to-face meetings are really important for parents to be able to sit down and talk one-on-one or in a group with an IEP team if that's, if that's needed. But I just wanted to make sure that I brought that up because that's been something that I've been receiving from parents over the past several

[02:32:23] weeks. And then in addition, I wanted to deliver a specific thank you from Erica Ogadegby, who is the chairwoman of the discipline committee. She wanted to thank everyone in SEAC for being so detailed in the feedback that you provided for policy 8215, which is the in-school disciplinary measures. That's the one we went over in the discipline committee most recently. So thank you on behalf of her, but I also want to deliver a thank you back to her, because she did a phenomenal

[02:32:55] job of ensuring that literally everything that you all had in that feedback was a part and incorporated into that policy. So thank you for your detailed insight and your feedback. Please know that it was taken very seriously, and it went into that policy, and it will move forward from there, you know, back to the board in the near future.

[02:33:21] So thank you very much. That's exciting to hear. So all of those hours of work were meaningful, so I appreciate that. So I'll move on to our Office of Special Education, Tedra Richardson, our staff liaison and the Director of Special Education and Specialized Instruction.

[02:33:46] Thank you. Good evening again. I'm here with your monthly update on vacancies in special education across the levels. Currently for elementary that is inclusive of early childhood special education staff We have eight teacher vacancies and nine ta vacancies at the middle school level We have six teacher vacancies six teaching assistant vacancies and one behavioral assistant vacancy At the high school level. We have 11 teacher vacancies

[02:34:20] 25 teaching assistant vacancies one behavioral assistant vacancy and five job coaching vacancies. Again, as you are out and about in the community, we appreciate your support in recruiting for us to work in our amazing schools with our phenomenal students.

[02:34:41] The next update that I have is a review of LCPS services during COVID, the return to learn and recovery services. And I must say that as I worked with staff, because I was not here during that time to prepare these updates for you and really we're giving you a timeline we're taking you back it it was challenging to look at the details of what we survived and what we lived through through a very different and unprecedented time so as we go over the timeline I do ask you to

[02:35:16] take yourself back to that moment in in time and be thoughtful about what it felt like as a parent as an employee, as an employer, as a wife, as a daughter, as a father, as a husband, just be thoughtful about the human experience that we all went through during that time.

[02:35:37] So as we go back, we're going to go back to August 2019 to March 2020. The school year was off to a great start. All of the supports and services were in place and operating under what we would consider to be expected conditions. March 2020, I believe it was March 13th, 2020 to be exact, we were all issued the governor's executive order for a mandatory school closure across the Commonwealth of Virginia.

[02:36:05] April 2020 to June 2020, LCPS began the implementation of temporary distance learning plans. It is important to note that not all students had services through those temporary distance learning plans during this period services were also captured in students current individualized educational plans and during this time frame in LCPS attendance was not compulsory that brings us to September 2020 LCPS had a phased approach of a

[02:36:40] return to learn for four days per week of instruction for all students at that time temporary distance learning plans ended teams were given guidance to come together and review all IEPs so IEPs were reviewed at the school based level I believe at the central office level and then teams were asked to pull together meetings to make the appropriate adjustments to services where it was required for students to continue to access a free appropriate public

[02:37:14] education during virtual synchronous instruction. Parents were notified that they could also request an IEP meeting to consider adjusting services if the IEP meeting was not initiated by the school team. Please note that teams were given guidance to consider also if services were required on the asynchronous days, which at that time for LCPS were identified as Mondays.

[02:37:47] October 2020, additional guidance was given to teams regarding reporting progress for students with disabilities. Also in October 2020, additional guidance was given to teams regarding the reporting of progress for students.

[02:38:05] Students in programs, specialized programs, also had the option to return for hybrid in instruction of two days of in-person learning and two days of virtual synchronous learning. Some students elected to remain virtual. Students in grade kindergarten through second, this was division-wide, had the option to return to hybrid instruction in October 2020. December 2020, all elementary students K-5 were provided the option to return for hybrid instruction and all

[02:38:42] All specialized program students were offered the opportunity to return to four days per week of in-person learning. Some students certainly did have the ability to remain virtual as indicated or elected by their parents.

[02:38:59] That brings us through January to 2021. Middle and high school students across the school division were given the option to attend hybrid instruction, two days in-person while two days were virtual. March 2021, IEP teams began considering the provision of the required COVID recovery services as set forth by the Virginia Department of Education, which could then be provided upon consent or during the established summer timeframe.

[02:39:35] April 2021, all students could choose to increase their in-person days from two days to four days per week across LCPS. Fall Enrichment and Extension began June 4th, 2021, where schools were provided guidance from the Office of Special Education to begin to formulize plans so that they could be implemented over the summer of 2021.

[02:40:03] From June to August of 2021, summer opportunities were offered for site-based COVID recovery services for a identified time frame of June 28th, 2021 to July 30th of 2021.

[02:40:21] It was four hours per session. That brings us to August 2021 to January of 2022. Fall enrichment programs were underway at school locations.

[02:40:38] At the end of January 2022, the Office of Special Education did make the provision available for recovery services to continue through the duration of the 21-22 school year ending in June. Certainly if families or individual teams still have questions about how we as a school division are continuing to move through the trauma that we certainly all experience with the sudden onset of the mandatory school closures.

[02:41:14] Please do reach out directly to this office. Our doors are always open. You may be routed to your cluster supervisor, but certainly our director team is also available to meet with you and process and to support school-based teams as we work to recover the learning and the routine for all of our students across LCPS.

[02:41:38] The next update is that you are going to be given an inclusive practices survey. This is in alignment with new legislation. There are going to be 10 areas in which this survey is going to cover. We would like your feedback on the following.

[02:41:57] A clear and consistent vision and vocabulary for inclusive schools. Legislative and accountability standards currently in lcps and those that we should consider tier one in instruction student-centered decisions such as staffing and scheduling effective use of resources collaboration among educators specialized support social inclusion family and community community engagement and sustaining

[02:42:33] inclusive success so that survey will be forthcoming and we will make sure that it reaches all of our parents and certainly our SEAC membership. Other items coming up for March of 2023, we will give you another monthly update of vacancies across the school system, as was asked for special education.

[02:42:53] You will also have some members of the pre-international baccalaureate work group to give you about a 10 to 15 minute overview of that opportunity. And then we will also give you an overview of the LCPS annual plan application for special education federal funds for 2023-24.

[02:43:14] Thank you. - Thank you, Ms. Richardson, and good evening SEAC.

[02:43:31] My comments will be very brief. Couple of things I want to express my deep appreciation for your continued advocacy to support our specialized programs, as well as for the comments collectively as a SEAC and individually of some parents that came out to speak to our board members during the budget process.

[02:43:51] Please know that one of the things I know the board has been committed to is maintaining the existing staffing standard to support our inclusive and specialized self-contained programs so those are in the budget those are protected and those are maintained that information regarding the staffing standard is online certainly if you can't find it we can email it to you if you email us we'll point out where that is so with the changes in the staffing the existing staffing standard which is above that

[02:44:26] of the requirements from the virginia regulations that will still maintain with the hold harmless we asked for that last year using covet funds that were available but we weren't quite sure with the population shifting that we did not want to release any of those positions that are very difficult to hire into and to recruit. And with the hold harmless clause, we're going to continue to maintain that. But with that provision, we are calculating and reviewing the number of students and the service delivery that is required to maintain those positions. So let's say someone

[02:45:05] such as self is at that 30-year mark or so and they're looking at retiring. If there is still a need, yeah, I plugged that, I'm sorry, if there is still a need for that FTE or that position because we have that service delivery in the students' IEPs and there's still a need for that, we will hire into that position.

[02:45:27] The position doesn't go away because the person has gone away. It's maintaining our staffing standard as is. Also included, you are correct, and I appreciate you advocating because I certainly have advocated for that in the superintendent's recommended budget, as well as trying to increase the staffing standard for our inclusive programming at the elementary level.

[02:45:50] That will continue to be a request as we move forward with our instructional programming. But I will say, Mr. Metz, one correction is that there are indeed two supervisors for special education that support the clusters and the instructional programming that are are in that held harmless provision, one has already been taken, and the other, if there is a retirement or a resignation or some supervisor is to leave, we will lose that position as well.

[02:46:23] So it's not that they're in the hold harmless, but should that position or someone happen to leave that's a special education supervisor, that will go away like the other positions if the staffing standard doesn't require it.

[02:46:40] So I just wanted to hold that out there. We always look for our boots on the ground employees. That's first and foremost in working with our students. As I shared during the budget presentation, it's very painful. I don't want to lose any of our FTEs that are there, but I also recognize from a budget process that we need to look at the staffing standard with our own administrative staff included.

[02:47:03] And so unfortunately, not just are the boots on the ground positions included in there, unfortunately our supervisory team is included in that as well. So again, I just want to clarify that, to share with you, and to also appreciate your continued support.

[02:47:20] And one other thing I'll also share that Mrs. Polifco did, that at any time a parent, not just annually, can ask for their IEP team to convene. convene. But in addition to that, there are times not related to a child's disability that there might need to be a support team that's pulled together, support from our Unified Mental Health team members or any other area outside of what's covered in a child's IEP. And at any time, you can contact your school's administrator or your school's school counselor for that support meeting request.

[02:47:54] Thank you. Is Denise Ocup here? There she is. I didn't see you back there. So from the Department of instruction. We have Denise Sokoop. She's going to speak on virtual distance learning.

[02:48:21] Thank you, Ms. Trove. I just wanted to share a little bit about virtual distance learning. It is a continued offering for our students in grades 6 through 12, rising 6 through 12. It is an application process, so any student that is interested, the application asks the key question, why would distance learning be the academic best fit for your student? And there's a lot of reasons why that might be the case and we serve a number of students that have IEPs and sometimes IEP related reasons are the reasons that it might be the academic best fit so I thought this would be a great audience to come to knowing your

[02:49:00] historic support of our distance learning program some ideas that might be you know either about your students or about other students that are in your community might be students that would benefit from the universal accommodations like closed captioning, screen readers, that students have a little bit more access to that when they're online. Students with sensory preference differences, there might be something about being at home or learning in a different space that works better for them. Students with

[02:49:33] mental wellness or medical needs also benefit from our program. And we have a very engaging staff and a very supportive team of special educators. So I just invite you to outreach me if you have any questions and explore our website.

[02:49:53] It's lcps.org/distancelearning, and the application will be open until April 28th. Thank you. And that's all we have for this evening, and I'm sorry we ran over.

[02:50:11] These big policies just take a long time to review, so I'm glad we were able to do that first. Thank you.

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