Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County School Board, Specialized Programs & Centers Committee Meeting, Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Date: Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Place: Loudoun County Public Schools / School Board meeting (see BoardDocs / LCPS-TV)
Length: 19m (video)
Official meeting video (Vimeo / LCPS-TV): https://player.vimeo.com/video/819206860?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] tonight by Mr. Morse and Mr. Beatty so we'll move to public comment is there anyone here for a public comment there's not all right we'll move to three the minutes approval of the draft minutes for the March 21 2023 meeting is there a motion to adopt so moved there a second second moved and seconded any changes or recommendations all right all in favor of the motion to approve the draft minutes for March 21 2023 please raise your hand say aye aye that will carry three zero we'll move to four our information items 401 from business and financial services

[00:00:37] school nutrition services agreement with hillsborough charter academy miss willoughby yes thank you so last summer hillsborough charter academy reached out to the school nutrition team at lcps regarding the possibility of us providing meals to their students since that time our team along with their team has been working diligently to come up with an agreement that we could all operate under.

[00:01:06] The draft agreement is attached. I will also share, though, in terms of what this program would look like, it's essentially bringing them underneath our umbrella of the school nutrition program, of which we follow the USDA guidelines. So it would really be we are treating them as if they were a true LCPS school and not a charter school.

[00:01:27] So what the agreement is capturing is a lot of what those provisions are. So, for example, that the meal charges would be the same as what is set by the school board each year. The revenue, the financial reporting, all those requirements that the school nutrition team does today for our other schools would be managed by this team for the charter as well.

[00:01:52] In terms of, so you'll see in the agreement, I won't read the whole thing, but there's the funding arrangement, and it talks about, again, the charges, that they would participate in the free and reduced program, you know, all the record keeping related to that, that any monies that are generated would become income to LCPS.

[00:02:18] but an important piece is going to be 4e and so under that section of 4e it does talk about that in the event that the quarterly costs exceed the revenues that lcps would reduce by the same amount the quarterly remittance of funds prescribed by the charter school renewal agreement so we did include in board docs a high level estimate of what a budget could look like for next year And in that item, you could see that, again, a projection of revenues of about $63,000, cost of $72,000,

[00:02:58] so that there would be roughly a balance under this scenario of a little over $8,000 that the HCA would cover. And this could not be passed on to the students or anything like that. And we're fully under, you know, I think we're all in agreement there. In addition, there's discussions about the responsibilities of LCPS.

[00:03:23] And again, this is just, we would do what we do with any of our other schools, responsibilities related to HCA and what they would do in terms of providing space, publishing meal schedules. Again, similar requirements that we have for any of our other schools.

[00:03:39] The only thing I think that did come up as we were finalizing this and bringing it to the committee was I think we would be open to including language regarding giving notice related to any termination of the agreement.

[00:03:55] So under Section 7, Other Terms and Conditions, right now it just says that this agreement would be automatically renewed for one-year terms, but that the school board reserves the right to terminate this agreement at any time with or without cause. And I think we would be open to language that either party could terminate this agreement with perhaps 90 days or some level of notification.

[00:04:16] Other than that, I think we're in agreement. And I know the principal is here as well regarding any questions you may have. Committee members, any questions? Mr. Morse. Okay, so the termination, the possibility of termination by either party is already written into here.

[00:04:35] So is your concern the amount of heads up that the school division is giving? And the school has no issues with that with us? No, we don't have any issue with that at all, Mr. Morse. Actually, what we were hoping for, the reason why that went back to Ms. Willoughby is we just wanted to make sure that if for some reason, which would be completely unforeseeable, but if there was some reason why LCPS needed to cancel the program, that we wouldn't be left in the lurch and have to try to figure out how to feed the children two weeks later.

[00:05:10] Right. Okay. That makes sense. The other question I have is concerning facilities. The food that's being delivered requires preparation. Do you have it? Is your cafeteria services, the cooking, everything up to code?

[00:05:25] It is. Thank you. Two questions. First would be what is this replacing, their current meal preparation? Certainly. So for the last two years, we've been working with a vendor who is actually Loudon-based called Schoolhouse Grill.

[00:05:46] And Schoolhouse Grill prepares the food in Sterling and brings it out to us each day. Our scholars and their families go online, and they can order lunches for the following month. So it's not too dissimilar in that way. And then when it is brought to our school, we have to check temperatures to make sure the cold items are at the right chilled temperature and that the hot items are at the right hot temperature.

[00:06:12] We do have, to answer your question a little more thoroughly, Mr. Morse, we do have a new steamer, we have a new dishwasher, we have a new refrigerator, we have a new walk-in freezer. So all of those have been replaced over the course of the last 12, 14 months.

[00:06:33] Thank you. To piggyback on Mr. Morse's question with the facilities, the agreement says prep on-site for breakfast and lunch. Are there other cooking facilities you have that can handle that? Yes, they can handle that. As a matter of fact, one of the first things that we did is we had Miss Mills come over and walk through the kitchen along with one of her supervisors.

[00:06:57] And there are a couple items that truthfully are a little bit archaic that don't need to be in there anymore. And, you know, they've recommended that we have those removed. And so once, you know, this is all ratified by hopefully the school board and our board, then, you know, we would put in some red tag requests.

[00:07:21] I guess one final question for Ms. Willoughby. Going back to the budget impact, can you explain how there would be a loss based on this? Because I seem to remember most of our school nutrition programs seem to make money or at least break even.

[00:07:36] So overall, district-wide, we do, in typical years, make money. We run a net profit. Part of the reason here would be, as it relates to that, this is a small school, so you don't get the benefit of economies of scale.

[00:07:53] So there's a small number of students that would be receiving meals, generating revenue. However, they would have, in essence, higher overhead because we are preparing the meals on site. So that's why, in this scenario, we are actually projecting that there would be a slight net loss okay thank you so committee members are we in consensus about adding the language with the time frame for termination okay is there any time constraint on getting this to the board are we good if we send it to the board

[00:08:28] in May there any for turnaround I don't have any concern I know I think they're working through their board and I and I failed to mention this would be for the upcoming school year so for the fall so I think we'd probably be okay all right So I would agree with that.

[00:08:43] Great. Thank you. So we'll ask staff to add that to the agreement with the time frame for termination and we'll bring it back for action at our next meeting. Thank you. All right we'll move to item 402 special programs update.

[00:09:02] Dr. Ellis. Thank you. Yes this evening we have an update on our special programs underway including the International Baccalaureate programs that we've been planning for dual language immersion and a quick update on conversations we've been having about a health and medical science pathway.

[00:09:24] So I will turn it over to Katie Clark. Thank you. Good evening. Thank you for having us here tonight to talk about our special programs. As a reminder, special programs are directly aligned with the strategic plan, specifically aligned actions 1.1, core academic excellence, and 1.2, multiple accessible pathways to success.

[00:09:49] As Dr. Ellis just mentioned, this is our status chart for special programs, and we're going to give an update on the two in the planning phase and one potential new program this evening. Now I'll turn it over to Suzette to give an update on our dual-language immersion program.

[00:10:12] Pretty loud. The interdepartmental collaboration continues between DDI, the registrars, and teaching and learning throughout the registration process. The lottery permission click interest form closed last Friday.

[00:10:28] We continue to work with all LCPS departments and the DLI schools to ensure a successful start to this program. We are currently working with Sanders Corner and Potomac Elementary School on the May PD session for all school staff. We'll provide an overview of the program and its impact on the school's culture.

[00:10:46] DLI parent community session dates have been determined. We expect to begin this summer. We are working with Razzie on fine-tuning the evaluation plan that was developed for DLI. Under curriculum, we have interdisciplinary curriculum work with content specialists and elementary instructional facilitators from professional learning that continues.

[00:11:09] Instructional resources are being reviewed and finalized for purchase. Coming up, as of Friday, we had about 360 families, I guess, that demonstrated interest. RASI will run the lottery either later this week or next week.

[00:11:28] And the DLI teacher positions were posted. And this concludes the DLI update. And now Katie will give us the IB update. Thank you, Suzette. So as far as International Baccalaureate, we held a joint professional development session on March 13th for our LCPS pre-IB leadership teams at both Heritage and Loudoun Valley.

[00:11:54] And that was a joint effort with George Mason University. We continue to hold monthly meetings with all departments in LCPS to ensure a successful start to this program. We also have monthly content supervisor meetings as our IB program stretches across all content areas.

[00:12:15] As far as authorization updates, we are in our consultation visit currently at Heritage. Today was our first day. Tomorrow is our second day. And we completed our consultation visit with Loudoun Valley where our consultant came out, gave us our report, and we got the green light to apply for authorization.

[00:12:35] So we are on schedule with authorization deliverables at both schools. As far as program enrollment updates, we are currently still accepting and enrolling students into the program. Current eighth and ninth grade students can still access the student opportunities to show interest in the program at both Heritage and Loudoun Valley.

[00:12:58] For upcoming, we are getting ready to submit our application for authorization, and we look forward to having those authorization visits early fall. Textbook adoption is getting started, and also we are continuing to work on our curriculum development for these new courses that will be offered with IB.

[00:13:19] all right here is where we're going to turn it over to the wonderful mrs. Renee Dawson to talk about a program under consideration our health and medical science evening I want to share with you some of the work that we've done around the health and medical sciences in the school year 22 and 23 we are actively working to initiate a special programs proposal for health and medical

[00:13:52] medical sciences. We are also in the process of seeking grant funds to that end. We are happy and pleased and thank you to the board for your approval of the HamSci resource teacher in the Perkins grant. We are very excited to be hosting a HamSci roundtable with key stakeholders that will be happening on April 28th. We had a successful implementation of Bloom, which is building learning opportunities and options in medical sciences 200 middle school students six middle

[00:14:28] schools and we had some industry partners inova the loud and fire and rescue and also lef it was a medical sciences day of exploration we are also pursuing in summer of the arts we are going to offer a health and medical sciences class for students in summer of the arts and that's for SY 2223 and then thinking forward some of our next steps are completing our special programs proposal having a resource teacher hopefully through our grant and other staff that will

[00:15:06] engage in the curriculum development connecting with our business partners and some additional planning to include clinical experiences in this process we are going to also be reviewing our CTE And our hopes are to provide a career exploration course in our middle schools that will allow our students to have an opportunity to engage with some health and medical science careers.

[00:15:33] We are going to continue, based on the success of Bloom and feedback from all of our industry partners, we are going to continue Bloom and continue with our summer in the arts to increase our student interest and awareness. We are now looking at SY2425.

[00:15:52] We will, our hope is to have a career investigation series in seventh grade for our CTE courses, and that would include some health and medical sciences curriculum. Our hope is also at that time that we would have been submitted through the process for special programs.

[00:16:10] We would open the portal for health and medical sciences lottery beginning the fall of 2024. And, of course, we're going to continue with the success of Bloom and Summer in the Arts to make sure that we maintain that student interest and awareness in health and medical sciences.

[00:16:28] And then our hope is that we will open the doors to ham-sci for ninth grade students in the fall of 2025. Thank you, and I will turn this over to Ms. Clark. Thank you, Mrs. Dawson.

[00:16:44] That concludes our update for special programs, and we would be happy to answer any questions you might have. Thank you for the update, and I can just, it's so exciting to see all of this moving forward and progressing, so thank you for all the hard work to get the new programs up and running and moving forward.

[00:17:00] It's really great, and I'll open it up to other board members. Mr. Morse? I think it sounds fabulous. I did want to ask the question about what in CTE 7th grade are we going to take out to put in a new module? So currently we have, in our 6th grade, we have our intro to computer applications, which is kind of keyboarding.

[00:17:23] It used to be keyboarding, and then some entrepreneurship is embedded into that. We're specifically looking at FACTS and Tech Ed 7. It would not be in addition to. We're considering replacing those courses. We have some ideas.

[00:17:39] We haven't really kind of finalized what that's going to look like. And we do know that we have received some guidance based on our CTE reviews that it's kind of strongly encouraging us to review some of the things that we have and to build a stronger career exploration in the 7th grade.

[00:17:55] So that's where it would be in the 7th grade. you're going you're doing an overhaul of the CTE and you're going to look for that that is correct thank you all right well thank you all so much certainly appreciate the continued updates I think it it helps the board stay informed and I assume that the board will receive an update in the weekly update for this information because I think a lot of board members would be interested in knowing where we are with these programs yes they will receive a summary of this meeting and also I'll just put a plug in for the health and medical science roundtable next Friday I think you all got an email from the chief of staff

[00:18:33] about that and if you are able to attend we would love to have your voices at the table it should be a really good opportunity to bring our some of our community partners our health and medical science experts in the field our community college partners and staff members from LCPS so if you can join us please do great thank you so much and thank you all for being here and we look forward to your next update and thanks for all the great work joining new business seeing none we are adjourned have a great evening everyone

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